No More Bullshit: Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill
Edward Curtin
Jimmy Breslin and Peter Hamill
Growing up Irish-Catholic in the Bronx in the 1960s, I was an avid reader of the powerful columns of Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill in the New York newspapers. These guys were extraordinary wordsmiths. They would grab you by the collar and drag you into the places and faces of those they wrote about. Passion infused their reports. They were never boring. They made you laugh and cry as they transported you into the lives of real people. You knew they had actually gone out into the streets of the city and talked to people. All kinds of people: poor, rich, black, white, Puerto Rican, high-rollers, low-lifes, politicians, athletes, mobsters – they ran the gamut.
You could sense they loved their work, that it enlivened them as it enlivened you the reader. Their words sung and crackled and breathed across the page. They left you always wanting more, wondering sometimes how true it all was, so captivating was their storytelling abilities. They cut through abstractions to connect individuals to major events such as the Vietnam War, the assassinations of President Kennedy and his brother Robert, the Central Park jogger case, Aids, among others. They were spokesmen for the underdogs, the abused, the confused, and the bereft, and relentlessly attacked the abuses and hypocrisies of the powerful.
They became celebrities as a result of their writing. Breslin ran for New York City Council President along with Norman Mailer for Mayor with the slogan “No More Bullshit,” did beer and cereal commercials, and Hamill dated Jacqueline Kennedy and Shirley McLaine. Coming out of poor and struggling Irish-Catholic families in Queens and Brooklyn respectively, they became acclaimed in NYC and the country as celebrity reporters. As a result, they were befriended by the rich and powerful with whom they hobnobbed.
HBO has recently released a fascinating documentary about the pair: Breslin and Hamill. It brings them back in all their gritty glory to the days when New York was another city, a city of newspapers and typewriters and young passion still hopeful that despite the problems and national tragedies, there were still fighters who would bang out a message of hope and defiance in the mainstream press. It was a time before money and propaganda devoured journalism and a deadly pall descended on the country as the economic elites expanded their obscene control over people’s lives and the media.
So it is also fitting that this documentary feels like an Irish wake with two old wheelchair-bound men musing on the past and all that has been lost and what approaching death has in store for them and all they love. While not a word is spoken about the Catholic faith of their childhoods with its death-defying consolation, it sits between them like a skeleton. We watch and listen to two men, once big in all ways, talk about the old days as they shrink before our eyes. I was reminded of the title of a novel Breslin wrote long ago: World Without End, Amen, a title taken directly from a well-known Catholic prayer. Endings, the past receding, a lost world, aching hearts, and the unspoken yearning for more life.
Hamill, especially, wrote columns that were beautifully elegiac, and his words in this documentary also sound that sense despite his efforts to remain hopeful. The film is a nostalgic trip down memory lane. Breslin, who has since died, tries hard to express the bravado that was his hallmark in his halcyon days, but a deep sadness and bewilderment seeps through his face, the mask of indomitability that once served him well gone in the end.
So while young people need to know about these two old-school reporters and their great work in this age of insipidity and pseudo-objectivity, this film is probably not a good introduction. Their writing would serve this purpose better.
This documentary is appearing at an interesting time when a large group of prominent Americans, including Robert Kennedy, Jr. and his sister Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, are calling for new investigations into the assassinations of the 1960s, murders that Breslin and Hamill covered and wrote about. Both men were in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in 1968. They were friends of the senator, and it was Hamill who wrote to RFK and helped convince him to run.
Breslin was in the Audubon Ballroom when Malcolm X was assassinated. He wrote an iconic and highly original article about the JFK assassination. Hamill wrote a hard-hitting piece about RFK’s murder, describing Sirhan Sirhan quite harshly, while presuming his guilt. They covered and wrote about all the assassinations of that era. Breslin also wrote a famous piece about John Lennon’s murder. They wrote these articles quickly, in the heat of the moment, on deadline.
But they did not question the official versions of these assassinations. Not then, nor in the fifty plus years since. Nor in this documentary. In fact, in the film Hamill talks about five shots being fired at RFK from the front by Sirhan Sirhan who was standing there. Breslin utters not a word. Yet it is well known that RFK was shot from the rear at point blank range and that no bullets hit him from the front. The official autopsy confirmed this. Robert Kennedy, Jr. asserts that his father was not shot by Sirhan but by a second gunmen. It’s as though Hamill is stuck in time and his personal memories of the event; as though he were too close to things and never stepped back and studied the evidence that has emerged.
Why, only he could say.
Perhaps both men were too close to the events and the people they covered. Yes, their words always took you to the scene and made you feel the passion of it all, the shock, the drama, the tragedy, the pain, the confusion, and all that was irretrievably lost in murders that changed this country forever, killings that haunt the present in incalculable ways. Jimmy and Pete made us feel the deep pain and shock of being overwhelmed with grief. They were masters of this art.
But the view from the street is not that of history. Deadlines are one thing; analysis and research another. Breslin and Hamill wrote for the moment, but they have lived a half century after those moments, decades during which the evidence for these crimes has accumulated to indict powerful forces in the U.S. government. No doubt this evidence came to their attention, but they have chosen to ignore it, whatever their reasons. Why these champions of the afflicted have disregarded this evidence is perplexing. As one who greatly admires their work, I am disappointed by this failure.
Street journalism has its limitations. It needs to be placed in a larger context. Our world is indeed without end and the heat of the moment needs the coolness of time. The bird that dives to the ground to seize a crumb of bread returns to the treetop to survey the larger scene. Breslin and Hamill stuck to the ground where the bread lay.
At one point in Breslin and Hamill, the two good friends talk about how well they were taught to write by the nuns in their Catholic grammar schools. “Subject, verb, object, that was the story of the whole thing,” says Breslin. Hamill replies, “Concrete nouns, active verbs.” “It was pretty good teaching,” adds Breslin. And although neither went to college (probably a saving grace), they learned those lessons well and gifted us with so much gritty and beautiful writing and reporting.
Yet like the nuns who taught them, they had their limitations, and what was written once was not revisited and updated. In a strange, very old-school Catholic sense, it was the eternal truth, rock solid, and not to be questioned. Unspeakable and anathema: the real killers of the Kennedys and the others. The attacks of September 11, 2001 as well.
When my mother was very old, she published her only piece of writing. It was very Breslin and Hamill-like and was published in a Catholic magazine. She wrote how, when she was a young girl and the streets of New York were filled with horse drawn wagons, the nuns in her grammar school chose her to leave school before lunch and go to a neighboring bakery to buy rolls for their lunch. It was considered a big honor and she was happy to get out of school for the walk to the bakery she chose a few streets away. She got the rolls and was walking back with them when some boys jostled her and all the rolls fell into the street, rolling through horse shit. She panicked, but picked up the rolls and cleaned them off.
Shaking with fear, she then brought them to the convent and handed them to a nun. After lunch, she was called to the front of the room by her teacher, the nun who had chosen her to buy them. She felt like she would faint with fear. The nun sternly looked at her. “Where did buy those rolls?” she asked. In a halting voice she told her the name of the bakery. The sister said, “They were delicious. We must always shop in that bakery.”
Of course the magazine wouldn’t publish the words “horse shit.” The editor found a nice way to avoid the truth and eliminate horse shit. And the nuns were happy.
Yet bullshit seems much harder to erase, despite slogans and careful editors, or perhaps because of them. Sometimes silence is the real bullshit, and how do you eliminate that.
SUPPORT OFFGUARDIAN
If you enjoy OffG's content, please help us make our monthly fund-raising goal and keep the site alive.
For other ways to donate, including direct-transfer bank details click HERE.
It might have been worth mentioning that Jimmy Breslin’s 1982 novel Forsaking all others described exactly the situation – the Irish-American Democratic machine dominating all the political jobs in a part of NYC populated mainly by people of color – that AOC’s defeat of 10-term incumbent Joe Crowley in 2018 finally put an end to in the Bronx. I bet JB didn’t think it would last another 36 years.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/02/09/cia-may-have-used-contractor-who-inspired-mission-impossible-kill-rfk-new-book-alleges/?utm_term=.38208257713e
The above link is to Tom Jackman writing in the Washington Post, his review of Lisa Pease’s “A lie too big to fail”. It is uncanny that the Wapo, owned by Bezos linked to CIA could be the harbinger of truth? The remarkable thing is the Establishment admission of the assassinations of RFK. Why RFK died and why it matters, is still urgent, as is the recent petition to re-open the investigation. Though neither Pilger (nor BigB) believe in the Camelot myths, there had to be a reason for RFK’s blatant execution. I have not gone to the primary sources, but as we know from the testimony of E. L Hunt, the CIA has ‘previous’ in fabricating false evidence, more disinformation to muddy the waters. But even if Pilger and BigB can see the sordid truth of the amoral, psychopathic, whore-mongering Kennedys, perhaps the saintly CIA really did us all a favour? As we say in NZ, Yeah, right.
“Improving upon the record! ” – I was in fact thinking of E. Howard Hunt and I found this reference to his archival imagination in Wikipedia:
“Hunt’s White House duties included assassinations-related disinformation. In September 1971, Hunt forged and offered to a Life magazine reporter two top-secret U.S. State Department cables designed to prove that President Kennedy had personally and specifically ordered the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother, Ngô Đình Nhu.[27] Hunt told the Senate Watergate Committee in 1973 that he had fabricated the cables to show a link between President Kennedy and the assassination of Diem, a Catholic, to estrange Catholic voters from the Democratic Party, after Colson suggested he “might be able to improve upon the record.”[28]
Perhaps the deep state has improved the record in other ways, as well?
If JFK’s brain could vanish from the national archives, maybe other things have too, or various original papers have been substituted by improved versions.
The alternative would be to believe that an apparatus which was capable of assassinating an elected president, would never dare to fabricate paper records. Why would that be, because of their principled commitment to historical truth?
“A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”
–Saul Bellow
(Sounds like a definition of someone’s favorite agency, what Norman Mailer called “The Mind of America”)
I must say, you really are clutching at strawmen. E Howard Hunt: a man so disacquainted with the truth, and so skilled in the art of deception, no one could really ever trust a word he said. Do you even know who Diem and the Nhu’s were? Or what their nepotistic Catholic dictatorship meant for the people of South Vietnam? Death squads, religous and ethnic cleansing, forced collectivisation, chemical warfare, etc. For the record, JFK did not order the coup …but neither did he rescind the telegram. He was desolate when his puppet dictator was killed …which was against his will. But he supported the repression for two years, until they became an embarrassment. It was that very repression that turned the people against the imperialists …which is why the war escalated. John Pilger is telling the truth, get over it.
BigB. I don’t think I said that Pilger lied, though I did query his hesitance to ask the next question? Can you directly answer the simple question: why kill RFK?
Other than the double murder theory: I do not know. And I do not care, not any more. What I care about is that the epistemologically ungrounded virtual history making draws attention to two men: and obfuscates their war crimes. The confabulated speculation becomes a smokscreen, one that no Camelotian will look beyond. In order to maintain their precious story.
You manage to wriggle out of any factual conversation by confabulating stories about why they were special. Tell that to the people of South Vietnam. I want to point out that no one has offered a single fact to discount what JP said, particularly about the escalation of the Vietnam War – the “secret invasion of Vietnam”. It is all confection and bluff.
One particular case in point was the fantastical anecdote that you left me with, a couple of months back. “It wouldn’t be a good night to go to the opera” – that one. It is made up. I checked it against the primary record. The memo, recounting what RFK actually said (corroborable with the ExComm transcript), appears below. The version of this memo that appears in the fictitious Thirteen Days was edited by Sorenson. Now, you have to ask – why would a meticulous historian like Douglass not know that? Particularly as he references the ExComm recordings – yet he blends them with the uncorrobarable Thirteen Days version? Douglass is either not a very good historian, or he was engaging in narrative construction and virtual mythmaking.
How many more inaccuracies does it take to build the tissue of lies that JFK was turning to peace? The reality is that their violent oppression and death squads had turned the peaceful Buddhist communities against them. This has to be parsed from history to maintain the lie that Kennedy was special. Why he died, and why it mattered is virtual pseudo-history that covers the rivers of blood of Empire. Whatever he was killed for, it was not ‘peace’. Not by anything less than the inverted meaning of peace.
So why do you prefer the lie to the fact? Because it is a nice story? Why is the retelling of this powerful and intoxicating myth more important than the story of unknown ordinary people that had their ancestral villages bulldozed; severing their thousands of years of ancestral ties to the land; forcing them, against their will, into concentration camps known as fortified ‘strategic hamlets’; forced from autonomy and self-sufficiency to state dependency; the dependency on a violently oppressive Catholic dictatorship, with its own secret police death squads: forced to watch the land exfoliated, poisoned, and destroyed for generations; who became targets if they were not within their iniquitous confinement, etc? If this was happening now, the oppressing imperialist régime would rightly be vilified. 65 years on, and the two leaders are sanctified …because of a beautifully retold, elegiac, storyline that says they were special. As they also say in UK, Right.
