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Thanksgiving for JFK

by Edward Curtin

If he had lived, President John F. Kennedy would have been 100 years old this year. At Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow, his family would be raising a glass in his honor.

But as we all know, he was murdered in Dallas, Texas on this date – November 22nd – in 1963. A true war hero twice over, he risked his life to save his men in World War II, and then, after a radical turn toward peace-making in the last year of his life, he died in his own country at the hands of his domestic enemies as a soldier in a non-violent struggle for peace and reconciliation for all people across the world.

But we can still celebrate, mourn, and offer thanksgiving for his courageous witness. When we gather tomorrow to give thanks, we should remember today – the profound significance of the date – and the absent presence of a man whose death, dark and bloody as it was, is a sign of hope in these dark times. For if John Kennedy had not had the spiritual conscience to secretly carry-on a back channel letter correspondence with Nikita Khrushchev, facilitated by Pope John XXIII, we very well might not be here, having been incinerated in a nuclear holocaust.

Hope? Not because he was assassinated, but why he was assassinated.

While there is much media focus on the release of more of the JFK files, they are beside the point. They were withheld all these years to dribble out the clock on an endless pseudo-debate about who killed President Kennedy. We know who killed him: the national security state, led by the CIA, killed him, not Lee Harvey Oswald. It was a coup d’état purposely conducted in plain sight to send a message that every president since has heeded: Your job is to make war and threaten nuclear annihilation for the Deep State elites. Follow orders or else. They have followed.

If you find my assertion about the CIA audacious and absurd, first read James Douglass’s JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, a book widely regarded as the best book on the assassination and its meaning. Read it very closely and slowly. Check all his sources, read his endnotes, and analyze his logic. Approach his meticulous research as if you agreed with Gandhi’s saying that truth is God and God is truth. Try to refute Douglass. You will be stymied. Then read David Talbot’s The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government for further clarification. You will come away from these two books profoundly shaken to your core. Be a truth-seeker, if you are not one already.

Or if you prefer, call me a “conspiracy theorist,” as the CIA wants, since it was the Agency that produced CIA Dispatch # 1035-960. “Most Americans,” writes Professor Lance deHaven-Smith of Florida State University, “will be shocked to learn that the conspiracy theory label was popularized as a pejorative term by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in a propaganda campaign initiated in 1967.”

This program was aimed at critics of the Warren Commission. The CIA requested that its own people and corporate media accomplices, including all its journalist assets, besmirch the good names of anyone who dared to point out the absurdities in the government claim that Lee Harvey Oswald, a man working for the CIA as a fall guy, could have killed Kennedy. Critics were branded as communists. “In the shadow of McCarthyism and the Cold War,” deHaven-Smith continues, “this warning about communist influence was delivered simultaneously to hundreds of well-positioned members of the press in a global CIA propaganda network, infusing the conspiracy-theory label with powerfully negative associations.”

So be careful how you use the term, if you don’t want to be working with the assassins to silence their critics.
But my intention here is not to debate the obvious. In a season of thanksgiving and hope, I want to remind you to remember and honor JFK. Because he knew the horror of war and grasped the systemic evil of its proponents within his own government, John Kennedy grew out of the war machine – in James Douglass’s words in JFK and the Unspeakable, when he was assassinated, JFK “was turning, Teshuvah, ‘turning,’ the rabbinic word for repentance,” against war and toward peace as his actions in the last year of his life make crystal clear. As a result, the unspeakable deep-state forces murdered him. He knew they would, but as a man of great courage, he knew he must follow the words of Abraham Lincoln dear to his heart: “I know there is a God – and I see a storm coming. If he has a place for me, I believe that I am ready.”

Hope comes from facing the truth, not from fleeing from it. The Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, called our denial of the truth about JFK and his turn toward peace that led to his murder by forces within his own government, the “unspeakable”: “the void that gets into the language of public and official declarations at the very moment when they are pronounced, and makes them ring dead with the hollowness of the abyss.” We are living in that abyss today. But we can still speak; we can refuse to be silenced. And in speaking up we will find hope.

Jim Douglass asks:

How can we take hope from a peacemaking president’s assassination by his own national security state?”

He answers:

The story of why John Kennedy died encircles the earth. Because JFK chose peace on earth at the height of the Cold War, he was executed. But he turned toward peace, in spite of the consequences to himself, humanity is still alive and struggling. That is hopeful, especially if we understand what he went through and what he has given us as his vision.”

His life’s story is the story of the courage to change radically and turn toward truth and peace-making no matter what the cost.
We should all raise our glasses in a Thanksgiving toast to John Kennedy. In his story is ours; the hope he bequeathed to us through his courageous death is one of hope for life. Our gratitude to JFK must follow with our commitment to oppose the killers in our own government who want to silence us all, now and forevermore.

Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely. He teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His website is http://edwardcurtin.com/

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vexarb
vexarb
Nov 29, 2017 11:10 AM

Ahah! Same kite flying in the Telegraph 28Nov: “Could the Kennedy name trump Trump, and bring the White House back to the Democrats?”

MoriartysLeftSock
MoriartysLeftSock
Nov 29, 2017 11:50 AM
Reply to  vexarb

The drive to separate JFK’s memory from the meaning of his own death should certainly be opposed, but is this best achieved by arguing over his personal qualities and deploring a poorly-defined “Camelot” myth?

