Why Lies Aimed At the "Left" about JFK are Far and Away The Most Important Lies

[Nathaniel Heidenheimer]

"What does what Chomsky, Cockburn, Goodman and Sir Seymour of McClain have to do with me. Nothing. I don't consider myself a leftist, at least what passes for one these days"

That right?

Well then lets just allow the complete decoupling of the JFK assassination from the following events and issues:

1) The further evolution of a permanent war economy.

2) the credibility of the billionaire's media

3) the assassination of the first detente

4) the development of the US Latin American relations ever since

5) the origins of NAFTA and Rocky's Free Trade Zone

6) the ability of the public to see and analyze the final fingerprints of the permanent military and intelligence bureaucracies before they went permanently sub rosa

7) The VIetnam War

8) The genocide of 1.25 million people in Indonesia

9) The Coup d'etat in Brazil in the early Spring of 1964

10) the transition of the US from industrial to finance capitalism...

11) more to come as I remember them...

ALL OF THESE ARE OF NATURAL CONCERN TO THE LEFT. Therefor, if the assassination was to be shorn of implications for these areas of concern, it would take a McLeftist (i.e. a US Foundation Funded quid pro quo ""leftist"") with credibility among the most critical audience whose skepticism needed to be worked over the most.

The assassination has-- for the general brainwashed corporate media american-- been entirely shorn of its historical implications. Regardless of one's political orientation it is imperative to recognize that the most important sheering is done by official McLeftists on their quid pro quo (not really) " "Alternative" radio shows.

10)

Edited June 20, 2012 by Nathaniel Heidenheimer

[Guest Tom Scully]

Nathaniel, my experience is that there is no "left," the work has been that successful.

Early in the thread about Mimi Alford's "tell all" book, the founder of this forum posted at the following link.:

http://educationforu...41

It has been several days since I posted in that thread that the author's best friend is the daughter of one of Goebbel's shining lights in America in 1941, a man also close to Gerald Ford. It has been more than a day since I posted reliable information showing Mimi Alford's best friend to also be one of the closest people to David Rockefeller for more than 20 years, and a member of CFR.

There has been no reaction posted on that thread to any of that information.

I started a thread on the problem of elements of the U.S. government assassinating Americans, at least as far back as the assassination of President Kennedy, and since last year, much more openly, by drone, in Yemen. I was very surprised that members of this forum are accepting, and even defending of such anti-constitutional, bold authoritarianism.

I keep coming back to it, but this is the best explanation I can find for what you and I seem to agree is so troubling.:

"......Sinclair Lewis, for his part, showed how the simultaneously banalizing methods of capitalist enterprise (false advertising, consumerism, pieties of affluence, amoral bureaucracy) are exactly what that enterprise created to keep from being criticized......."

Where we seem to have descended to in contemporary politics is a climate in which too many "progressives" are still enamored by a right wing, war on terrur, hopey, changey, kind of a guy who has legitimized and extended the right wing extremism of the Cheney administration and shielded it from investigation, prosecution, or anything other than wholehearted endorsement. Bipartisan preemptive war doctrine necessitates a complete rewrite of history, and so many who we don't even recognize anymore, for their politics, eat it up as they cheer for "four more years"!

Hair: Obama Punches a Hippie on Memorial Day

by PeraclesPlease 5/29/2012 - 3:00 am

Ah yes, trotting out those tired old lines:

”You were often blamed for a war you didn’t start, when you should have been commended for serving your country with valor. You were sometimes blamed for misdeeds of a few, when the honorable service of the many should have been praised. You came home and sometimes were denigrated, when you should have been celebrated

No matter how many times someone points out the myth of hippies spitting on vets just didn't happen in any numbers, that the protests were aimed at the Pentagon, not G.I. Joe, the story just won't die.

Apparently Obama missed one of the major vibes of the period, trying to end the war, trying to keep our neighbors from dying for no good reason. Are the kids at Kent State included in the remembrance of Memorial Day?

Perhaps we should chip in to buy Obama a video of Hair, a major period piece and successful broadway show that James Rado and Gerome Ragni started writing in 1964 and performed starting in 1967, set in Central Park a few blocks from where Obama went to school. About benevolent hippies who try to keep a naive uneducated stranger from going off to war to be killed or to kill. And even one of those hippies Christ-like takes his place, so the Okie can marry his sweetheart and live out the war in marital bliss.

If we were so hard on vets, how did this sentimental piece about love towards soldiers become popular?....

http://www.harpers.o...2006/06/0081080

June 2006 · Previous · Next PDF

Stabbed in the back! The past and future of a right-wing myth

By Kevin Baker

......The right's initial blindness toward first the Axis and then the Soviet threat in Europe; the disastrous military campaign waged by one of its icons; its feckless and even apocalyptic ideas for recouping its previous mistakes—all had been erased in much of the public consciousness by the stab in the back, a vote-winning tale of deviancy, subversion, and intentional defeat radiating from Yalta all the way to Korea. The Vietnam War, however, would call for yet another expansion of the dolchstosslegende.

