Is the JFK assassination a "foundational event" through which we should view our current crisis?
As people continue seeking out alternative news sources, established narratives surrounding historical events will likely crumble as well
One of the most fascinating dynamics driving our tumultuous times is the unfolding challenge to the information dominance of legacy sense-making institutions. The American and Western elites are clearly rattled by what they are seeing. In an appearance on MSNBC last week, Hillary Clinton griped about it to Rachel Maddow:
[…] because of the way we are getting our information today, and because of the lack of gatekeepers and people who have a historic perspective who can help us understand what we are seeing, there is a real vulnerability in the electorate to the kind of demagoguery and disinformation that, unfortunately, the other side is really good at exploiting.
But as people continue losing faith in elite institutions and seek out alternative sources of information, established historical narratives that have undergirded the longstanding political order are likely to come under increasing strain as well.
Last week marked the 58th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Part of me is hesitant to wade into a subject so deep—and one in which I admittedly have no expertise—but I came across a couple of articles this past week that were too stimulating to keep to myself. So I’ll just summarize, provide links and let you draw your own conclusions.
To begin with, the academic Edward Curtin published a fascinating piece, which I recommend reading in full. In it, Curtin not only sets out to debunk the official version of the assassination, but he moreover argues that Kennedy’s killing is the “foundational event of modern American history,” one that should be revisited in order to make sense of the present mess:
Despite a treasure trove of new research and information having emerged over the last fifty-eight years, there are many people who still think who killed President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and why are unanswerable questions. They have drunk what Dr. Martin Schotz has called “the waters of uncertainty” that results “in a state of confusion in which anything can be believed but nothing can be known, nothing of significance that is.”[1]
Then there are others who cling to the Lee Harvey Oswald “lone-nut” explanation proffered by the Warren Commission.
Both these groups tend to agree, however, that whatever the truth, unknowable or allegedly known, it has no contemporary relevance but is old-hat, ancient history, stuff for conspiracy-obsessed people with nothing better to do. The general thinking is that the assassination occurred more than a half-century ago, so let’s move on.
Nothing could be further from the truth, for the assassination of JFK is the foundational event of modern American history, the Pandora’s box from which many decades of tragedy have sprung.
Curtin writes that from the day he was sworn into office, Kennedy had to constantly resist pressure from both the Pentagon and CIA to wage war—whether clandestine, conventional or nuclear—and argues that his assassination was a consequence of that pushback. The endless wars and creation of a surveillance state that ensued thereafter were, in turn, a consequence of the assassination.
Curtin examines Kennedy’s public record of anti-colonial positions before turning his attention to the friction that arouse pretty much immediately between the president and the national security apparatus. Sensing he had been manipulated and set up to fail in the Bay of Pigs invasion, JFK fired CIA Director Allen Dulles during his first year in office. Writes Curtin:
JFK said he wanted “to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.” Not sentiments to endear him to a secretive government within a government whose power was growing exponentially.
Curtin then goes over the various other disputes Kennedy had with the CIA and Pentagon, including whether to send troops to Laos, a false flag terrorist plan to drum up support for a war against Cuba (Operation Northwoods), as well as his decision to resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis diplomatically and withdraw troops from Vietnam.
(Kennedy) was well aware that his growing resistance to war had put him on a dangerous collision course with those generals and the CIA. On numerous occasions, he spoke of the possibility of a military coup d’état against him.
The night before his trip to Dallas, he told his wife, “But, Jackie, if somebody wants to shoot me from a window with a rifle, nobody can stop it, so why worry about it.”
And we know that nobody did try to stop it because they had planned his execution from multiple locations to assure its success.
Curtin continues:
If the only things you read, watched, or listened to since 1963 were the mainstream corporate media (MSM), you would be convinced that the official explanation for JFK’s assassination, the Warren Commission, was correct in essentials. You would be wrong, because those corporate media have for all these years served as mouthpieces for the government, most notably the CIA that infiltrated and controlled them long ago under a secret program called Operation Mockingbird. In 1977, celebrated Watergate journalist, Carl Bernstein, published a 25,000-word cover story for Rolling Stone, “The CIA and the Media,” in which he published the names of many journalists and media, such as The New York Times, CBS, Time, Newsweek, etc., who worked hand in glove with the CIA for decades. Ironically, or as part of “a limited hangout” (spy talk for admitting some truths while concealing deeper ones), this article can be found at the CIA’s own website.
