Get ready.
Thirtieth day of January twenty twenty six, allegedly according to that thing we call a calendar, And here's me going live early on a Friday. And I'm not going to try the experiment I have in mind for the Friday night shows this week, but perhaps in two weeks we'll try a little experiment and see we can improve communications. But up until we start taking calls at eight pm Eastern, I've got a piece of JFK stuff to play for you.
Now.
This is not mine, and it was actually produced around the thirtieth anniversary of the JFK assassination. Michael Parente wasn't the first to the only person to poke holes, you know, into the lone gunman theory, that's for sure, but he took a different approach, and one that did shape quite a bit of what it is. I thought afterwards. Thirtieth anniversary,
obviously is nineteen ninety three. I had been in for about five years and was starting to get sophisticated enough after studying the baseline evidence to begin looking at other people's points of view.
And this is.
Well, Michael PARENTI will introduce it himself and explain it himself in about a forty seven minute presentation here, so hopefully we can fit the whole thing in before we get to the live Friday night show.
I've been looking at history, and I've been impressed and depressed by the fact that history is really a chronicle of immense atrocities.
What we have in history is.
The fact that when surplus value develops, when there's more than a subsistence economy, you have some portion of the population that will do everything it can to enslave and to expropriate the labor of the rest of the people, whether it's a slave society as an ancient Greece and Rome, or feudal society where people were reduced to serfs, or in capitalist society where people are driven to the edge
of insecurity and made to work faster and harder. And one of the things that's used in that arrangement is a very conscious instrument of control that's very necessary, and that instrument is called the state.
Okay, this is very basic presentation and is necessary. I know some of you are going, oh, sounds like a whole bunch of liberal crap, and maybe, but then again, you know, nineteen ninety three, how old was I.
Let's see.
Eighteen twenty one years old. Yeah, I was twenty one years old, and I was particularly moved by somebody making relevant and rational statements. And yeah, uh uh for you a trumpy people, you know, sorry, but there was stuff before the idiocy. And for you liberals, you can have yourselves all day with this.
I don't care. This is reality.
And uh, Parente laid it out perfectly in my mind.
That is what they do is set up a state, an organization that has a as Max Weeber, who wasn't a Marxist, as Max Weber called it, an organization that has a monopoly on the legitimate uses of force and violence, on the use of legitimate force and violence.
But that's what we have today.
We also have developed, in modern times some democratic features, some means of trying to fight back and restrain this arbitrary power. What are we trying to say that, along with government, we also have a thing called the state. And along with governance, along with policies, and along with
those things, we have this other instrument. Even in a democratic state, and that instrument, whether it's in democratic France or democratic England, or democratic Germany or democratic Italy all or democratic USA or democratic can in all these countries, all of them have these other instruments and agencies that act like a bunch of gangsters, that act repressively, that use surveillance, that use every dirty trick in the book on equal enforcement of tax laws, name it, the bringing
in of drugs into whole neighborhoods and communities, trumped up murder charges, assassination that you have in the middle of these democracies, you have the state within the state known as the national security state. And that state is capable of the most unspeakable crimes that you can think of. And those crimes are perpetrated against their own people. They're
perpetrated against people all around the world. Not long ago, I got a letter from a woman who's been a community organizer in Chicago, and she said, with grief in her heart, she said, I remember the sixties. I remember the tremendous democratic organization and leadership that was developing in the Latino and African American communities.
And I remember those leaders and.
Everything on one of them today is either dead shot by the police or in marrying prison on trumped up charges. And I remember the demoralization that took place, the shattering of those organizations. And after those organs organizations were shattered and demoralized, then in came the drug traffickers.
And those drug.
Traffickers, the thing I remember the most about them is that they were aided and abetted by the FEDS, by the federal.
Agents themselves. And this is what happens.
That is, we are dealing with the state that was engaged in domestic counterinsurgency, and it was more interested in having a population that was unorganized and demoralized than a population that was organized that was effectively fighting for its
democratic rights. Because if it's organized and it's effective and it's powerful, it will start making demands and start pursuing its interest and it will start cutting in on the interests that those police and those coppers and those undercover people and those forces of military and law and order are dedicated to protecting, protecting the status quo, protecting those
with property against who those who don't have it. And by the way, for the last thousand years, we've had theorists who've made that point, except they make it proudly. Adam Smith said, as the divisions of property become increasingly unequal, it is more and more necessary to have a state to defend those who have property from those who do not.
John Law, The purpose of.
The state is to defend those who have property from those who do not. James Harrington, you can go on, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton. The only difference was that when Mark said it, he said to defend those who have property from those whose labor is expropriated by those who accumulate.
Wealth off their labor, who have all the property. He changed it a little bit and he said it.
Wasn't just plves and have nots, it was halves taking it from those who produced it and created the haves. And throughout the world, dominant economic interests today have enlisted the efforts of assassins and torturers as we talk at this moment.
The CIA and other such agencies in this country and other countries.
Have sponsored violence, tortured death squads, drugs in scores of countries from zay Yea to Angola, to Mozambique to Olsalvagtor, to Guatemala, to Indonesia to a stem Moore, and you go on and on to Western Europe to the USA, to Chicago and Detroit and Boston and New York. They are systematically targeted in many countries, the clergy, the peasant leaders, intellectuals, journalists, student leaders, labor union leaders, workers and any community activists and such.
Tens of thousands have.
