By James F. Tracy
When I first heard Lou Reed’s “The Day John Kennedy Died” while a sophomore at college, it momentarily bridged an otherwise broad, taken-for granted generational divide between my parents and I.
“I dreamed I was the president / Of these United States,” Reed began with his trademark awkwardness.
I dreamed I replaced ignorance
Stupidity and hate
I dreamed the perfect union
And a perfect law, undenied
And most of all I dreamed I forgot
The day John Kennedy died
Indeed, for a majority of Americans John Kennedy symbolized the intersection of national history and personal biography. This is evident, for example, in the “Where were you when you heard the news?” stories they guardedly shared. Those at once distant yet intimate junctures suggest something much larger—the possibilities Kennedy signified on a level transcending the personal means and desires of common people and yet determining their fate—particularly civil rights, economics, and foreign policy.
There is a strong likelihood that Kennedy’s guiding mission in the last months of his life involved the prospect of a world order subject to personal introspection on the significance of peace versus a dangerous and wasteful arms race and continued flirtation with nuclear catastrophe.
At the same time, much like Martin Luther King Jr. and his brother Robert came to realize several years later, John Kennedy understood in the last months of his life how the forces arrayed against him were far greater than he could overcome. To this day such forces remain unseen and hence, for a broad swath of the US public incessantly coaxed by its media minders, are ushered to the realm of the unspeakable.
Months after the world’ narrow escape from the Cuban missile crisis President Kennedy laid down his challenge to the military industrial complex by proposing the possibility of world peace in the famous speech to American University’s 1963 graduating class. “The nonviolent theme of the American University Address,” author James W. Douglas observes, “is that self-examination is the beginning of peace. Kennedy was proposing to the American University graduates (and the national audience behind them) that they unite this inner journey of peace with an outward journey that could transform the Cold War landscape.”
The discourse was a signal moment in Kennedy’s presidency that precipitated the achievement of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. It was also significant in terms of world public opinion, being broadcast widely in the Soviet Union. Perhaps unsurprisingly the address received little fanfare in the American press, for it “was considered treasonous by forces in his own government.” Nevertheless, as Douglas notes, the wish and intent of the speech, the
call for an end to the Cold War, five and a one half months before his assassination, anticipates Dr. King’s courage in his April 4, 1967, Riverside Church address calling for an end to the Vietnam War, exactly one year before his assassination. Each of those transforming speeches was a prophetic statement provoking the reward a prophet traditionally receives. John Kennedy’s American University address was to his death in Dallas as Martin Luther King’s Riverside Church address was to his death in Memphis.[1]
Kennedy’s violent mediated demise traumatized an entire nation, constituting a form of mass coercion that—much like 9/11—disciplined the body politic into acceptance of the military-industrial complex’s ever-expanding psychic and material tyranny.
Like our parents and grandparents before us, the American people have been continually shocked and disciplined away from considering the prospects of peace and toward fulfillment of priorities that run counter to their own interests, and for which they (we) exercise no meaningful input.
Much as Kennedy’s brief time as president increasingly suggested the crystallization of a popular will toward peace and higher purpose, his public execution on November 22, 1963 demonstrated a fierce existential negation of such desires. Those aspirations become more and more remote as the possibilities for the broader public to recollect and apprehend the historical record are discouraged, lost, or otherwise rendered meaningless.
Public suspicion over the actual circumstances surrounding JFK’s killing was at one point difficult to subdue. Following President Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974 and subsequent Congressional investigations into the US intelligence community thru the early 2000s, an overwhelming majority of the US public (75 to 80 percent) recognized serious flaws in the Warren Commission and mainstream media’s strongly imposed conspiracy theory that Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole assassin.[2] Today, however, only 50 to 60 percent question the bizarre account,[3] suggesting an increasingly depoliticized and ahistorical populace cultivated by mass public schooling and corporate media.
Those conscious of JFK’s assassination yet too young to recollect it firsthand may have encountered it in a multitude of vicarious ways. This was perhaps even more so the case in Irish-Catholic households. I once told my father that he reminded me of Ted Kennedy. I didn’t need to tell him why. Both were largely overshadowed yet also defined by their older brothers’ achievements—and tragedies. I recall my father often suggesting how he wished I could have known his older brothers, one of whom was killed in an auto accident at 31, and another from a heart attack at 50. Unlike dad, the wayward upstart of the three, each attended the best prep schools and universities and were destined for greatness—the former as an attorney and the latter a physician with political ambitions and boundless enthusiasm for the Kennedys. “You were short-changed,” my father would say, distantly. Like a host of other larger-than-life figures I never personally knew, his brothers were warmly resurrected in stories he would tell.
While going through dad’s personal effects several years ago, often imagining him beside me, I found a copy of Kenneth O’Donnell’s Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye: Memories of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, along with several complete copies of the Rochester, New York Democrat and Chronicle newspaper, dated November 23, 1963 and June 6, 1968. Implicit in the magic and promise eclipsed by loss was the intimate experience of biography and history, and the growing realization that we’ve all been short-changed.
Forgetting the day John Kennedy died requires an enduring awareness that the popular will JFK symbolized and envisioned 50 years ago was effectively vetoed by an unelected force, and the cascade of subsequent overlooked and unresolved deep events have allowed that America to be replaced by today’s war on terror, growing police state, and drive toward global corporate governance.
Notes
[1] James W. Douglas, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008, 36, 46.
[2] Darren K. Carlson, “Most Americans Believe Oswald Conspired with Others to Kill JFK,” Gallup News Service, April 11, 2001.
[3] Art Swift, “Majority in U.S. Still Believe JFK Killed in a Conspiracy,” Gallup.com, November 15, 2013; Jim Williams, “Conspiracy Theory Poll Results,” Public Policy Polling, April 2, 2013.
Republished at Global Research on November 22, 2013.
No one who was aware of the event at the time could possibly forget, just like everyone remembers where they were during 7/7 or 9/11. The just over 50% today challenging the official JFK illogical narrative is, as you point out, too low.
An early investigator has largely been forgotten but he deserves credit for nailing the fake Oswald Tippett connection:
Penn Jones Jr publisher 1965
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IB5JGfxIxFk
Marzi, Your tribute to Penn Jones is a most beautiful and deserved act. He was a good friend and one of the bravest men I’ve ever known. I read James Tracey partially because he reminds me very much of the spirit of Penn and the fearlessness of a true seeker of truth. Often one can judge the worth of a blogger by the quality of comments he or she attracts. This site is extraordinary in that regard.
Good reflections and memories.
The Kennedy Assassination was important historically because it initiated the Orwellian age in America. Having been founded by religious fanatics, the Puritans and Pilgrims, religious hypocrisy formed the basis of the Orwellian duplicity of American ideology, where the Proclaimed truth of power was precisely contrary to the reality-based truth of the people. However with the president’s murder, this became much more blatant, the Warren Commission being the biggest fraud in the Western tradition since the Dreyfus Affair.
And like the Dreyfus Affair, it had a racist aspect, what might be called Other-bigotry. Kennedy was an Irish-Catholic in an English-Teutonic country where the powerful were Protestant. The American people were indoctrinated with a lynch mentality by the Educated classes, killing the Other with a different skin color, religion, language, etc being ingrained in the American soul. It forms the basis of the War on Terrorism, the killing, torturing and raping of dark-skinned Muslims.
Irishness and Catholicism were originally Other characteristics in America, a noted book being written about Irish-American history, How The Irish Became White. The Klu Klux Klan targeted Catholics and Jews along with the non-White in their racist terrorism. However all this bigotry and racism has been swept under the ideological rug by the White plutocratic class, and the White professional-managerial class that serves them. Therefore both Educated and gutter racism and bigotry is considered Natural and Normal in the USA, and is routinely displayed in the comments of the Memory Hole commenters.