And all anyone has offered to maintain the sanctity of this peculiar obsession is bluff. Not a single fact. So tell me, why were JFK and RFK killed? Only, tell me a truthful version that does not rewrite history, and takes into account the unquantifiable suffering they caused. No more bullshit: let’s write the people’s history – one that highlights all sources of oppression – not recount the fables of Empire that perpetuate it?
BigB. Your frustration is palpable and I too would like to know the truth. I likewise agree with you that the untimely deaths of a few US politicians is as naught compared to the killing, maiming and torture inflicted on millions of SE Asians.
Instead of fighting each other, can we find some common ground of agreement? Surely we can agree that MLK was a genuine man of peace? Yet he was assassinated in a very similar operation to the Kennedys I.e. the unwitting patsy, cast as a lone nut. Can we not agree that his death was political, because pacifism is bad for MIC business? Is it not possible to see that the same logic applies to the deaths of JFK and RFK, even though they may not be the saints I would like them to be?
WRT the spurious JFK quote post CMC, can we not also agree that JFK upset all the hawks by his hesitation? Is it possible that he knew his life was in danger, but that he feared the deaths of millions more than his own death? As I recall, the remark was made in private and thus unlikely to be on any Ex.Comm transcript.
We now know that JFK’s reluctance to invade Cuba was correct. Therefore, wittingly or unwittingly, his more cautious response may have averted WWIII.
Can we also assume that his desire to destroy the CIA, his veto of Operation Northwoods, his disgust at the JCS desire for preemptive nuclear strike on Russia are all the fervid dreams of hagiographers? His speech to American University on 10/6/63 spoken by a ventriloquist? His many speeches in the UN advocating multilateral disarmament were all just hot air?
It is as impossible for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven as it is for a pacifist to be elected President. Tulsi Gabbard will be destroyed by MIC propaganda. Yet JFK wrote privately to a friend that wars will continue until the conscientious objector receives the same respect as the warrior does…or is that just another invented quote?
Finally, the lying E H Hunt is not a credible witness, but I doubt he was a supporter of JFK. Sometimes, you have to read between the lines. Even the devil speaks true sometimes.
Yes Hugh, there is plenty of common ground for agreement. And robust dialogue is not fighting, and anyway – I’m a big softee really. In general: the assassinations – or Deep State events as Peter Dale Scott christened them – were incredibly significant …and linked. The Continuity Of Government (COG) planning is a common thread: as are some of the recurrent personnel – such as your man, E Howard Hunt (Cuba, Dallas and Watergate). Of course they were political. There might have been a common MO: but I doubt there was a common reason. The simplistic “went against the MIC” doesn’t stack up. Have you read the final speech? The MIC were doing just fine. As for peace: that depends on your definition of peace.
What I do not see as necessary is the making up of stories to explain probably inexplicable events. It is understandable, but not at all helpful. In fact, it is counterproductive. There is plenty to be learnt from the Deep State events – without fictitiously ‘solving’ them. Have you ever considered that the turning to peace, going against the MIC hogwash as a limited hangout? All the focus is on the inept CIA: deflecting from COG and Army Intelligence? “Turning to peace” does not link JFK to 9/11: COG does. Perhaps our focus is wrong?
https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-doomsday-project-and-deep-events-jfk-watergate-iran-contra-and-9-11/27806
On MLK: of course he was a genuine man of peace. There is an Army Intelligence link their too. Not that I know who the sniper was, but it wasn’t JER. And it probably wasn’t a Memphis cop either. I feel confident enough to speculate that MLK was shot to decapitate the March on Washington, and to end the alliance of anti-Vietnam war protest and the civil rights movement. His definition of peace very definitely was a threat to Empire: JFK’s not so much.
JFK’s reluctance to precipitate WW3, or get embroiled in another Korea, can’t be equated with peace though. It needs more nuanced attention. Whilst seeking to avert the “final failure”: even before the end of the CMC (which continued into November) he was pressing on with contingency invasion plans and authorising covert operations and the resumption of Operation Mongoose – including attempts to kill Castro. At the Superbowl in December: he told Cuban exiles that their flag would be flying over “free Havana”. He refused to give Krushchev a ‘non-invasion’ assurance – ratified at the UN – so that he could be flexible in his efforts to overthrow Castro. That doesn’t sound at all reluctant to me? [Source: Sheldon M Stern; JFK Library; NSA Archive]
His veto of Northwoods has to be evaluated against Operation Mongoose and the sabotage that he did authorise. At the end of the day, it is not for you and I to have a gentlemen’s agreement about what constitutes historical accuracy – there are facts. Granted, facts and documents have to be contextualised – so there is room for interpretation. Previously, David Ray Griffin was presented as being historically inaccurate – which I find incredibly unlikely. And now JP. Which I find equally unlikely. There is no real need to argue, certainly not ‘fight’. There is no need to agree a pact: all we have to do is attend to the fact.
The western capitalist Empire is a cult of indivuation. It recounts its history as a series of Great Men (their sexism, not mine): involved in heroic deeds. Looking below the surface, it is all bollocks …a process of psychological brainwashing and process of heroification. My own perspective is to tell humanities tale, from the bottom up. Just what does history look like from the dirt and rivers of blood. It’s not nearly as pretty as charismatic heroes wrestling with dark forces – holding the Unspeakable at bay. But this perspective makes no difference on the ground: it is merely entertainment and distraction.
I’m sure the oppressed in SE Asia, Cuba, Greece, etc feel a sense of relief that they were repressed by the good western imperialists – not the ultra-reactionary ones. Otherwise, they might have been twice as dead.
Sorry Hugh, but that is the way I see it. Until the Unpeople are given the same voice and status as the good imperialists – there will never be peace. History needs a universal humanist retelling to replace the ‘Hero’s Journey’ mythology of Empire creation.
This excerpt of a conversation below, related by Dr. Norman Cousins, of his talk with JFK, is a flat out, frank, and flagrant refutation of so much of what we have seen posted here, of “re-revisionist” counter-conspiracy theories about the premise of “JFK and the Unspeakable” being so much non-factual Camelotian nostalgia, subscribed to and propagated by Douglass, and V. Salandria, Gaeton Fonzi, Oliver Stone, and so many others of the more creditable, and non-incredible, conspiracy realist community. It is well worthy an addition to this dialogue here, to read Cousins book about this: “The Improbable Triumvirate” which recounts the work of three great men for peace. (I have yet to see this underscored by historians, though I suspect more than one of them have: all three of the key figures in ending the Cold War: Pope John XXIII, JFK, and Kruschev were gone form office all within a year or so of each other, and in quite suspect ways: the Pope and the President were dead within less than a half year of each other, and Kruschev who must have seen the writing on the wall, one would infer, stepped down less than a year after JFK’s hit.*
“I spoke of the situation inside the Soviet Union and the pressure
on Mr. Khrushchev to adopt a hard line.
The President said: “One of the ironic things about this entire
situation is that Mr. Khrushchev and I occupy approximately the
same political positions inside our governments. He would like to
prevent a nuclear war but is under severe pressure from his
hard-line crowd, which interprets every move in that direction as
appeasement. I’ve got similar problems. Meanwhile, the lack of
progress in reaching agreements between our two countries gives
strength to the hard-line boys in both, with the result that the
hard-liners in the Soviet Union and the United States feed on one
another, each using the actions of the other to justify its own
position.”…
I told the President that the evidence seemed to suggest that a
political crisis was developing inside the Soviet Union, and that
the test ban might be something of a pivotal issue….
There was some indication, I told the President, that the Chinese
had already written off the chances for successful completion of
a test-ban treaty. The present impasse, now being exploited in
their propaganda, had apparently convinced them there would be no
further negotiations….
The President said he recognized the complexities of
Chinese-Russian relations. Some things were beyond our reach or
our power. But one thing that might be within reach was improved
American-Soviet relations.
In that case, I said, perhaps what was needed was a breathtaking
new approach toward the Russian people, calling for an end to the
cold war and a fresh start in American-Russian relationships.
Such an approach might recognize the implications of a world that
had become a single unit, however disorganized; it might
recognize, too, that the old animosities could become the fuse of
a holocaust.
The President lit a thin cigar and said he would like to think
about it. He asked me to prepare a memorandum for him on the
subject….”
Page 113-117, added by David T. Ratcliffe. “This book offers remarkable context to JFK’s June 10, 1963 Commencement Address at American University which called for nothing less than an end to the Cold War was the first acknowledgment by a U.S. President of the suffering of the Russian people during WWII.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
(*An interesting personal footnote: My father and Cousins had both been at UCLA in some capacity, and Cousins was a client of my father and his firm, ecjlaw.com. That’s about as far as my knowledge of what was going on, when I lived at his house, going to school through the 1960s. Other than that, my old man, John W. Ervin, used to talk about him to me frequently at the dinner table, mostly as a fan of his literary output. Later, as a student of his health book about laughing oneself well. JWE sure could have used that. But I know they also collaborated on international law issues. JWE wheedled me to go to an International Law Convention in Beverly Hills with him, spring of 1969, and it being a Saturday night, I resisted, until he agreed to terms: he said, as a concession, that I could sit for the whole night next to Laura Huxley, and, one less easy to concede, that I could wear my John Lennon-esque red velvet Nehru Jacket.
I was the only one there, besides Laura in her “peasant dress”, among hundreds at round dinner tables, who was not in a three piece BH power suit, but I also was, apparently, the only one who asked a relevant question: why would the World Court, the purpose of the night’s presentation, defend individual citizens against brutal regimes, but would not defend American draft resisters for simply saying no to the draft of an undeclared war? I had a pressing personal interest, as a cadet at an Army ROTC School, where Bob Haldeman was an alumnus, and Chairman of the School’s Board, and father of a classmate, all of us curious about our place at soon upcoming draft age.
I didn’t get much of an answer, besides generic patronization and a pat on the head by the speaker who totally dodged the whole question, in front of hundreds of attorneys, some who complained to me, and others, later, about my needlessly “angry attitude”.
Well, I WAS 16, an HS Junior, and not yet fully aware of just how constipated the relations of the US were with the rest of the human rights community, among so many others.
By the following year, when there was yet another such charade of a convention, the same speaker asked my sister why I wasn’t there with her, and she said that I had since fled my father’s house, never to return.
He answered her, as she called me long distance the next day to retell it, laughing, “Too bad, I’ll miss him, his was the only interesting and pertinent question that was asked all night.”
And no doubt due to the whole Orwellian character of the event, so it was.
I include it as a relevant and poignant personal moment, one that says a cameo”s worth of feeling about the entire ambience and context of these issues, JFK and, at the time, his recently murdered brother, and the many interlaced stories we still contend with, here. And many elsewheres.)
As far as I’m concerned, the conversations of Cousins and others with Kennedy, which make up much of the core of Douglass’ book and others who know those truths, are more than enough to send the Posners and McAdams and Bugliosis, packing. To where they belong.Where all such disservants belong.
Wherever that is, not a good place.
The remarkable thing is the Establishment admission of the assassinations of RFK. Why RFK died and why it matters, is still urgent, as is the recent petition to re-open the investigation. Though neither Pilger (nor BigB) believe in the Camelot myths, there had to be a reason for RFK’s blatant execution.
I predict that the conclusion of any new investigation will be that Donald Trump did it, acting on the orders of the Russian government. When the explosive demolition of WTC-7 can no longer be concealed, the verdict will be the same.
Wow, I like the sound of this pair. Difficult to imagine guys of their background being given a similar platform and such latitude today.
BigB, I like and admire Pilger. I am confident I would like you too. You are knowledgeable and uncompromising. But you are preaching to the choir about Pilger in general. This thread and my comments were specifically about Pilger’s claims about Viet Nam and about you quoting them. Kennedy was not responsible for 2M deaths, he stated very clearly he was going to pull out, a month before he died, and that the Vietnamese were going to have to win by themselves. And he had been exposed to the same pressure and counsel that led Eisenhower to send military advisors to Nam in the first place.
Kennedy was murdered for his stance(s). Was he a martyr? Too early to tell but probably. But by enlisting in the anti-Kennedy cabal, you run with a bad crowd. And if you don’t mind me saying, you are being much out of the character and presentation of self that you have exhibited on this site. Kennedy was no saint but neither does Pilger speak ex cathedra.
George
I’m sure too that we would get on fine over a pint, and could put the world to rights in a few short hours. Lack of agreement just makes for more lively debate, no malice intended.