Been murdered and assassinated to prevent social change, to destroy any kind of redistributive politics, any kind of government, any kind of social movement that is not willing to reduce its people to economic fodder. And with NAFTA, with the North American Free Trade Agreement, we now see the third worldization of the us A will continue full speed ahead. The gangst The nature of the state is cloaked by the democratic facade and by the democratic substance of the government.
I mean, there is some democratic substance there. Democratic victories have been one, we have struggled, and certain things have been one.
And yet in the midst of this, the state still goes on.
And what is so compelling about an issue like drugs.
As Michael Levine's point out, is.
That it's not that we're saying the government is not doing enough about drugs or they're losing the war against drugs. Is that the government or elements in it are active perpetrators and purveyors of drugs. And what it is so compelling about the JFK assassination is how nakedly the gangster nature of the state is revealed.
It is an awakening.
And to know the truth about the JFK assassination is to create a delegitimating force that calls into questions the entire state system and the entire social order it represents.
And this is why for thirty years the mainstreams press has suppressed or dismissed out of hand in the findings about JFK's death, the findings of independent investigators like Peter Dale, Scott, Harold Weisberg, Carl Oglesby, Mark Lane, Anthony Summers, Philip Millinson, Jim Garrison, Cyril Weckt, and dozens and dozens of others. They're called assassination buffs.
They're not buffs.
Even that word is a limiting and marginalizing and diminishing term. A buff is a kind of a hobby pursuer.
You're seeing.
It's a kind of a quirky person who follows quirky little interests.
Would you talk about Holocaust buffs? Would you know? They are serious investigators of a very.
Serious crime which leads to all sorts of serious understandings about the criminal nature of the state. And this is why they relentlessly, the mainstream media, and the opinion leaders and the political leaders of this country relentlessly attack or ignore this literature.
And this is why they give.
Fulsome gushing ready publicity to the likes of Gerald Posner with his Bookcase Closed, which got.
Put into every major magazine.
I couldn't put the TV on all week without seeing in the guy's face and hearing him blather these kind of cliche statements whose credibility are dependent on you being totally ignorant of what the investigators for thirty years have been uncovering and the questions that have been raising.
And we did a.
Grotesque, idiotic whitewash of the whole thing.
And this is why they savage.
They savaged all of A Stone's movie JFK, a movie that was very accurate about the specifics of the murder, a movie that reached millions of people that broke through that thing that they were keeping down, the only movie in the history of Hollywood. And I wrote a book called Make Believe Media, which is about TV and films, So I think I know something about films At least, I did spend the better part of a year reading
a lot of literature. It's the only movie that I know of that was attacked six months before it was ever released in the Washington Post and the New York Times and in Time and Newsweek, and attack relentlessly for a year after it was released. And this is also why in this past week they kept up the relentless propaganda campaign with the thirtieth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination to show.
That Oswald was the loan assassin.
And they're always limiting the question, just as the Warren Commission did a priori did it was Oswald alone assassin? Did he act alone? Did he or did he not act alone? Meanwhile, all the serious investigations investigators have a different question. It's not that he was not at all one of the people who shot Kennedy. He did not act at all, although he was involved in another way. He was involved as a fall guy. And this is why they do this. If you want to know why,
you just listen to them. It's not my analysis, it's what they say. The propagandists of the right and the center know why they've got to trash this issue and contain it. Listen to what Tom Wicke of the New York Times had to say. Now he's never written a
movie review in his life. JFK came out and Tom Wicker, who is a columnist, a Washington columnist for the New York Times, suddenly became a movie reviewer, and instead of getting the usual movie review length of eight hundred words, he got two thousand words.
It's the whole page with pictures, Nola. And in that review, he tells us.
That if the quote wild assertions in all of A Stone's movie are taken at face value, Americans will have to accept the idea that most of the nation's major institutions conspired together and carried out Kennedy's murder In an era, Wicker goes on, in an era when mistrust of government and loss of confidence in institutions the press not the least are widespread and viruling, such a suggestion seems a dubious public service.
So truth on I'm not true has nothing to do with it. He's saying.
The question is institutional legitimacy. Wicka understands the heart of the matter. A full revelation about the murder would be a serious attack upon the legitimacy of the dominant institutions of state and class, the press not being the least of one of those institutions, a faithful servant of it,
the system that New York Times writers faithfully defended. Playing before mass audiences, the movie JFK did not finger a cabal of malevolent perpetrators, but in fact pointed the finger at the National Security State.
Itself as the murderer damage control.
You know, back in nineteen seventy eight, the House Select Committee reported, in fact, after an investigation, that there was more than one assassin shooting Kennedy then, and there therefore was a conspiracy. In response, the Washington Post immediately editorialized in nineteen seventy eight, quote, could it have been some other malcontempt who mister Oswald met casually?
It gets better? It gets better with.
Could not as many as three or four societal outcasts with no ties to any one organization have developed in some spontaneous way a common determination to express their alienation in the killing of President Kennedy. It is possible that two persons, acting independently, attempted to shoot the president at the very same time.
It is possible. It's not at all likely.
So sometimes those who deny conspiracies create the most convoluted.
Fantasies of all.
David Garrow, who wrote a biography of Martin Luther King, benignly, patronizingly looks at you, at the public mind, and he says that the evidence pointing to a conspiracy to murder Martin Luther King now at large. You see what it is a large majority of the American people do believe in assassination conspiracies.
That allows events to have large.
