<< But in the case of the Kennedy assassination, Occam's razor would seem to favor what is here called the Chomsky/Cockburn line. >>
Yeah, right. The magic bullet theory ranks right up there with the tooth fairy.
<< It is also pretty clear that the chief political use of conspiracy theories of the Kennedy assassination is in apologetics for the u.s. involvement in Vietnam. It takes the onus off the ruling class and puts it on a few glamorous cold warriors in the CIA. It lets the servants take the blame for their masters. >>
You can find more of political value in MacBird than in the Warren Report. Are you accusing Barbara Garson of being a Kennedy stooge? In 1968, Marvin Garson's San Francisco [Express Times? underground paper] headline was "Kennedy Killed Again!" That certainly wasn't an expression of lament.
Considering that many of the veteran assassination researchers/reporters were among the earliest protesters against the U.S. war in Vietnam, during the Kennedy administration, I regard this as Alex Cockburn's ignorance now being propagated as fact, blaming the left for Oliver Stone as it were. At that time, if I recall correctly, Cockburn was New Left Review's house Trotskyist. None of us who picketed and heckled Madame Nhu in 1963, and organized against conscription, mourned Kennedy. From the Bay of Pigs to Berlin, he was the arch enemy. In fact, our initial reaction to the assassination was fear that it would be used as pretext for mass arrests of reds.
<< Actually, focusing on the conspiratorial features even of actual conspiracies is a political error. >>
Not true. It is as essential as the critique of political economy. It reveals the actuality of bourgeois rule, as distinct from its camouflage of democracy, openness, and legitimacy. That is the reason that front-line revolutionaries -- Black Panthers, New Africans, Puerto Rican independence fighters, Native American insurgents, and others similarly situated have always devoted considerable study and agitprop attention to them. The surprise is that the quoted sentence was written by the person who reminds us that Marxism consists of ruthless criticism of all that exists. Particularly in moments of revolutionary upheaval, the tendency of the mass movement [the Communards, for example] to underestimate their enemies' conspiracies can be fatal.
In the particular instance of the FBI's secret war against the Cairo United Front, the subject of an earlier plaint by Carrol, widespread knowledge of the conspiracy (which included an FBI-controlled militant Black nationalist newspaper) might well have changed the course of political history in the Saint Louis area. It was evidently known to British counterinsurgency specialist Brigadier Frank Kitson (of Kenya, Cyprus, and Belfast). In his 1971 book Low Intensity Operations, Kitson wrote of an FBI-controlled Black nationalist "pseudo gang" in Saint Louis. No one in the U.S. could prove its existence until the particular COINTELPRO documents were made available, which I published in 1981.
I'm not claiming these as a substitute for other more essential mass activities; but they should not be neglected or tossed off as Carrol does, either. The particular one that began this thread -- CIA mind control experiments -- are important to expose, and ought to become the focus of vigorous protests.
Ken Lawrence