Vietnam was the sort of war Republicans had been clamoring to fight for two decades. A liberal administration had started it, with misplaced bravado, but it had been egged on—even dared—to take the plunge into full-scale war by prevailing right-wing dogma. When the war soured, Republicans first tried to blame not the failed premise of the domino theory or the flawed diplomacy of the Kennedy Administration or the near-universal American failure to recognize Vietnam's boundless desire for self-determination—no, it was the old fallbacks of appeasement, defeatism, and treachery in high places.

Once again, we were told that American troops were not being “allowed” to win, if they could not mine Haiphong harbor, or flatten Hanoi, or reduce all of North Vietnam to a parking lot. Yet Vietnam was a war with no real defeats on the ground. U.S. troops won every battle of any significance and inflicted exponentially greater casualties on the enemy than they suffered themselves. Even the great debacle of the war, the 1968 Tet offensive, ended with an overwhelming American military victory and the Viet Cong permanently expunged as an effective fighting force. It is difficult to claim betrayal when you do not lose a battle.

Worse yet, Republicans could not provide any meaningful alternative strategy. Nixon was able to take office in 1969 only by offering a “secret plan” to get the boys home from Vietnam, not by promising to hugely escalate the fighting or risk a wider conflict. Richard Nixon became the first Republican president since the turn of the century to take office while a major war still hung in the balance, and now all the fantasies began to fall away. More than 21,000 Americans were killed in Vietnam during Nixon's time in office, and there were no Democrats to blame it on.

The only political hope for the administration was to turn its gaze outward—to blame the people themselves, or at least a portion of them. Nixon, as historian Rick Perlstein has observed, “had a gift for looking beneath social surfaces to see and exploit subterranean anxieties,” and he had been on hand at the creation of this game. Initially, the divisions he sought to exploit were much the same as those he had manipulated back in the 1940s, though they were now aimed at broad swaths of the general public—the children of the New Deal, as it were. The leading tactics included employment of the same sorts of code words so bluntly wielded twenty years before, along with a good deal more street muscle.

Over and over, antiwar protesters were called Communists, perverts, or simply “bums”—the last epithet from Nixon's own lips. The large percentage of college students in their ranks were depicted as spoiled, obnoxious, ungrateful children. Older, more established dissidents were ridiculed by Nixon's vice president, Spiro Agnew, in a series of William Safire‒authored speeches, as “nattering nabobs of negativity,” and, unforgettably, as “an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.” These invectives were, of course, doubly disingenuous; it was Agnew and Safire who very much wanted such persons to be known by the damning label of “intellectual,” and what the vice president was really calling them was fags.

All these bums and effetes might be un-American, but their disapproval still was sufficient to demoralize our fighting men in Vietnam and thereby put them in imminent peril. And on hand to take the torch from an increasingly beleaguered Nixon was a new Republican master at exploiting subterranean anxieties, Ronald Reagan. As early as 1969, Reagan was insisting that leaders of the massive Moratorium Days protests “lent comfort and aid” to the North Vietnamese, and that “some American will die tonight because of the activity in our streets.”

The Nixon Administration now had its new Hagens. People who voiced their opposition to the war were traitors and even killers, responsible for the death of American servicemen, and as such almost any action taken against them could be justified. The Nixon White House even had its own blue-collar shock troops. Repeatedly, on suspiciously media-heavy occasions, construction workers appeared to break up antiwar demonstrations and beat up peaceful demonstrators. The effete protesters had been shown up by real working-class Americans—and their class allies in the police force eagerly closed ranks.

Neither Nixon, nor Agnew, nor the war would survive a second term. With the shameful, panicked helicopter evacuation of Saigon, U.S. prestige in the world dropped precipitously—but none of the other dominoes followed. Once again, by 1975, the American right should have found itself utterly discredited. A war that conservatives had fervently supported had ended in defeat, but with none of the consequences they had prophesied. Instead, the entire operating right-wing belief in “monolithic communism” was debunked in the wake of our evacuation from Saigon, as Vietnam attacked Cambodia, China invaded Vietnam, and the Soviet Union and China clashed along their border.

Yet the cultural division that Richard Nixon had fomented to try to salvage the war in Vietnam would take on a life of its own long after the war was over and Nixon had been driven from office in disgrace. It cleverly focused on the men who had fought the war, rather than the war itself. If Vietnam had been an unnecessary sacrifice, if world Communism could no longer be passed off as a credible threat to the United States, then the betrayal of our fighting men must become the issue.

Vietnam, for the right, would come to be defined mainly through a series of closely related, culturally explosive totems. The protesters and the counterculture would be reduced to the single person of Jane Fonda, embalmed forever on a clip of film, traipsing around a North Vietnamese antiaircraft gun. The soldiers, meanwhile, were transformed into victims and martyrs. It became general knowledge that they had been savagely scorned and mocked upon their return to the United States; those returning through the San Francisco airport were especially liable to be spat upon by men and women protesting the war.

Of course, those who were able to return at all were the lucky ones. Soon after we had bugged out of Saigon, millions of Americans became convinced that American prisoners of war had been left behind in Vietnamese work camps, by a government that was too cowed or callous to insist upon their return. Numerous groups sprang up to demand their release, disseminating flags with a stark, black-and-white tableau of a prisoner's bowed head against the backdrop of a guard tower, a barbed-wire fence, and the legend: YOU ARE NOT FORGOTTEN POW*MIA.