Mysterious causes instead of small idiosyncratic ones. I would say the Washington Post had the most mysterious cause of all a few minutes ago. They like that, They like the large causes, you see. But the question of conspiracy has to be decided by an investigation of evidence, not by a priori unscientific and patronizing presumptions about the public mind. In any case, the evidence in King's assassination doesn't involve large mysterious causes.
But very immediate actualities.
And the investigators, like Peter Dale, Scott and how A Weisberger Mark lane Is, they weren't impelled by some yearnings, you see.
They were impelled by questions.
Of evidence, by things that didn't just seem to make sense by very immediate empirical things which drew them into this more and more, but which these people who never read that evidence don't have to deal with, and so they can fashion all these theories. The independent investigators demolished the Warren Commission. The first and most effective, perhaps was how A. Weisberg's book Whitewash and the Other and then the other one by Mark Lane rushed to judgment right there, terrific,
written twenty five years ago. Let's focus on a small part of the actual conspiracy. I can't obviously go through it all, it would take ages. Let's start with Oswald. If you watch television this week, you again, for the seventy eighth time, heard that Oswald was a loner and incompetent, not very bright.
You heard he was emotionally disturbed.
Joe Posma got on there, turning instant psychiatrists, and he said, the abby Oswall was a very disturbed young boy. He had a very disturbed childhood. And he was a passive aggressive, I said, a passive aggressive, a passive aggressive assassin. That explains why use a rifle which couldn't shoot straight. He also was a leftist Alexander Coburn has joined the right and the center and in a column and the examiner said he was a leftist. The truth is something else.
Lee Hobby Oswald. All his IQ tests show that he was above average intelligence. He was a bright guy, a quick learner. O. Lee Hobby Oswald spent most of his adult life not as a lonely drifter, but directly linked to the US intelligence community. At the age of eighteen, in the US Marines, he had secret security clearance and he was working at Marine Air Control in Atsugi Base in Japan. Atsugi was a top secret base where the CIA launched some of its U two flights and did
other kinds of COVID operations in China. The next year, at the age of nineteen, he was assigned to El Toro Air Station in California with security clearance to work radar, and here he emerged. Certain strange things began to happen. He emerged as a babbling Russo file and Soviet Communists. He started playing Russian language records at blast level in his barracks. He started addressing his fellow Marines in Russian. He read Russian books and touted Soviet Communism as quote,
the best system in the world. He called his fellow Marines comrades. Now, the US Marine Corps nineteen fifty eight was not exactly known as a bastion of liberal tolerance and free thinking. My buddy Bernard Livingston wrote a book called Closet Red. He tells of his experiences in the Army, where they had to filter out anybody who had funny opinions,
who had pink oish opinions, or whatever else. They had to be reported that the Army constantly, and I'm sure the Marines constantly surveils anybody who might outspokenly or actively begin to say or act certainly in the way he did. But in this instance Oswald's Marine commanders didn't mind. He kept his security clearance, He kept all the radar records.
He could see what was going in and out, and knew all about the things that were happening there, and a wealth of sensitive radar information and otherighly sensitive information from sensitive.
Basis black operations, as they will call.
Well, if Oswald was a Soviet spy or a Cuban spy, as some people now claim, he certainly had a novel way of building a couver other odd things began happening. In February nineteen fifty nine, lee hobby Oswald failed the Marine Corps proficiency test in Russian. Six months later he was practically fluent in Russian.
Only.
In nineteen seventy four, a document that was dislodged from the Warrant Commission that had been secreted. Thanks to Howrod Weisberg's legal efforts got the document out, it was shown that Oswald had attended the US Army Monterey School of Languages. Now, Monterrey is not open to anyone who just happens to have a hobby, a language hobby.
You go only for.
Serious training, and you are sent by the government and it must be related to government work in a language picked by the government, which is related to specific assignments. So Oswald learned Russian at the US Monterey School of Languages. Another odd thing, Oswald was given an early discharge from the Marines because his mother had injured her foot. Let's
call it this dependency discharge. Your parent needs you. A jar had fallen on her toe, and he was immediately he put in the request and he got it within a week. His fellow Marines were astonished at the velocity of the release.
It also so happened that the jaw fell on her foot a year before the discharge, but she was happy. It wasn't healing right. You know.
This was only one of a number of very strangely favorable treatments that the US government began to give Lee Harvey Oswald. He then defected to the USSR. But how Philip Mellinson raises the question. To get to Russia in those days.
It would have cost one five hundred dollars.
Lee Hobby Oswald's bank account showed a deposit of only two hundred and three dollars. He got after he arrived in London and was there. He left London and went to Helsinki on October eleventh, in a day when there were no available commercial flights that would have allowed him to make it in one day. He had some kind of private transportation to get to Helsinki. In Russia, he announced that he was renouncing his US citizenship and that he had lots of secrets that he was going to
give to the Soviets. He even went into the US embassy and announced that and made sure they all knew it. The Soviets didn't bite. They let him stay, but they at no time thought he could be an agent of many use to them. They kept him under constant surveillance. He worked in a factory. He showed no particular interest in guns, but he belonged to the factory's gun club. He used to join in the rabbit shoots, and he
could never hit the rabbit. That always someone had to come behind him and shoot the rabbit while he was firing, otherwise they would have been there all day.
It was a joke.
He was a miserable marksman, as he had been in the US Marines. He had been flagged again and again on the They missed the whole target a number of times, you get the flag. So Lebby Oswald's show was a couldn't hit the.