In various publications, John Pilger has deconstructed the entire Vietnam War narrative – from 1945, through Dien Bien Phu, through JFK, to the end. Ho Chi Minh wasn’t truly a communist (nor were the PVA) – that was a propaganda designation; North and South Vietnam were American propaganda structures too; the re-unification elections were cancelled by Diem/Dulles; etc. No one person started the Vietnam War – but the propaganda constructs were key. JFK did nothing but uphold them, promulgate them, and enforce them by increasing the US presence – where, quite frankly, they had absolutely no right to be. And what did they do there? ‘Counterinsurgency’ and ‘pacification’ of an innocent population. I have already intimated what these terms really meant. As for leaving: he was not. He said so several times, including a double emphatic on prime time TV. In his last speech, he said so again – Vietnam would fall without his support. He praised the ‘counterinsurgency’ effort. He then went on to brag about doubling the the size of his nuclear penis extension – sorry to be so crude, but I have posted all this many times before.
My point is: one man’s insurgent is another man’s freedom fighter. In the end, it comes down to definitions, and how we frame reality. In our own terms and definitions – or inherited, internalised Empire myths and conceptual propaganda constructions. JP wrote a brilliant essay on the “Death of History” (published on this site). No Vietnamese died in Vietnam – only Americans. The Kennedy myth feeds this counter-historic narrative. Who was Diem, and hid murderous brother (and sister-in-law) Nhu? What did they do? Why was America supporting a murderous minority dictator? Why was JFK upset when he was murdered? You don’t have to be a military genius to know that Nhu’s ARVN would NEVER have been ready to take on the Vietnamese Peoples Army.
On the note of definitions: can we at least agree the meaning of “pull out”? That NSAM 263 was never a document that “pull out” could be applied to. The 1,000 to leave were due to natural reassignment and return due to the end of tours, etc. They simply were not going to be replaced. Around 15,000 or so were due to stay for the ‘counterinsurgency’ initiative for two more years. That is a quantum leap to define this as a “pull out”. A lot can happen in two years. A lot did. A lot of people seem to think that they know what would have occurred had JFK lived …or why he died and why it mattered – based on erroneous definitions of phrases such as “pull out”. Define “pull out”?
I’ll leave the last word to RFK, who was there after all:
Extract from an oral history. Whose definition of “pull out” are we using?
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/vietnam.htm
In reply to Ed Curtin:
The question is of truth – only whose truth. Humanities or the Empire’s? The specific charge is the John Pilger’s quote (I posted) are “are factually wrong, emphatically wrong”. Are they? If so, from whose POV?
The well known fact that Sirhan Sirhan did not kill RFK bears no relevance to the veracity (or not) of Pilger’s claims – and so is misleading. The updated ‘truth’ is in Douglass and Talbot et al. It’s also in the primary record, which I have repeatedly referenced – contra Douglass (I don’t know Talbot, but I am unlikely to be convinced by him if he writes as much utter bullshit as Douglass).
I have read the Douglass pulp fiction novella. I have also done what no one else appears to have done locally. I cross-referenced Douglass with the primary record – and found him wanting. I have commented numerous times, referencing the primary record, to no avail. I’m not doing it anymore. No one actually bothers to consider that there might be a distortion in Douglass – which there is – but facts and references do not sway cherished opinion. So commenters can keep their cherished opinion, and cherry pick facts to suit …only who does this narrative construction favour?
What is Empire? The Zen definition is that it is a mere confected story. One that becomes effective the more beautifully it is told and retold. The constant, and momentarily recurring, retelling of a beautiful fiction makes it presently real and reified as a substance, with the inherent power of its conviction. In other words: it has power over us – power we affirm and reaffirm with each retelling (internalising its concepts and definitions). But what is it really? Can you smell that?
I take it no one actually followed the link to John Pilger’s article? His main point, and the reason I posted it, was that the myths and fables of Empire get recycled time after time to justify and validate crime after crime against humanity. John was there, in Vietnam (after Kennedy) to humanise the real suffering the myths of Empire erase (on which I have elaborated below). But it would have been different if JFK had lived?
This is utter BS, epistemological confection and virtual myth-making of the highest order. If anyone thinks that they can accurately recast history after someone’s death – then they have claimed superhuman powers they do not have. This is metaphysical mystification epitomised.
About know I usually get led into the strawman that their death’s meant something? They must be special. What about the the conservative 25 million Unpeople the Deep State have also killed? That is the humanising frame of reference that should be the wider context that their fiction should be set in. Not the myopic US-centric tunnel vision reality that their heroification requires. I particularly find the ‘Teshuva’ turning to peace mendacity sickening. Tell that version of the truth to the dehumanised, forced-Catholicised, raped and murdered Unpeople of Vietnam. Define ‘peace’? Question: is that humanities definition of peace – or Empire’s?
John Pilger was there. He witnessed and told the truth about genocides we would never heard of – and risked his life in doing so. Denigrating him does him and humanity a great disservice. If we include the vision of all humanity as a lens and true perspective to frame history – bringing into focus the suffering in Vietnam, Laos, ‘Free China’, Greece, the Soviet Union; etc – the heroic, and historically inaccurate, virtual mythologising of the Kennedys in particular …become a mere confabulation and yet another myth of Empire.
A fact, I’m sure, many will choose to ignore. I tried to do it the right way with facts (like the fact RFK was the chief hawk during the CMC – incontrovertible from the primary record – this fact alone renders Douglass as pulp fiction). The myths and fables of Empire are all subtle power plays. They distort the perception of reality. They say: look over here – look at this important Deep State murder. Don’t look at all the mass murder and attempted genocide that went on in the Kennedy regime era. They were special: they stood for peace. Define ‘peace’? Is that a universal humanist definition of peace …or just another beautiful, elegiac, narrative fictional definition of war?
How about, JFK (never mind his brother) thought that nuclear war with the Soviet Union was probably a bad idea, whereas the Pentagon psychopaths thought that they could “win” it?
How about we check the primary record, and stop fantasising about what people may or may not have thought? The ExComm meetings during the CMC were recorded and are available for reference. Sheldon M Stern has written three books on the topic. The whole point is that the intelligence was so poor, they did not know what they risked. The neat humanity versus insanity – RFK and JFK versus the “Unspeakable” – is a contrite narrative fiction. RFK even made a list of hawks v doves …but excluded himself as the chief hawk. There was no clear demarcation and a shifting landscape of opinion that defies any neat Hollywoodised scripted good v bad guy story. The story that has prevailed through Douglass and the “Thirteen Days” propaganda (and it was pure propaganda finished by Sorenson to conceal the quid pro quo missile swap) is untrue …a pure myth of Empire.
The preparation for invasion of Cuba carried on long after the end of the Crisis. As did SAC’s. “Emergency War Orders” (24/7 strategic deployment of nuclear bombers). No sooner than a deal was agreed with Krushchev than it was violated. Operation Mongoose was resumed before the end of the year …all by the President, not the JCS. Who really are the Unspeakable? The myths of Empire conceal more than they reveal …that’s the whole point.
Here’s some primary record, for you. A link to a transcript of the speech Fidel Castro gave Saturday, November 23, 1963: while Lee Harvey Oswald was still a (dead) man walking the earth, or at least a Dallas city prison corridor.
Castro knew within hours what we are really still “just” finding out, mostly since the new millennium, and he spells it out in detail: that JFK and Oswald were killed by “Nazi” interests here.
He removes all the CYA of CIA in minutes, laid bare in the Cuban sun.
An astounding document. Speaks volumes about where we are today:
https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/HWNAU/appendixII.html
@John Ervin. This extract from your Link shows Castro in line with BigB’s theory of COG: removing a powerful POTU$A so as to clear the deck for a power struggle between lower-echelon sharks in the U$ regime. A long way from that attempt to synthesize a myth, a romantic idyll a la Geoffrey de Monmouth, about mystical King John F. Arthur in Camelot for Peace.
And now the BULLSHIT is Quentin Somerville, BBC Middle East Correspondent, standing accused by Beirut-based Riam Dalati, of organising fake footage in Douma to justify military action in Syria (called for subsequently by a salivating Guardian Nobhead, Simon Tisdall). Story on rt.com …..
To say that Somerville and Tisdall can never be journalists again if this story is true completely fails to put the appropriate punishments in hand.
The entire senior Editorial teams at the BBC and the Guardian are guilty of criminal dereliction of duty and that dereliction will have been wilful, as a bit of Pompeo-style torture will undoubtedly reveal that both teams will have several security service operatives planted within them.
On top of that, vast swathes of the House of Commons will be equally discredited, requiring public demand for immediate defrocking, lifetime bans from public service appointments and criminal prosecutions, after appropriate disclosure-inducing torture, for public conspiracy to commit mass murder overseas.
The absolute evil resides, however, with Quentin Somerville for fabricating evidence intended to incite illegal military action and mass death overseas.
The HOC is not fit and proper to organise the public defenestration and humiliation of amoral, unprincipled, soul-less and utterly evil wastrels who the BBC, in its infinite amoral culture of murdering inhumanity, has deemed fit to carry out the most important moral task of a national media organisation, namely the absolutely honest- and unimpeachable reporting of terror overseas.
That must be carried out by those who are honest and unimpeachable.
I would hire John Pilger, Robert Fisk, Oksana Boyko, Seymour Hersh and Frank Field MP (Chairman).
I would exhort them to be undiplomatic, absolutely condemnatory, completely public and implacable to forces attempting to dilute the ferocity of their conclusions, recommendations and condemnations.
It is time for the Augean Stables to be given the most powerful investigative laxative on earth and if the shit released spreads all the way to Washington DC and beyond, well dear me, Watergate will have nothing on this one…..
Vanessa Beeley — How BBC depicted staged hospital scenes as proof of Douma chemical attack
Rhys, Frank Field? Ffs.
Your rant was good till you put him in that list – and Fisk has always been a curates egg.
The real and only answer to the msm conspirators and extrajudiciality of the aristos, is the completion and full implementation of the Leveson Inquiry.
In fact I’d be happy to have that Judge deploy justice upon the deepshits that have plagued us for many decades and nullified legal expertise and independence. Including firing and trying and imprisoning judges – who have conspired to pervert natural justice – like the lady who ruled on Assange, etc.
Meanwhile, the ObsessiveGraun runs with it’s usual, scary big nosed clowns, Cohen & co, to split the thicko ‘socialist’ readers of that not so secret state infiltrated rag, with the red herring of a impossible referendum.
ABC they cry. Anybody But Corbyn, they beg, gnashing and tearing their own hair out. He will undo all our works! They moan.
We are not buying – not mrs ballsy, Yvette; nor mr flippyfloppy ummama mama ; or the oleagenous Mr Smugleslie; or miss eversogreasy; or the dodgyprogeny twins kinnockandBenn and the rest of the failed and failed again and again chickencoupers.
They were definitely splitting on thursday, and then friday … it’s sunday now !
Chicken is as chicken does. Cowards and liars.
Funniest was the dynamic photo of chukka and soubry marching purposefully in westminster looking like they were the figureheads of the new centrists mirage of taking back control, not from the EU, but the now inevitable Corbynite Labour government. Which threatens the superpower and gains of being two faces of but one secret neocon party that has brought us privatisations from the day their goddess Maggie bared her multibreasted teats to nurture all the pigs and fatcats and handed back to the aristos what had been grasped from their long and cold hands in 1945.
How can the declared new centrists conspirators of friday now go and sit on the back benches on the monday? As if it was all a dream?
It would appear that France is only Nation with a wide-spread movement to clean out ” the Augean
Stables “. A widespread movement contra to France’s undemocratic political ruling establishment.
I suggest that those who are sincerely interested in threat of real democracy. any time soon just watch
the online video statement : ” 12 minutes to understand the yellow jackets movement in France “.
Simply browse the aforementioned, in your address bar and enter, if you have twelve minutes to be enlightened and also speak the english language, just press the enter key on your keyboard.
Another era, gone forever. Thanks Edward. I too, had an Irish Catholic upbringing in New Zealand, and had the (mis)fortune to attend a Catholic Convent school. The fear those nuns instilled in us kids, something I still remember vividly. The World has changed radically, the breakdown of society, an increasing dystopia, ever increasing homelessness and poverty in the West, increasing numbers begging in the streets while a tiny minority wallow in obscene levels of wealth and luxury. And the media? What they have become? Stenographers for, and protectors of power and the status quo. There are only a handful of journalists I trust now – John Pilger is one, Finian Cunningham another, Seymour Hersh, Gareth Porter and Eva Bartlett others. And as Pilger pointed out a few years back, much of the World has become slaves to digital technology. You only need to look around you to see that.
Breslin had the Gift, and couldn’t write an un-interesting New York City article if he tried. The national scene wasn’t his forte, nor was JFK .
From that now lost generation of brilliant localized American journalism, I would include Chicago’s Mike Royko & Studs Terkel, Texas’ Molly Ivins, perhaps San Francisco’s Herb Caen in lite-weight mode..
In today’s corporate-police-state america, factual quality journalism is no longer required, and the Sy Hersch’s and John Pilgers are exiled to obscurity.