It would do no good to point out that there is no objective evidence that veterans were ever spat upon by demonstrators or that POWs were ever left behind or that Jane Fonda's addle-headed mission to Hanoi did anything to undermine American forces. The stab-in-the-back myth is much more powerful than any of these facts, and it continues to grow more so as time passes. Just this past Christmas, one Faye Fiore wrote a feature for the Los Angeles Times about how returning Iraqi veterans are being showered with acts of good will by an adoring American public, “In contrast to the hostile stares that greeted many Vietnam veterans 40 years ago.” The POW/MIA flags, with their black-and-white iconography of shame, now fly everywhere in the United States, just under the Stars and Stripes; federal law even mandates that on at least six days a year—Memorial Day, Flag Day, Armed Forces Day, Veterans Day, Independence Day, and one day during POW/MIA Week (the third week of September)—they must be flown over nearly every single U.S. government building. There has been nothing else like them in the history of this country, and they have no parallel anywhere else in the world—these peculiar little banners, attached like a disclaimer to our national flag, with their message of surrender and humiliation, perennially accusing our government of betrayal.

If the power of the stab-in-the-back narrative from Vietnam is beyond question, it still raises the question of why. Why should we wish to maintain a narrative of horrendous national betrayal, one in which our own democratically elected government, and a large portion of our fellow citizens, are guilty of horribly betraying our fighting men?

The answer, I think, lies in Richard Nixon's ability to expand the Siegfried myth from the halls of power out into the streets. Government conspiracies are still culpable, of course; ironically, it was Nixon's own administration that first “left behind” American POWs in North Vietnam. Yet this makes little difference to the American right, which never considered Nixon ideologically pure enough to be a member in good standing, and which has always made hay by railing against government, even now that they are it. What Nixon and a few of his contemporaries did for the right was to make culture war the permanent condition of American politics.

On domestic issues as well as ones of foreign policy, from Ronald Reagan's mythical “welfare queens” through George Wallace's “pointy-headed intellectuals”; from Lee Atwater's characterization of Democrats as anti-family, anti-life, anti-God, down through the open, deliberate attempts of Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove to constantly describe opponents in words that made them seem bizarre, deviant, and “out of the mainstream,” the entire vernacular of American politics has been altered since Vietnam. Culture war has become the organizing principle of the right, unalterably convinced as it is that conservatives are an embattled majority, one that must stand ever vigilant against its unnatural enemies—from the “gay agenda,” to the advocates of Darwinism, to the “war against Christmas” last year.

This has become such an ingrained part of the right wing's belief system that the Bush Administration has now become the first government in our nation's history to fight a major war without seeking any sort of national solidarity. Far from it. The whole purpose of the war in Iraq—and the “war on terrorism”—seems to have been to foment division and to win elections by forcing Americans to choose between starkly different visions of what their country should be. Again and again, Bush and his confederates have used the cover of national security to push through an uncompromising right-wing agenda. Ignoring the broad leeway already provided the federal government to fight terrorists and conduct domestic surveillance, the administration has gone out of its way to claim vast new powers to detain, spy on, and imprison its own citizens, and to abduct and even torture foreigners—a subject we shall return to.....

http://web.archive.o...age_review.html

Jerry Lembcke. The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam. New York University Press. 1998.

Among the cultural images that create historical meaning about the American experience of the Vietnam War, that of the Vietnam veteran who was spat upon by antiwar protesters carries particular weight. Recent analysis of the effects of the Vietnam War in American culture has revealed that the dominant cultural narrative of Vietnam veterans has to do with their treatment after their return from the war rather than their experiences in the war. So, for example, the symbolic recognition of the veterans at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. (a memorial for the dead that is also specifically about the living) can be said to have offered recompense to veterans much more on the issue of their treatment at home than their service at war. 1

Jerry Lembcke's book looks at this image of the veteran who, having served his country and barely survived, is spat upon by representatives of the antiwar movement, and finds it to be an urban myth. Lembcke works hard to show that there is no evidence of such incidents taking place, and examines why this image nonetheless carries such tremendous cultural currency. He effectively demonstrates that, in fact, many Vietnam veterans turned against the war and formed important coalitions with the antiwar movement. Moreover, he pinpoints the ways in which the Nixon administration, and later the Bush administration during the Gulf War, had enormous stakes in depicting the antiwar movement as anti-veteran, effectively rewriting the cultural memory of protesters demonstrating at induction centers while recruits and draftees went off to war into a story of protesters demonstrating at airports when the worn veterans returned home. Lembcke makes clear that the government's stakes in this representation were high, in particular in terms of garnering public support for the Gulf War by convincing Americans that not supporting the troops was a fatal mistake of the Vietnam War. Once those hundreds of thousands of American troops were sent to the Persian Gulf, this narrative effectively helped to shut down public debate on the war's merits. 2

Using this image as his focal point, Lembcke, who is a veteran himself, examines the ways in which the spurned veteran has functioned as a myth that both aided in the stereotyping of the veteran as a mentally unstable psychopath and in demonizing the antiwar movement and the political Left. He covers this issue from many angles, discussing the role that well-meaning psychiatrists, in designating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a veteran ailment, played in perpetuating the myth of the veteran as isolated and unstable and analyzing the gendered aspects of the myth that women spit on men. Lembcke is at his most effective when examining the compelling history of the work of veterans against the war, the ways that the Nixon-Agnew administration created a public discourse of good and bad veterans, and the long-term effects of this myth on subsequent antiwar movements. 3