In this piece, James points out, for the first time to my knowledge, the Other-bigotry of the Kennedy murder, and the reason for the intense hatred he evoked among the more reactionary of the Educated classes. There were parties all over the South celebrating his murder. Jim Douglass, also an Irish-Catholic, points out in JFK AND THE UNSPEAKABLE the historical consequences of this murder, being a proximate cause of the Vietnam war, and the continuing Cold War against Communism.
Which still vitally affects us. Today, Nov 22, marks the fiftieth anniversary of the NY Times and the pseudo-radical Noam Chomsky lying to us about the Kennedy murder, and so much else as well. The bigotry against the Other continues in the racist hatred of Obama, not for his policies, but for his skin color. And African-Americans and Hispanics identified with Obama for precisely the same reason, although his policies sold them out.
Pointing out the racial and bigotry aspects of American ideology, as James does in this piece, less crudely than I do, is an essential historical process to uniting the American people to the despotic American power being marshaled against us. It will be a lengthy process because of this Other-racism, not because Americans don’t know, or don’t know they don’t know, but because they don’t WANT to know.
Yes, right. Excuse me while I now go flagellate myself as I pay penance for my ancestors who are solely to blame for the state of the world today.
It is a measure of your remarkable monomaniacalism, your astonishing ability to find racism where it does not exist, Mark, that you can congratulate James for finding it, too. Makes my head spin.
“In this piece, James points out, for the first time to my knowledge, the Other-bigotry of the Kennedy murder”
Very impressive. I wonder how much training it takes to learn to detect agreement with your overall thesis, to this far extent. Certainly postdoctoral studies on postmodernist theory is a given; after that, 10 years writing a biography of Michel Foucault, perhaps?
Thankfully, back here in reality, almost everyone who reads your obsessive weirdness just bursts out laughing.
Irish American families that moved up the socioeconomic latter somewhat quickly in the early 1900s mimicked the trappings of proper etiquette as “Lace Curtain Irish,” so as not to exclude themselves from proper society. This was especially important if the family’s livelihood was at least partially dependent on “fitting in.” Italian and Jewish American families often found themselves having to assimilate in similar ways. While there was no doubt some bias and perhaps even bigotry toward those of Irish descent, it cannot be readily compared to the experience of African Americans during the same era.
As someone who’s grandparents were those very ‘lace curtain irish’ moving up the socioeconomic latter in the early 1900’s, I can assure you that not all irish were these ‘lace curtain’ types, and that many of them suffered very similar bigotry and discrimination as the African Americans. Have you hung out in coal country, Pa, Dr. Tracy? How about the sweat shops of those early 1900’s? You only take into account a slender element of the irish in those years. My father’s side, not lace curtain, worked as janitors during those years. You are way off base here. I also suspect you have little grasp of how similarly poor whites were treated in the South to the African Americans.
The problem with white liberals is they tend to speak for all whites. I don’t speak for anyone here, I just delineate between various elements of whites and report the facts.
Or, maybe you don’t know shit about American history. Let me guess, you’re a Tea Party Republican/libertarian who suspects slavery was a liberal lie to create white guilt. Too many of your kind are co-opting the “truth movement”.
I guess you are saying that you are one of those with the antennae capable of detecting in this essay an argument James is making that the Kennedy hit has something to do with racism. Well, you and Mark make two.
Incidentally, you caught me. I am ignorant of American history. I just like to blather, and waste everyone’s time. Oh, and you caught me on the slavery thing, too. Ignore all the many comments I have made in these pages on the subject: you’re right, I was lying about it all. I think slavery never happened; it is, as you suspect I believe, a “lie” by “liberals” to make white people feel guilty. Never happened. I still can’t figure out, though, how all those pesky blacks got here. I’m working on that. Come to think of it, you’ve given me an idea. Maybe I’ll set up a meeting with my “Tea Party Republican/libertarian” mind controllers to fill me in on the right answer. I’ll get back to you after I’m properly reprogrammed.
Well, got to run. Got a big schedule of co-opting to accomplish this afternoon.
To quote the inimitable Richard Pryor, “We certainly can communicate on a higher plane than that.”
Labeling readers/commenters as representative of one alleged faction or another is a conversation-stopper, as well as a clear way to “co-opt” any exchange that aspires toward something productive and meaningful. After all, shouldn’t arguments be evaluated based on their own merits, rather than allegiances to phony political alignments?
Come on James, you know better than that. You pointed out in your well written article that the anti-Catholic animus could be felt back in those days towards the Kennedy family. Patrick is one of these Tea Party revisionists who try to shut down any conversation regarding America’s past racial bigotry. The second it gets brought up they are the first to jump on it and call it “liberal propaganda”. And then I call them on it and you criticize me. Conservatives have mastered the game of being the bully and playing the victim at the same time. To be sure there is all kinds of stupid political correctness going on in the media, but I would ask what the purpose of it is. Do they really want to turn America into a hyper-sensitive PC state, or are they just trying to gin up the racial tension and create a racist reaction and sabotage any real discussion of racial inequality.
Hi Chris, Hi Patrick, Hi James,
I do not want to play ‘conflict resolution counselor.’ But if I may . . .
I think that Chris’s position has some validity. Patrick, it seems to me, at times manifests an insensitivity that is ‘out of place.’ And if there are grounds on which to debate Mark’s views on the race issue, then the views, and not the state Mark’s psychological constitution, should be at issue. If I impute to you a “remarkable monomaniacalism,’ I’m no longer debating anything with you. In effect, I’m trying to shut you down — and anyone else who may share your views — through, as Chris puts it, an act of bullying.
Race is a pivotal issue. It must aired. It must be discussed. The reality is that the world is divided and divides itself along racial lines, that entire systems of oppression and exploitation incorporate ‘racism’ as an essential component of ‘control,’ and that unless the victimizers and victims of this inhuman paradigm come to transcend it, there is little hope for us in the future.
So I agree: “We certainly can communicate on a higher plane than that.”
Nothing is accomplished by slinging insults. Frankly, it is a sign of pathetic immaturity.
“If I impute to you a “remarkable monomaniacalism,’ I’m no longer debating anything with you. In effect, I’m trying to shut you down”
“monomania”: “exaggerated or obsessive enthusiasm for or preoccupation with one thing.”
If that does not define Mark, I’ll eat my hat.
To say that my pointing it out is “bullying,” or “slinging insults” is ridiculous.
James did not even vaguely imply that he believes Kennedy was executed because of his ethnicity. Mark is monomaniacal about race, to the point that he sees it in utterly absurd examples; this is one among many. It is so defining a trait of his (at least on this forum) that I made up a word to describe it in his case. I made it an “ism.”
I find Mark’s obsession frankly hilarious. If I’m guilty of any sin here, it’s being too sarcastic (I AM prone to that). But I’ve not been insulting (God knows how many times Mark has baldly insulted me, and what could you call this Chris person, if not the same?); I challenge you to find one instance in which I have behaved that way toward Mark.
And to say that my mocking laughter is an example of “bullying” is to debase that once useful word into meaninglessness.
Nice try, Norm.
Oh, and if you want absolute proof, Mark has provided it in his most recent comment. Not only does he double down on his preposterous assertion that Kennedy’s murder was somehow racist in nature (he does not enlist James Tracy in the canard this time, however), he pretty much distorts our entire history in a truly astonishing way. He truly hates us, that much is without question. That his obsession with race is the grid he structures that hatred around is really chilling. This most recent comment of his, perhaps for the first time, did not make me laugh. It made my blood run cold.
Thank you for that, James.
Although it is true that we Celts are prone at times to lost cause thinking and tragic repetitions of what might have been, I have to say that I feel Kennedy’s legacy to us is alive if we listen to his words. When he said that the torch was being passed, he meant it. Perhaps his hold on it was short, but it still burns. In Ireland he quoted George Bernard Shaw when he said “I see the world as it might be and say ‘Why not?.'”
