Gaza and JFK

[Robert Morrow]

Let's fast forward to June 8, 1967. Lyndon Johnson, completely beholden to Zionist interests and in cahoots with Israel, tried to sink an American ship, the USS Liberty and murder everyone on board, so that the heinous crime could be blamed on Egypt so the USA would have a pretext to enter the Six Day War and bomb Nasser out of power. Nuclear war was avoided by about 5 minutes when LBJ and McNamara got on the military phone called back nuclear loaded planes that were headed to Cairo.

https://web.archive.org/web/20140704030539/http:/judymorrisreport.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-most-incredible-story-never-told.html

"Sacrificing Liberty" is a very good documentary on this topic: https://www.sacrificingliberty.com/

[James DiEugenio]

It has been noted by many respectable scholars that LBJ broke with Kennedy in many foreign policy areas.

Donald Gibson wrote about the break in the Dominican Republic with Juan Bosch.

Greg Poulgrain and Brad Simpson have written about how Johnson switched policies towards Sukarno and Indonesia.

John Newman, Peter Scott, and Fletcher Prouty proved that Johnson altered JFK's policy in Vietnam.

James Bill and Robert Rakove and others,  have shown how Johnson changed policies in the Middle East.

NIxon and Kissinger kept those policies in place.

And this was the beginning of the erasure of the Kennedy/Roosevelt view of foreign policy from the record books.

In my speech in Pittsburgh, I then noted that the official beginning of the onslaught of the Neocons was the Halloween Massacre, appropriately held under Warren Commission cover up artist, Gerald Ford, with Cheney and Rumsfeld doing the handiwork.

That was the official burial of JFK's ideas.

 

 

Edited December 25, 2023 by James DiEugenio

[Benjamin Cole]

6 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

It has been noted by many respectable scholars that LBJ broke with Kennedy in many foreign policy areas.

Donald Gibson wrote about the break in the Dominican Republic with Juan Bosch.

Greg Poulgrain and Brad Simpson have written about how Johnson switched policies towards Sukarno and Indonesia.

John Newman, Peter Scott, and Fletcher Prouty proved that Johnson altered JFK's policy in Vietnam.

James Bill and Robert Rakove and others,  have shown how Johnson changed policies in the Middle East.

NIxon and Kissinger kept those policies in place.

And this was the beginning of the erasure of the Kennedy/Roosevelt view of foreign policy from the record books.

In my speech in Pittsburgh, I then noted that the official beginning of the onslaught of the Neocons was the Halloween Massacre, appropriately held under Warren Commission cover up artist, Gerald Ford, with Cheney and Rumsfeld doing the handiwork.

That was the official burial of JFK's ideas.

 

 

Ir gets even uglier.

After the JFKA, the US ended up backing the Muslim anti-communist Suharto in the massacre of up to 3 million non-Muslims ("unbelievers"), or communists, or ethnic Chinese, as Suharto was considered an ally of US commercial interests. 

Suharto, who had cooperated with the Japanese during their occupation of Indonesia, after 1967 ruled Indonesia for 31 years, always murdering opponents, without number. 

Today this is Indonesia: "West Java, one of Indonesia’s most conservative Muslim provinces, where attacks against Christians, Ahmadis, and other religious minorities frequently make headlines in local news. Attacks against women’s rights, private gay parties, and transgender crowds are not uncommon."

But...not everything that happens globally is the fault of post-JFK errors. Hatred existed before LBJ, and after and today. Others are expert at manufacturing hatred for political or commercial ends. 

But perhaps JFK could have prevented the massacre 3 million fellow humans in Indonesia in 1967. That alone would have been a huge achievement. 

 

 

[James DiEugenio]

This is one of the things we tried to put forth in the long version of the film.

I am very glad we did so, since I think its the first time anyone did that in a widely broadcast JFK documentary.

As Roger Hilsman said, there were certain policies in place in 1963 that were really Kennedy's.  Because, in fact, he was really his own Secretary of State.

In his book To Move a Nation, he says that Sukarno and Indonesia was one of them. Once Kennedy was gone, Johnson made quick work of the USA support for Sukarno.

