>>> Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> 06/11/99 11:27AM >>>
At 10:48 AM 6/11/99 -0400, Charles Brown wrote:
>More specifically, this thread is on secret police in the U.S. and the
idea is that it was elite U.S.secret police operations that assassinated
the Kennedys It was a coup d'etat by one part of the ruling class against
another , but to have that open rather than secret would ruin the U.S.
public relations image as a "democratic" country with power at the level of
President transferred only by elections and with no secret police violence.
>Transition of supreme state power by means of government agent
assassination is an extreme form of secret police.
-- snip
Charles, my problem with conspiracy theories of that sort is not that they are false in the factual sense - to be sure, business and political elites are de facto conspiracies - but that people who circulate them usually have not way of learning about them in a matter of fact way. If the assassination was the work of secret police, how for goddess sake would peons like us know about it?
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Yes, Wojtek. Of course, in the "is capitalism a conspiracy or a system" debate, I am on the system side. There are conspiracies, but uncovering and stopping conspiracies will not end the system.
On us finding out about it, as I said to Doug, we have to use inference and detective work. Really it mainly takes having the average leftwing critique or just average joe skeptic attitude toward what the "official"line is on any important event. Then making common sense inferences. On the JFK event, we have had 35 years to deliberate on who dunnit.
By the way, I don't think JFK's assassination was such a big system event, just in the context of this thread, it is a striking example that the U.S. too has police state characteristics that it likes to pretend only foreign nations have. We are the "land of the free" and nobody else is as free. You know the rap.
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The popular demand for these stories has similar origins as demand for religion, personal god and similar crap - anthropomorphization of natural or social forces, which provides an illusion of an explanation to minds untrained in critical thought.
Charles: I hope I can make my response to this clear. I think that the main point here is that we ALREADY KNOW THE ANSWER TO THE MYSTERY. It is really pretty simple. The media hype here proceeds to cover this up by making it seem like there is still a mystery to be solved. That is why the "mystery story" is promoted as you mention above. Most of the books and other coverage (now from many years ago) went over whether or not there were more than one shooter , etc. , etc. But Oswald alone was an obvious CIA agent. That is enough to suggest strongly a police plot. All the conspiracy theorists on this help to divert from the most important fact: these are agents of the government. This was a coup d'etat in the great "democratic", USA.
This was not natural forces. This was human forces. The killers were anthropomorphs.
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I may also add that blatantly outrageous conspiracy theories serve a very useful function for the preservation of the status quo - a function that is similiar to that proverbial boy crying "wolfs." Circulating blatantly improbable conspiratiorial fantasies discredicts whistle-blowing and fact of the matter reporting of elite wrongdoing.
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Charles: Probably. This is not outrageous. It is really fairly obvious. Thus in this case , the coverup proceeds by trying to divert from the obvious. The coverup proceeds by promoting all kinds of documentaries on sensational side aspects to divert. Who cares how many gunmen their were ( the big "debate"). That "debate" is the public diversion. The one gunman we know for sure, Oswald, had a lot of the earmarks of a spy. Any other gunmen are just icing on the cake.
It is not a big mystery. CIA hit squad takes out Kennedy.
But if the general public were to conclude the truth, that this was a coup d'etat, it would do some significant undermining of naive faith in the goodness and democracy of the American system. This would be rather subversive.
The whistleblower here, Garrison and others had their whistles shoved down their throats. Far from falsely crying wolf, this was the time that the wolf actually came. The U.S. repressive apparatus flashed its sharp teeth for a few seconds in Dallas.
Charles Brown