Only in a society which has effectively abandoned objective reality, in favour of the delusional fantasy world promoted by official propaganda, could something like this go unacknowledged, for decades:
Whoops! The above screen shot of a monkey with a hammer has replaced a link to the WTC7 collapse. How odd…
If a billion monkeys with a billion hammers attacked the steel frame of the WTC towers for a billion years, they might succeed in producing something like the 9/11 event.
Controlled demolition does not rule out the hand of AlQaeda as they have previous for this in their attempt at blowing up the WTC in the 1990s
It certainly doesn’t, since al-Qaeda is actually the CIA.
As Lori Price of http://www.legitgov.org has dubbed it for many years:
Al-CIAduh
(An excellent news feed for all news uncovered or suppressed.)
That was a silly little van bomb that cost a few hundred dollars and caused a handful of casualties. It was so amateurish that one of the 3 involved got caught trying to get the deposit back from that famous Dutchman, Hertz van Rental. That is about the limit of any genuine terrorist attack.
Controlled demolition DOES rule out the hand of Al-Qaeda. As Graeme MacQueen says, “There is no room in the official story for controlled demolition.” CD does not fit the official story in any shape or form. CD could only have brought down those three massive skyscrapers (Al-Qaeda – are you kidding?) by a completely inside arrangement whoever the actually demolition crews were and, if under the auspices of insiders then who exactly brought them down is not really very relevant is it? Insiders were the main culprits.
Trout, your Mask is slipping.
Or THIS:
https://www.amazon.com/DOPPELGANGER-Legend-Lee-Harvey-Oswald/dp/1530364981
Published only a year or so, ago. It sure explains the mysteries of 6th story window and starkly conflicting eye witnesses. “Legend” SpySpeak for cover.
I have pictures from another book of both dressed alike in Dallas City Jail with Chief Jesse Curry, but in different places there. Makes sense to have two, for “The Big Event”.
Fine article, and a point well made about the limits of street journalism, that lost art. However I do recall reading a column of Pete Hamill wherein he stated that Frank Sinatra, when Hamill asked him about the JFK murder, replied that if he told Hamill everything he knew about the assassination that he, Sinatra, would get killed . . .
Sinatra knew Sam Giancana well, and that Capo di Capos, the head Wiseguy who took over the Chicago “Outfit” for Al Capone, was murdered, apparently by someone he knew well, the day before he was to testify in Washington about what he knew of Mob connections to the CIA.
Some of his Mob buddies said that he had told him in the days before he was hit, something like, “They just don’t get it in D.C. The Mob and the CIA are different sides of the same coin.”
I repeated those “famous last words” to Dave Emory when I met him, 2 years ago today, and he jumped in before I had put a full stop to my quote:
“The CIA *IS* The Mob. It’s the biggest Mob in the world, ever.”
And he’s my preferred authority on much of this: from his lips to your ears.
Another Sinatra acquaintance from Beverly Hills (my father’s law firm http://www.ecjlaw.com was at ground zero in BH: Wilshire and Beverly, a block from Rodeo Drive, featured in Beverly Hills Cop, to refresh memories across The Pond) was Johnny Roselli, the CEO of Giancanan Murder Inc. (And HIS lawyer Grant Cooper somehow became Sirhan’s defense counsel, favoring the poor patsy with the fruits of his lawyer labor: a death penalty, later commuted, no thanks due to GC, who himself was under indictment at the time by the feds!)
Two years after Giancana had a half dozen slugs put in him, with a detail of Chicago PD assigned to his home for his protection standing down and disappearing an hour before the hit, the (Frank) Church Committee had morphed into the HSCA (House Select Committee on Assassinations) and had called “Handsome Johnny” Roselli to testify.
They found him around the date for the testimony, in sections, floating in a 55 gallon drum in Biscayne Bay, Miami. Apparently he’d gone marlin fishing with some pals, and that was the result, instead of canning albacore, he got the can all for himself.
Happened to a lot of them, like Charles Nicoletti. Another Chicago gangster allegedly in Dallas 11.22.63.
All these facts are referenced and documented. Nothing “theoretical” about a plethora of stiffs.
So, I believe Emory more each day. At the top of the menu at his website: spitfirelist.org you can find free audio of the most massive series he has ever put on radio, or online, in 30 years: a Twenty Five (25!) part interview with Jim DiEugenio called “Destiny Betrayed” which is about all of this.
And with past as prologue, you can see why Ol’ Blue Eyes, Sinatra, the Chairman of the Board, was reluctant to gossip about assassinations.
<>
The writer is describing the political process in the US. However, don’t you find it is spot on description for the majority of Western countries as well??
As has been abundantly clear for some time now, “the majority of Western countries” are merely vassal states of the Anglo-Zionist Empire. It stands to reason that their intelligence agencies, secret police, and deep-state gangsters, assassins, and death squads, would be merely vassals of the CIA and the Mossad.
Yes, but most of it was exported by fascist interests in the US. Wall Street and that nest of transnational pirates. And not any 1 of the Euro nation states, or 2 or 3 combined, come close to even a distant second. Germany was civilized by the “aversion therapy” of Dresden Fire Bombing, and lost a lot of Hun and Goth genes in the flames of all that. Hopefully we cowboys will be purified with less refining fire, but the forecast seems for more of the same….
At the end of “Smiley’s People” by former MI6 agent John le Carré, the defector, captured, tells Alec Guiness, as Smiley – if memory serves, it’s been 20 years! – part of his motive for defection, “England since World War Two has become nothing more than street walkers for America.” Having lived in London and preferring it about 12 to 1 over L.A., here, that stung.
******
“You cannot be happy in Heaven until you come to recognize your own personal Hell.”
–The Purple Sage (my nickname for a distinguished Iroquois friend of mine)
“God will lead you nowhere where His Grace can’t keep you.”
–ibid.
“Couldn’t have said it better, m’self,” my mensch.
Excellent followup, shining links.
Thanks for expanding on this, very needful to students and even some “scholars”.
I have seen a lot of this, but great gratitude for increase of links.
And clearly, there IS that much more to all this. And more. The wondrous Koch crime partners, OOPS, brothers have their own intel agency now, and THEMIS, etc.
Not only are the bad guys developing tech to mind controls, but, maybe good news, there are foreign interests and adversaries trying to mind control them with all kinds of plots and gizmos. What goes around…?
What a world. We’re stuck with it.
Time to shine!
*****
Jingle I wrote in 1980, a time of monstrous disruption, and great gifts in its wake:
Better shine your spirit
When Dark begins to fall.
You’re not up against a “lot”
You’re up against a wall.
Shine your spirit now
Don’t be misunderstood
“World War Three” is happening
For everybody’s good.
” John F Kennedy referred incessantly to “America’s mission in the world” even while affirming it with a secret invasion of Vietnam that caused the deaths of more than two million people. ”
Is that what you are calling ” outrageous hyperbole which should cause anyone to question anything Pilger says.”?
It seems unexceptionable to me.
There is no doubt that Kennedy, badly advised and disgracefully insouciant, did authorise the significant military escalations that, fairly directly, led to the deaths of at least two million people. Harold Wilson and LBJ did something similar in Indonesia, leading to the deaths of about a million people, and counting. Trump appears to have ordered steps to be taken that could lead to the deaths of millions more.
There is a moral somewhere here, perhaps it has something to do with constitutions that allow individuals to take the final decisions over matters of life and death. On the other hand, neither the British nor the US Constitution allows the expenditure of one penny or the firing of one shot without the express permission of the lower house of the legislature.
Having been a marcher against the Viet Nam invasion/war, I took a keen interest in the background and rationale. This was not easy to come by in the zeitgeist of the sixties. The Domino Theory and general anti-communist paranoia were the warp and woof of public engagement with foreign policy but neither came from Kennedy. He authorized 16,000 ‘military advisors’ to go into Nam but made clear in public interviews that this was a battle that the Vietnamese would have to win themselves. Invasion seems an exaggeration. Escalation came after Kennedy’s assassination and Johnson’s role , surely in one, possibly in both, should not be ignored.
Here is a timeline for Viet Nam. Pilger could just as rationally blamed Eisenhower as introducing the first American advisors to Nam in the 50’s.
http://mahargpress.com/wounded/additional-material/timeline-of-vietnamconflict/
@Cornell: “The Domino Theory and general anti-communist paranoia were the warp and woof of public engagement with foreign policy but neither came from Kennedy.”
So what was the use of Kennedy?
BEVIN’s claims about the British and USA constitutions do not enable either of the two National entities to go to war without the ‘ fig leaf of cover ‘ from a the lower elected governmental assemblies.
Well to start with the British as a monarchy and it does not have a constitution!
Sinmilarly, the USA is apparently steadfast in its claims to be a fully-fledged democracity, but it still evidences the ability of it so-called democratic leaders, to undertake;
International rape and plunder in war, without any initatale permission from any of its constituent assemblies – long after nations have been invaded and peoples murdered ?
The Stuarts have left the country. Largely because they took your view of the Constitution.
The comment you reply to is compleat steer manure. It’s well documented that JFK had advised in NSAM 263 a month before his murder that he was pulling out of Viet Nam.
The CIA has created so many bogus back stories on JFK that most folks are left with mere optical illusions.
Get the facts in James Douglass’ landmark 30 years research, “JFK and the Unspeakable”. Or Martin Schotz’ many appendices of documents, such as the trove of letters between Kruschev and Kennedy to broker peace, with Pope John XXIII backchannels, privately. Scintillating read that changes the whole game of NWO CIA disinfo (aka Lies).
The world has been treated to a tsunami of disinfo about JFK because the Intel community and its war merchant puppet-masters want to bury his strong dream of peace for the world, so they continue to murder him munificently for as long as it takes, a half century of character assassination and going strong as Day 1?
Now that’s an assassination worthy of Jesus Christ!
Quite an accomplishment for an “insouciant” “playboy” from Boston….
I find your comment very interesting, John. I’ve read virtually nothing about JFK so when I read the comments in OffG for and against him I don’t know what to believe but your comment supports what my instincts tell me: that his enemies would push propaganda to show he is as morally bankrupt as they are. I guess I’ll never know unless I do my own research … and even then???
Touche, John
Your Camelotian “steer manure” doesn’t pass the sniff test. Did you ever bother to read NSAM 263? He was leaving around 15,000 ‘advisers’ in situ until after the election. To toast marshmallows and singalong rousing hymns around the campfire, no doubt? Roast ‘communist sympathiser’ Vietnamese would be closer to the truth. The retelling that makes this acceptable are the very myths and fables of Empire we have inherited today. Propagate them if you wish …no CIA required.
Pleeez. Don’t make me rebut that. I’d get writer’s cramp or keystroke burn. Milosevic and others have posted the links where there is a plethora of ample refutation.
People need to “fish” out the millions of red herrings, such as your very skewed treatment of NSAM 263, overturned barely a month later by LBJ’s NSAM 273, which says everything needed. Here.
Or then.
Ethel Kennedy finally felt she could go to Cuba a few years ago and told Fidel face to face something like, “I was in the White House every day, and my husband and his brother never spoke a word about assassinating you.”
Fidel: “I know.”
He knew it within hours. Everyone needs to read his landmark speech, included at Schotz free online version of History Will Not Absolve Us.
Pleeez.
Fidel Castro — Concerning the Facts and Consequences of the Tragic Death of President John F. Kennedy
How about this link with free online version of Schotz book, which has Castro speech of Saturday November 23, 1963, hours after the assassination ?
https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/HWNAU/
And a whole lot more, the astounding letters between JFK and Kruschev.
The amazing usefulness of Castro’s speech is he knew everything about LH Oswald to make his case, and he deeply understood the whole event.
A long and meticulous speech about OSWALD, WHILE OSWALD WAS STILL WALKING THE EARTH!
Well, a dead man walking.
Hours to live.
History Will Not Absolve Us — Orwellian control, public denial, and the murder of President Kennedy, by Martin Schotz
False Mystery — Essays on the JFK Assassination, by Vincent Salandria
More BS. On the Schitz version – RFK went to Dobrynin and told him “remove the missiles, or we will remove the for you”. His specific message was “there could be no quid pro quo”. The Kennedy regime was ready to invade. The evidence for the truth of this is in the ExComm tapes …corroborated by the memo RFK wrote to Rusk on the 30th.If it is online, it’ll be in the JFK Library. Otherwise, you’ll have to buy the book.
From the primary record. Compare with the Schitz (I have just read) and Douglass pulp fiction versions. Or, more likely, ignore and continue to propagate the myths of Empire for another six months!
https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/111553.pdf?v=68796a468e2ca4ba537e49353bc97721
Of all the writers on this subject -the one Curtin homes in on at the end, the strange amnesia of Breslin and Hamill about what really happened in assassinations that, amazingly, Breslin and Hamill were rubbing elbows with the victims- no one has diagnosed this condition (modern national epidemic) more deeply and completely than the psychiatrist and writer E. Martin Schotz, below. (His pupil James Douglass has dedicated the other really great work on this problem, to Schotz: “JFK and the Unspeakable”.)
https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/FalseMystery/COPA1998EMS.html
*******
I should have some affinity with this subject myself: my father was attorney to the 33rd degree Freemason, Manly Palmer Hall (see book: “Master of the Mysteries” ) who was seeing Sirhan at the spooky reading library of Hall’s haunt below Griffith Park, The Philosophical Research Society, in 1967 -when Hall was holding court there, a world renowned hypnotist, apparently MKULTRA-fying, hypno-programming Sirhan. What else?