I am also reminded of similar words which Lafayette uttered – his family motto in fact was “Cur non?” “Why not?” It was part of the idea of freedom. Now it is necessary to remind people that means personal freedom, because the technical means of intrusion are so widespread and pervasive.
Kennedy subscribed, it is said, to the “great man theory of history” which has been challenged so much in recent decades, it’s hard to know what it meant.
But I think that for him it involved the examination of private conscience, soul-keeping if you will, and the constant effort to refocus on underlying reality – such as that even our so-called enemies, being mortal, must also aspire for the survival of future generations, and long to protect their children from harm or want.
Yes, there are psychopaths who live in a solipsistic isolation or who only care for their brothers in arms to the exclusion of everyone else. But he meant the vast majority of people who would die like us in nuclear wars. That they were entirely like us in every way that counted, and that dialogue must be entered.
I have seen since his time other presidents with sparks of conscience that I regard as similar – Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, Carter far more so but less effectively than Reagan, who although caught up in Star Wars resisted the right wing’s drive to continue to demonize all Soviets and think of their every move as a sinister trick. Because the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain came down with a whimper rather than a bang, I think some credit is due to another Irishman’s charm and personality, which kindled the best possible response in the Soviet leader and his people. It could have gone worse. There were things Reagan did which were awful and coming from LA, I know about the sort of rich men who voted for him and what their values mostly are (not good for the poor or minorities, not empathetic), but on the main issues which concerned war and peace, he took the kind of positions Kennedy might have done had he lived and perhaps ended the East West mess sooner.
The terrible conditioning the American public has been subjected to with regard to synthetic terror is deeply corrupting, and the cleansing process will not be pretty when we finally come to it, if ever.
Last week, I walked around my original hometown of Washington, DC. I attended a Press Club dinner (they rent out) where my grandfather, a reporter, lawyer and former protege of Joseph Kennedy was once a member. I visited St. Matthew’s Cathedral where my parents were married and where JFK’s funeral Mass occurred. I am half Protestant, for the record, and have never been as intensely Irish Catholic as my mother or some of the Kennedy’s. I cannot (with an atheist WASP father) claim to come from an Irish Catholic family. But when Kennedy died, believe me, from my grandfather down it was a death in the family, far beyond politics, although his “first Catholic President” was very significant.
Most people today do not study in detail the deep background of Oswald, which even to a child at the time – myself – appeared really, really weird. The idea that he would be on his own with a Soviet wife in Texas, able to mess around in Cuban issues without being watched 24/7 occurred to me even then. Perhaps my origins in a political family made me aware of that kind of thing. Lone nut indeed.
“…Reagan, who although caught up in Star Wars resisted the right wing’s drive to continue to demonize all Soviets and think of their every move as a sinister trick.”
Remember how he repeatedly said that if only he could get Gorby to tour a typical American shopping mall, he’d finally see America for what it really is, and that would be the beginning of the end of the Cold War?
Another thoughtful, and though provoking, commentary on just how far down the rabbit hole we have been led, Dr.Tracy.
It is nearly impossible to invoke in someone who was not of age at that time the sense of vast promise that lay ahead of America. A race for space, an industrial base that was unmatched, popular cultural hegemony…and all led by a charismatic young president and his cultured and lovely wife. No wonder the idea of “Camelot” didn’t seem far fetched.
Besides the direct connection to the aborted promise of Jack Kennedy’s vision, I firmly believe the deep, almost mystical attraction that period holds for those who lived through them has to do with a tremendous loss of innocence and sense of noble destiny America had then. Whether one is politically aware or not, it is almost impossible to feel that we have no fallen very, very far as a nation, and as a people, from those days. I don’t think it’s explained by simple nostalgia. We were better then; we were trying harder to be better and succeeding. It was exhilarating to be a small part of that sense of belonging.
We now are “the indispensable nation”, self-anointed by some of the most depraved and psychopathic examples ever to lead our government. And we work at a deep disadvantage as those who remember the real American dream pass from the scene…replaced by those who grew up in Stalag Amerika.
I am convinced that John F. Kennedy literally died trying to make this world a place that the vast majority of the world’s peoples would support and cherish. He was brutally, cold-bloodedly killed in a public execution by those who are human in name only.
There is no punishment too swift or to extreme for those who plotted this murder. Whether we shall ever have the pure pleasure of righteous revenge for it, I do not know. We deserve it, and I continue to hope and pray that against all odds, some day we will have it. That we will come together to forever wipe away the grotesque organism that has been feasting on blood like Jack Kennedy’s for centuries.
Just noticing Penn Jones’ eyes during the interview. He appears to be reading from cue cards at times.
I can see that too, but I think his eyes are switching back and forth from the interviewer to the camera.
Its possible. However it seems his speech is picking up and slowing down with the eye movement.
He might need to make sure he remembers all those many names. There are a lot of them. But yes, I assumed the same thing. He strikes me as the kind of guy who would write his own cue cards though.
[…] The Day John Kennedy Died (memoryholeblog.com) […]
Thank you for sharing your view of the historical (and personal) context of the JFK assassination. I put together a short take on the topic focusing on the enduring value of the work done by people like yourself who question the official narratives: http://desultoryheroics.wordpress.com/2013/11/22/50-years-after-jfk/
It almost seems like we’re lost in a fog. 50 years ago a Coup D’ etat occurred and if you talk about it seriously, people may think you are nuts.
There was a re-alignment inside the “deep-state.” Read the book “A Man Called Intrepid” by William Stevenson. Pay particular attention to the comments on Joseph Kennedy, the father of John Kennedy.
Some have told me they don’t think it’s possible to know who killed JFK, but with these excellent eyewitness history videos the picture becomes quite clear.
It’s worth watching these two even though they’re long. Good to pass on to die hard gov believers.
LBJ and his circle
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgNfQYpS1gQ
Oswald
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgNfQYpS1gQ
Here’s the Oswald video –
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gBxMJFQd04&feature=youtu.be
America was cheated of a brighter future by the murderers of JFK, MLK, RFK and Malcolm X, among others.
There is no good reason for keeping the Kennedy files sealed except to protect the murderers.
The Kennedy files are concealed to protect the American power system. If ‘Conspiracy Theories’ are legitimated, it will lead to crucial questions about the 9/1-anthrax homicides, which would not only de-legitimate the Terrorist War, but the American power system as well.
You mean Conspiracy TRUTHS against We The People.
The truth hasn’t been told about Jekyll Island, the fraudulent 16th Amendment and its ratification/lack of, the Great Depression, World War 2, The Nuremberg Trials, the Vietnam War, the murder of JFK, MLK, RFK and Malcolm X,the impeachment of Nixon, the 18 minutes erased from the tapes and the truth of the Watergate break-in, Black Tuesday, Iran-Contra, Ruby Ridge, Oklahoma City, Waco, the 1993 WTC bombing, the events of September 11th, 7/7…you get my point, certainly.
The “American power system” is NOT the system that We The People see fit to lend our blood, sweat and tears – our system was based on life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That is the system in which I believe and will give my life to protect.
pdf download of first chapter of this gorgeous book available here
http://eddieleaks.org/the-unspeakable/
Completely absorbed into the day-long memorials of this date. I was 29 when JFK was killed. Dealy Plaza, grassy knoll, schoolbook depository, Parkland Hospital, et al., entered the national lexicon in a few short hours. Then I sat transfixed in front of the TV the rest of the weekend until “the day of the drums”–his burial at Arlington. Nothing has been quite right since and I fear never will be. Doubt who did it lies only in the minds of the uninformed or those in denial.
Alex Jones was in Dallas to represent the common folk, those not invited, those lett out of the conversation. Jones cannot be silenced, unlike many bobbing heads passing for journalists in other media. On WBAI NYC, the Jim Garrison interview ran for about two hours. Stunning in its depth of information and personal insight. The movie, “JFK” by Oliver stone was
highlighted as Garrison offered background information validating the percepts of the Stone classic.