Total control of information requires media complicity, and with the JFK assassination, and in all matters they consider important, the CIA and the MSM are unified.
Curtin proceeds to examine key details of the assassination plot, exposing many of the holes in the official narrative and laying out, in his view, a more plausible theory. It’s an engaging read, but here I will skip straight to the conclusion:
The evidence for a government plot to plan, assassinate, cover-up, and choose a patsy in the murder of President John Kennedy is overwhelming.
Five years after JFK’s assassination, we would learn, to our chagrin and his glory, that the president’s younger brother, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, equally brave and unintimidated, would take a bullet to the back of his head in 1968 as he was on his way to the presidency and the pursuit of his brother’s killers. The same cowards struck again.
Their successors still run the country and must be stopped.
I came across another article this past week, published in The Canadian Patriot, which echoes many of Curtin’s themes. Its author, Cynthia Chung, similarly highlights Kennedy’s anti-imperial stances, in addition to his conflicts with the intelligence community and military brass, but she covers other terrain as well. For instance, Chung looks at Kennedy’s relationship with Charles de Gaulle, as well as the CIA’s involvement in assassination attempts against the French leader. Included is an interesting quote attributed to de Gaulle following Kennedy’s funeral:
“What happened to Kennedy is what nearly happened to me… His story is the same as mine. … It looks like a cowboy story, but it’s only an OAS [Secret Army Organization] story. The security forces were in cahoots with the extremists.
…Security forces are all the same when they do this kind of dirty work. As soon as they succeed in wiping out the false assassin, they declare the justice system no longer need be concerned, that no further public action was needed now that the guilty perpetrator was dead. Better to assassinate an innocent man than to let a civil war break out. Better an injustice than disorder.
Chung also looks at Kennedy’s attempt to remove the CIA from Cold War military operations, the escalation of the conflict in Vietnam that was facilitated by his death, as well as the assassination plot itself. She concludes:
There is a lot of spurious effort to try to ridicule anyone who challenges the Warren Commission’s official report as nothing but fringe conspiracy theory. And that we should not find it highly suspect that Allen Dulles, of all people, was a member and pretty much leader of said commission. The reader should keep in mind that much of this frothing opposition stems from the very agency that perpetrated crime after crime on the American people, as well as abroad. When has the CIA ever admitted guilt, unless caught red-handed? Even after the Church committee hearings, when the CIA was found guilty of planning out foreign assassinations, they claimed that they had failed in every single plot or that someone had beaten them to the punch, including in the case of Lumumba […] Those at the top such as Allen Dulles were just as adamant as Churchill about protecting the interests of the power elite, or as Churchill termed it, the “High Cabal.”
Interestingly, on Dec. 22nd, 1963, just one month after Kennedy’s assassination, Harry Truman published a scathing critique of the CIA in The Washington Post, even going so far as to state “There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position [as a] free and open society, and I feel that we need to correct it.”
The 58th anniversary of JFK’s assassination came, incidentally, a month after the Biden administration delayed yet again the public release of documents relating to the tragedy of November 22, 1963—a decision that was criticized by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who himself has emerged as a major dissident during the pandemic. In his recently released book, “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health,” Kennedy Jr. asserts that the intelligence services have been heavily involved in the government’s pandemic response.
As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, partisan attitudes towards the FBI and CIA have flip-flopped in recent years, with Democrats now holding those institutions in higher regard than Republicans. The fact that so many on the Right are convinced that President Trump had to fight the same dark forces as Kennedy surely has contributed to that reversal.
On that note, here is Chung’s parting message:
Thus is it not natural that those who continue to defend the legacy of Kennedy should be regarded today as [a] threat, not truly to the nation’s security, but a threat to the very same grouping responsible for Kennedy’s death and whom today have now declared open war on the American people.
This will be the greatest test the American people have ever been confronted with, and it will only be through an understanding of how the country came to where it is today that there can be sufficient clarity as to what the solutions are, which are not to be found in another civil war. To not fall for the trapping of further chaos and division, the American people will only be able to rise above this if they choose to ask those questions, if they choose to want to know, to want to find out the truth of things they dared not look at in the past for fear of what it would reveal.