Side of a bond.
Now, if Leharvey Oswald was really a defector and not a US spy, then US intelligence could well have taken the view that his was one of the most damaging defections in history. Now, what's done in all defections, especially those connected with definitely those connected with government and military, is that there's a damage assessment. No damage assessment was ever made on Oswald's defection. This did come out in
the Warrant Commission in the House Select Committee. Why there was no damage assessmentsion.
I guess it was just overlooked. We don't know.
After two and a half years, he applies to return to the US. This is after renouncing his citizenship, announcing he was going to give away secrets, and instead of being grabbed when he comes out and tried as a trader of the US accepts him back.
And he says he was never debriefed.
In fact, he was the pri in Harlem, in Amsterdam, but the CIA has no record of debriefing him.
Head doesn't doesn't know who he is, never touched him, was never near him.
And their explanation before the commission was that there were so many tours coming out that there was nothing particularly about him that would would would catch our attention. One might wonder what is needed to catch your attention a defector of secrets and all after the assassination, the CIA claimed that they suspected that he was a Soviet spy, they still didn't from debrief from them.
That makes it even more curious.
He gets he gets out of Russia, and what does the State Department do? They give him money, they give him money to travel back to the US.
And get set up.
They pay all his travel and moving expenses and those of his wife's. He's given back his passport with full rights to travel anywhere and denounce the US government again someplace else. His wife is exempted from usual immigration quotos.
No way, no exclusion for.
Having belonged to the Soviet Compsamol was the Communist youth organization, which is a violation of US immigration laws.
Yes, she was allowed in. Once back in Dallas, the.
Rvy Oswall settles in under the wing of one George de moorin Child, a right wing Russian with CIA ties, and this begins a whole pattern that.
Goes on in Dallas and New Orleans.
Namely the forays out into the public eye as a leftist. Once back in Dallas, the rvy Oswall settles in under the wing of one George de moorin Child, a right wing Russian with CIA ties, And this begins a whole pattern that goes on in Dallas and New Orleans, namely the forays out into the public eye as a leftist. He starts a one person Fair Play for Cuba organization in New Orleans, never has another member, never recruits another member.
All his time in New Orleans and in Dallas, he never once contacts a single member of the Communist Party or any other left organization, although he writes lots of letters to the Communist Party USA and to the Socialist Workers Party.
Two groups which at that time weren't even talking to each other. Day, dear comrades, how are you? We fight bowart and we go on. Yes, what should I do? And this and that? Send me instructions.
You know, he blazes a trail local TV fistfights inflammatory incidents leaflets. One of the leafless shows that his organization was on Camp Street and the very same building that Guy Banister had his office. Guy Banister was an FBI agent, and a whole bunch of other Cuban McGray right wing groups were there, and his personal relations were with right wing anti communist Cubans or with right wing crypto fascists
or CIA types or others. So, while he supposedly was this leftist, and if you ever heard any of the tapes of him speaking and explaining what communism was or socialism, was this laughable. It's this little rope, superficial thing. While he was leftist, in fact, all his personal associations were with right wing people linked to the intelligence community.
He also knew Jack Ruby.
Now they would have us believe that this man who couldn't hit the side of the barn, took a man link a khar Khan, a rifle whose sights were not even set, an Italian weapon, by the way, which the Italian said, the weapon that never killed anyone on purpose, and.
He fired and killed the President of the United States.
That he would forego shooting President Kennedy when he had a full body shot of him coming right at him down Houston Street, right toward the right, toward the Texas Book Depository, where he could where he could go at him, go at him like a shooting gallery that's coming closer and closer, perfect the ideal thing.
He didn't shoot him.
Then he waited until the car turned at one hundred and ten degree angle down Elm Street, and as he went by and had only his head in a little portion of his shoulders, and then firing through the trees, he rapidly got off three shots in a few seconds, something which the best marksmen in the country were not able to emulate until after much practice, and after the sights on the manlinka karkana, were reset and brought into a laboratory and fixed in there, and they had all
sorts of remarks to make about the awful performance of this rifle.
By the way, right through a tree that was later cut down.
We are asked to believe that a bullet would go through John Kennedy, pose in mid air for two seconds, changed directions, and wound Governor Connolly in two places, and then reappear intact on a stretcher, fallen out of Connolly's body.
By the way, that's not true. It did not ever reappear.
On the stretcher as if fallen out of somebody's body. It had reappeared wedged into the side of the stretcher.
It obviously had been pushed in there.
So this was a bullet that jumped out of Connolly's body and.
Wedged itself in the side of the stretcher.
This magic bullet had a lot of magic in it. We're asked to believe that a treasure of physical evidence the interior of the limousine, the presidential limousine itself, which would have all sorts of evidence, bits of strappedn or whatever else from bullet, parts of blood, lines of fire, which was which was just accidentally taken instantly, torn out, destroyed, and totally rebuilt.
That this was not a deliberate cover up.
But we're asked to believe that Kennedy's brain just disappeared. That the X ray, which now shows a reconstructed head with no exit wound, is oddly taken with no lower, with no jaw, so it could be anybody's. You can't do any kind of dental identification to see if that x ray is President Kennedy's.
That the autopsy was just botched innotantly.
