>>> Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> 01/13/00 04:17PM >>>
Charles, to make a long story short -- where did you get the idea that I
(or others) believe in gov't honesty?
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CB: Well, in this discussion, that is pretty much the other side of the coin of maintaining a posture of skepticism about socalled conspiracy theories. To believe the government line that JFK was assassinated by a lone gunmen is to take the government line at face value and honest, for example.
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It does not go without saying that under-the-table deals, exchange of money and favors, public denials, hidden agendas, revolving doors etc. are a normal part of government operation. But what do we gain by calling it a conspiracy?
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CB: As I said, I don't care much what you call it. I just refer to "conspiracy" because it is dawning on me that a lot of the 90's left ( and goodie, goodie, the socalled 90's is over) has picked up this media thing of skepticism about socalled "conspiracy theories". So, I use "conspiracy" to be clear that I want to criticize this specific left trend as preposterous. I just use the word , because that is how it is being formulated by those who I want to criticize.
The point is not what you call it,but that the left promote a state of mind which is skeptical about official explanations for events that are big in the mass consciousness. If the mass media spends a lot of time discouraging the masses from thinking that something was fishy in how something went down, then the left should pick up on it and promote skepticism about things being on the up and up.
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It is like using the term "fornication" to describe a sexual act - we are talki about one and the same thing, but "fornication" also carries emotive connotation that does not add anything the matter.
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CB: You are the one hung up on the term. Call it X as far as I am concerned. I want to promote the practice of skepticism and suspiciousness about government or corporate explanations and involvement in a lot of shit that goes down. "Plot" is fine with me. We should think of the FBI as "secret police". This is the left's job to promote distrust of the corporations and their government. Things are not as they are presented in the mass media should be our reflex response to everything.
On the other hand, I don't agree that emotion and emotive words are not to be used by the left. Politics and rhetoric requires skill in the using words with respect to emotions as well as thoughts. Where did you get the idea that we shouldn't be involved in evoking emotions with the words we use on the left ? This is an error.
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I do not think there is a clear distinction between right wing and left wing conspiracy theories, both are often expression of a certain brand of populism that claims fantastic plots without a shred of emprical proof.
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CB: Dead wrong. As I say, you don't seem to know your left from your right. You don't have a basic political orientation. There is no "objective" political middle that sits there above the left and the right, as you pretend you are in. You are with the right when you promote the idea that left and right analysis of the Machiavellian machinations of today are the same thing.
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There is, however, a difference between such claims and the research on social networks to identify human actors with names and adresses behind the workings of the system (see for example the work of Beth Mintz, _The power structure of American business _, Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1985.). But exposing human agents behind social systems is not the same as conspiratorial views: the former emerges from a careful study of personal constact, exchanges, dealing etc., while the latter is an apriori assumption about how the world operates with little or no empirical support to back it up. Stated diffrently, the empirical search for human agency aims to identify secret networks and dealings among other social institutions and intractions, whereas for conspiratorial theorists everything is a conspiracy.
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CB: No, my theories are based on evidence ( what you as a social scientist refer to as empircial support). I am not involved in uncovering "conspiracies" . I am involved in making logical inferences based on evidence which comes to light in various ways. A lot of it actually comes from the bourgeois media. I mean it is a fact that JFK or MLK were assassinated.
You see lawyers and detectives work with material evidence as much as social scientists. You have no exclusive claim on evidence. Evidence is more of a legal term than a social scientific term.
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I do not think anyone of us really knows the whole story behing JFK's death, so the lone gunman theory is as good as a rightwing conspiracy theory. Both are plausible, but we canot rule either one out.
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CB: No, looking at all the evidence, the two theories are not equally likely. That conclusion is based on unscientific "anti-conspiracy theory". Looking at all the EVIDENCE as a whole, it seems that the assassination of Kennedy was a rightwing coup d'etat of the U.S. government. That has a lot of political significance as I have already detailed. It means that the U.S. is a big liar when it contrasts itself as more democratic than other systems.
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My only problem with the conspiract theory is why would right wingers want to eliminate JFK? You do not suppose he was a closet leftie, do you?
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CB: It's not what we think is "left" or soft on communism. It is what the rabid rightwing of the early 60's thought was. Kennedy had just completed a nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviets. Also, previously , he basically lost the "chicken fight" , showdown in the Cuban missile crisis, because the bottom line was Castro got to stay in. The Soviets finessed it by giving up the missile. Rabid rightwing miliary types would analyze it this way. They probably felt Kennedy should have called the bluff and invaded.
Anti-Sovietism is one reason people don't get this. They expunge from their mind the victories the Soviet Union won in the Cold War. They forget how worried the U.S. rightwing was about those successes. They want to think of the whole history of the Soviet Union as one big failure in its contest with the West.
Anyone with a realistic understanding of the climate of that period in the Cold War would see this. What is left out is how paranoid the U.S. rightwing was about communism, and how they easily could conclude that someone like Kennedy should be rubbed out. Kennedy also had a swinger lifestyle that was way out there for the fifites/early sixties. That is sort of lost today, when everything is so much more swinging. The rightwingers were moralistic oppressors too. They didn't like Kennedy's lifestyle being a role model for the baby boomers. In fact the sixities cultural battles were anticipated in this regard by the Kennedy assassination.
>From the point of view of the real right wing of that day, Kennedy was too soft on communism and too swinging to be the number one role model for American youth.
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He was pretty right wing (more so than Clinton) and pretty corrupt as well - so if the rightwingers wanted something from him that he would not want to give, they could get it by threatening to expose his sex scandals, mob connections, etc. just as they did it in Clinton's case, except back then it would have had a much greater public effect. Pressures, blackmail, backstabbing, character assassination are more effective political tools than actual assasination. A corrput, vulnerable president is certainly more pliable than a dead one.
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CB: Your lack of understanding on this is exactly one of the points to be made here. The rightwing had to be really agonizing on whether the office of the presidency would be undermined by the sex scandals and all that stuff becoming public. You see, the conservative demeanor and image of the presidency was something that the rightwing wanted to preserve at that time, so they didn't have "the we will expose him " course of action as a choice. In part they killed him because if his behavior became public , it would undermine the conventional morality which the presidency was supposed to be a symbol of. He was being too reckless for them.
You don't quite understand how different things were from today culturally back then. This was before the actual "60's" cultural reforms and sexual freedom experiments. You sort of had to live through it to know what I mean. Your analysis is thrown off by how much things have changed today in part because of the lifestyle radical reforms that were precisely started by Kennedy's looseness. They killed him in part because they felt that he was subverting American conservative lifestyle culture from the bullypulpit , as the Presidency is called. The rightwing hated the whole Camelot scene. They didn't consider him rightwing, but a swinging liberal. That is what matters. Not what "objectively" Kennedy was compared with Clinton thirty years later. Today, what Kennedy did seems tamed, but then it was very, very wild for a president to be doing all that stuff. Having Marilyn Monroe as a girlfriend ? Are you kidding ? It would take a long, long post to recreate the significance of ! that for you. "Fornication and adultery" meant a lot more to 50's/60's American conservatives than you realize. You are projecting a 90's mindset onto the early sixties, and so your analysis of rightwing thinking then is off.
Today's post is about the fact that MLK's assassination was another in this pattern. Domestic assassination and plots were STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE for the U.S. secret police in that period. This is an important history lesson that only the true left will preserve. The bourgeois media wants to erase it from our historical memory in order to paint a pretty picture of the bourgeois system for the current generation. Our job is to fight that, not help them.
CB