Brad Simpson, who wrote a good book on this, Economists with Guns,  told Oliver that if Kennedy had lived, Suharto would not have been able to do what he did in Indonesia.

PS But Ben, I have never seen that figure so high on deaths in Indonesia.  The highest I have seen is about 750 K- to one million.  What is your source for that 3 M?

[Benjamin Cole]

33 minutes ago, James DiEugenio said:

This is one of the things we tried to put forth in the long version of the film.

I am very glad we did so, since I think its the first time anyone did that in a widely broadcast JFK documentary.

As Roger Hilsman said, there were certain policies in place in 1963 that were really Kennedy's.  Because, in fact, he was really his own Secretary of State.

In his book To Move a Nation, he says that Sukarno and Indonesia was one of them. Once Kennedy was gone, Johnson made quick work of the USA support for Sukarno.

Brad Simpson, who wrote a good book on this, Economists with Guns,  told Oliver that if Kennedy had lived, Suharto would not have been able to do what he did in Indonesia.

PS But Ben, I have never seen that figure so high on deaths in Indonesia.  The highest I have seen is about 750 K- to one million.  What is your source for that 3 M?

JD-

 Gellately, Robert; Kiernan, Ben (July 2003). The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective. Cambridge University Press. pp. 290–291. ISBN 0-521-52750-3. 

Of course, it is an estimate. 

This is from Al Jazeera 2012, and also mention three million massacred, and that it was "mostly Muslim youth" who inflicted such horror on their fellow humans: 

It was one of the bloodiest massacres of the 20th century, well hidden from the outside world - the systematic killing of communists or alleged communists in Indonesia in 1965 and 1966. Researchers estimate that between one and three million people died.