Cannot think of this sad day in America, without being overcome in sadness and tears blurring my vision, this is the day the evil doers won. In the first grade in Rochester, NY, could not comprehend the hysteric crying at the school, who dismissed us early and the same that enveloped my home. You are too young to understand, the President is dead. Seemed it was shortly thereafter, there were riots in the streets and my 16 year old brother was laying down with a shotgun in hand on the grocery store roof next store, where he worked and were expecting looters. Think all of you in big cities that have experienced the mob looting and knock out crimes need to relocate now! http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2013/11/22/4-men-arrested-in-alleged-knockout-attack-in-brooklyn/
Our four hour radio series special on it aired on Pacifica today- http://www.projectcensored.org/project-censored-presents-key-issues-assassination-president-john-f-kennedy-special-broadcast-pacifica-radio/
Mickey Huff, you ordered me to stop emailing you and I did so. You posted a link here to projectcensored.org on an interactive website that I’ve be participating in. That makes my questioning of you here not a wrong imposition on you in the slightest way. I think you should be questioned about your finances, broadcasts, and endorsement of Russia Today calling it an independent news source. http://www.censorednews.org/ I intend to do so here, sir. I don’t think you’re in a position to validate or invalidate anything. I think Project Censored is not valid.
911ARTISTS I have allowed you to post several comments (including this one, which I remain tentative on) on the faith you are sincere. I have in the past emphasized to you that I agree with Huff that RT is in many ways independent, as it provides much news and information that simply cannot be found elsewhere. And I support Project Censored.
After looking at your blog, I have noted that it only has but a handful of posts. These are over one year old, and suggest that you have unreasonably taken issue with other public figures on questionable grounds as well. One such individual concludes that you are a troll.
911ARTISTS:
Barrett, why do you not publish my response to Syed here?
KEVIN BARRETT:
i published one, which is perhaps more than you deserve
i’ve spoken to you, and you come off as all ego, no concern for 9/11 truth in itself
what you’re doing here is being a troll
go away
I could see how it might appear that way to you, Prof. Tracy. It’s not the case though. Let me think about what your saying here and how to respond to it a bit, please.
But quickly in self-defense let me place here that you published what Barrett said about me but not my response which is right at the same URL address. And Dr. Kevin Barrett is an editor on a site called Veterans Today that deliberately publishes false information according to it’s chairman Gordon Duff. His words about me and everything should be seen in this light, I think.
Can someone please explain to me the difference between censoring and banning someone because they are considered a “troll”.
Thanks
If you like this place, violeta, you should appreciate James’ remarkable ability to maintain a very high level of conversation here. Would you like it if a high percentage of the comments were by trolls? Those kinds of places drive away the serious-minded.
I think James has revealed himself to be very cautious about identifying such interlopers. No one has a right to be published here. If they come to ruin the party, they can be shown the door. That’s not censorship. It’s keeping the party fun.
Comprendo:)
“Indeed, for a majority of Americans John Kennedy symbolized the intersection of national history and personal biography.” Nice piece of prose,that, JT!
Fantastically enlightening article by Jacob Hornberger which explained to me for the first time the “World War 3” mindset behind all of the coverup. Now it makes sense…
http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/the-national-security-states-assassination-of-john-f-kennedy/
A nice summary, martha. I do take exception to some of it, though. There’s this, for example:
“Thus, Kennedy was viewed as hopelessly naïve. Rather than saving America by going to war against the communists, he was effectively disarming America and surrendering to the communists with talk of peace and peaceful coexistence, nuclear test ban treaties, and intentions to withdraw from Vietnam. What greater threat to national security than that?”
It’s not that it’s not true; it’s that it is in itself a little naïve.
Some months back there appeared on Lew Rockwell’s web site an article arguing that the real reason for the nuclear bombing of Japan was to start the Cold War. It was a message sent to the USSR. This is not as far fetched as it initially sounds.
The truth is, the world was scheduled to undergo a transformation with the close of WWII. Bretton Woods gave the world a new monetary system, a new economic paradigm, for instance. Britain handed the world-policeman baton to America. And Eisenhower’s “military industrial complex” would underpin it all. It was to be a permanent war economy.
Many months ago I wrote here at some length about the pattern Kennedy’s killing set up (James made it into a stand-alone article http://memoryholeblog.com/2013/05/18/secret-government-deep-events-and-the-emerging-police-state/). I won’t repeat it all here, but I will say this: Kennedy was not supposed to win that election. His father stole it, with the use of his mafia contacts. This enraged the establishment, the secret government (the visible tip of the iceberg is the visible portion of the CIA), who had plans for the whole world to come under a completely new, different, organization. Kennedy proposed to stop that process, as best he could.
What I’m saying is that “Kennedy was NOT viewed as hopelessly naïve.” He was viewed as a serious threat to the implementation of a Plan that was well underway, and had been for a decade and a half. The Cold War was essential to its implementation, as were the CIA and the Fed, and all the rest of the things Kennedy was attempting to muck up the operations of.
There are very serious, intentionally invisible powers at work, crafting a New World Order, and they won’t allow mere men to stop that process. They kill naïve people who blunder into disrupting the Plan, certainly. But they hold particular venom for those who know what they are doing, who defiantly fight them without fear.
Mark, the whole milieu of which you speak in so Bizantine and fraught with intrigue, it defies the imagination…you can’t make this stuff up. Even a skilled novelist with a background in clandestine statecraft such as John LeCarre could not devise a plot and subplots so intricate.
Kennedy had always been under the care of doctors for one ailment or another, since childhood of fragile physical health. Is it conceivable that someone was manipulating him but could not get to his moral core,–establshed within the family?…On his maternal side, Rose was a devout, no-nonsense Catholic. His paternal relationship with Joe proved no less daunting. Joe was a strict disciplinarian who taught his family to think independently and achieve. Ambitious, Joe Kennedy’s lust for power could not be quenched; his romancing of the Third Reich cost him a bid for high office. When the eldest brother died in war, the burden fell to John to carry the banner. It is said he was a reluctant politician.
Perhaps the powers-that-be thought they had their man. Nixon was not “presidential timber” according to DD Eisenhower–his own president.
He had none of the personal attributes that attracted voters. But Kennedy did. That is why I wonder if his winning was a mistake in strategy–or planned. Maybe he just bolted off the reservation and veered toward sanity. Who was actually running the CIA after the war?
Its ties to the old NAZI regime are a matter of documentation. The Cold War proved a boon for the military/industrial complex. Endless enemies and endless war. It also allowed many German criminals to escape detection and replant their virulent seeds globally. (My provable theory)
I meant to direct this reply to Patrick, not Mark…oh, well…
And who exactly moderates comments? Are they actually checking on the content–by way of Wikipedia???
What reply?
You were stuck in “moderation,” evidently. I’ve had that happen to me a few times.
I’m not sure how Kennedy’s life/family history relates to my remarks. I agree with your summary; these facts do not contradict my premise.
He WAS slated to lose. His father DID enlist the mob in stealing the election.
Nixon was a compliant soldier–which is the key character trait required for a man to be allowed to be president. (I address this at some length in the article link.) When Nixon had the presidency stolen from him, he was told to be patient; he’d be given it eventually. He moved to New York, and lived in the same building as Nelson Rockefeller (if memory serves, he was on the same floor). He was given a Rocky-connected lawyering job, and for the first time in his life he was making a high salary. Presumably, he was being shown the ropes all the while.
There was never any doubt that the kingmakers were going to give him the presidency. The Rockefellers controlled the media, and thus the political process.
John Kennedy, as you say, was not the “chosen one.” His father had been grooming Number One Son for that crowning achievement of the old scoundrel’s life–a son in the White House. But alas, he died in the war. So Joe The Bootlegger had to settle for Jack. This, it seems, is the key element here.
