Austin Voices: Harlan Dietrich of Brave New Books

The first in a series of interviews with Austin business owners and entrepreneurs.

I’m here with Harlan Dietrich, who is the co-owner and manager of Brave New Books, which is a unique bookstore here in town. What’s different about Brave New Books compared to other bookstores in Austin?

Brave New Books is cut from a little different cloth. We aren’t a mainstream box bookstore that you would find that has your typical array of bestsellers. The normal format for a bookstore is something we don’t try to follow. In fact, we sort of take the opposite business model, and the less you’ve heard about it, the more we want it in the bookstore. So, the “least-sellers” is what we focus on, and this is because we specialize in suppressed information.

Correct. Probably DVDs currently are outpacing our book sales. This is a reflection of where our culture is going -- to be more image-driven. Through things like the internet is how information is more readily available.

It’s easier to communicate nowadays with video stuff rather than books, so you’re doing both of them.

Well, we are probably one of the only bookstores where you will find nine different televisions playing DVDs that promote the content of the books as well as the videos. So there is sort of a symbiotic relationship between the DVDs, largely documentary films, and the content of the books that we provide as well. So the DVDs are also usually documenting some other suppressed aspect of our society.

So you specialize in these kinds of “suppressed” videos and books and information. And I know y’all started the store about three years ago, and one of your main issues is that you say that what we’ve been told about what happened on September 11, 2001, is not really what happened, and that’s one of the main reasons you started the store, right?

I’ll just give you a quick rundown of the events that led up to the store opening. Cut to me, newly graduated from the University of Texas with degrees in History and American studies – a very frustrated and disgruntled graduate, I must add.

UT was a fine education in fundamentals, as far as being able to think critically, being able to read critically, rhetorically being critical. But as far as content, I was grossly unimpressed. This was due to the fact that while in college, I was becoming more and more aware of this undercurrent throughout history of suppressed information, and I was in college during 9/11, and was very quick to observe the suppression of factual evidence that countered the official story, and in fact pointed to a larger conspiracy involving elements of our own government. So this led me to delve deeper and deeper into these issues.

The store specifically grew out of a conference held in Chicago in the summer of 2006 where, through a sequence of events, I met a gentleman at this conference, and we happened to live in the same neighborhood here in Austin. We started talking about how there could be a business model created where information can be disseminated and there can be a sort of financially sustainable way to get this information out. We had lots of ideas and lots of brainstorming sessions, but I decided that a bookstore might be the most appropriate course of action.

Largely until 2006, all this information was only available on radio and on the internet. Very little TV, very little mainstream movies, very little importance put into it in other bookstores. So I wanted to create a space where people could take these ideas out of the virtual world, and make it real. They could come to a place and meet like-minded people with the same knowledge base as them, who have been studying this stuff, and see that the books are real, and the ideas could be legitimate. There was a niche market that wasn’t being served, and this would be a philosophical boost to people like us. It was to give us some sense of hope that at least there was more than just being at home on the internet.

9/11 was the impetus because this is what the conference that started the store came out of. And 9/11, as we showcase here in the store with many, many volumes of movies and books on the subject -- all the evidence, and it’s not hyperbole, all the evidence really does point to a high-level conspiracy involving officials within our own government acting as moles in order to carry this out.

It can be proven now scientifically and forensically (put that in bold print) that those three towers were brought down with high-grade explosives, namely thermate to be specific. It’s un-de-niable. There are two engineering journals out that have both peer-reviewed papers on the subject, and the federal government refuses to investigate the appearance of thermate in these samples. So it does appear sadly that our government was intimately involved in shepherding and carrying out the attacks of 9/11.

So to simplify, you think that there are criminal people in the government right now, and I see you even have this shirt on with the upside down American flag, which is a sign of distress, like “the nation is in distress,” and you’re saying there’re criminals in the government, and that is why some of this stuff is being suppressed.

Sure, I would call it a “kleptocracy.” We don’t have a democracy, we are a nation that’s been stolen, and these thieves largely are satellites of a banking system. Something I was never told about while studying history is the power of the banking system, the power of the money. This runs counter to what we sort of instinctually know as human beings -- that people are out for profit and greed. And this is something that we should look to as a causal meme throughout history. But no, this is something that is never taught to you.

It’s been almost eight years since 9/11, and a lot of people are aware of this information that you’re talking about, but I would say, it’s still not a very popular idea, or talked about very much. When I read the Austin Chronicle, they actually attack people who are talking about a controlled demolition of the buildings, that it wasn’t just the planes that caused the fires, but that there were actually explosives in the buildings. Do you receive a lot of flack for trying to push this suppressed information?

The bookstore doesn’t receive a lot of flack, I personally don’t receive a lot of flack. But in a general sense, people who believe this, we still do experience a lot of disagreement. This is the reason for a bookstore like this, because of the void that is there, and only mainstream, corporate news is there to provide answers for people. You may say, “Well, the Austin Chronicle isn’t mainstream, and it’s not corporate,” but it definitely has an agenda not to print things that seem to rattle people’s cages.