This is one nexus that I have not seen nearly enough researchers develop. Maybe I’m prejudiced, since I remember as a toddler in 1952, barely out of diapers, my mother referring her near-daily coffee companion -Ruth Drake, the wife of Hall’s V.P.- to their preferred pronunciation of PRS as “PEW! RS”. (And how!) To my infantile bemusement.
Having recently been potty-trained, I was able to get the joke. And I used to wonder what could possibly make it stink that bad. Now I know.
You really just can’t make this stuff up. No, seriously. This nexus to the events of the ’60s was odd. With roots unbenkownst to us in Nazi death camps and MKULTRA. All of that.
As: my father and Hall were later both separate homicides themselves, both deaths highly suspicious (well, aren’t they all?). In ’82 and ’90, respectively. As the rumored director of Project Monarch (aka for MKULTRA), Hall knew all those oddest of crafts.
As: I was walking in and out of a Dallas hospital the night before my father was found dead in Westwood (UCLA) in ’82 in a locked new Lincoln, victim of a supposed self-inflicted gunshot wound. I had dropped by the ER ward to drop off flowers at the room of a friend who was sleeping off a non-fatal gunshot wound through the chest, the only other person I know who was gunshot.
As: I was driving out the hospital ER exit and happened to notice the marquee. Yep, Parkland. I had no doubt just been a few feet away, in the gunshot ward, from where JFK (and 2 days later, Oswald) were pronounced dead. My friend John had been luckier. I saw him back at work when I got back from my Dad’s funeral in L.A.
As: I had been during those assassination years in the tiny ROTC High School, Harvard, in N. Hollywood with David Talbot, who has become one of a handful of writers to publish recent explosive (factual) histories of those state murders, as in his 2015 Allen Dulles/Assassination history “The Devil’s Chessboard”. (Oddly -though we were both dismissed in ’69 as editors of the two rival school magazines- I don’t recall we ever spoke in those 5 years -his mag was school-sponsored and narrowly controlled, mine I published as “Palantìr” independently, and which may have been the 1st “underground” mag at a CA private school, before it was assimilated by the school, then hung in the wind to die, a couple years after I was expelled – familiar black op against creative writer schiolboys LOL).
As: Mayor Sam Yorty used to land his chopper on our football field on early Monday mornings in the dark, in 1967, the only year I boarded at Harvard in deep “detentional” misery. I found it unusual that most all of the cadets on our top story of rooms, barracks, would almost always wake up and go to the balcony to watch the event, at 3am in our regulation Army underwear, rain or shine. I’d ask around and never get much of an answer. It stands out in memory, since a year later it was Yorty who confiscated Sirhan’s diary and held an historically ridiculous press conference about the seizure (I haven’t reviewed it yet at Youtube, but I bet it holds dazzling clues). All of this portends that there was advance knowledge afoot about the RFK assassination. That seems to be unspoken in the commotion caused by Yorty’s late night landings on our field. He was in the middle of laying groundwork for the RFK June “visit”? Of course, at that time in the fall of ’67 RFK had not yet declared. But Yorty is mentioned by Bobby in his victory speech, as having called the RFK campaign earlier that night,Tuesday, just minutes before he was shot….
A few years ago I found a reference by Yorty, calling my old man’s client, Manly Palmer Hall, “my guru”. (Harvard was only a couple miles down the street from our home on 14322 Valley Vista. Hmmmm.)
And Reagan had said that Hall’s book, “The Secret Destiny of America” was his “inspiration” for entering politics.
Figures.
Some poet said that we write poems not to resemble life but to be as incredible as life.
You just can’t make this stuff up, though. Not much can surpass Hollyweirdness.
Really.
£4£4£ & $4$ *************
(Only caveat about Schotz assessment: we strongly disagree with his take on RFK SR. as an AG accessory after the fact in his brother’s death, knowing all that we know now about the Kennedy histories, although I understand a little why Schotz inculpated him somewhat, when he wrote this 20 years ago or so. He needs to recall that Bobby’s only surviving brother, Ted, was to nearly die in a plane crash, the only survivor. What could Bobby have done, in ’64, against all the clandestine armies of the night and the High Cabal? In fact, one of Bobby’s key reasons for running in ’68 was to re-open JFK-Dallas, as President.
Otherwise, Schotz’ work stands tall. Key addition to an understanding of how our country got hijacked, and more importantly, it continues to be driven down as “a pall descended” and is bound through these same players (& scions) to be destroyed.
Seems worth studying. In greatest depth.
As Curtin has been doing, it shows.
I’ve cleared a lot off my own table, just to do so. But it’s a labor well rewarded. It is a major and most important lens through which to see our fragmenting society.
Wow. John Erwin.
That is Pynchon-esque!
Thanks. More please.
John Erwin: I second DunGroanin. Brilliant comment. There is an obvious reason people have ‘amnesia’ if they know too much. Its about continuing to wake up the next day. The whole thing is one truly evil web.
Well, if my own narrative can connect some more dots into this massive story arc, I’ve not fought in vain.
I post this screed because these are real facts from a witness of much historic surrealism, such as he is. I can submit bona fides for all this, so these are not tall tales out of Texas, not any 1 of them fictitious. And the CIA finds me enough of a bother that they finally got me shut down for articles at one website that gets 100 million hits a month, nearly. What really gets them going, BIG TIME, is when I use Angleton’s Counterintelligence concept that he spoke to Congress: “We want our adversaries to find themselves in a wilderness of mirrors.” He was fired forthwith. Read the last line sometime of my High School classmate Dave Talbot’s Devil’s Chessboard (2015) and you’ll get the big picture (hélas). The Espiocrats don’t want to ponder fully just exactly what the reductio ad absurdam portends, in that technological reality of proliferating mirrors, and how they can use that (or the caveat of all history: how they can ABUSE it). But it is the international Nazi factor, the 1 that hit the Kennedys, that is developing this psyop weaponry on a nearly infinite scale, and so it is these sorts that don’t want us to know.
Otherwise, we might find ways to defend!
So, to oblige them, I’ll just call “IT” a “Ponderosa of Simulacra”. There, now. That’s much better.
I’d rather be making music, my main squeeze, but these issues beg not to be sidelined, for the good of all. World War Three is morphing into that other dimension. What was a Cold War has become The Psywar.
“And then there was war in Heaven.” So Scripture tells us, referencing that as this Psywar.
And I was raised at arm’s length in the middle of this. It took me decades to connect many dots, and no one was more surprised to find they boomeranged back to my living room of 50 years ago, since my father kept many secrets from me. I used to see small connections, then only to find that the Old Man, a 1982 (highly assisted) (apparent) suicide, was connected to a lot of it, as a very prominent L.A. corporate lawyer (think: Allen Dulles[t] and Sullivan and Cromwell) only posing as a Democrat, and with Illuminati like Armand Hammer on his curious client list.
(The film “Gorky Park” came out the year he was murdered/contract-killed, but I didn’t see that connection til recently. In the novel original, Martin Cruz Smith wrote of the “only American ever to have import export rights with the Soviet Union”. In real life, there could only be one. Armand Hammer. His museum at UCLA is only a stone’s throw from where my old man’s body was found….)
OK, so maybe this shouldn’t be a thread, but just a miniseries like The Prisoner, of Patrick McGoohan. I met him when I was walking around bored and solo at my older sister’s HS graduation, apparently at the time he had wrapped that prophetic series, mid-June of ’67. I followed him to the front desk, at the height of his glory years, of that photogenic lodge, the Beverly Hills Hotel, while he checked out, dapper in a smoking jacket and ascot. I waited til he was done, then asked him for the first autograph I’d ever sought. He responded with such courtly grace and bonhomie, offering me egalitarian smiles when he’d done signing, beaming down on a shrimpy 5’2″ 15 years old, before my growth pains! You’d rarely if ever find such, elsewhere, here. Such pure class. He had been the first offered the James Bond role and declined, citing its affront to his Catholic values. He was valiant as an anti-spy, since the whole marketing of Bond as a womanizer was just another example of product placement: commercializing sex like cigarettes, to spawn more addictive behavior, more sales.*
And to his gallant credit, he said no. He paid the price too. Blacklisted covertly, much like the Prisoner he foresaw, where Uncle $kkkam, with an assist from his European counterparts, wants to gain clandestine Kontrölle not only of our lives, but every level of our minds, in the cyber-fascist program of complete 360o possession.
And like McGoohan, like his Prisoner, we can say no. And keep saying it. Holy Writ has it: “Fight manfully for your God and He will fight alongside you.”
*******************
*(In the old B&W Perry Mason episodes you will note they are always offering each other a cigarette, the producers choreographing their pimping for the tobacco companies into every script: half of the regular cast famously died of lung diseases in the next ten years, Talman, Collins, Hedda Hopper’s son Wm.)
(BTW: “John Ervin”. With a V. Not that I care, but I have wound up losing not a few letters, and Rx, when the Post Office or Pharmacy conflate the “V” for a “W” or usually the “i’s” with the “e’s”. Then I got one letter in Ohio 6 months later, in a blizzard. Just think Mel Brooks and “NOT Hedy Lamarr! HEDLEY! The proof is that the W was replicated in the next commenter, like an infection. Adding to my spelling chaos, the old man’s middle initial was W, for Wesley. But not to distract from thanks for your appreciation of my comment, much obliged.)
****************
“It is the vulgarity of this country to believe that naked wealth, unrelieved by any use or design, is merit.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1820
“Only among people whose minds have been weakened by a kind of mesmerism, could so transparent a trick as that of advertising ever have been tried at all.”
–GK Chesterton, “What I Saw in America” 1920s
[what was troubling him was not a “kind of mesmerism” but he could see the 1st seeds of systemic, systematic, multi-dimensional, multi-contextual, multi-phasic, MKULTRA-fied, panoptic technologized and ever more deployed hypnotic Mind Control: Hypnotism Lite OR Hypnotism Coercive, “enhanced”, as performed on our Pasadena neighbor over the hill, Sirhan B. Sirhan, now 74, still The Prisoner, of a deadly and defiled politics.]
**********
“I am not a number, I am a free man!”
–Patrick McGoohan as The Prisoner 1966
£4£4£ & $4$ !
“I don’t want poetry that is like life. I want poetry that is as impossible as life.”
–The Poet
John Ervin: John – may I humbly suggest you could submit a story for OffGuardian? When you said about mind control, immediately thought of Edward Bernays and Walter Lippmann. We are bombarded with marketing and advertising and propaganda, every hour of every day. And utterly enslaved to digital technology; our smartphones, our laptops. Fully distracted from what is happening all round us, oblivious to what is happening in places like Yemen, Venezuela, Palestine, Afghanistan, except for the small minority of us who are awake, and visit sites like OffGuardian or other alternative news sites. I say No also.
This is a rollicking nostalgia trip: only what relevance does it really have? It is also well known that there were at least thirteen shots fired in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel. So these guys were profoundly deaf as well as ‘deadline’ apologists for Empire?
So what they elegiacally confirmed was the same old myths and fables of Empire: which they never revisited. I have long wondered what the American Empire did actually lose, if anything at all, with the Kennedy assassinations? Rather than muse, I will just quote John Pilger, who was also in the pantry that night. And who also witnessed in person the streams of blood and death the myths of Empire cause:
We need a new mythology, not a “gritty and beautiful” written apologia perpetuating the same old redundant mythology of Empire.
http://johnpilger.com/articles/the-kennedy-myth-rises-again
Forgot the punchline “No more bullshit: we need a new mythology…”.
BigB – The relevance is truth, not very complex. When the mainstream media in great numbers heap only encomia on Breslin and Hamill and an HBO documentary about them at the same time that many others – RFK, Jr., James Douglass, and 58 other well-known Americans are calling a truth commission on the assassinations of the 1960s – and refuse to point out Breslin and Hamill’s failure in this regard, it is incumbent on a writer to write the truth. John Pilger has done great work, and I hold him in high regard, but his comments you quote about the Kennedys are factually wrong, emphatically wrong. He too has not “updated” his personal experience in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel nor read the works of James Douglass, David Talbot, et al. that would show him where he has erred. The fact is that Sirhan Sirhan did not shoot RFK and that there was a conspiracy and a cover-up of the highest order. And if you think there is no contemporary relevance to the fact that the US national security state could assassinate a president of the US and others long ago, then I am afraid you are stuck in the present.
