“…I should make it clear that I propose deep political analysis [of the Kennedy Assassination] not as a substitute to … structural analysis ….. but as an extension of it. I have always believed, and argued, that a true understanding of the Kennedy Assassination will lead, not to “a few bad people,” but to the institutional and parapolitical arrangements which constitute the way we are systematically governed. The conspiracies I see as operative, in other words, are part of our political structure, not exceptions to it.
“It is certainly true, as the establishment press reiterates from time to time, that many people are psychological disposed to conspiratorial explanations for events like political murder. Many leftists repeat this cliché, adding that conspiratorial explanations allow people to externalize evil and separate it from the political system under which they live. Such psychological explanations can be put forward in an open-minded and truth-seeking spirit, but only if their proponents concede that the opposite is also true. That is, many people, particularly those whose careers have prospered under the status quo, are equally disposed on psychological grounds to reject conspiratorial explanations for events that affect the legitimacy of the society they live in. For some years, whenever I have been treated to a short sermon about the paranoid style in American politics, I have asked the preacher if he (it is never she) did not recognize the psychological grounds for his anti-conspiratorial position as well. Few do.
“….What is at stake here is a competition between paradigms of how politics works. One is the establishment paradigm, codified in textbooks and taught in universities as “political science,” whether pluralist or Marxist: this sees politics a system of overtly identified interactive forces, and offer an inclusive chart of political behavior in which, for example, there is little or no room for assassinations.
“…The deep politics (‘conspiratorial’) paradigm….attempts to go beyond all such restricted, unified explanations. It is essentially an extension of conventional political investigative methods to consideration of a much larger field of evidence, including, but not restricted to, the unacknowledged processes and events in this larger field of deep political arrangements, it breaks down the distinction between overt and covert power, and thereby hopefully avoids the frequently asked question: Which forces are in control, the public or shadow powers?
“The shadow of the unresolved Kennedy case has only increased the skepticism of many as to reason’s ability to address the major social events. Even among former assassination researchers, one finds the cynical assumption that the more important a political mystery, the less likely we are to learn the truth about it…..What has failed here, in myview, is not human rationality itself, but that imperfect ideological crystallization of it which we call the Enlightenment. Both marx and Weber, following Hegel, hypostatized rationality and neglected competing factors in history. Others, acting in the opposite direction have hypostatized the irrational, or (in the case of the later Freud) the return of the repressed.
“The defect here has not been that of rationality, but of the historic ideologies put forward in reason’s name. In my poetry I take issue with the Enlightenment contempt for poetry and religion; I propose that, in the spirit of Dante of the Tao Te Ching, we should move instead toward a deeper Enmindment that respects the truths of darkness, as well as those of light.
“…We still talk of an America of constitutional government. But in crisis after crisis the real power centers turn out to be institutions like the CIA, or the National Security Council, which the Constitution never contemplated and arguably cannot survive.”
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