John could be idealistic, because he was not selling his soul to the system to achieve power–which is the one thing the system demands of politicians. This is easy to see, when you reflect that there are very few politicians with souls. Ron Paul was a source of consternation for the system; they cheated him out of seniority-driven committee assignments out of spite and hatred, because he wouldn’t sell his soul; they mostly forced silence upon him in presidential debates; they constantly tried to redistrict him out of office.
John could afford to refuse to be a compliant soldier; when his dad got him the presidency, he could set about breaking the machinery that had been put in place and had been running for a decade and a half, the engineering of the New World Order.
To quote myself, from a comment in the Thom Hartmann article,
“There is a recent book about the Dulles brothers. I haven’t read it yet, but heard the interview on NPR’s Fresh Air–a great source for me to learn about books I would not otherwise know about. It seems that both men were corporate lawyers, whose core principle was that the federal government’s job was to make the world safe for American corporations. When pesky South American countries elected representatives who had the loony idea that their country is their own, and that their resources are for their own people, the Dulles brothers put a stop to that nonsense. Allan, the CIA director, would meet with Foster, the Secretary of State, and decide what to do. The visible government, State, would run interference for the invisible government, CIA, as CIA interfered with the internal affairs of what Allan considered piss-ant countries who were proposing to hinder the activities of American corporations there. These conspirators murdered many heads of state, and replaced them with compliant lackeys. They did the same in Iran. Thus, they changed the course of the 20th century for the worse.
“My point in outlining the Dulles brothers’ corruption is that because they did what they did, both the state and the corporations were allowed to grow so powerful that nothing can at this point stop the catastrophe that is unfolding.”
Kennedy could afford to defy these people. He fired Allan Dulles, and vowed to destroy the CIA. Can’t have that.
Patrick, I’m afraid I am going too far down the rabbit hole in my thinking at times. Getting beyond the obvious into the shadowy world of surrealism just below the surface. What became of Kennedy’s :thousand days’ in office once he was eliminated as a threat?
Ah, Johnson, definitely a company man, prolonged the Vietnam War to the delight of war profiteers;the Civil Rights Law was passed, Medicare was legislated into practice and the welfare rolls were expanded into the bloated bureaucracy we see today. What is the upshot?
More dependency on government control, less individual initiative–the collective mindset run amok. So many people now demand from the government what past generations worked to achieve–with pride and dignity.
Of course, once a person is caught in that spiraling downdraft, the government can pull the rug out from in under–the government giveth and can taketh away. It’s complicated from one perspective, but quite clear if you are seeing the Globalist’s strategy from the inside-out.
By deindustrializing America, sending jobs overseas and importing cheaper
labor to in effect undercut our own labor force, the New World Order is achieving economically what military invasioin could not accomplish.
We have to stop 20th Century thinking. Marches and letters to our congressional reps are not working. Also the divide and conquer strategy must be exposed for the charade it is. My distaste for Obama is not based on race or gender or class; it is simply his dubious character and his sketchy resume, so lacking in experience for the weight of the office he was ‘assigned.’ These issues require much more space than a blog can offer. But it is a good starting point.
“My distaste for Obama is not based on race or gender or class; it is simply his dubious character and his sketchy resume, so lacking in experience for the weight of the office he was ‘assigned.’ ”
So it is with us all, Marilyn.
I consider this forum a place where reality can be faced and analyzed, along with great minds we cannot meet any other way. We can sometimes misspeak, or not completely get our thoughts in order before speaking, and others will help us. What a joy.
“These issues require much more space than a blog can offer. But it is a good starting point.”
Indeed.
Patrick… I wholeheartedly agree with you…
However, I believe that the comment you quote about Kennedy “being naive” was written from the point of view of the CIA/Intelligence/Cold Warrior Patriots who felt that Kennedy’s move towards Peace was a BLUNDER, not an act of moral superiority.
I appreciate your thoughts on this matter, martha. I agree with you, to the extent that most of the people who man the posts, who are decent people doing their jobs, can’t see into the darker motivations of the secret government. That’s why when I said this: “It’s not that it’s not true; it’s that it is in itself a little naïve,” I wasn’t being hard on the guy. The problem is the deeper rabbit hole (h/t to Marilyn).
I love Peter Dale Scott’s term: Deep Politics.
Another term, one we all know, is “need to know basis.” Few indeed are deemed to have the “need to know.”
My daughter, 18 in a couple of days, got me to read the Hunger Games books. I’m glad I did. The (first two) movies do a great job of bringing that story to those who can’t be bothered to read. The great news is that those of us who read the books are not greatly annoyed. I bring this up to encourage everyone to read and watch this material. And also to provide a cheater I will not do. I want to, because it’s perfect. It’s the exact reference. Let’s just say this. There is a place. Enough. Won’t ruin it.
Read those books. Watch the movies. (The new one is better than the first, but netflix the first one first; not only do you need it, it’s well worth your time.)
That story is our story, those of us who find this place so helpful.
Those are great books.
To various things, I like to say, “I do not volunteer as Tribute.”
NSA: “I do not volunteer as Tribute.”
Obamacare: “I do not volunteer as Tribute.”
TSA: “I do not volunteer as Tribute.”
Useful phrase.
Martha, you’d written: “Marches and letters to our congressional reps are not working. Also the divide and conquer strategy must be exposed for the charade it is.”
I agree. But, want to interject that the massive outcry against the proposed Syria bombing campaign gave our mighty leaders pause. It is the public calling, emailing, tweeting, FB/HuffPost commenting their Congressional Leaders, State and Local representatives that made it clear this wasn’t going to be cakewalk selling to the American Public.
Getting involved in the political process does work. Just look at the amount of jostling that is constantly being done to sway “public opinion.”
Standing outside in the rain in a rally is merely standing outside, uncomfortable in a crowd—in the rain.
Vote. Pick up the phone (numerous times). Tweet like a madman. FB your approval/displeasure. Write a letter. Make an appointment. Be the “lobby for American interests.”
Martha’s find of the Hornberger article she links to is well worth reading. It is why the Free Press for half a century has tried to delude the American people about the Kennedy assassination. Over the decades honest investigators have uncovered an enormous amount of evidence overwhelmingly indicating that the Kennedy assassination was a political murder by the national-security state, a veritable coup to continue the War on Communism.
If the American power system conceded the obvious truth of the assassination critics, it would greatly diminish the stigmatizing of Conspiracy Theorists. Since if one homicidal conspiracy by USA power occurred with enormous historical effect, so could others. And if the War on Communism was continued by this political murder, why is it not possible that the War on Terrorism was initiated in the same way, by homicidal conspiracies of secret violence organs.
So the Kennedy assassination is still crucial, not so much for murder conspiracy itself, but for the COVERUP CONSPIRACY. If the American government lied to the people for a half century, and the media repeated the lies as if they were true, the question arises as to how this could happen in a Democracy ruled by the people.
The implication that people will eventually concede after much historical misgiving is that American Democracy is largely a fraud, and we are being ruled by sinister elements to serve their own interests and those of the Educated classes: the 1% of the plutocratic billionaires and the 10% of the professional-managerial class who serve them.
And since they have institutionalized a monstrous inequality, the oppression needed to maintain it, and the lies needed to legitimate it, the question arises: do we want to be ruled this way. With the impoverishment, violence, and duplicity initiated in the Orwellian age by the Kennedy assassination.
A half a century, almost to the day, of the murder of John Kennedy, the USA power system, out of weakness, has begun to turn away from the public relations Wars. With the European powers, it has signed a nuclear agreement with Iran in the teeth of Israel opposition. The Terrorist War of killing Muslims and devastating their countries has aroused such world opposition that it has leaked over to the American people, who have finally said No.
So Obama has shifted gears, what Kennedy wanted to do a half century ago. He was becoming so unpopular, along with the world fear and loathing of American power, that he had to. Whether it will withstand the opposition of Aipac and the Ziocons remains to be seen, but you have to give Obama credit. His deviousness and political talent for deceit finally had a pro-people turn, and, who knows, maybe it will continue to some extent abroad, although unlikely to at home.
