[Peace-discuss] Re: solution to a non-problem (fwd)

[C. G. Estabrook]

You bring up a good number of important points here, Jim.  I want to
comment on just one, and not the most important.  You quote Michael
Parenti, as follows:

> ...The conspiracy findings in regard to the JFK assassination, which
> the movie JFK brought before a mass audience, made many people realize
> what kind of a gangster state we have in this country and what it does
> around the world. In investigating the JFK conspiracy, researchers are
> not looking for an "escape" from something "unpleasant and difficult,"
> as Chomsky would have it, rather they are raising grave questions
> about the nature of state power in what is supposed to be a
> democracy...

I don't think that's what the conspiracy findings (if they can be called
that) did.  As represented by Stone's movie, they rather served to
re-incorporate people into the American political mythology by suggesting
that the "bad daddy" Lyndon Johnson replaced the "good daddy" John
Kennedy, probably guiltily, and led us into the mire of Vietnam.  Kennedy
was killed, it was argued, by a conspiracy of those who rightly believed
that he would have withdrawn from Vietnam.  But the evidence shows that
the views of Kennedy and those around him (all of whom remained in the
Johnson administration) were no different from those that dominated the
Johnson administration.  The idea that Kennedy would have withdrawn form
Vietnam is at best a pious hope, born of hindsight.  (For some "Kennedy
intellectuals," like Arthur Schlesinger, it seems to be a conscious lie.)

What (some) conspiracy theories of the Kennedy assassination do is assure
us that US institutions are reasonably sound except when they are
corrupted by cabals of evil men, so our political action can be directed
to keeping that from happening (e.g., by electing the Gore people instead
of the Bush people): we need not face the possibility that the
institutions themselves are fundamentally corrupt...

What actually happened in the killing of Kennedy (or Lincoln, or King, or
Lumumba, etc.) -- and who was responsible -- is an interesting historical
question, and a matter of fact.  But many conspiracy theories are
inherently conservative and, one might say, anti-political -- at best a
distraction from the real political tasks, at worst a (conspiracy of)
misdirection...

And that may be true of some speculations about 9/11.  Regards, Carl