[Peace-discuss] Deep politics, conspiracy theories, JFK murder

[ndahlhei at uiuc.edu]

To quote from Peter Dale Scott, political researcher and 
activist and former Canadian diplomat on the nature of 
understanding the JFK assassination in terms of Deep 
Politics, 

Page 15, "Deep Politics and the Death of JFK"

"It is certainly true, as the establishment press reiterates 
from time to time, that many people are psychologically 
disposed to conspiratorial explanations for events like 
political murder.  Many leftists 
(Page 16) repeat this cliche, adding that conspiratorial 
explanations allow people to externalize evil (ie a small 
group of old men in the Joint Chiefs, CIA, and military-
industrial complex killing the handsome young President) and 
seperate it from the political system under which they live.  
Such psychological explanations can be put forward in an open-
minded and truth-seeking spirit, but only if their proponents 
concede that the opposite is also true.  That is, many 
people, particularly those whose productive careers have 
prospered under the status quo, are equally disposed on 
psychological grounds to reject conspiratorial explanations 
for events that affect the legitimacy of the society they 
live in.  For some years, whenever I (Peter Dale Scott) have 
been treated to a short sermon about the paranoid style in 
American politics, I have asked the preacher if he/she did 
not recognize the psychological grounds for his anti-
conspiratorial positiion as well.  Few do.
     And yet the evidence is there: not just with respect to 
the central event of the assassination itself, but with much 
smaller, ancillary matters, such as the repression and denial 
of the Vietnam policy change which occurred in the same time 
period of the assassination.  What is at stake here is a 
competition between paradigms in how politics works.  One is 
the establishment paradigm, codified in textbooks and taught 
in universities as "political science," whether pluralist or 
Marxist: this sees politics as a system of overtly identified 
interactive forces, and offers an inclusive chart of 
political behavior in which, for example, there is little or 
no room for assassinations.  (Aside: I read Chomsky's columns 
on ZNet often and I don't think even he deviates too much 
from what Scott considers the establishment paradigm.  More 
on that maybe in a later posting).

ALTERNATIVES TO THE ESTABLISHMENT MODEL OF GOVERNMENT

     At present there is more than one alternative ro this 
establishment model.  What I propose as a competing paradigm, 
that of deep politics, is certainly not the most commonly 
encountered alternative.  Many more people, convinced that 
overt politics is not the true arena of power, postulate a 
kind of Satanic reflection of it.  Thus they talk reactively 
of some unified "shadow government," "invisible government," 
or "secret team."
      Unified "shadow" models are, in my experience, usually 
based less on research than on reactions to the resistance 
and denial which have been observed with regard to sensitive 
topics, such as the political assassinations in this country, 
or the CIA, or elite institutions such as the Council on 
Foreign Relations, or the drug traffic.  The moment one 
(Page 17)
begins to gather extensive data on any one aspect of deep 
politics, such as organized crime, it is only too easy to 
pass from one extreme reception of it, the systematic 
underacknowledgment of its power, to its opposite, and to 
conclude that one has found the key to all political 
mysteries.  Actually, shadow-government theories, by their 
very totalizing, do not seriously challenge the most 
sensitive feature of the conventional establishment power 
paradigm.  This is the belief that overt politics and deep 
politics have little to do with each other, a belief in which 
the establishment media, hyperstructuralist Marxists, and 
even shadow-government conspiratorialists, all paradoxically 
concur.
     The deep-politics paradigm, in contrast, attempts to go 
beyond all such restricted, unified explanations.  It is 
essentially an extension of conventional political 
investigative methods to consideration of a much larger field 
of evidence, including, but not restricted to, the 
unacknowledged processes and events which conventional 
decorum excludes from our current "political science" 
textbooks.  By thus examining overt events in this larger 
field of deep political arrangements, it breaks down the 
distinction between overt and covert power, and thereby 
hopefully avoids the frequently asked question: Which forces 
are in control, the public or shadow powers?
     It also responds to those who object that no conspiracy 
to kill the President could have remained a secret for so 
long in a society as open as America"s.  We shall see in this 
book that beneath the open surface of our society lie 
connections and relationships of long standing, virtually 
immune to disclosure, and capable of great crimes, including 
serial murder.  To the stock objection that it would be 
virtually impossible to assemble a murder conspiracy without 
leakage, the response is that an existing conspiratorial 
network or system of networks already in place and capable of 
murderm, would have much less difficulty in maintaining the 
discipline of secrecy.
     I shall focus on the intelligence-sanctioned 
international narcotics network as a candidate for such 
a "conspiracy," because of the involvement, directly or 
indirectly, of so many relevant players.  The drug traffic, 
when we look at it more closely, will be seen to consist of 
overlapping networks, relating official to private power 
through collusion and corruption.
     We shall see that a key reason to suspect drug 
involvement in the assassination is the sustained effort of 
administration and congressional 
(Page 18) 
officials in 1964 (Warren Commission) and again in 1978 
(House Select Committee on Assassinations which blamed JFK's 
assassination to a mafia conspiracy), to conceal the extent 
of Jack Ruby's involvement with both drug traffickers and law 
enforcement.  I have not assumed, and certainly cannot prove, 
that this network arranged the assassination.  I suspect, 
however, that the need to keep this particular secret helped 
explain the cover-up, particularly with respect to Ruby, even 
if the other principals were only indirectly related to it.
     This book analyzes diverse forms of deep politics and 
parapolitics, acknowledging the historical relevance of 
splits within bureaucracies, within economic systems, and 
within the clumsily named phenomenon of organized crime.  In 
other words, the model for deep politics put forward in these 
pages, although aiming at a more integrative view of politics 
than the conventional model, is also roughly pluralistic both 
above, in the public arena, and also below.  Above all, the 
fact than an area of political activity (such as CIA covert 
operations)is unacknowledged, or even actively suppressed, 
shjould not lead us, reactively, to exaggerate its 
importance.  That these pages focus on areas of facts usually 
unacknowledged or denied does not mean that I believe them to 
be the determinant areas or facts of our political life; only 
that fuller understanding of our politics, toward the goal of 
public control of political life, requires a fuller 
understanding of these areas as of others.
    The common method in these chapters is to look at areas 
where there is such resistance and denial.  The findings I 
rech in them are still too scattered and incomplete to be 
labeled a competing paradigm.  What I put forward here is not 
a new system, but only a new method.  And if I apply it to 
the Kennedy assassination, the goal is not so much to solve 
that beleagured case as to better understand the society that 
engendered it.