In an important book from Skyhorse of a few years back, Patrick Nolan writes in his “CIA Rogues and the Killing of the Kennedys” that there were several key witnesses, including a press photographer, who witnessed flames from “6 inches to 12 inches” coming from Sirhan’s Iver Johnson .22
That testimony never made it to trial. The only way that happens is if the gun is firing blanks.
Sirhan was meant, in a variation on a theme of Oswald, to be gunned down in a crossfire of the real assassin(s) (Nolan sketches two, behind Kennedy) and never see a courtroom, or even a jail. But Sirhan was quickly tackled by some real athletes, and out of range. Unlike Oswald.
The anomalies in his case mount up, not to a mountain of evidence, but more of a mountain”range”.
The book shows how much, including a mention of his visits to my dad’s client Manly Palmer Hall. Which is why I bought my own copy.
In the diaries of Sirhan that Mayor Yorty seized hours later, we can read, “RFK must die. The Master says shoot on command.”
Well, dad told me when I was 8 or 9 that Hall’s nickname among his Hollywood “cognoscenti” was “The Master”. Because I asked.
And Louis Sahagun wrote a bio of Hall a few years ago called “Master of the Mysteries”.
A dammed spooky character.
Murdered in 1990 on his ranch south of LA. 8 years after my father.
In Shane O’Sullivan’s gripping Youtube documentary, “The Real Manchurian Candidate” we hear one of Sirhan’s current defense team, Laurie Dusek opine that Sirhan was referring to the “Range Master” at the Corona Firing Range, outside LA in Riverside County. And she gives some logical reasoning but speculative.
I am strongly convinced Sirhan was speaking of my father’s client Manly Palmer Hall, who is described in his wiki bio as “Master” of the Freemasonry Lodge in Vancouver, B.C. and “Master of the Mysteries”.
Hall was leaving us that calling card, mocking us, when he subjected Sirhan to all the Nazi death camp techniques of Mengele, through what I call “enhanced hypnosis” –the handmaiden of what they called in Iraq invasions, “enhanced interrogation” such as, but not limited to, waterboarding and all that Orwellian Pentagon claptrap. In fact, more than handmaiden, it seems fairly clear they were using all that, like Hall, to create Manchurian “armies”. And still are.
A grim thought.
But then, who are we?
Are we all the children of these states?
I sure hope not.
At best, we have become their hostages, with God our only ransom…
******
My big sister, who was the only one of us around my old man in his last 12 years, took me out to dinner in 2000 and told me that San Diego PD had finally closed the book on Hall’s death with a ruling of homicide.
I had been following it, but she knew more.
She said the massive corpse had been found with “worms crawling out of every orifice.”
I have since read they were black ants.
No matter, there is much shape shifting in the news, this millennium. Sign of the times.
With her flair for drama, I think she had been reading the latter pages of The Book of Acts when King Herod, failing to give God the glory for miraculous gifts, was stricken on his bed in that hour, and died with worms immediate, crawling “out of every orifice in his body.”
COINCIDENCE OR CONSPIRACY?
WE REPORT, YOU DECIDE.
********
All in all, welcome to Hollywood, and this epic & latter day Film Noir. Hold the popcorn.
What about the context of Israeli power and zionist conspirators?
I have long wondered what the American Empire did actually lose, if anything at all, with the Kennedy assassinations?
The question might be, what did the Israeli project gain from the Kennedy killings?
JFK tried to stop Dimona. RFK tried to rein in AIPAC and organised crime, and was arguably set to re-open the investigation into Dallas.
Johnson and Angleton were practically Israeli. Rubenstein, Lansky, Permindex etc.
Sirhan was ‘a Palestinian terrorist’ – how strange !
Lots more besides. M Collins Piper is a read.
https://www.unz.com/article/did-israel-kill-the-kennedies/
Fits together for me..
Pilger’s reference to the Kennedy’s attack on “un-American” activities could take a different nuance if one accepts this thesis. The Catholic boys’ antagonism toward Jewish Power….?
Sirhan grew up in Pasadena in a Greek Orthodox CHRISTIAN family. You’d never know it by the intro to the piece on him at Wikipedia.
Though, they do happen to mention that he was transferred to his current pen on….
NOVEMBER 22, 2013…..
Golden Anniversary
It was interesting to read the official drivel that the Dept. of Corrections spokesman had to say, about the timing?!
COINCIDENCE OR CONSPIRACY?
WE REPORT, YOU DECIDE.
I have to confess complete ignorance of RFK’s assassination but I’m guessing that Sirhan Sirhan was, effectively, an agent just like Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby and is not in jail although we’re told he is.
What they seem to always do in their crimes regardless of whether they’re hoaxing us with fake terror where people aren’t killed or killing them for real in assassinations is provide giveaway signals. For example in the JFK assassination:
— a $12 relic of WWII Mussolini’s armed forces, a Carcano, was allegedly the rifle chosen by Lee Harvey Oswald for his crackshot assassination. As if.
— Oswald speaks the truth when he says, “I’m just a patsy”. “I’m just a patsy” has two functions: to signal the truth and, paradoxically, as propaganda aimed at skeptics to persuade us that Oswald needed to be silenced due to this indication he might spill the beans. Agents don’t spill the beans. That’s not what they do. He was hired to do his job and he did it, including reciting the scripted line, “I’m just a patsy.’ Why would they kill him for doing his job when they could just follow the standard practice of “sheepdipping” him (providing a new identity)? Even taking into account different camera angles, there is no still from the footage of him being SHOT ON LIVE TV that can match the photograph (another obvious sign – of different takes).
They also provide us with propaganda to persuade us that Jack Ruby did the killing but only very reluctantly. He was apparently “under pressure from the Mafia” and both an (unnamed) daughter of an ex-flame and an (unnamed) niece claim that he obviously couldn’t have been planning to kill him when he went to the jail because he’d brought his beloved little weenie, Sheba, with him in the car and he would never have brought Sheba if he’d really been planning on killing Oswald, knowing that he would be whisked off to the cells and thus obliged to abandon her. Doncha love it?
They told us Ruby was put in jail. Why on earth would they have done that to him? Similarly, they tell us that Sirhan Sirhan is in jail but that doesn’t mean he is. And the transfer date is the golden anniversary and well-known Masonic multiple of the Masonic key number, 11 (JFK 22/11, 9/11, Manchester bombing 22/5, perp 22 yo, 22 dead, time 22:33). They lie about everything so why do we assume they tell the truth that someone is in jail. Even if there are photographs of someone in jail that may simply mean they visited the jail for a photop.
They enjoy mashing their crimes right in our faces like cream pie and daring us to do anything about it. (The Carcano may have been a nod to the neofascist Italians in on the job – see Michele Metta’s fascinating film.)
See Hypothesis 1c on this webpage for links to bolded words above https://occamsrazorterrorevents.weebly.com/3000-dead-and-6000-injured-a-lie.html
I awoke to the possibility that they don’t really put people in jail when I realised that the only real part of the 1980 Bologna station bombing was the bombing and that death and injury were staged. Therefore all the neofascists responsible for the false flag (which was, in fact, a false-flag hoax just as 9/11 is) would not have been put in jail as claimed.
https://occamsrazorterrorevents.weebly.com/bologna-1980-and-mogadishu-2017.html
Why don’t you just come out and tell us that JFK and RFK are still alive, and that the Vietnam War was faked on a Hollywood movie lot?
So you think they killed Lee Harvey Oswald, milosevic? If so, how do you explain the anomaly that the photo does not match a still in the “live” TV footage?
I think you explained it yourself — “different camera angles”.
The simplest explanation that accounts for all the available evidence is the most likely to be correct. Therefore, it is highly likely (haha) that JFK, RFK, Oswald, and Ruby, are all dead, the Vietnam war actually happened (unlike the moon landings), two Boeing-767s crashed into the World Trade Center, and three of those buildings were then blown up with pre-planted explosives, killing everybody above the fire zone.
Your unswerving faith in the humanitarian inclinations of the US government is touching, but contrary to all available evidence. Therefore, theories such as the above, which are predicated on the basic human decency of the Pentagon and the CIA, are highly unlikely (hoho) to be true.
“Unswerving faith in the humanitarian inclinations of the US government”
What on earth are you talking about milo? I don’t think the US government didn’t kill the people in the buildings because of any goodness in their hearts. Are you absolutely kidding me? It’s just not their MO … and for very good reasons. The loved ones of those, had they murdered them. But that’s only one reason.
What very few seem to get about the power elite but is so screamingly obvious to me – at least after I learnt it from Ole Dammegard – is that they love to chortle at us. They so love to chortle. Why does no one get that? They lead us down various garden paths with all sorts of stories, laying on the ridiculousness layer upon layer, and people still don’t get it.
Why do people doubt that they TELL us what they’re doing when they make it so obvious? When I learnt from Ole Dammegard that that’s what they do I didn’t doubt it for a nanosecond because it explained all the anomalies I had previously pondered over and yet I have not seen one person in these comments pick up on the fact that the power elite tell us and chortle at us as they push the envelope ever further – they must roll around on the floor and slap their knees practically choking on their laughter. But you don’t seem to get it milo nor anyone else. And yet it’s so obvious. I find it so frustrating. And you know sometimes I wonder: they treat us like utter morons but then …
I said ALLOWING for different camera angles. When you allow for them you still cannot get a still shot that would match the photograph – obviously the still shot won’t be exactly the same when the camera angle is different but even when you allow for it you will not get one that will match. So you should be able to stop the video and say, “This still shot is that photograph at a different angle” but it cannot be done. If you think it can please direct me to the point in the video that you think matches the photograph.
19 seconds, or 20 seconds, into this video (note that those are from two different TV cameras) looks like a good match to me, right down to the position of Ruby’s left elbow, and the expression on the face of the cop with the white hat.
Slow it down to 1/4 speed, and you can see exactly when the still photo must have been taken.
OK, so I was rather arrogant and foolish. Of course, no way would it have occurred to me that the photo didn’t match any still in the video, however, someone pointed it out in a comment on the YT video. (Such golden nuggets to be obtained in YT comments as well as in YouTuber videos). I’m like, “What a genius. What a fantastic, easy way to prove the shooting was staged.” I confess I didn’t really look all that closely. I just knew the commenter was right. But you have prompted me milo to do a proper analysis and I couldn’t have wished for greater obviousness.
What on earth were you looking at with your slowed down version? There is ZERO in common. Zero. It’s not even the same people surrounding Oswald nor does it seem to be in the same spot. See how they push their crimes in our faces if we bother to look? There’s the guy (circled) in the policeman’s hat in the photo who we don’t even see in the video. None of the people surrounding Oswald are looking in the same direction in photo or video, including the guy in the light-coloured suit.
I have taken four screenshots over two seconds of video and placed each of them against the photo. There is not even the slightest hint of a match.
https://occamsrazorterrorevents.weebly.com/lho-shot-tvphoto-comparison.html
A lot of claims for mismatch are made based on a failure to appreciate changes in perspective and the truly massive distortion s created by camera lenses.
The photos and the film are taken from two very different perspectives so it’s not surprising they don’t match in terms of what can be seen. The film camera is seemingly closer and lower than the still camera, and it’s angled directly behind Ruby toward Oswald. The line of view from thus perspective obscures the people behind, including military guy.
Take a look at some other YT vids about distortions of perspective and camera lenses. It may help sort the true anomalies from the phoney ones that tend to be blared out by disinfo people and their dupes
Admin, you have got to be joking. Perspective cannot account for a complete mismatch. You can see that people in the photo are simply not positioned at all in the same place as they are in the video and you can see that people are not looking at all in the same direction. Please look at my stills of the video against the photo.
What you’re doing is simply making general observations without close examination of the evidence. You need to look more carefully. There would have to be a particular point in the video that can be identified and there isn’t. If you can find it please let me know where it is, otherwise your general observations qualify simply as hot air.
https://occamsrazorterrorevents.weebly.com/lho-shot-tvphoto-comparison.html
They absolutely are looking in the same direction – simply shot from different angles and with different lenses.
Do NOT underestimate the distortion created by different camera lenses, which can not only completely change the apparent proximity of objects, but also the apparent relationship of objects to each other. Go research that before making any other claims. The results will astonish you. A great many faux claims of discrepancy can be accounted for by the observers being unaware of these factors.
I don’t know why you don’t use a scientific method, as I have, and simply identify the still from the video that you think matches the photo. Then rather than debating to and fro about general principles such as perspective we can argue about something more concrete.
I have identified four possible stills and put them against the photo. There is a very clear mismatch regardless of perspective. If you disagree, please tell me which of the four stills matches the photo, or, if you think another still matches please tell me where it occurs in relation to my four stills (before or after all of them or in between them).
https://occamsrazorterrorevents.weebly.com/lho-shot-tvphoto-comparison.html
Have you studied the extreme effects of lenses? Until you do that and realise just how much they can change how a scene looks you can’t really comment with any authority.