We're asked to believe that Jack Ruby a gambler and gangster with links to the Cuban exiles and an acquaintance of Oz Walls. He once worked for Congressman Richard Nixon for the House and American Activities Committee in Chicago when his name was still Jack Rubinstein before he changed it to Ruby. We're asked to believe that he just took it upon himself to kill Oswald because he was so moved by the suffering that Oswald had caused the Kennedy family.
Although Ruby, in his a year later in jail, repeatedly kept alluding to the fact that you don't know the whole story.
There's much more behind all of this.
There's something really deep and sinister here in all this, and he was just simply dismissed.
By a media that was taking its cues.
We're asked if the twenty one witnesses, persons otherwise related to the case in some close way, with some information, privy to some conversations, whatever else, or who met violent deaths were part of a colossal coincidence like the one the Washington Post was talking about that later on in nineteen seventy eight, the second round of killings that started after the House Select Committee investigation, sixteen more who died violently.
They just happened to coincidentally violent debts, including one of them being George de Moronschild himself killed by a gun blast to the head three hours after a House Assassinations Committee investigator had tried to contact him. He was being set up for an interview. He was being set up for a lot more than that. George Morinschild was not only close to Oswald, but in his telephone book there was found an inscription or an insert to George Pappy Bush that he was a close friend of George Bush.
And there was a correspondence between them.
The sheriff's office in Palm County, Florida found that his shooting was very strange.
And it was ruled a suicide.
William Sullivan a third FBI, third guy in the FBI, who was supposed to appear before the House Committee to talk By the way, Sullivan was on CIA. According to rober Murrow, he was on the CIA payroll. He was shot right outside his home by a man who claimed
to have mistaken him for a deer he was. He was charged with misdemeanor and released in custody of his father, a state policeman, sam Jan Kanno, who died from natural causes when his heart stopped beating after a bullet went through it one day before he was to testify about MOB and CIA connections while and while under government protection.
And by the way, what comes out of this whole thing is the incredible linkages between the CIA and MOB families and MOB figures again and again, because after all, the Mob is very functional. They can do the kind of dirty things that the CIA may sometimes want them to do. There are even some on the left like Noam Chomsky and Alexander Coburn, who argue that this whole interest in the assassination comes from a Kennedy revival.
Hey, okay, here's the problem.
There's a couple of facts in Parente stuff that were lesser known at the time and have been developed greater since. Like, we know a lot more about g and Kanna's death, we know a lot more about the guy who mistakenly shot somebody thinking they were a deer.
We know a lot more about this stuff. Now.
Parente was dealing with this in nineteen ninety three. So if you add in the updated facts, the argument remains the same except one problem in my mind, and that is this over focus on the CIA. It is the intelligence community. It is that whole entire apparatus, not just the CIA, and certainly not the CIA proper.
But this is an.
Adjustment that comes to you many years later and with a lot of work.
The Camelot yearning, the yearning for lost Messiah, I'm getting close. These are close right From Chomsky, co Vern and Chomsky and others. They challenged the notion that Kennedy was assassinated for intending to withdraw from Vietnam or under the CIA or in the Cold War. These things could not have led to his downfall because they were not true. Kennedy was a co warrior, a counterinsurgent to wanted a military
withdrawal from Vietnam only with victory. I have argued similarly in my book Democracy for the Few, that in fact, indeed Kennedy was a co warrior and a counterinsurgent, and that he should not be romanticized as a progressive. Chomsky, Coburn, and others claimed that the change of administration that came with Afk's assassination had no large scale effect on policy, not even on tactics.
Okay, so there is the largest issue, which is that a guy like Parente believed in Kennedy not being progressive enough. Therefore, but it wasn't progressiveness, it was not liberalism. It was
a matter of pragmatism. Kennedy was willing to go to war when it made sense to go to war, but when it was senseless or it was just to propagate idiocy, like they wanted in Germany, like they wanted in Lauts, like they wanted in Cuba, with the constant in Vaine Asian being called for because killing is a business, and business was very good and that's what you have to wrap your mind around. It's not this oh liberal fantasizing.
Kennedy's not a liberal, not even close. And you know, until we went crazy in recent years, there was a liberal sort of construct who could try to wrap it around Kennedy and it didn't fit. It fit when it came to being progressive and less, you know, the racist jackassery of the former Conservatives.
It fit there. But outside of that nothing.
This guy's practically a Republican, an old school Republican, not a Trump era republican, not a post War on Terror idiocy republican, but a regular old died in the wall. You know, we believe in business and people's right to make themselves Republican. That fantasy, Yeah, that's what Kennedy was.
Not a progressive, not a liberal, but also not a hardliner and not an idiot who just wanted to throw away people's lives to accomplish nothing but filling the coffers of people whose business it was to prop it off of blood and torture.
In other words, if Kennedy had lived, he likely would have fabricated a Tonguin gulf as his belly. He would have introduced ground troops in a massive land war, as Lyndon Johnson did, he would have engaged in the merciless Bee fifty two carpet bombings of Laos, Cambodi, and Vietnam, as Richard Nixon did, He would have risked destroying his own electoral base, proving himself a mass murder as bad as Nixon. Chomsky and Coburn don't tell us how they
know that. All we know is the one surviving Kennedy. The Robert Kennedy, in fact, went a different way. He became an anti war critic. He opposed the war, He broke with the Johnson administration, and he said that his brother's administration, his administration, had committed terrible mistakes. The evidence we do have, in fact, is that John Kennedy observed Cambodian neutrality and negotiated to see fire and coalition government in Laos, which the CIA.