Connect With 101 East     Never before have the executioners spoken out in as much detail as in the recently-released documentary The Act of Killing. In this film, killers in North Sumatra give horrifying accounts of their executions, and even re-enact them. The killers have always considered themselves heroes because their acts were supported by the government and large parts of society. Many executions were directly committed by the military. In the years that followed, Indonesians were bombarded with anti-communist propaganda and, until today, most people do not know what really happened. The film, and a recent report by the Indonesian national human rights commission that called the killings crimes against humanity, have launched a new debate on how the country should deal with this very traumatic past. Mass graves have yet to be exhumed and victims are yet to see some kind of justice. In many villages, killers and victims' relatives are still living with the awkward reality that 'our neighbour has killed my father'. Al Jazeera's Step Vaessen talks to former executioners and finds out why so many people - mostly Muslim youths - turned into cold-blooded killers, and why this dark episode in Indonesian history is still very sensitive and alive today. 'The Act of Killing'   By Syarina Hasibuan, producer When a friend told me of a documentary about an executioner involved in the killing of alleged communists in 1965, I did not believe her. I had never heard of anyone confessing to this - let alone a documentary about it screening at international film festivals. I was dying to see it and, luckily enough, I was one of the first Indonesians, along with a small group of journalists, to attend a secret screening of The Act of Killing in Jakarta. We were told not to reveal the location of the screening for security reasons, which reveals just how sensitive this bloody period in Indonesian history remains today. After I watched it I felt shocked, confused and betrayed. Shocked to find out how horrible the situation was at that time - with people living in fear and killings taking place everywhere, every day. Confused because I did not know what to think of Anwar Congo, the executioner in the film. Somehow I did not hate him because I saw him as an uneducated man, brainwashed by the government into believing that he was doing the right thing by killing all those people. It was clear that his actions haunted him for life. I felt betrayed because the government never told us the real story when I was growing up. They lied to us. And now I wanted to know more. As an Indonesian who grew up during President Suharto's 'New Order' regime, I was taught that the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), which was one of the biggest political parties in 1965, was violent and that its members did not believe in God. When I was a child, if we hated someone we used to call him or her a communist - meaning that we thought the person was evil. That is how brainwashed I was. In elementary school every year on September 30, teachers would ask us to watch a three-and-a-half hour long government sponsored film about how the Communist Party had planned to topple the government. The film showed how, on one day in 1965, the PKI had kidnapped seven top military men in the middle of the night, killed one of them in front of his wife and children, and brought the others to a rubber plantation, where they tortured and mutilated them. Throughout it all, they were singing, dancing and shouting "Kill! Kill! Kill!". Then they threw the dead bodies into a well. Many of the scenes in that film were too violent for elementary school students to watch. But I guess the aim was to brainwash the younger generation, to imprint the most gruesome parts of that film onto our brains so that whenever we heard of the PKI we thought of evil. And, for a long time, it worked. I grew up not understanding what actually happened in 1965; I did not know that maybe up to three million people had been killed because they were accused of being involved in the PKI. If my parents or grandparents knew about it, they never spoke of it. After watching The Act of Killing I felt we should make our own story about the killings. I talked to victims, executioners, witnesses and investigators to find out more about what actually happened. And the more I talked to people, the more gruesome the picture that formed in my head. After the military accused the PKI of being behind the murder of the seven military men, PKI members all over Indonesia were hunted down, put in prison without trial, tortured or killed. Civilians and students from religious boarding schools were used as executioners. And the military released some of the most violent criminals from prisons and ordered them to carry out executions. Hundreds of dead bodies were found floating in rivers every day. The situation was so chaotic that a person could easily be accused of being a PKI member simply because someone did not like them. Killings even happened between family members. Ndoren is an old man who does not know his real age. He has only two teeth left, but smiles a lot. He told us he was an executioner. We went with him to Luweng Tikus, or the Rat hole as local people call it - the location where soldiers forced him to kill more than 40 people, some of whom he knew personally. In front of the 42 metre deep hole he told us his story, continuously warning us not to go any closer. The alleged communists were brought in by the military after walking in the dark for hours, with their hands tied. They were lined up in front of the hole. Then, one by one, Ndoren hit each of them on the back of the head with a crowbar and threw them into the hole. He said they hardly struggled, as if they had already accepted that they were going to die. The stench from the hole was so bad that villagers far away could not bear it. The hole was covered until 2002 when human rights activists opened it up and found human bones and skulls inside. After Suharto's downfall 14 years ago, people cautiously started to speak out. Victims and human rights organisations asked the government to at least apologise for what happened. Nearly 50 years after the events of those years, the National Commission for Human Rights conducted a four-year long investigation into the case and concluded that crimes against humanity were committed and that the military was responsible. Still nothing much changed. I am happy that elementary school students no longer have to watch the same propaganda film we were forced to endure. But Indonesia's 'killing fields' remain absent from the history books. The communists are still considered devil-like in the eyes of many Indonesians and grandchildren of Communist Party members still do not want to admit to this in public. There are still those who prefer not to talk about what happened in 1965. Why open up old wounds, they say. Let us keep it buried. But there are also many Indonesians, like myself, who want to know what really happened. What is it that has divided our country for so long? Did the PKI really plan a coup and kill those army generals, even though their position was so strong at the time? What was it that made my fellow Indonesians so willing to kill one another that they would even execute family members? I am happy that they have partially excavated Luweng Tikus and found the skeletons. But many others remain scattered across Indonesia. And we have a long way to go before we have all the answers we deserve. I believe that if we want to learn from the past we must know the truth about our history.

 

[Greg Doudna]

Speaking of genocide closer to home ... in 1982 I lived and worked in Eureka, California for about six months. It was a coincidence that during those few months I was there, news broke that a coup in Guatemala had occurred and a new general, Rios Montt, had taken power who was an evangelical Christian and member of a sectarian church headquartered none other than in Eureka, California, called Gospel Outreach. I had never heard of it before or the church's Lighthouse Ranch on some acreage in Humboldt County outside Eureka. 

Guatemala 1980s was the location of perhaps the worst and most horrible massacres of native peoples backed by US supported militaries perhaps in all of Latin American, in sheer numbers, exceeding the horrors of the more well-publicized El Salvador. I remember those days. In my linguistics undergraduate major at the University of Oregon in the 1980s there were in that department fieldworkers who worked in Central America studying indigenous languages and told firsthand some of the stories. 