There’s an economic incentive not to give people the truth, because as soon as you give people the truth, people say, “Well, where were you eight years ago?” and you automatically disenchant and alienate your audience. So there’s an economic incentive, even from the Chronicle’s standpoint, to not pay any mind to theories like this, because it would automatically alienate their audience.

Also, one thing I think about, as far as the buildings and who had access to the buildings, it sounds like one of them was Salomon Smith Barney which is part of Citibank, and then there was Morgan Stanley. A lot of these are some of the biggest corporations in America, and if you look, they probably advertise in a lot of these papers. That’s just one thing, that’s not their full influence. Are these some of the people that are involved in some of these economic scams? These are big dogs to be attacking.

Sure, they are, but I am not saying that someone from Deutsche Bank calls the Chronicle and says, “Don’t print this article.” I’m simply saying that from a basic economic model, these magazines don’t have an incentive to print this kind of stuff. But yeah, they are big names. It is very real and very scary stuff.

And then the federal agencies that were in those buildings. The most interesting one is the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) – Were they doing some sort of investigations and lost a lot of the paperwork for those investigations?

Yeah, close to four terabytes of information involving the MCI WorldCom and Enron scandals was lost, in a building that housed the SEC and the largest office, outside of Langley, for the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), and this was called World Trade Center Building 7 (WTC 7), the Salomon Brothers building, which was the third building that collapsed on the day of 9/11. It collapsed at 5:20 in the afternoon. It was 47 stories tall, which would have been the tallest building in thirty states in America, and it collapsed in six-and-a-half seconds, close to freefall speed, exhibiting all the characteristics of a controlled demolition. Its investigation has been a fraught with mistruths and distortions when many scientists around the world, including Danny Jowenko, Europe’s leading expert on controlled demolitions, even admits that after seeing the video, that it appears to be a controlled demolition.

And the collapse of Building 7 is the key to open the door on 9/11?

Clearly for a lot of engineers and scientists, it is a key for them. In fact, that’s the testimony you’ll hear from them. They saw Building 7 fall down, and as scientists, they had to examine it because it did not perform like a building whose structure had failed. It performed like a building that had been imploded.

So that’s what woke them up. For me, it wasn’t Building 7, it was many other things, but that’s the thing about the store. It doesn’t just have to do with 9/11. Where people’s interests lie – say it is money, or say it is health, or say it is food, or say it is history, or say it is media – there are number of ways to understand that something is going on at a deeper level.

It’s what Peter Dale Scott, a professor out of UC-Berkeley, termed “deep politics.” That is that, underneath the superficial politics, there is a deeper politics going on, and that is hidden from view. And so, this is something that we are trying to instill into people’s heads, that this is always existing, and behind the headlines, there is something deeper at play. This is sort of the philosophy behind Brave New Books, to sort of make this an issue. So one day, “deep politics” can be what is discussed, and it won’t be deep politics anymore. It’ll be out in the open for people.

It’s an interesting metaphor that we’re actually located underground, because the information we have here is how it is represented in our daily lives – it is “underground” information. We’re trying to one day make that “above ground” information.

And just to promote a couple of your products here, you got Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984, which both have visions of the future that are utopian for some and dystopian for others. What do you think of the predictions from those two authors?

Well, in my opinion, what we’re experiencing, and hopefully it’s not what we will experience, because hopefully we will be able to change things in the interim – but what we’re experiencing now I think is an interesting mix of both of those books. The Huxley version of events is a scientific dictatorship, one in which we’re genetically spliced and cloned, and once we reach certain ages, we’re all supposed to perform certain acts, we’re all to be given certain drugs to keep us pacified, to keep us uninterested in anything more meaningful than a party, or an orgy. These are the things that hold meaning in our lives.

Of course, then there’s George Orwell’s version of events where everyone is kept uninterested in meaningful things through discipline and hard work and fear. And so you see both of those things in our world today. The media is constantly putting us in fear, constantly getting us to be apolitical and apathetic to any sort of change. And then there is the other side we see in mass media, and in culture in general, and that is a blasé attitude, one that is only about what is in style, constantly fixating on trends – this is very much like Brave New World.

And also a scientific dictatorship where you now have a large swath of the population on pharmaceutical drugs, chemical lobotomies – it’s in our food, it’s in our water, and if you’re not getting it in there, you’re getting it from a prescription because of your state of mind. This is directly out of Brave New World where people are given actual drugs to keep them happy. So it’s an interesting mix of the two worlds, but I tend to think that we live in a bit more of a Brave New World version of events where people actually want their enslavement, and they don’t want to be ripped away from their comforts. They’re willing to give away certain things, like their freedom, and their ability to reason and be critical, and their ability to speak openly. These are given up in exchange for “eye candy.”

Anything new here in 2009 at Brave New Books that we didn’t have last year?

We look forward to growing and we want to continue to offer great events, lots of speakers, lots of bright, talented authors that don’t get a lot of publicity in other places whose books are available here. So look for us in 2009 to continue to speak truth to power.

Brave New Books is located at 1904 Guadalupe St., near the University of Texas campus, downstairs from the Chase Bank.

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