I fail to see the proliferation of nuclear weapons(including our own) to be “pro people”. Growing up under the threat of nuclear annihilation was oppressive, plain and simple. Talk about rewiring the brain. How can we ever measure what growing up with that did to us? And they say religion is bad for you.
The past is never dead. It isn’t even past. The US wants to continue the Terrorist War in Afghanistan even though there is almost no strategic reason for doing so. The US control of central Asia advocated 15 years ago by Brzezinski in THE GRAND CHESSBOARD has long been superceded by the power of Russia and China. Obama would not follow his mentor at Columbia if reason were all that was involved.
Why is he doing it? Why does he want to maintain 9 bases with 20 thousand men? Because Kennedy was murdered in Dallas a half century ago.
If the US would withdraw from Afghanistan, there is no way to obscure the fact that this is a military loss when the Taliban assume control. This would no doubt piss off the military, the Ziocons, and elements in the CIA. They have a precedent, and homicide is addictive, like eating salted peanuts. Once you start, it is hard to stop. One year in the Roman empire, four emperors were killed in succession. Obama doesn’t need Faulkner to tell him to be careful.
While the useless killing continues.
Faulkner is undeniably right. In cultural and institutional terms, nothing much “changes.” It takes an unbearably and tragically long, long time . . .
And neither a JFK nor an Obama, whatever their personal aspirations or hopes, could redeem from within a system of rule designed to concentrate immeasurable power and wealth in the form of ‘private property’ in the hands of only a few.
The important lesson, I think, to be drawn from the JFK assassination is that those who currently rule and serve the existing power structure will not hesitate to eliminate what they perceive as existential threats to their privilege, whether from within or without. As you have written elsewhere, as everyone who posts here knows, political murder, both domestic and foreign, has been institutionalized.
The only hope, I think, that ‘we’ have is to come a ‘collective realization’ that ‘we,’ the majority, from the bottom-up, must somehow start over again.
JFK, the man, may indeed have been as president ‘one brief shining moment’ that will never again arise, and for this he deserves ‘our’ heartfelt remembrance.
Perhaps more importantly, however, his murder underscores and unmasks the true nature of the despotism that hides behind the cover of fine sentiments and phrases that keep ‘us’ hoping that real change might be only one or two elections away.
Until that particular hope becomes completely extinguished and “people refuse to play by the controller’s rules” – to quote ‘lophatt’ from an earlier post – the useless killing of not only ‘statesmen with integrity,’ but of innocents in their millions will continue.
It is quite amazing the ruling “Bush family dynasty” is never mentioned in any of these commentaries. “Rivaling families” have always been a point of contention in historical periods.
Rivalry between the ruling dynasties, certainly. The aim should be to rid ourselves of these dynasties and their methods of control.
Thank you for the excellent and thoughtful piece. I remember well what I was doing on that day. I remember what a number of people had to say about it. Hagiography aside, it has taken on a number of different meanings for different people. I think it was the day that innocence died.
Now, many years later, I see that politics and the psychopaths that engage in them have nothing to do with the stated goals we were so carefully taught in school. There is no doubt that JFK had his own sense of entitlement and was far from perfect. That said, compared to what we see these days, he’s a saint.
Maybe, once they got away with cold-blooded murder in front of millions, they decided there was no longer a need to keep up the pretense of “service”. Hope died on that day. We all saw who was in charge.
The comment on “race” above is, in my view, ridiculous. While all groups (when we are speaking of groups) have signature characteristics, whether those are caused by “nature or nurture” is a study in itself. No matter what that study might show, I am not ashamed to be White nor do I blame “myself” or my ancestors for all the ills of the world. And, as disgusting as I find Obongo, it is not because of his race. His “race” is convenient, however, as a tool to deflect legitimate criticism from the real topic.
If there is a lesson in any of this it is that “salvation” is not going to come from the government. Placing your faith in public parasites, even if they have the best of stated intentions, is sure to fail. As we see with JFK they will not be tolerated by those who actually pull the strings.
Nonetheless, it was an excellent piece and allowed me a little nostalgia for a better time. It made me think back to those days and the realization that no matter what any of us want, we are not going to get it. At least not from “government”.
“And, as disgusting as I find Obongo, it is not because of his race. His “race” is convenient, however, as a tool to deflect legitimate criticism from the real topic.”
Youbetcha.
The cleverest thing the architects of the New World Order ever did was put this black Chauncey Gardiner in the Big White (as Michelle’s Mirror calls it, hilariously–everything she says is hilarious). Because he looks like a decedent of American slaves, he’s above reproach. He can act in ways so lawless as to astonish anyone in our entire history, and be absolutely certain he won’t be stopped.
He could personally go “polar bear hunting,” and murder a 90 year old lady on national TV as a result, and I’d wager that the MSM would run cover for him.
We are doomed.
Wow, she is funny! How can any one person be so funny?
Patrick,
Yes, I think when they made the “casting call” for the next front man that was a definite consideration.
I’m not sure how we got on a “race” discussion. I suppose it is related to JFK being “Irish Catholic”. Up until about the middle of the 20th Century the term “race” had different meanings. It was used by scholastics to describe any grouping with a common interest.
It is clear (at least to me) that all of the efforts to define what is “acceptable” when discussing the human condition have been a success. Having an emotional attachment to one’s “race” to the point of feeling pride or shame is interesting.
It would take a book to adequately discuss these notions. I’m fairly confident that I am not “naive” about this subject. I am equally confident that people have a right to their prejudices (should they exist). Discrimination is another matter.
When people identify themselves with a group, racial or otherwise, they should expect to be considered in that company. If they want to be seen as worthy individuals they should identify themselves in that way. I neither have acceptance or rejection for any individual that is based on anything other than their behavior. If someone wants to blame their bad behavior on the group they belong to they are free to do that. I doubt that is the road to acceptance or success.
My Grandpa was a hard working, proud Irish American who knew our ancestors who braved that big ocean to start a new life here. There were rumors we were somehow related to the Kennedys, but Grandpa would have nothing to do with that conversation. He used his worst swear word to describe them, ‘those dirty buggers are criminals and have done nothing but bring shame to the Irish.” His declaration was confusing to a young child but have come to understand his train of thought. Perhaps being a criminal is a requirement in holding political office.
Dr. Tracy, I’m curious your thoughts about the Reelz theory of what happened. They were airing their special over the past week or so. I’m not a JFK expert, I only woke up this year (Sandy Hook was my awakening). But it sounded like their theory had been presented quite a while ago.
In case your readers had not seen it, the Reelz theory is that a secret service man, two or three cars back, shot JFK. They claimed that when the SS heard the shooting, the SS reached down for an AR-15. In the heat of the moment, the gun accidentally shot, striking Kennedy in the head for the final blow. This explained why the SS and CIA were so desperate to protect one of their own.
This proposal is completely ridiculous in my opinion and I’m offended they would insult the people by floating such a lie. They completely disregarded the connections and motives of the conspirators. I learned a lot from the show, and I was wondering where the MSM was taking me. I was wondering if they were going to drop a bombshell, but in the end, the MSM disappoints again. Your thoughts?
Lophatt’s comments on racism are so naïve because we are Educated, Informed, and Entertained by a truth tradition restricted by a White perspective. The media and other truth institutions are owned,financed and managed by a White plutocratic class, produced historically by White truthers recruited from the professional-managerial class, and oriented to a White American audience. In a world where nearly 90% of the earth’s people are non-White.
The relation between White racism and anti-government ideology was reinforced in the South after the civil war by Reconstruction. Confederate generals, like Forest, formed the Klu Klux Klan to implement the racist terrorism that has been a continuous, but ideologically repressed, historical tendency in American history.