Regarding the images under discussion, the film camera is in a different place, at a different height, facing in a different direction than the still camera. Even without factoring in any lenses being used why would you expect the two cameras to show identical images?
No I haven’t studied the extreme effect of lenses.
I absolutely do not expect two cameras to show identical images – I do say “allowing” for different angles, don’t I? You’re such a great strawmanner, Admin, top marks. However, I do expect two cameras of the same scene to show shots that can be matched, allowing for angles, height, etc. In my opinion, albeit without the benefit of lens expertise, the differences are too great to be put down to differences in lenses, angles, heights, etc.
What it seems you’re arguing for is the possibility that shots could match rather than that they do. Do you think there are matching shots (accounting for differences of angle, height, etc) or are you simply arguing for the possibility that there might be? If you think there are two matching shots please tell me what they are. If you think my lack of expertise precludes credible judgement on my part we’ll have to agree to disagree. It’s true I have no expertise but I believe that the case simply doesn’t require it. Of course, your own credibility is in question too though, isn’t it, because you’re a great one for arguing for the possibility of something without actually arguing for its existence with evidence.
Look, you are the one making the extraordinary claim – you are the one who needs to do the work. You can’t just hand wave away questions of angles and lenses! The same scene can look COMPLETELY different if photographed from different perspectives with diff lenses, you need to eliminate this possibility before making your extraordinary claims.
I disagree that my claim is extraordinary. Firstly, it wasn’t even my claim initially it was someone else’s – I simply recognised its validity. Secondly, when we look at the context, logic would indicate that it was more than likely staged and a simple lack of evidence also suggests staging.
Premises
— Oswald was an agent hired to play the patsy.
— Intelligence agencies disappear people by “sheepdipping” them, that is, giving them new identities and shipping them off elsewhere.
(Perhaps you don’t agree with these premises?)
Logic
As Oswald was an agent hired to play the patsy they could easily follow their sheepdipping practice by not killing him for real. There is no particular evidence that suggests they wanted to kill him for real.
His saying, “I’m just the patsy” perfectly fits two hypotheses:
1) that they tell us what they’re up to with: the actual truth, ridiculousness added to their already ridiculous story, things that clearly don’t add up, etc
2) that it had a propaganda function of indicating he needed to be silenced because he might spill the beans. Surely, if Oswald was going to spill the beans he wouldn’t have done it like that. It simply doesn’t seem a credible way to do it. Surely, they would have conducted this operation with complete confidence that no one was going to advertise that they might spill the beans in this manner.
Evidence for and against killing for real
For:
The only evidence I can find that suggests he might have been killed is the body on the mortician’s table. I cannot say I see obvious fakery in that, however, it is not a clear photograph. I think it’s actually possible that they may have sutured him for real to produce the post mortem sutures but I don’t know whether that’s really possible – I know people have suture fetishes so it doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility. This is the only tangible evidence I’m aware of and I wouldn’t call it bulletproof (pardon the pun).
Against:
There is nothing in the “live” footage or the photo to indicate he was really shot.
It is really quite interesting to look at the comments on the CNN YT video. One commenter observes that at 45 seconds when the reporter says, “He is shot” a man in the video runs his finger under his nose – in my opinion rather ostentatiously. Apparently, touching the nose is a sign of lying – I imagine generally it is an involuntary sign but it is not out of the realm of possibility that they actually inserted this deliberately (or is that too David Icke or whatever for you, Admin?)
Additionally, we know they stage a lot of stuff. As you know I have a $5,000 challenge to come up with 10 points that favour “real” over “staged” for death and injury on 9/11, Sandy Hook and Manchester to which I’ve had no responses. I’ve put my money where my mouth is while you haven’t done that.
So I’d argue that there is a very good context in which to make the claim that there is no still in the footage that matches the photo, apart from, what to me, is the clear evidence of it all by itself. I assert that if you wish to argue that a still does match the photo then you need to identify that still and give an argument for how it matches. If you aren’t prepared to do that I have no wish to discuss the matter further.
Oops! We do see the guy with the policeman’s hat though not while LHO is actually being shot – a second or so later – but in any case he’s on the wrong side of the screen.
You can see that people in the photo are simply not positioned at all in the same place as they are in the video and you can see that people are not looking at all in the same direction. Please look at my stills of the video against the photo.
Actually, people ARE looking the same direction, but the two cameras aren’t — it appears that the direction of view of the video is about 45 degrees to the left of that of the photo. Naturally, then, relative to cameras looking in different directions, people APPEAR to be looking in different directions, and their apparent relative positions have changed.
If you line yourself up with two other people, you can then make the farther person appear on either the left or right of the closer person, by taking a step to the left or right, respectively.
This is just basic perspective geometry — if you doubt it, recruit six or eight people, pose them according to the video, and then take some pictures from different places. See how their apparent positions and orientations change.
I think your still-frames #3 and #4 are an exact match. Check the expression on the face of white-hat-cop in #3, and Oswald’s expression in #4, as he is shot.
Two guys in dark suits, with dark hair, are visible behind white-hat-cop in both the photo and the video. The guy with the police cap is outside the right edge of the video frame.
The reason it appears somewhat staged is because it is — everybody except Oswald (and the media?) knew exactly what was going to happen. The Dallas police must have planned it rather carefully, to make sure that none of them got shot by accident.
—
If this is the kind of argument that you find convincing (like the 13-foot-tall dummies at the WTC), then I can see why you’re so confused. But you’re making yourself look foolish, for people who understand basic physics and geometry.
I cannot reply to your comment about my stills 3 and 4 on your comment so I’ll do it here. We’ll have to agree to disagree. To me, they are so obviously not a match. There’s nothing more I can say. As I said, it wasn’t me who worked it out but someone else but perhaps the commenter and I are both wrong while you and Admin are both right. It’s always possible. Also, I have admitted to being wrong about the giants in the windows but being wrong once (or more) doesn’t mean always being wrong so please don’t use it as an argument. I’ll agree though that I do not have a good spatial sense, however, in this instance the mismatch between the video and photo go far beyond any perspective issue so it’s not relevant.
And just to add: I find it phenomenal that on a video posted by mainstream media (not a hoax analyst) there are so many commenters saying that they think the shooting was staged. Simply phenomenal.
Not strange at all – there’s a huge push to derail serious analysis by flooding it with nonsense and uninformed speculation. There are always trolls BTL claiming the earth is flat or everything is fake – what better way to drown out the real signal than with a gush of static and white noise?
Actually, I’d say it is an unusual phenomenon because you see it rarely so while you might have a perfectly valid reason to expect it, my experience is that you rarely see it. But perhaps your experience differs. Of course, you may simply think these people are trolls. They don’t strike me that way, especially, obviously as I agree with them.
And just to add: When half (or more of the story) is false why believe any of it? This is what I don’t understand. Why do people believe any of the story (unless there’s good evidence for it) when so much of it is false? We don’t have to believe that they put people in jail just because they say they do. We don’t have to believe that people die just because they say they do. Why should we believe a single word? We don’t have to believe that Sirhan Sirhan was hypnotised or whatever just because they say or suggest he was. They luuurrve having lots of different theories out there being argued over. The most obvious thing is that LHO, Jack Ruby and Sirhan were agents hired to play the patsy (JR a different kind of patsy) and they were sheepdipped. For the latter two they pretended they went to jail and had them make special appearances. It’s so simple.
Grave impediments to truth are the influence of cultural taboos such as death and emotional investment in the story.
When half (or more of the story) is false why believe any of it? This is what I don’t understand.
The “Tonkin Gulf Incident” is a complete fabrication; it never happened at all. Therefore, the entire Vietnam War is also a fabrication; it was faked on a Hollywood movie lot. The supposed 58,000 American casualties are all fictitious personas; they never existed, either.
Why do people believe any of the story (unless there’s good evidence for it)
Oh wait, that’s why.
Also, dead men tell no tales, or at least, not after they’re dead.
Yes, Gulf of Tonkin was a lie used as a pretext to start war but the war wasn’t a fabrication. You seem to suggest this is the way I reason. I don’t.
Very, very few agents tell tales and when agents say they’re ex-CIA and now they’re spilling the beans, don’t believe a word of it, unless the truth of it seems extremely certain – it’s generally just more bullshit. As someone on a video (don’t remember which) said,”There’s no ex. There are no ex agents.” There’s a guy now, Cody Snodgres, who’s allegedly ex-CIA spilling the beans on the Oklahoma bombing and various other things. I don’t believe him and I’m surprised that Ole Dammegard seems to accept what he says. I have to admit I did believe him initially but then I started to realise what he said was not adding up.
“There are no ex-agents.”
More accurately, there are no LIVING ex-agents. According to the usual understanding, a former agent who outlived his usefulness, but not for very long, thereafter becomes an ex-agent.
The JFK assassination is thick with such people. Or do you claim that David Ferrie, Clay Shaw, Guy Banister, etc, lived on after their supposed expiry date? Why? Dead men tell no tales.
Yes, one option is to kill them for real and no doubt this happens reasonably often. But, of course, they’re very wily, aren’t they? Other options are:
— pretend to kill them as a form of propaganda suggesting that they needed them killed to try to suppress certain information. Like many truthers, I believed that Dutch controlled demolition expert, Danny Jowenko, was killed in a suspicious car accident on his way home from church. This helps to perpetuate the idea that the perps are killing people here there and everywhere when, in fact, death and injury were staged AND they tell us anyway about controlled demolition through their disinfo agents lamenting the loss of their loved ones. Now I realise how ridiculous this car crash was and that Danny was actually HIRED to give his “impromptu” performance. As if a CD expert would not have known about WTC-7.
— wheel them out as ex-agents to propagandise whatever info they want to propagandise us with. I haven’t checked but I’d expect that some of the alleged ex-CIA agents telling us the “truth” about 9/11 are simply performing distraction exercises or whatever.
This helps to perpetuate the idea that the perps are killing people here there and everywhere
So, according to you, the US government is NOT killing people here, there, and everywhere. Got it.
Who’s the disinfo agent, now?
Milo, of course, they’re killing here, there and everywhere but not necessarily where they’re making out they’re doing it. You’re too black and white about things. In certain situations it suits them to pretend they’re killing people when they’re not and in other situations they kill massively but hide the evidence of it.
It upsets me that they used Nick Vogt, a soldier who had his legs blown off by an IED in Afghanistan and whose life was in the balance, to play “Jeff Bauman”, Boston bombing survivor who allegedly had his legs blown off in Boston. Nick Vogt was luckier than some, he survived but many soldiers do not. They show us the fakery at Boston but NOT the killing fields in Afghanistan and elsewhere. No they don’t show us them. You simply cannot find evidence of maiming and carnage caused by bombs on the internet any more, only fakery. That is very scary. Of course, Kashmir was faked. My god, they make so little effort, so very little effort to fake these things. It’s ridiculous.
Nick Vogt
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/06/nick-vogt-soldier-double-amputee-recovery_n_2082647.html
aka Jeff Bauman
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/17/us/in-grisly-image-a-father-sees-his-son.html?_r=0
Very interesting and lively exam of some of the forensics, and it’s great to see you think on your own, beyond suggestions, and go more deeply into these mechanisms of our betrayed public trust than most.
.
Yes, you never know.
But I believe there are some things that can be deduced from live footage, forensics, and other primary sources and so forth. Still, it’s great to see some1 in a spirit of science challenging the very contexts more deeply!
It’s 4am here in LA. Too late to open up this can of worms, pardon the morbid Manly Palmer Hall pun.
I’ll try to get back to this a little down the road, as they say in Dallas.
Or as I spell it DullASS TexASS. (Hope there are no “kickers” reading, I knew some cool people there, the year, 1980, I worked at Dealey Plaza. 200 feet from where JFK was splattered, alas. What are the chances?)
When a big event occurs which you suspect is a covert operation be very, very suspicious of the claim “live footage”. I think the impossibility of matching the photo to a still from the “live footage” indicates it was not live – or at least if it was live, Oswald was not shot as there is no evidence in the live footage that he was and if the footage was live the photo wasn’t candid. His shooting is just so very obviously staged and the whole hypnosis thing with Sirhan Sirhan just reeks of CIA elaborate story – they get us all excited because of MKUltra – yes, MKUltra is very real but I strongly suspect that they just used that to distract us from the probably prosaic nature of the patsy operation: that Sirhan was simply scripted like Oswald.
Much as the 9/11 organizers would not have trusted the success of the operation to the dubious flying skills of a bunch of deranged Wahabi fanatics, the function of MK-ULTRA patsies is to be seen firing a gun loaded with blank cartridges, while the target is eliminated by professional assassins.
The RFK assassination is the most obvious example of this model; the Lennon assassination is likely another. (Ronald Reagan???) Oswald is a patsy, but not an MK-ULTRA patsy. MK-ULTRA patsies do not say to TV cameras, “I didn’t kill anybody. I’m just a patsy.” Perhaps it was because of this embarrassing glitch in the matrix, that the MK-ULTRA model was chosen for subsequent operations.