Refused to honor.
They preferred to back a right wing faction that continued the war.
Chomsky says much about troop withdrawals.
Who just wrote a whole book on this, Camelot Revisited and all that, but he says very little about troop escalation, other than to offer Roger Hillsman speculation that Kennedy might well have introduced US troops ground troops in South Vietnam.
Maybe so, maybe not.
In fact, the same Hillsman noted in The New York Times not long ago, and Chomsky doesn't note it that in nineteen sixty three, Kennedy was the only person in his administration who opposed the introduction of US ground troops. He was the only thing preventing an escalation of the war. Forget the question of withdrawal.
Or not withdrawal. He was a barrier in that sense.
Whether or not, there are certain left analysts who think Kennedy was or wasn't a progressive or liberal and thinks that the CIA had no reason to kill him, or other people had no reason to be dissatisfied him. The fact is, do they see it that way? You know, entrenched interests are notorious for not seeing the world the
same way that left analysts do. In nineteen sixty three, people in right wing circles, including elements in various intelligence organizations, did not believe that Kennedy could be trusted with the nation's future. Some months ago, on a San Francisco talk show, I heard a guy come on. It was on KGO and he said, I never said this before. I never
said it. It's the first time of saying it. But I worked for Army intelligence, and in nineteen sixty three I was in Japan, and when he in, the accepted word around then was that Kennedy would be killed because he was messing too much with the intelligence community. And when word came of his death, we were all I could hear with delighted comments.
Like we got the bastard.
What JFK's enemies saw something was What they saw was something different from what Chomsky and Coburn have seen. They fixed on Kennedy's refusal to provide air coverage the Bay of Pigs, his refusal to go in with US forces, his unwillingness to launch another invasion of Cuba is no invasion guarantee to KHRUSHEV on Cuba. His atmospheric test band treaty with Moscow. His American University speech calling for a re examination of our Cold War attitudes towards the Soviet Union.
His unwillingness to send ground forces in a massive form into Vietnam, his anti trust suit against General Electric, his fight with US steel over price increases, his challenge to the Federal Reserve Board, his warm reception at labor conventions, his call for racial equality and responsiveness to civil rights leaders, reluctant responsiveness, his talk of moving forward in a new frontier.
Erwin Nole, the Progressive says that he admits he has no idea who killed Kennedy, but this doesn't keep him from asserting that the Oliver A. Stone film was manipulative and that Stone provided false answers.
How do you know that, Erwin, if you have no idea who killed Kennedy?
And the remarkable thing about Erwin Nole and Nom Chomsky and Alexander Koburn is they don't know a damn thing about the criticisms and investigation that's been made. We've said this again and again, and the rebuttals in the Exchange in the Nation, almost every one of them said, Alexander Coburn doesn't know anything about this case. He doesn't know anything about le Hobby Osrol. Really he doesn't know.
Just some of the questions I brought up.
They don't know any and they never deny it. They never say anything. They go on with their patronizing comments. Well, Chomsky patronization and condescension Coburn with vitriol and venom.
They go on attacking.
Those who supposedly are idealizing Kennedy. Erwin Noel shows he's flexible, though he says he allows that the Warrant Commission did a hasty, slipshod job of investigation.
I disagree. The Commission did a brilliant job of investigation.
It sat for fifty one long sessions over a period of several months, much longer than most major investigations. It compiled twenty six volumes of testimony and evidence. It had the investigative resources of the FBI.
And CIA at as command.
From being hasty and slipshod, it painstakingly crafted theories that moved toward its foreordained conclusion that Oswald was the assassin. It framed an argument and moved unfailingly to fulfill that argument. It failed to call witnesses who saw something different from what it wanted to hear, who saw who not only heard, but who saw people on the Grassy Knoll shooting.
It failed to call them.
It ignored or reinterpreted what little conflicting testimony that did creep into its proceedings. All this took deliberate effort. It was carefully crafted, painstakingly. A hasty, slipshod investigation would show traces.
Of randomness in its errors.
Some would go this way, some would go that way, but the Commission's distortions consistently moved in the same direction in pursuit of a prefigured hypothesis, the gullible US public that Irwin Knowle talks about Noel, who condemns all of a Stone for playing on the gullibility of the American people.
See, he's not gullible. He's cool. He doesn't fall for this. He's so cool, didn't even go see the movie. You see, the US public has not bought the official explanation.
Seventy eight percent say they believe there was a conspiracy in both Chomsky and Coburn, Coburn in the Nation, Chomsky and Z Magazine, and again in a letter in exchange with me. Both of them dismissed that fact and point out the same identical analog. They point out that, in fact, over seventy percent of the people also believe in miracles. So what does that prove and what has that got to do with the question at hand? That people can have a stupid opinion about one thing doesn't mean they're
stupid about everything. In fact, Chomsky and Coburn are themselves evidence of that. In any case, the comparison is between two different things. They're comparing the public's gollibility about miracles with the public's unwillingness to be gullible about the official line of it being fed and shoved in their.
Faces for thirty years.
That takes.
That's not gullible it at all. Ezion D.
Koburn and Nom Chomsky have told us that we must not reduce great developments in history to conspiracy, for then we lose sight of institution, class, and other systemic factors of American capitalism. I don't need them to tell me about systemic factors in American capitalism. I use a structural analysis in all my writings. But investigating the JFK conspiracy, we are not looking for an escape from something unpleasant
and difficult. That's psychiatrist nom Chomsky speaking. But we're hitting upon the nature of state power and what is supposedly to be a democracy. Conspiracy is not something that's in contradistinction to structural analysis.