In what Mainstream truth calls “the Compromise of 1877,” Samuel Tilden was swindled out of the presidency, and the Northern and Southern White ruling classes agreed effectively on what was to become Jim Crow racism, which lasted nearly a century. This was revealed by Robert Lind in THE FOURTH AMERICAN NATION. The White racism was allied with the traditional anti-government policies of the White rich to avoid taxes, government regulation, and government nationalizations.
This alliance between White racism and anti-government is institutionalized in the theory of libertarianism, their iconic leaders being highly racist. Murray Rotbard supported the KKK leader David Duke because he was anti-government along with his other racist pronouncements. Ron and Rand Paul both opposed the Civil Rights Act on libertarian principles, and Ron Paul put out a racist newsletters for many years. He stated assertions like “..I think we can safely assume that 95% of the black males in that city [Washington, DC] are semi-criminal or entirely criminal.” And many other such comments.
The homicidal racism indoctrinated in the American people, including a lynch mentality, was visible in the Kennedy assassination, if one is willing to look. Most Americans aren’t, and the information and conceptual language of the American truth tradition is segregated like the American people, making it more difficult to see the holistic truth. The compartmentalization of liberal truth was pointed out by Michel of Global Exchange, and quoted by James in a previous thread.
This disconnection of the truth is the rule in the American truth consensus, and required a half century to put the Kennedy assassination in a world historical setting. And it is still not finished, since the Texas oil billionaires involved in the assassination was not discussed by Douglass in his book.
The past was racist. The present is racist. That is to say, most people perceive themselves and ‘others’ as being of ‘essentially’ different biological lineages of human decent, as being different if closely related ‘species’ of man. This way of ‘seeing’ or ‘categorizing’ people is not the sole preserve of ‘Caucasians’ or ‘Negroes’ or ‘Asians,’ and so on. In other words, it afflicts both the ‘victimizers’ and the ‘victims’ of ‘racist’ social systems that confer or enshrine real advantages on the basis of ‘racial’ distinctions, however these distinctions may have come to be ascribed and enshrined.
Now a person can see himself as belonging to either a ‘privileged race’ or an ‘oppressed raced,’ and this in quite objective terms, depending upon which of the ‘races’ at issue is the one being ‘objectively’ privileged in a specific social context. In a racist society, if one ‘objectively’ bears the ‘marks’ of the underprivileged class, one is ‘objectively’ underprivileged on the basis of one’s ‘objective’ racial characteristics. No question.
But here is the rub: one can decry the inequality of the ‘races’ within a society that privileges one race over another. But does one thereby transcend the paradigm of ‘race?’ In other words, will you continue to insist on the ‘essential’ difference between men on the basis of their ‘racial characteristics,’ or will you insist on equality between men on the basis their ‘essential humanity’ in spite of their ‘racial characteristics.’
This is not an idle distinction. Because those who insist on equality between the ‘races’ cannot do so without insisting on or emphasizing, as the ‘racist’ himself does, the differences between the ‘races;’ they remain ‘conceptually’ trapped on the plane of the idea of ‘race-as-essential-difference,’ the very notion that is the ground that subtends all ‘racist ideologies.’
This is the meaning, for example, of Fanon’s declaration that ‘the white man is not, no more than the black man.’ And Fanon’s appeal is not to the ‘white man.’ He is addressing his fellow black man. He is asking the oppressed victims of racist ideologies to shed their own racism, to stop thinking of ‘themselves’ and of ‘others’ as members of specific ‘races,’ to regard themselves first and foremost as ‘men,’ without ‘racial’ distinctions. This does not abolish the ‘objective racist system of oppression and exploitation,’ but it does abolish the malady of ‘racism’ in the minds of the objectively oppressed, a thing that must at some point happen if ‘we’ are ever to get beyond the horror. Of course, though Fanon’s appeal is being directed to his oppressed countrymen, by implication, it is also an appeal to ‘all’ men, whomever and wherever they may be.
You cannot get beyond ‘racism’ without at the same time getting beyond the notion of ‘race-as-a-manifestation-of-essential-differences-between-men.’ Likewise, you cannot get someone to admit to being complicit in the crimes of a ‘racist’ social system if he has forsaken, in the manner of a Fanon, all racist ideology. At most, you can get him to admit that in objective terms the context is racist. But just because he happens to bear the ‘marks’ of what in that context is the ‘master race’ does not make him guilty of the crimes being committed on the basis of the racism inherent in that context.
I am white. I myself did not commit the crimes of my forebears. I see the racist context within which I live. I decry it. But I am not guilty of my father’s sins. Nor do I commit his sins.
Let each man bear the guilt of his own actions.
I what men to be equal. Not the various ‘races’ of men. Because all men, to my way of thinking, are ‘essentially’ alike.
But we agree: where a man is discriminated against, where a man is being lynched on account of his color, there an unspeakable crime is being committed.
Sandy Hook Report released:
http://www.ct.gov/csao/lib/csao/Sandy_Hook_Final_Report.pdf
Just skimmed it. Hope some of the better sleuths here can go over with a fine tooth comb.
You can get both the abridged report and the 26MB appendix here http://www.ct.gov/csao/site/default.asp
TBH 3/4 of it reads like a correction (or setting the “facts) of a wikipedia page on Adam. Just background about his psychological background and likes and dislikes. There are some good laughs in it
“There are some good laughs in it”:
‘Adam’ stood 72″ and weighed 112 lbs. He was super fit though because he played Dance Dance Revolution for 4 to 10 hours a day. They know this because he used his GPS almost everyday to find a local theater where he drove to play the big bad game.
(According to her autopsy report, Karen Carpenter weighed 108 lbs, and stood 64″.)
Fine print page 8: “To conclude that all such information, including the basic facts of the incident itself is confidential would prohibit
even the disclosure of the children being killed. Such an interpretation would be unworkable and is not taken here. It
is concluded though that the C.G.S. Sec. 17a-101k(a) is applicable in the present case and will be applied in the
manner described.”
Curious what exactly this means? Here is the stature (CT code updated on 1/1/2013)
http://www.cga.ct.gov/current/pub/chap_319a.htm#sec_17a-101k
Here is what I think is a 2005 version
https://law.justia.com/codes/connecticut/2005/title17a/sec17a-101k.html
Trying to figure out the significance of the statute. Maybe if they had record (fake or not) that Adam was abused or neglected then this law would limit release of information about him? Just a guess
Or are they talking about the schoolchildren? Maybe trying to say that they can say named children died but refuse to provide any proof? Anybody know the exact significance of the statute?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHtLi8P5s2c
JFK HARRY CHAPIN JFK
She Is Always Seventeen
What is important to clarify, Norm, is not the biological concept of ‘race,’ but the social concept of ‘racism.’ The UN definition equates all discrimination against ethnic groupings as ‘racism.’ I maintain that it is also necessary to include bigotry against CULTURAL groupings as well as racism, or some equivalent term. Since America has always had a racist power system, especially ingrained in American Law and Justice, its truth tradition wants to restrict the term as much as possible, to prevent us from understanding how it uses the bigotry against minority groups to serve its policies and power.
In a paper I am writing, I define the notion of ‘homeracism,’ the racism of a grouping located in a particular homeland, which can range from a neighborhood or ghetto to a continent. This can be given a mathematical expression to clarify it. In this conception, nationalism or Patriotism is the homeracism of nations. It is necessary to define such terms generally to conceive political and social reality in a world context, rather than a national context, homeracism being used by states or power systems in conflicts in the world power arena, each against all.
Homeracism has been systematically covered up in Educated discourse. Martin Jacques in WHEN CHINA RULES THE WORLD says:
(p.308)
“Racism is a subject that people often tend to avoid, it being deemed too politically embarrassing, any suggestion of its existence often eliciting a response of outraged indignation and immediate denial. Yet it is central to the discourse of most if not all societies….Racism, in fact, is a universal phenomenon from which no race is exempt, even those who have suffered grieviously at its hands.”