I suppose that we could consider Ruby a patsy of some sort, if there were any serious evidence that Oswald was actually shot by somebody else. In my opinion, the video analysis above does not qualify as such.
We’ll have to agree to disagree, milo. I see no reason, as an agent, why he simply would not deliver the scripted line, “I’m just a patsy.”
Why does it benefit the CIA to point out on live TV, that the JFK Assassination Official Story, which they went to so much effort to set up, is fake?
I’m just a logical, prosaic thinker. I don’t like to see crime thrillers alone because I find I often can’t follow the story properly and need some explanatory help afterwards. My progress in ability to analyse events has come from picking up golden nuggets of information and running with them. When you run with the nuggets your understanding expands and you are better able to analyse.
As I keep saying, milo, they inform us of their crimes. Ole Dammegard was informed by an insider that the power elite feel that by informing us they put the onus on us to call them out and if we don’t they are spared karmic repercussions. Why do people ignore this nugget? The evidence so supports it and without including it in your analysis things do not add up.
As I also keep saying, it is obvious in the ridiculousness that they put into their staging that they love a good chortle too. We might also infer that in their hoax crimes, at least, that as they involve the collaboration of response staff and media that they could justify to them what they do by saying “Well, we really tell them.”
Additionally, it’s them relishing their power, isn’t it? They mash their crimes in our faces and, little plebs that we are, we just go along with it.
Initially, I thought it was just hoaxes but then I realised that the weapon they chose for Oswald was ludicrous. Why on earth would they choose a Carcano? Also, the story about Jack Ruby taking his “weenie”, Sheba, to the jail indicating he had no real intention of killing Oswald is utterly ludicrous (totally swallowed it myself though initially).
To speak of “benefit” in a prosaic sense doesn’t necessarily work when considering the power elite’s behaviour. You have to take on paradigms that might seem counterintuitive at first sight but actually make a lot of sense when you think about them.
You are so selective about where you apply your skepticism. It never occurs to you, for example that Ole Dammegard might be making that story up. You have no evidence, you just decide to trust him and indeed build a massive tower of assumption based on his uncorroborated word. Your arbitrary decisions about what you ‘know’ to be true or false are not analytical, despite your frequent boast, they’re merely your own impulses and prejudices which you choose to regard as deep insights.
Why do simply never catch on, Admin? How on earth do you manage it? I said I believed it immediately because it fitted the evidence, didn’t I? As I said that, rather than claim I “have no evidence” why do you not ask me to provide it. I’ve provided it in the past but somehow you must’ve missed it.
Certain evidence, in fact, makes no sense without accommodating this fact. No sense at all. A classic example, is “witness”, Mark Walsh, being interviewed by FoxNews near the twin towers shortly after their collapses. He’s obviously not a genuine witness and what he says is ludicrous – that he saw the second plane ream through the other side – among a number of other highly suspect things from a witness. Additionally, his mood is inappropriately chipper and excited.
https://youtu.be/f-pLwI7dcQ0?t=56s
Also, I state categorically that I’m a prosaic, logical thinker which implies I don’t have deep insights. That’s my point! It’s just a question of going with the golden nuggets as I say. All I do is match the claim with the evidence, that is all.
Why do you not do that or do you simply not see that there is a match? Why do I go on receipt of the nugget from Ole, “Oh yes, the ludicrous Mark Walsh testimony, oh yes, Silverstein’s saying he said to “pull it”, oh yes, the terrorists turning up alive, oh yes, the magic passport.” Now I understand. So very counterintuitive, but they tell us! But you don’t???
Sorry, I misunderstood your question. I think I agree with you if I now understand. I see no reason to think that Sirhan wasn’t scripted just like Oswald. I believe the MKUltra/hypnosis thing is just an elaborate story even if MKUltra is a very real phenomenon. It’s just a belief but I think I’m perfectly justified in not believing a single word that we get about any of these crimes unless the evidence is clearly presented … and even then you can never be sure.
The Kennedys were murdered by a high cabal operating since long ago within the Freemasons, not, as one of the official conspiracy theories goes, because they were after the secret societies…
…but because at the higher echelons the Freemasons are after
The Roman Catholic Church
When Presidente Calles of Mexico about a century ago got a 100,000 people killed in the Cristero War putsch of priests, the Scottish Rite Freemasons in Mexico gave him a “medal of merit” for his “work against the Roman Catholic Church”.
And why? Since their origins in the Knights Templar, the Freemasons have been pledged to destroy the Catholic Church, not for religion, but because of the great financial base and influence.
Same with Hitler v. Judaism. It had nothing to do with religion. Nothing. It was “the economy, stupid”. He was after their loot. (Same with Manzanar. When the Japanese returned home a few years later, all their homes, ancient art collections, yachts et al. were all gone.)
If you trace the Kennedy killings to their roots, you’ll go thru politicians, on to the mobsters, keep going thru the CIA and the oiligarchs… and you wind up on Main Street, Freemasonry.
I’ll wager. I’ll bet the house.
11 Popes since 1700 have put Freemasonry under the ban, yet they continue to infest the Church like a Plague. It was highranking Masons who nearly collapsed Banco Vaticano 30 years ago or so.
And if you dig below the pedophilia scandals, you will find Masons in the woodpile. (Since every large institution has roughly the same percentages of offenders.)
And blade will do, for them to bring down the Church. Including massive anti-Catholic hit pieces in media. For all reasons.
And JFK and RFK were both devout Catholics who obeyed the papal ban. (JFK was a 3rd degree Knight of Columbus).
Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, Knights Templar etc. are just so much hogwash and a diversion from the very real Zionist complicity in JFK, 9/11, and so much else besides. Like the hasbara troll factories who will bang on endlessly about the Oil Companies, Saudi Arabia, UFOs, leprechauns or anything, just don’t mention Israel. Any old smokescreen will do, no matter how ludicrous.
Don’t get excited. Not a Freemason, then?
I gave facts as an eyewitness in Hollyweird of the 1960s, with a Freemason father who founded the oldest law firm in Beverly Hills, ecjlaw.com
He took the unique step of making me sit in the cold backyard in full view til past midnight, while PRS had their soirees at our Sherman Oaks home on Saturday nights in the 1960s and making sure the sliding glass doors were locked, so he always had me outside without an egress and in view. He never did that on ANY other occasion. And he had been just before that made VP of (33rd degree Freemason, wiki bio states, hence Illuminati) Manly Palmer Hall’s PRS (think: London’s Society for Psychical Research, only a whole lot Holly-weirder).
Instead of reminding us how many clowns populate the CIA disinfo-infested “where’s Waldo” canvas of conspiracy hokum, do some real homework, not the standard diversions about the Jews. Dude.
Fascinating. What I don’t understand is why the Kennedys don’t call out who really assassinated their kin.
Because they would, uh, get even more and more assassinated.
Douglass, in his great book on JFK, says at the end that Jackie and RFK found themselves in the odd position of turning to Russians for protection of some kind, after Jack was blasted.
That doesn’t seem odd at all, today. That sounds like SOP today, in Trumpland.
JFK JR. called it out, and they didn’t even start a search and rescue for his sea crashed plane for THIRTEEN hours. You can get really wet when you’re in the water, for 13 hours.
Exhibit A. The defense rests.
Yes, blame the fairies, dude, blame the elves and pixies and freemasons, just don’t mention the Jews.
Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, Knights Templar etc. are just so much hogwash and a diversion from the very real Zionist complicity in JFK, 9/11, and so much else besides.
Correction: “ANY blade will do”. I was thinking, as was Michael Parenti, of Julius Caesar and Brutus’ reasonable and valid Conspiracy Theory of “The Lone Bladesman”.
That social outcast and malcontent who stalked Caesar and killed him with a Single Stab.
Well, according to the Brutus Commission. I’ve got the report right here.
People go to funerals for lots of reasons. My last attendance was to be there for the widow of someone I did not admire. Kennedy’s reaction to the Lemnitzer mad dog Northwoods proposal was to flatly reject it and essentially fire Lemnitzer. It probably cost him his life. Saying Kennedy cost 2 million lives is the kind of outrageous hyperbole which should cause anyone to question anything Pilger says. I admire Pilger but his imprimatur should not be accepted uncritically, either.
You have quoted Pilger and there are good objections to the key points you replicate in your post. They are in the posts below/above. Defend them if you can. Otherwise acknowledge the erroneous scurrilous nature of the Pilger excerpt you posted..I will ignore the rest of Pilger’s intemperate ill-considered anti-Kennedy rant, unless you wish to continue to replicate them.
The above was meant as a reply to BigB, not sure why it was filed here.
To George Cornell. George, Pilger is a curious enigma. In an interview on Democracy Now on the 40th anniversary of RFK’s murder, he testified that shots were being fired after Sirhan had been disarmed:
“There’s no question that there was another gunman, because one of the people who was hit, just grazed, was standing next to me, and that happened when Sirhan Sirhan had been wrestled to the ground. So that’s the interesting thing. There was another assassin or another several assassins. And then it was bedlam. And as you know, Kennedy died about twenty-four hours later.”
But later in the interview, he is coerced back to the official line by Amy Goodman (Bad Lady) into blaming the Kennedy’s for Vietnam and every other crime ever committed. Pilger’s mouth had gone off the reservation. Surely, no matter how much he seems to have loathed RFK, he had a duty to investigate what could only have been a “conspiracy” if there was more than one gunman. It seems that Pilger is not alone in his “cognitive dissonance” (a much kinder phrase than wilful ignorance).
George and Hugh
John Pilger is easy to defend, denigrating him does him and humanity a great disservice. He was there. He was a first hand witness. Not just in the pantry, on the frontline in Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia …even back home in Oz: on the frontline reporting the oppression and landgrabs against the First Nation Peoples who were custodians of the fucking land from before we even reached Europe – let alone set up a ‘civilisation’ there.
He reported the death, maiming and damage the myths and confected fables of Empire cause. Belief in the Kennedy myth automatically renders the majority of humanity otherised Unpeople. The ‘Teshuva’ turning to peace bollocks profoundly and conveniently nihilates the suffering of the ordinary Vietnamese that were forced from the land, forced into Catholicisation (religious imperialism and ethnic cleansing); collectivised in ‘strategic hamlets’, had the land poisoned to this day, and who would be shot to death by helicopter gunships if they were outside the confines of their prison. That is the Empires definition of ‘peace’ – not mine.
My other main area of contention with the Camelot myth is the the fucking idiots nearly ended humanity – and we are supposed to venerate them? Hugh, you left me with a fictitious anecdote that I checked against the primary record. RFK pushed for the invasion of Cuba to the very end of the CMC. As I have been saying for too long, if they had moved against Cuba – the Soviet missile batteries were ready to go (the IRBMs never actually had their warheads attached – but the battlefield nukes were armed and ready). Invasion equals Armageddon – and the Kennedy clowns pushed it to the wire – so that there would be no “quid pro quo” loss of face. These are the very myths and fables that we inherit as the reason to withdraw from the INF Treaty and slow-motion car-crash toward Armageddon again. Luck and Khrushchev saved us before. Not the fucking Kennedies.
I’m sick of posting references to the primary record that demonstrate this. No one reads them and the myths of Empire keep on being recycled and reified. The mythology of the peace warrior JFK renders the rest of humanity inhuman. John Pilger risked his life to tell the story from the POV of the dehumanised Other. Kiss the ass of the Kennedies; denigrate John; promulgate the myths of Empire unwittingly …only spare a thought for the dehumanised Other; and the millions of Unpeople John made real by witnessing the tragedies that the myths of Empire render Unhistory. No more bullshit: spare a thought for the dehumanised Other …John did.
Big B. I thank God for Pilger and his courage. However, he was indeed witness to the conspiracy to kill RFK. Incontrovertible proof os a state assassination is surely worthy of some investigation by both Pilger and you.
I answered that above. This thread was started with the charge that JP’s portrayal of the Kennedy’s was emphatically wrong …to which the murder of RFK is a deflection. In my first comment I said there were thirteen shots – or more. But this has nothing to do with the facts …particularly of the Vietnam War. The war was started secretly and two million people died. And it was JFK that started it, even though he inherited the situation. In 1961 he started to increase the American presence. What followed was ethnic cleansing, mass repression, forced collectivisation, etc. This turned the people against the Americanised occupation …which led to greater repression. But no one wants to accept such facts (easily verifiable) lest it blight their vision of their sun king Kennedy. Hardly anyone prefers the stone cold facts, they prefer their story. It’s not just a story though …it’s a myth of Empire that covers yet another war of aggression. Pilger is emphatically wrong, it wasn’t down to our precious obsession with Jack …he was a man of peace and humanity who would have made the world a better place. Maybe in the vivid tunnel vision of some, in the real world …he never was.