In taking on a topic that is both narrow (the specific image of the spat-upon veteran) and potentially vast (the cultural memory of the Vietnam veteran), Lembcke is faced with a particular set of challenges, and at times the book seems to be arguing not simply that no veterans were spit on by anyone but also that no veterans were ostracized after the war or mentally damaged by it. Furthermore, in arguing in detailed fashion about whether or not actual spitting took place, or, for instance, giving a detailed analysis of why the film Coming Home (1978) distorted the stories of the veterans on whom it was partially based, Lembcke seems at time to be arguing against himself. For as he makes clear, the cultural memory of the spat-upon veteran, which some veterans themselves remember, is, even if a kind of false memory, nonetheless still a memory that has cultural value: it acts as a symbol for the difficulties experienced by the veterans after the war and the invisibility they felt. At other times, Lembcke is skilled at walking that ever-important line between dispelling the myth and acknowledging the difficulties that do exist for many veterans. His book is an important contribution to creating a more complex analysis of the experience of Vietnam veterans and, importantly, of the ways in which the image of the Vietnam veteran (and the Vietnam MIA/POW) has been exploited to aid in furthering warfare. 4

Marita Sturken

University of Southern California

Dewey Canyon III, the protest in 1971 where vets (many VVAW) threw their war medals back at the capital building, is imortalized on the jacket of this insightful volume. Lembke dissects dozens of stories of 'Nam vets being spat on by the anti-war movement at home (usually, legend has it, by a young woman in the San Francisco airport). But even more importantly he eloquently exposes and breaks down who the myth serves, and the importance of accurate recollection:

"...Ironically if the real [emphasis added] Vietnam War had been remembered, the Gulf War might not have been fought. We need to take away the power of political and cultural institutions to mythologize our experiences. We need to show how myths are used by political institutions to manipulate the decision making process. And we need to dispel the power of myths like that of the spat-upon Vietnam veteran by debunking them."

"...instances of attacks of U.S. officers by their own men are all but forgotten in the popular remembrances of the Vietnam War. Many Americans today "know" that GIs were mistreated upon their return from Vietnam. Their images of Vietnam veterans run from the hapless sad sack to the freaky serial killer; for them post-traumatic stress disorder is a virtual synonym for the Vietnam veteran. But they have never heard of "fragging," the practice of soldiers killing their own officers. The true story of the widespread rebellion of troops in Vietnam and the affinity of GIs and veterans for the politics of the left has been lost in the myth of the spat-upon Vietnam veteran."

This is a must read for anyone fighting to keep the real legacies of the Vietnam War alive. Lembcke goes into the history of how important past wars, their veterans, and the common summation of the public, are invaluable in building for support for the next war. He's also got a great filmography and references for further study.

"...How Vietnam is to be remembered looms large on the agenda of the turn-of-the-century legacy studies. Remembered as a war that was lost because of betrayal at home, Vietnam becomes a modern day Alamo that must be avenged, a pretext for more war and generations of more veterans. Remembered as a war in which soldiers and pacifists joined hands to fight for peace, Vietnam symbolizes popular resistance to political authority and the dominant images of what it means to be a good American. By challenging myths like that of the Spat-upon Vietnam veteran, we reclaim our role in the writing of our own history, the construction of our own memory, and the making of our own identity."

Edited June 20, 2012 by Tom Scully

[Paul Trejo]

"What does what Chomsky, Cockburn, Goodman and Sir Seymour of McClain have to do with me. Nothing. I don't consider myself a leftist, at least what passes for one these days"

That right?

Well then lets just allow the complete decoupling of the JFK assassination from the following events and issues:

1) The further evolution of a permanent war economy.

2) the credibility of the billionaire's media

3) the assassination of the first detente

4) the development of the US Latin American relations ever since

5) the origins of NAFTA and Rocky's Free Trade Zone

6) the ability of the public to see and analyze the final fingerprints of the permanent military and intelligence bureaucracies before they went permanently sub rosa

7) The VIetnam War

8) The genocide of 1.25 million people in Indonesia

9) The Coup d'etat in Brazil in the early Spring of 1964

10) the transition of the US from industrial to finance capitalism...

11) more to come as I remember them...

ALL OF THESE ARE OF NATURAL CONCERN TO THE LEFT. Therefor, if the assassination was to be shorn of implications for these areas of concern, it would take a McLeftist (i.e. a US Foundation Funded quid pro quo ""leftist"") with credibility among the most critical audience whose skepticism needed to be worked over the most.

The assassination has-- for the general brainwashed corporate media american-- been entirely shorn of its historical implications. Regardless of one's political orientation it is imperative to recognize that the most important sheering is done by official McLeftists on their quid pro quo (not really) " "Alternative" radio shows.

10)

Nathaniel, who leads the left in the US today? I want to know. Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, Saul Alinsky and the A.D.A. were visible leaders in 1967, and still leaked Marx from every pore. After them - who?

