Henry C.K. Liu
Apsken at aol.com wrote:
> Carrol Cox wrote,
>
> << 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