[Peace-discuss] Rethinking Chomsky as a true dissident---JFK murder as example

[C. G. Estabrook]

Who's Your Daddy?

I think there are people who rather deeply *want* to believe that there
was a conspiracy to kill John Kennedy.  It's easier -- and somehow more
comforting -- to believe that our political and social problems come from
a small but very powerful, very evil, and very secret group of people --
rather than from an ongoing struggle built into an historic social
arrangement that, by "the equal exchange between free agents ...
reproduces, hourly and daily, inequality and oppression."

For one thing, such a view suggests a different way to attack our
problems.  If we can just winkle out who that group is, we can put them up
against the wall and shoot them.  Different attempts to do that in the
last century have however met with at best indifferent success.  There
looks like being more evil in the world than the private malice of a few
can account for.  Worse, it looks like we may all be bound up in it in
extremely complex ways.  The task may be harder and longer than we'd like
to think.

If the situation is that bad, there may be some comfort in believing that
there are leaders out there who can get us out of it, and the only reason
they don't is that they're brought down by dark forces -- good daddies
under secret attack from bad daddies.  For every old Hamlet, a Claudius.  
That nice attractive Mr. Kennedy, who surely was on the point of stopping
the bad things he was doing to Cubans, Vietnamese, etc., etc., must have
been killed by dirty old LBJ (or people like him in the CIA, the military,
etc., etc.) because, being dirty, old and evil, they wanted to keep doing
evil things...

But it's otiose to speculate on the motives of people who hold an idea as
a way to determine its truth.  Ideas are not responsible for the people
who believe in them.  Ideas should be judged on the evidence offered to
support them.

There may indeed have been a conspiracy to kill Kennedy, just as there may
have been a conspiracy to kill Lincoln.  In Kennedy's case, however,
federal government policy arguably changed less than it did as a result of
Lincoln's death.

Defenders of the conspiracy theory of Kennedy's death argue that there
must have been a conspiracy because Kennedy was *about* to change policy
(though the evidence for that is weak), and the little group of, etc.,
killed him because they, for whatever reason, didn't want that policy to
change.

This is fantasy-land, and harmless enough, until it reaches the point of
disparaging the work of those who don't accept the fantasy on that ground
alone. In this case, it's led to the denigration of three of the most
important political writers of the last half-century, Cockburn, Chomsky,
and Stone. It's a classic red herring if it leads people away from reading
them and the serious revelations that they have to offer about our
situation.

--CGE


On Tue, 23 Nov 2004 ndahlhei at uiuc.edu wrote:

> http://users.crocker.com/~acacia/rethinking-chomsky.txt
> >From the net...