I ask because in 1962, Dan Smoot, one of the extreme right media stars, published his landmark rightist screed, The Invisible Government, which for the first time exposed the CFR (Council on Foreign Relations), by naming its members. The right-wing named this privileged group, The Establishment.

That's pertinent because today the left-wing seems to echo, not Abbie Hoffman, but Dan Smoot.

As for Vietnam War protests, one can argue that General Edwin Walker was the first protester, because he quit the Army in 1961, as he said, because the Army planned to send him to Vietnam after Hawaii, and he had already promised himself that he would never again fight another No-win United Nations war as he did in Korea. (Walker quit the Army in protest of Vietnam, and he encouraged rightist youths in the Southern USA to follow his lead. Thus the Vietnam War protest was not purely left-wing, but a true, grass-roots movement with active members from both the extreme left and extreme right.)

Anyway, who leads the left today, in your opinion? What is their message, if not the rightist Dan Smoot message? Because, last time I looked, Marxism was on its death-bed in Cuba.

Best regards,

--Paul Trejo

[John Dolva]

This apparently wiilful ignorance dooms a proper analysis.

[Guest Robert Morrow]

Tom Scully: "It has been more than a day since I posted reliable information showing Mimi Alford's best friend to also be one of the closest people to David Rockefeller for more than 20 years, and a member of CFR."

Here is my reaction. So what? Who cares? Big deal. Mimi Alford had a lot of Republican friends. And your point is? Do you think David Rockefeller is behind books revealing John Kennedy's sexual escapades? Do you think it have to take a Rockefeller (or a rocket scientist) to get that stuff out? - it is so much to choose from.

Tom Scully ... have you ever heard of the word "coincidence" or perhaps the phrase "unrelated coincidence?"

You don't have be a CFR member or supporter or even a Republican to know John Kennedy was chasing lots of young women - Mimi Alford just ONE such example.

Edited June 23, 2012 by Robert Morrow

[Nathaniel Heidenheimer]

Paul I am forced to agree with Tom in his conclusion that there is no US left. This, however, does not mean that there is a shortage of fake leftists paid to pose for the sole purpose of spreading lies ESPECIALLY FOR THOSE WHO WOULD ONLY BELIEVE THEM IF THEY CAME FROM A MOUTH THAT SEEMED TO BE LEFT.

I have frequently heard people say that Chomsky, Goodman, etc have had the effect of dissuading them from looking into the JFK and RFK assassinations. Moreover, the widely accepted lie that JFK was just another Cold Warrior is accepted by 70% of the population because of work done by the fake leftists, whether the believer is leftist OR NOT.

The only leftists allowed in the US are writers who guarantee that this particular strain of left will self-abort before they become large enough to matter. It is 100% psyops, and anyone who dismisses this possibility out of hand simply needs to read more about the history of communications research.

The fake-leftward origin of most of the disinformation regarding the JFK assassination is a fact that cannot be denied and a fact that is far more important than many realize if one seeks to realize why so many have failed to connect the political assassinations to our current american fascism.

Edited June 24, 2012 by Nathaniel Heidenheimer

[Nathaniel Heidenheimer]

Official US McLeftists are allowed to print famous quotes from Smedley Butler. Yet this quote from David Shoup of the JCS is virtually unknown to readers of the major McLeftists.

After his retirement, Shoup became an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War. He publicly supported the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) VVAW by 1971. In May 1966, he said about the building war in Vietnam: “ I believe if we had, and would, keep our dirty, bloody, dollar-crooked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own. That they design and want. That they fight and work for... and not the American style, which they don't want. Not one crammed down their throats by the Americans. ”

This statement ties back to an assessment made by Shoup that "in every case... every senior officer that I knew... said we should never send ground forces into Southeast Asia."

Gee, I wonder why?

Could it be because the most senior of these senior officers took The Constitution seriously?... and where that would lead fledgling leftists...right into the No-Fly Zone that should be their widest horizon?

[Dawn Meredith]

"It has been several days since I posted in that thread that the author's best friend is the daughter of one of Goebbel's shining lights in America in 1941, a man also close to Gerald Ford. It has been more than a day since I posted reliable information showing Mimi Alford's best friend to also be one of the closest people to David Rockefeller for more than 20 years, and a member of CFR.

There has been no reaction posted on that thread to any of that information."

(Taken from a post make by John Simkin"

WOW, that is quite a sinister group of "connections".

Dawn

[Paul Trejo]

Paul I am forced to agree with Tom in his conclusion that there is no US left. This, however, does not mean that there is a shortage of fake leftists paid to pose for the sole purpose of spreading lies ESPECIALLY FOR THOSE WHO WOULD ONLY BELIEVE THEM IF THEY CAME FROM A MOUTH THAT SEEMED TO BE LEFT.

I have frequently heard people say that Chomsky Goodman etc have had the effect of dissuading them from looking into the JFK and RFK assassinations. Moreover, the widely accepted lie that JFK was just another Cold Warrior is accepted by 70% of the population because of work done by the fake leftists, whether the believer is leftist OR NOT.

The only leftists allowed in the US are writers who guarantee that this particular strain of left will self-abort before they become large enough to matter. It is 100% psyops, and anyone who dismisses this possibility out of hand simply needs to read more about the history of communications research.