He tells of the Han Chinese, 90%+ of China’s people, who conceive themselves as one race. Yet the Northerners are physically much different from the Southerners, being taller, heavier and having different features. What has happened over the five thousand years of Chinese history is obviously the blending of different tribes and groupings into one culture, which is then conceived as a ‘race.’ Like White Americans, perhaps even more so, they indignantly deny they are racist, while discriminating against Tibetans and Uigars.
Racism has been swept under the ideological rug. Unless we discuss it frankly and candidly, we cannot eradicate it, and treat a person with respect for no other reason than he is a person of the earth, just as we are. In the USA, as in China, this will be an historical project, since homeracism has been ingrained for centuries, and in our ideological world-views, we have all been intellectually, morally, and politically perverted by anti-people power.
There is nothing here in what you write with which I can disagree. Homeracism, bigotry, racism — it is all of a piece to my mind though the distinctions may be conceptually worthwhile.
And indeed, discrimination can be unconscious. I suspect that that apparent oddity derives in part from the codifying in legal and universal terms relations of “conduct, distribution, and ownership” that had in practice crystallized or stabilized in times when the ‘racism’ was more overt and obvious. The American slave may have been freed, but without ‘property,’ his freedom was nugatory. Whereas the ‘law’ enshrined every man’s freedom, while insisting on antebellum property rights excepting the slaves as such, nothing much changed in the terms of the essential substance of the social relations between the former slaves and their former masters. And no one might be the wiser . . .
It looks like Dr. Tracy decided to sidestep all the conspiracy theories on this very significant day. The scholarship is there in spades on many sites proving beyond a reasonable date the reality of a conspiracy. JFK murder solved forum is just one rich resource of information. On the questions of JFK’s political and personal defects as well as those within his administration, Seymour Hersh did and admirable job exposing this in his book “The Dark Side of Camelot”.
For anyone who might be interested, an hour and some few minutes of Hersh commenting on his book “The Dark Side of Camelot:”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hYK6Kkn0wE
Interesting. Roughly 42 minutes into the presentation, Hersh is asked why he, on the strength of his reputation, might endorse a work by a ‘friend’ that he knows might not necessarily stand up to rational scrutiny: it is because if he didn’t ‘trade’ endorsements with other authors, his ability to make a living from his research and print would quickly desert him. Unfortunate, but that is how the ‘business’ works.
Here, in a nutshell, if you listen carefully, you will find in this video virtually all of the important elements of what is wrong with America in particular and the West more generally.
Salvador Astucia provides the most cogent theory in his online book The Opium Lords, about JFK’s murder by the CIA and Mossad. I researched Oswald and there is no doubt he had been groomed, at a certain point, by the CIA to be the patsy. LBJ was pro-Zion and JFK did not want Israel to have nukes.
And a century before the Kennedy assassination, Norm, there was the Lincoln assassination. It also put a Southern in the White House who was against giving the newly freed slaves ‘forty acres and a mule.’ He opposed Reconstruction, which was abolished a few years later, ushering in a century of Jim Crow racism. All these homicidal conspiracies ushered in enormous historical changes. The South lost the war but won the racist peace.
Hersh was one of the best investigative journalists. But he essentially lied about Conspiracies like all the others. On p. 451 of CAMELOT he writes:
“In the five years of reporting for this book, I found nothing that would change the instinctive conclusions of Julius Draznin, or the much more detailed findings of the Warren Commission–Oswald and Ruby acted alone.”
A half century after the death of JFK, anyone with critical thinking skills who was born before 1960 knows the truth. I believe that Dr. Tracy has no need to defend his position here or lay out the case for conspiracy – researchers have uncovered a mountain of facts and evidence in the assassination. For those who need it to be neatly tied up with a bow, we even have CIA Operative E. Howard Hunt’s filmed deathbed confession.
It is very troubling that many in the generations to follow are defending the Warren Commission report. They are vehemently ‘debunking’ solid witnesses, although there are forty-one witnesses who were actually in Dealey Plaza on the day of the assassination who reported hearing shots coming from the grassy knoll.
At the age of ten, I looked at the photo of the president clutching his throat, and saw the autopsy notes depicting an entrance wound through the knot of the necktie and into the Adam’s apple – an impossible trajectory from the sniper’s nest.
I don’t know how it’s even remotely possible to believe the official report.
It concerns me that this new Sandy Hook report, filled with gaping holes and utter nonsense, is so palatable to most people, including a new generation of unquestioning youth being raised in a world of manufactured chaos. When and how do we stop the madness?
James maintains that the bigotry against Irish-American immigrants was not comparable to the bigotry against African-Americans. It obviously was less, but does that mean it was not comparable? James sourced a paper a while back detailing that the Irish were enslaved in the same way that Africans later were, and there is a well known book on how the Irish became White.
During the English civil war, which was actually a bourgeois revolution, Cromwell and the Puritans invaded Ireland, killing according to some scholarly accounts more than half of the Irish population. The Irish famine, which led to most of the Irish immigration to the USA, was actually a form of genocide, like the starvation induced in India in the famine, while grain was exported to paying countries.
The UN defines racism as including ethnic bigotry. I am arguing here that it includes bigotry against cultures as well, which is in the popular mind is often not distinguished from genetic inheritance, and often not in the scholarly Educated mind as well. It is the social concept of ‘racism’ that it is crucial to define, not the discredited biological concept of ‘race.’
Until we can openly and candidly identify racism as a general form of discrimination, we cannot effectively combat it.
The concept must be generalized because a major form of Educated censorship is done by restricting the conceptual language to ideologically repress the simple holistic truth. As professor Michel of Global Research stated, as quoted by James, the financing of liberal truth by plut controlled foundations results in the compartmentalizing of it, disconnecting the partial truths from a general holistic truth.
The conceptual language of people and power has been conceptual segregated in the same way the American population has racially segregated. And for the same reason, to allow the powerful, and the Educated classes that support them, to divide and rule. People who cannot think in a simple general way cannot act in the simple general way that is sustainable over historical time.
I am arguing that the integration of the earth’s people ideologically is promoted by the conceptual integration of the conceptual language, since people who think the same way tend to act the same way. You may disagree, but is this a viewpoint that should be effectively censored by disallowing general holistic concepts like ‘racism’ which may be applied historically to Irish Americans as well as African Americans?
In some ways they are comparable and in some ways not, but I choose to emphasize the former because, in my opinion, holistic concepts would make it easier for the population to understand relations among persons, including power relations. A whole area of social or people theory has been thrown down the memory hole, and it is necessary for the Uneducated, persons like myself, to conceptually retrieve it. After a while historically, to the extent that the effort is historically successful, it would then trickle down to the universities and other Educated institutions.
Noel Ignatiev wrote the propaganda piece How the Irish Became White, which has been refuted by even some of his irish sources, who claim he is a distortionist. He’s a hateful, disgusting bigot who recently exhorted white males to kill themselves, except we know of course that as a jew he is somehow exempted from the european/white category – a distinction I most certainly agree with. Jews are not native europeans and have zero place speaking on europeans’ behalf, irish or otherwise.
It is illuminating that Sue attacks Ignatiev not because he is a communist, because he had Jewish parents. Even though he has been strongly anti-Zionist and even though he was against fostering the Jewish religion. Sue’s anti-Semitism, which she is not shy about expressing, goes so far as to conceive Jews as not being White, which of course some aren’t. She is against them being allowed to speak about Europeans, along presumably with other non-Whites.
Sue is an excellent illustration of my point that the major concept that needs to be defined is not biological ‘race,’ but the social-cultural concept of ethnic-cultural ‘racism.’ Although Sue’s racism is more vehement than most, she embodies a perverted ideology that is very strong in the USA and the world’s people, although in America usually directed most strongly against skin color.
But just as Sue is bigoted against the cultural-ethnic group of Jews, so the English-influenced American population in the 19th century was racially bigoted against the Irish. This has been put into a more general context by Michael Lind in THE NEXT AMERICAN NATION.