Joerg
Joerg
Nov 25, 2017 9:34 AM

A “must see”: THE ZAPRUDER FILM MYSTERY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_QIuu6hsAc

Admin
Admin
Nov 24, 2017 2:11 PM

Mark Mason’s comment was on a different article – it’s here
If you want to post your reply there I can remove this version for you

Joerg
Joerg
Nov 24, 2017 3:51 PM
Reply to  Admin

That (moving) would be great, admin, because my comment makes no sense here!
Thank You very much!
Sorry for my mistake

Joerg
Joerg
Nov 24, 2017 8:23 PM
Reply to  Admin

Sorry, admin, to having let you wait so long. Now I just posted “there” (https://off-guardian.org/2017/11/22/jfk-at-100-the-war-on-our-heroes-part-2/comment-page-1/#comment-91742)
You can remove my posting here now.
Thanks – and have a relaxed weekend!

Joerg
Joerg
Nov 23, 2017 5:53 PM

First a look into the past:
It was the attorney Mark Lane (who died in 2016) who earned a lot of merits for his brave fight for truth in the case of the murder of JFK. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Lane_(author) – or one of those interviews with him, e. g. “MARK LANE IS INTERVIEWED BY WILLIAM BUCKLEY (DECEMBER 1, 1966)” – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fI7GwBtTRvc .
Now to the present:
With crimes by the deep state or the government it’s always the same pattern:
a) A conspiracy theory is being launched – and endlessly repeated by MSM.
b) Fabricated optical material is being published – – and endlessly shown by MSM.
See my comment to that fact on https://off-guardian.org/2017/10/29/conspiracies-dont-happen-here/comment-page-1/#comment-87894 .
Also in the case of the murder of JFK there was a) the conspiracy theory of “Oswald and the Soviets/Cubans” and b) the fake “Zapruder Film” .
To “b)”: Also here – like with 911 before – it was the great Jack White who unmasked the “Zapruder Film”. For this see (short): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_xjLwacXdI – or see (1 ½ hour): “BEYOND JFK THE QUESTION OF CONSPIRACY” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_xjLwacXdI .

Joerg
Joerg
Nov 23, 2017 6:07 PM
Reply to  Joerg

Sorry! The Jack White video ist his one (and not “Beyond JFK the question of conspiracy”): “THE GREAT ZAPRUDER FILM HOAX” – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCigDMyHisE .

neiljmac
neiljmac
Nov 24, 2017 5:22 AM
Reply to  Joerg

Only one comment – can you change the death of Mark Lane to 2016 – seems trivial I know but, to be 100 years out on his death makes the rest of your post just crazy.

Joerg
Joerg
Nov 24, 2017 8:26 AM
Reply to  neiljmac

@neiljmac
Sorry ! Thanx for Your hint.
@admin
Please admin, can You change that “1916” to “2016”? Or ist there a way I can change that?
Thanx!

Admin
Admin
Nov 24, 2017 11:46 AM
Reply to  Joerg

No problem. Taken care of it

Big B
Big B
Nov 23, 2017 4:34 PM

I for one will not be raising a glass to JFK, this, or any other weekend. Not because, having read Douglass, I don’t get the importance of his assassination: or why it still matters. Or the inherent dangers of an overt Deep State coup: that continues to dominate much of the world with genocidal violence to this day. It is the concomitant apotheosis that I find equally psychologically dangerous: because the primary corollary of his ersatz heroification is our individual disempowerment.
As an historical example: Kit wrote yesterday that JFK “pushed for black civil rights and de-segregation”. Did he? Or was he pushed??? Was he a liberal crusader leading from the front: or was he responding minimally to centuries of human emancipatory spirit that gradually formed itself into a coherent social movement? Was he the embodiment of the full force and power of the social and historical dialectic: or merely responding to it? Was he the principal pivotal force in the Civil Rights Movement: or was he the acceptable face of liberal white privilege bourgeoisie attempting to co-opt and pacify the movement (to change: but not to change too much …a charge I would attribute to my understanding of Malcolm X; after the (unfinished) March on Washington). Were Claudette Colvin, George Lee, Emmet Till, Ernest Green, Bayard Rustin, and an innumerable number of relatively unsung alternative heroes any the less instrumental in the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965? I would argue not. In vesting our power in the ‘Great Men’ of history – we inevitably lose our own. And I’m afraid: as the vehicle for the ersatz immortal symbolic ‘Cult of Camelot’ – the real JFK would not have been able to live up to the hype. But whose fault is that? The deep lesson of the cult of Kennedy: is the inability to find our own hero within.

Schlüter
Schlüter
Nov 23, 2017 8:13 AM
vexarb
vexarb
Nov 23, 2017 5:44 AM

Kennedy, as I remember his regime, initiated or furthered: US Exceptionalism (“We shall go anywhere”); Cold War (“Ich binn ein Berliner”); Hot War (Cuba & Vietnam); and Insane Waste (the Moondoggle). And now, from a post by Matt, I learn that he signed legislation that furthered the Fed’s ability to create Fiat Currency (EO 11110). All of which hubris continues to plague the world and threaten global catastrophe.
“The evil that men do lives after them;
The good [if any] is interred with their bones” — Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

vexarb
vexarb
Nov 24, 2017 11:55 AM
Reply to  vexarb

Matt’s link debunks that meme: JFK _actually created a bit _more Fiat Money by signing EO41110 and its prior legislation. So what did K.nnedy _actually _do that made it so “the banking system didn’t like him!?
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/weberman/jfk.htm