The fake-leftward origin of most of the disinformation regarding the JFK assassination is a fact that cannot be denied and a fact that is far more important than many realize if one seeks to realize why so many have failed to connect the political assassinations to our current american fascism.

Sadly, Nathaniel, I'm inclined to think you're correct about the absence of a left-wing in the USA today. It seems that the McCarthy era did a completely thorough job through its next-generation presence, the John Birch Society, in its stated goal of wiping out the US Left.

The John Birch Society is still alive and well (http://www.jbs.org/) and has made considerable inroads in RepublicanTea Parties, IMHO, and in many back-roads in the USA and Alaska.

They offer a poor-man's political education, stil teaching that every Democratic (and most Republican) Presidents since FDR have been outright Communists and therefore Traitors. (By that logic, JFK deserved to die.)

The John Birch Society (JBS) is so right-wing it would be laughable except that it still has millions of members, and many of those members are successful and influential Americans.

In 1962 the JBS was enraged over the application of black student, James Meredith, to Ole Miss University. But only one member of the JBS stood up to lead the charge, and that was ex-General Edwin A. Walker, who had just lost his bid to be Governor of Texas, and had also been humiliated by his own pitiful performance of the April 1962 Senate Subcommittee on Military Indoctrination. (Rather than restore Walker's command back over the 24th Infantry Division in Augsburg, Germany, his Republican supporters in the Senate and Congress bid him a fond farewell and wrote him off.)

The protests at Ole Miss in Oxford, Mississippi did not go as well as the JBS had hoped. After RFK tossed Walker into an insane asylum, the Congressman from my home district in California (San Gabriel Valley) who was also the local chairman of the JBS, demanded that the JBS expel Walker from its rolls. But in five days Walker was released from the insane asylum with an apology, and in another eight weeks a Grand Jury dropped all charges against Walker. So our Congressman (namely, John Rousselot) joyously accepted Walker back into the JBS fold.

The key enemy for the JBS was the United Nations, which was a Communist organization, in their opinion. For the JBS, the most powerful USA advocates of the United Nations were in the CFR (Council on Foreign Relations). Dan Smoot, former spokesman for H.L. Hunt's radio show, Life Line, and famous for his own radio show and newsletter, was a big supporter of the JBS, as well as many ex-Nazi German officers who had settled in Washington DC. In the early '60's Dan Smoot exposed the CFR by naming every one of its members in print. The extreme right-wing had a field day with their local Conspiracy theories, tracking and harassing the members of the CFR (and they still enjoy this sport today).

In 1960's the next most hated enemy of the JBS was Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren, who had ruled that public schools should finally be racially integrated. Racial integration was, for the JBS, a 100% Communist proposal, designed only to weaken the USA. Along with Earl Warren, of course, was Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement in the 1960's, which the JBS also regarded as a Communist plot.

The JBS today remains perhaps the most vocal, outspoken and widely influential critic of the USA within the USA. They would like to roll back all policies from FDR onward -- social security, food stamps, unemployment checks, minimum wage, anti-discrimination in the workforce, public school bussing, government regulation of banks and industry -- and especially the income tax. The more radical among them would also like to roll back racial integration of schools, protection for unions, women's rights, gay rights, and Civil Rights in general.

The enemy for the JBS remains -- wait for it -- secret Communists. These secret Communists, they still insist, are in Washington DC, and have been secretly supporting Islamic Terrorist groups in order to undermine the USA. So, the UN, the CFR, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderbergers, Skull & Crossbones, and, yes, even the Masons -- these are the true enemies of American Freedoms according to the amateur politicians of our small towns across the USA who meet at JBS gatherings.

What does the left-wing have to counter-balance this grass-roots populist force to be reckoned with?

Nothing, as far as I can see. There is no more ADA, no more CPUSA, no more Bread-and-Roses bookstore chain. It is sad, but the most radical among the left-wing today seem largely to echo the JBS in their complaints against the CFR, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderbergers and Skull & Crossbones.

Whlie today's Left does not actually join the rolls of the the JBS; instead they tend to follow Libertarians and call for Radical Individualism.

In my opinion, when the Berlin Wall fell in 1990, and the USSR fell shortly after that, the cause of Marxist Collectivism collapsed along with them. Today, even the so-called People's Republic of China has little to do with Marx or Mao, but instead follows Chairmain Deng Xiao Ping's vision for friendship with the Free Market and the USA. Today, most USA corporations have moved their factories to China, to make the biggest profits of their careers.

The world is vastly different today -- and I can't find the left-wing anywhere. Where are they? If I meet a person claiming to be left-wing today, I feel as though I'm meeting a cosmic alien and I'm tempted to blurt out -- Take Me to your Leader!

Best regards,

--Paul Trejo

<edit typos>

Edited June 24, 2012 by Paul Trejo

[Nathaniel Heidenheimer]

Paul, I think the main reason there is no left today is because of the success of top-down CIA media operations. I do not think that the reason is because of a lack of relevance of left ideas. These top-down media operations have largely dealt with creating false dichotomies between "structural" analysis on the one hand, and key events that are more open to large numbers of people to interpret, on the other hand.

These successful media ops-- as best exemplified in the CIA's Encounter Magazine-- but which are being practiced on a much wider and more sophisticated scale today, have in essence made the tip of the iceberg seem like the opposite of the iceberg. I.e the RFK assassination is portrayed as somehow "the opposite" of the institutions that produced it. This of course is BS but it keeps people employed and safe for capitalism.