It is part of it.
These guys will use conspiracy. They will use legitimacy, They will finance elections, they will use publicity campaigns, they will set up liberalist organizations, they will set up alternative trade union movements.
They will use assassins and death squads.
They will use every single conceivable thing there is. And this was one of the things they used when they had someone who was giving them trouble, when they had someone who was standing in their path because he was a little too bright and too shiny. When they had an agenda to save Southeast Asia from communism, they would kill one of their own.
And that is a tremendous revelation.
It was a startling revelation of the American public to make them realize what kind of a gangster government and national security state we really have in this country and what it does around the world. A structuralist position should not discount the role of human agency in history. Institutions are not self generating forces. The great continuities of corporate and class interest, that's Coburn's phrase, do not happen of their own accord like reified disembodied social forces.
Neither empires nor.
National security institutions come into existence and fit apps and mindedness. Although the British elite used to say that the British Empire was accumulated in the fit of apps and mindedness. Give me a break, Give me a break, as these guys plotted and killed and brought armies in and destroyed, and bribed and murdered and lied and did all the things, and plundered these countries and plundered and plundered them absent minded.
God knows when you focus your attention what you would do.
There's a conscious interest being pursued here, and the evidence for it is the state itself. These things, these events are created by willfully intended policymakers who pursue specific interests.
It is the essence of the state and.
The function of state institutions to act as conscious agents in recreating the conditions of politico economic hegemony. That's what it's there for. That's what they're paid to do. To achieve their goals. State leaders, especially those within the national security state, will resort to every necessary form of mass manipulation, deception, and violence, even against one of their own whom they
have come to see as a liability. Conspiratorial action is not brothers and sisters, is not something separate and exclusive of institutional presence. In fact, there's a constant interplay between the two. And by the way, this is all this call for constructural analysis, institutional analysis. Where's the institutional analysis
in the Nation. All you get, all you get are all conspiracies, incite, intrigues, events, happenings, articles that preoccupy, when imediate policies, issues, events, personality, secret deals, all that kind of stuff. All of them are vastly lesser magnitude than jfk assassination. Yet, and yet in thirty years, the Nation and the Progressive have never published a single word by investigators like Peter Dale, Scott and such, except a letter to the editor once in a while. Let me quote
from Peter's book Deep Politics. He raises this question of conspiracy, and he points out that ge William Domhoff makes a point very much like coburns. He says, and Peter, I think, makes a point very much like the one I made which I was quoting from, which was in my exchange with Chomsky and Z Magazine about and also with them,
I mean with Chomsky and also in the Nation. In my exchange with Coburn, I made this point that conspiracy and institution are not mutually exclusive, and they never have answered or addressed that point, either to rebut it or to accept it, or to see how it doesn't apply
here or does apply whatever, They just ignore it. Tom Hooff points out if conspiracy means that these men, meaning the ruling elites, are aware of their interests, know each other personally, meet together privately and off the record, and try to hammer out a consensus on how to anticipate and react to events and issues, then they there is some conspiring that goes on in the Council for Foreign Relations, not to mention the Committee for Economic Development, the Business Council,
the National Security Council, and the central intelligence agencies. But then Domhoff Scott goes on to show to Domhoff Shares that same kind of resistance that Coburn and Shopsky have to the idea that an assassination conspiracy could have a lasting impact on our political arrangements. We all have a tremendous tendency to want to get caught up in believing there's some secret, evil cause.
For all of the obvious ills of the world.
Conspiracy theories encourage a belief that if we get rid of a few bad people, everything will be well in the world.
He's quoting Domhoff.
Then, Peter Answys, I believe that a true understanding of the Kennedy assassination will lead not to a few bad people, but to the institutional and parapolitical arrangements which constitute the way we are systematically governed. The conspiracies I see as operative, in other words, are part of our policical structure, not exceptions to it.
That's Peter Dale Scott.
What the left critics do is that they mistaken the low political value of the victim JFK, whom they hate and detest, their big fears that you're going to like him, with the high political importance of the issue and the implications for democracy, the revelation of the gangs, the nature of the state.
I mean.
Captain Alfred Dreyfus back in eighteen ninety four was a conservative militarist. Clemenceau once conjectured that of his name had not been Dreyfus, he would have been an anti dreyfussade. Does that mean that the political struggle waged in La Fair Dreyfus was a waste of time? The issue was quickly drawn between the right and the left, between those who stood with the army and those who stood with the republic itself.
And with justice. The same with Benino Aquino.