[Paul Trejo]

OK, I admit that last post was out of left field. But here's what I really wanted to say.

Speaking about the left-wing and the right-wing with regard to the JFK assassination, I find it surprising that the public never seemed to catch on that Lee Harvey Oswald had no actual characteristics of left-wing activism, except a few superficial days in New Orleans.

People point to Oswald's handing out leaflets for the FPCC (Fair Play for Cuba Committee) for a few weeks around August, 1963, but they conveniently separate that act from the fact that Oswald's FPCC chapter in New Orleans was a fake. It had no other members aside from himself and his alias, Alek Hidell (whose membership card Lee forced Marina to sign). Even Marina refused to join.

The FPCC in New York categorically instructed Oswald to desist from using their name in his fictitious Chapter. This was a fiction -- so it was the opposite of what it pretended to be. It pretended to be a real, left-wing organization, therefore it was really a right-wing organization, a Front group, serving the interests of the people that Lee Harvey Oswald actually hung out with in 1963.

Who were his closest associates? We have Oswald in photos, radio at TV in the happy company of Carlos Bringuier (DRE) and Ed Butler (INCA), pretending to be an FPCC officer each time. (Ed Butler was a propaganda specialist for Radio Free Cuba, which was very comfortably funded by wealthy Cuban Exiles as well as by the CIA.)

Who else did Oswald hang out with in New Orleans in the summer of 1963? We know for a fact that he didn't hang out with FPCC members in New Orleans -- BECAUSE THEY DIDN'T EXIST. They were a figment of Lee Harvey Oswald's pretend Chapter. (Ed Butler's TV show scripted a question for the interviewer: "How many members are in your FPCC organization in New Orleans, Mr. Oswald." Oswald replied, "I cannot divulge that information by the policy of our organization, in order to protect the names of the individual members.") What a deceit.

Who else did Oswald hang out with in New Orleans in 1963? We have sworn testimony from several witnesses in Clinton, Louisiana - not just registering voters, but also town officials, identifying Lee Harvey Oswald and David Ferrie in the same car. (Clay Shaw or Guy Banister was a third party with them.)

CIA operative William Gaudet admitted that he saw Lee Harvey Oswald speaking with Guy Banister in New Orleans during the summer of 1963.

New Orleans garage owner, Adrian Alba, placed Oswald in his garage, often, receiving white envelopes from FBI agents, in the summer of 1963.

New Orleans attorney Dean Andrews says he saw Oswald in the company of 'gay Chicanos' whom he didn't identify, but since Dean Andrews was himself gay, and preferred to speak in cryptic beatnik jargon, we are left to speculate that Oswald was hanging out with Cuban Exiles, or -- if really Chicanos -- then probably with Loran Hall and Lawrence Howard from Los Angeles.

Harry Dean says that Loran Hall and Lawrence Howard -- two serious Chicanos from Los Angeles -- accompanied Lee Harvey Oswald from New Orleans to Dallas to meet Sylvia Odio (and other potential money sources) on their way to Mexico City.

Gerry Patrick Hemming placed Lee Harvey Oswald at the Lake Pontchartrain training camp for Cuban Exiles in the summer of 1963.

Marita Lorenz placed Lee Harvey Oswald on a gun running mission with Frank Sturgis from Miami to Dallas in the summer of 1963.

Antonio Veciana placed Lee Harvey Oswald in a meeting with himself (Alpha-66 leader) and David Atlee Phillips, alias Maurice Bishop, in the summer of 1963.

All these social contacts -- but not one of them was from the left wing. Oswald did not attend CPUSA meetings; he did not attend Socialist Worker meetings. He had no friends or associates among the left-wing citizens of New Orleans (however few that might have been in 1963).

Yet one may object -- we have photographs of Oswald holding his rifle and pistol and some radical political newspapers. Well, aside from the fact that the right-wing had just as many radical political newspapers as the left-wing, we are also reminded that Oswald had plausible deniability that those photographs were real. They were retouched many times, according to seasoned experts in photography.

Yet, one may object -- even Paul Trejo admits that Lee Harvey Oswald was (one of) the shooter(s) at ex-General Edwin Walker on 10 April 1963. Yes -- but I also maintain that at the time he was with Larrie and Bob Schmidt, two leaders of the CUSA (Conservative USA) movement, and was inspired by George De Mohrenshildt (a former Nazi spy) and Volkmar Schmidt (an oil company contractor) and Michael Paine (a defense industry analyst with security clearance).

So -- where is the actual evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald was left-wing? I see nothing convincing.

Yet the Warren Commission, in addition to falsely portraying Oswald as an anti-social loner, also portrayed Oswald as a Communist (which is a formal contradiction, in any case). They knew this was a lie -- but if Oswald's actual connections ever came out -- those right-wing connections would have revealed quickly and conclusively that Oswald had confederates who were still at large following the assassination of JFK.

The fact that the FBI and the Warren Commission (and the Justice Department) didn't want those right-wing names to become fodder for the Press is one of our best clues that the FBI knew very well who they were protecting, and they were dead serious about continuing that protection.

Best regards,

--Paul Trejo

Edited June 24, 2012 by Paul Trejo

[Richard Hocking]

"What does what Chomsky, Cockburn, Goodman and Sir Seymour of McClain have to do with me. Nothing. I don't consider myself a leftist, at least what passes for one these days"

That right?

Well then lets just allow the complete decoupling of the JFK assassination from the following events and issues:

1) The further evolution of a permanent war economy.

2) the credibility of the billionaire's media

3) the assassination of the first detente

4) the development of the US Latin American relations ever since

5) the origins of NAFTA and Rocky's Free Trade Zone

6) the ability of the public to see and analyze the final fingerprints of the permanent military and intelligence bureaucracies before they went permanently sub rosa

7) The VIetnam War

8) The genocide of 1.25 million people in Indonesia

9) The Coup d'etat in Brazil in the early Spring of 1964

10) the transition of the US from industrial to finance capitalism...

11) more to come as I remember them...

ALL OF THESE ARE OF NATURAL CONCERN TO THE LEFT. Therefor, if the assassination was to be shorn of implications for these areas of concern, it would take a McLeftist (i.e. a US Foundation Funded quid pro quo ""leftist"") with credibility among the most critical audience whose skepticism needed to be worked over the most.

The assassination has-- for the general brainwashed corporate media american-- been entirely shorn of its historical implications. Regardless of one's political orientation it is imperative to recognize that the most important sheering is done by official McLeftists on their quid pro quo (not really) " "Alternative" radio shows.

10)

Nathaniel,

Regarding item number 10 on your list, I think it safe to say capitalism no longer exists in this country. Capitalism requires competition in a Free Enterprise system, something that has vanished from the scene. IMO, I would substitute Financial Facism as a more accurate description of the new reality, a financial oligarchy that dominates and regulates not only the U.S. economy, but most of the planet.

Edited June 24, 2012 by Richard Hocking

[Paul Trejo]

Paul, I think the main reason there is no left today is because of the success of top-down CIA media operations....

Nathaniel, I think that if fascism has taken a great leap forward in the USA (as suggested by the JFK conspiracy and cover-up) then one of the key reasons is the fascist populism represented by the John Birch Society. One can make a case that the JBS emerges from the German-American protest against the defeat of Germany in WW2, with the objection that the USA smashed the wrong country in WW2.

In other words, the sentiment that the USA should have supported Nazi Germany against Soviet Russia is probably the inner core of the JBS ideology.

Although the JBS is officially against Antisemitism, countless reports of Jewish members have exclaimed that most local JBS groups insult Jews as a standard practice. For example, Bernard Weissman (who was interviewed by the Warren Commission for his role in the black-bordered ad on 22 November 1963) was ordered by his CUSA president, Larrie Schmidt, to convert to Christianity. This was after Larrie came into contact with the JBS via H.L. Hunt and ex-General Edwin A. Walker.

Best regards,

--Paul Trejo

Edited June 25, 2012 by Paul Trejo

[John Dolva]

Paul, I think the main reason there is no left today is because of the success of top-down CIA media operations....

Nathaniel, I think that if fascism has taken a great leap forward in the USA (as suggested by the JFK conspiracy and cover-up) then one of the key reasons is the fascist populism represented by the John Birch Society. One can make a case that the JBS emerges from the German-American protest against the defeat of Germany in WW2, with the objection that the USA smashed the wrong country in WW2.

In other words, the sentiment that the USA should have supported Nazi Germany against Soviet Russia is probably the inner core of the JBS ideology.

Although the JBS is officially against Antisemitism, countless reports of Jewish members have exclaimed that most local JBS groups insult Jews as a standard practice. For example, Bernard Weissman (who was interviewed by the Warren Commission for his role in the black-bordered ad on 22 November 1963) was ordered by his CUSA president, Larrie Schmidt, to convert to Christianity. This was after Larrie came into contact with the JBS via H.L. Hunt and ex-General Edwin A. Walker.

Best regards,

--Paul Trejo

I think there is ample evidence to show that contrary to popular history important elements of the USWofA's power structure did just that.

[Paul Trejo]

Paul, I think the main reason there is no left today is because of the success of top-down CIA media operations....

Nathaniel, I think that if fascism has taken a great leap forward in the USA (as suggested by the JFK conspiracy and cover-up) then one of the key reasons is the fascist populism represented by the John Birch Society. One can make a case that the JBS emerges from the German-American protest against the defeat of Germany in WW2, with the objection that the USA smashed the wrong country in WW2.

In other words, the sentiment that the USA should have supported Nazi Germany against Soviet Russia is probably the inner core of the JBS ideology.

Although the JBS is officially against Antisemitism, countless reports of Jewish members have exclaimed that most local JBS groups insult Jews as a standard practice. For example, Bernard Weissman (who was interviewed by the Warren Commission for his role in the black-bordered ad on 22 November 1963) was ordered by his CUSA president, Larrie Schmidt, to convert to Christianity. This was after Larrie came into contact with the JBS via H.L. Hunt and ex-General Edwin A. Walker.

Best regards,

--Paul Trejo

I think there is ample evidence to show that contrary to popular history important elements of the USWofA's power structure did just that.

John, who or what is the USWofA?

--Paul