Aquino was a member of the privileged class in the Philippines. He promised no great structural changes. He was even more conservative than Kennedy. Does this mean that the Filipino people should have dismissed the conspiracy that led to his assassination as an event of no experience, So just another ruling class pig, what do we care? Instead, they used it as ammunition against the hated Marcos regime, as a revelation
of what that government was really doing. Archbishop Romero of El Salvador, he was a member of the Salvadoran aristocracy. He could not have made it to the top of the church hierarchy otherwise. When he was ordained, they came with presents, they hugged and kissed him, And the minute he opened up his mouth and made some critical remarks about the war and some favorable remarks about the poor, he was assassinated. I doubt if he hadn't been assassinated,
the Salvador In history would have been much different. Does this mean that solidarity groups in this country and El Salvador should not have tried to make his murder an issue that revealed the homicidal gangst the nature of the Salvadoran state. Instead of seizing the opportunity, some left wrights condescendingly ascribe a host of mass psychology, motivations, and emotional needs to those of us who are concerned about the
JFK assassination. The psychologize about our illusions, our false dreams, our longings from messiahs and father figures, and our inability to face unpleasant realities the way they can. They deliver patronizing admonitions about our conspiracy, captivation, and Camelot yearnings. They
urge us not to escape into fantasy. They are the cognushinti who guide us and out left us on the JFK assassination, a subject about which they don't know a goddamn thing and whose significance they will never be able and have not been able to grasp. I have a different name for our interests. It is not JFK worship. It's not Camlot yearnings as the left critics would say. It's not big evils and conspiracy titillation, as the mainstream
media would say. Our interest is born of democratic struggle, a desire to know what is going on, a desire to have rulers who are worthy of.
Our name and the name of democracy.
Thank you, New Year, same extra value mules at McDonald's. Now get a savory stutage, m muffin with a bus hash Browns.
And Okay, due to some last minute repairs, we're gonna start about ten minutes late on the call in show, and I got to create.
A little spot for our friend b Pete to join with us.
And I think we're going to try an experiment in a week or two, might be, might be a couple of weeks from now, because I want to make sure we got a full on, but we might try a different way for me and be Pete to connect. And we're gonna connect the show to the X platform, because why the hell not. You know what, I got a constant little bill. It's one of my little bills I pay for this network, and we got a blue check mark. I think we're gonna start using Twitter spaces and see
how that grabs some new people. I'm probably gonna get more pissed off hump Trump and Trump humping whatever, jackasses and deranged liberals. But what the hell I mean, I can only work with what speaks English anymore, I guess, and and the bots and such, so.
Let's see what happens. We'll go over there.
Who knows, maybe we'll find some woers. But anyway, this has been a tribute to Michael Parenti obviously, and if you didn't know who he was or anything else, that's your damn fault, and it's a big fault. Nineteen ninety three gave that lecture JFK and the Gangster State, and I even let a McDonald's commercial play halfway through at the very end, not because I wanted to, but what the hell. It's one of the last things on YouTube that doesn't seem to be tainted.
With AI, so screw it.
The call in show will begin after I drop off the stream completely, and I'm testing the phone lines. They are working, so you will be able to call in, and I was able to physically fix the broken phone. But I don't know how long this thing's gonna last.
I need to buy a.
New one, and y on and on it goes. Plus we're gonna get into videos starting in April, one way or another.
I went and finally got into an.
MRI machine today, and of course it's kind of predictable what happens. You know, I'm getting tired of being asked, why are you still alive? Why are you still walking around? It's fun, but not so much fun. Also, how is it that you removed shrapnel from yourself when you were shot in the leg when you were younger? I am tired of teaching doctors things and most people that listen to this what's left of you?
Anyway?
You don't care what I have to say anyhow, So screw it. Let's have a little fun. Maybe we'll talk about I don't know, beer and wine and women and song and things that make you throw up in the next couple hours here on the OCHLI dot com radio network, which will be live all the way to past midnight, when the Uncle Show will conclude, because eleven to twelve
pm Eastern will be the Uncle Show. Ten to eleven pm Eastern, we'll be Aaron Franz in the Age of Transitions, and for the next of what remains of up until ten pm Eastern. From eight say pm to ten pm Eastern, although it's already eleven after, you'll get the Ocelli effect with live call ins and my co host VPT and hopefully I don't pass out in the process of this show.
I got one eye closed. Now I got problems. Apparently I got some broken bones too, and I'm just, you know, struggling to breathe with them and walk around with them.
But what the hell?
My suffering doesn't matter. Nobody moves, nobody cares, and I'm being erased anyway.
So I'm in a great mood.
Hopefully you are too, stick around, because the o'elli effect is.
About about to get started.
Conversation. You are the effect.
The decider is broken, revelation, the conversation. Let's stop lines show effect.
Revelation, a devastation, revelation.
Effect.
You are the effectation to sell the fact revelation conation.
Titian through convers oh shall effect revelation.
The fas is gone and forgotten.
I'll sell you a fact beyond this place of rat and sears a little horror of the shame.
And yet the mercy of years finds it shall find me afraid.
And that's not a bra deicate, not.
The scroll.
I am the master of my fate.
I am the chanted of my soul. Funny of fact revelation, protect the propaganda horse, continued cashing in and teach us about religion, keeping score at home. Are people you'd like to see even by wolves, dis dropped dying soon.
The tangles are Jacko Tips and his continued ghost stormy touring streak says God sparred him and decided a firefighter dies in BA.
Revelation conversation Olly a fact, you are the effect.
You are the.
Effect relation through conversation, all praise, no straight same revelation through conversation, through conversation, all raised restraints.
I tell you affect revelation through conversation, through conversation, all restraints.
I'll tell you effected revelation through conversation.
God as the dead from cold all whatever got me from my indocorable soul. In the constant circumstance, I have not winced.
No cry allows a chance ahead, bloody about.
You are the effect, the actually effect, compilation through conversation, revelation.
Conversation effect. You are the effect.
You are the effect. Revelation through conversation, Ball's praise, no.
Street revelation through conversation, revel through conversations, no restraints, all effect.
Revelation through conversation through conversation, all raised, no restraints effect revelation. Through conversation, you a