What was going on in Guatemala was determined to be genocide by international definitions, and that was not long ago, this was western-hemisphere US, us, in our time (well, forty years ago). 

General Montt, a devout Christian, came to power in that coup in the midst of the ongoing carnage in Guatemala.

I saw Pat Robertson on TV on his national television program, the "700 Club", ecstatic that a fellow evangelical Christian was now in power in Guatemala. How God was moving in world affairs. Etc and etc. 

General Montt promised to restore order to Guatemala. As I recall he announced, everyone will obey the law, and any who do not will be shot. 

The reality was the genocidal actions carried out by the army continued and escalated under his time in power, and General Montt spent his old age in court facing criminal prosecution for crimes against humanity.

All of this holocaust was US supported. According to the Holocaust Museum Houston, during the full duration of what was considered a Maya holocaust which reached its peak intensity under General Montt, a reported 200,000 Maya Indians were massacred or disappeared and 646 Maya villages destroyed (https://hmh.org/library/research/genocide-in-guatemala-guide/). From a History Today article: 

While the genocidal killings have ended and dictator Efrain Rios Mott is dead, the United States has not atoned for its heinous actions in supporting the killings. The CIA is widely known to have understood its role in funding genocidal persecution whether intentionally or unintentionally. Regardless of the overarching goals of United States’ Cold War foreign policy in containing the spread of socialism throughout the world, the United States still bears responsibility in perpetuating genocide against the Mayan people of Guatemala. In combatting the denial of the Guatemalan genocide, citizens of both Guatemala and the United States must continue to stand up for the truth in remembering the atrocities of the past committed by both governments. By telling the stories of the Guatemalan Genocide and condemning the crimes against humanity perpetuated upon the Mayan people of Guatemala, further acts of genocide may be prevented in the battle against the violence of the state. (http://www.historyisnowmagazine.com/blog/2021/7/4/the-cold-war-era-guatemalan-genocide-and-americas-role-in-it)

Do most Americans know this history today? No. Just like Indonesia. The amnesia. So recent. No presidents, no CIA decision-makers, get held to account, criminally prosecuted, over things like this. It just goes on and on, again and again.   

It is hard to imagine JFK/RFK, not perfect, but that they would have gone along with that.  

[Miles Massicotte]

3 hours ago, Greg Doudna said:

Do most Americans know this history today? No. Just like Indonesia. The amnesia. So recent. No presidents, no CIA decision-makers, get held to account, criminally prosecuted, over things like this. It just goes on and on, again and again.   

"Happily for the busy lunatics who rule over us, we are permanently the United States of Amnesia. We learn nothing because we remember nothing." -Gore Vidal

[W. Niederhut]

On the subject of U.S. genocides since WWII, one of the most popular Global Research articles in history is this 2015 analysis by James A. Lucas. *

It includes detailed estimates of casualties committed by the CIA and U.S. military in multiple nations around the world since WWII-- totaling an estimated 20 million.

I vividly recall taking a psychiatric history from a Gulf War veteran at a local alcohol treatment facility back in the 1990s.  He described the horrific psychological trauma of seeing the charred bodies of thousands of Iraqi soldiers in burnt jeeps and trucks-- totaling about 200,000-- in the aftermath of General Norman Schwarzkopf's artillery barrage during GHWB's Gulf War.

That Gulf War carnage was largely blacked out of the sanitized U.S. mainstream media coverage.

And the Gulf War was celebrated as a glorious military triumph in the U.S. media, with almost no discussion of it's strangely deceptive origins.  (The later Neocon PNAC plan was a direct response to the disappointment of Cheney and Rumsfeld that Saddam had not been deposed during the Gulf War.)

People may recall that, in Dan Rather's famous interview of Saddam Hussein prior to the 2003 U.S./British invasion of Iraq, Saddam kept referring to George W. Bush as, "the Son of the Snake."

GHWB and Rumsfeld had actively armed Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime during the Reagan era Iran-Iraq War-- while simultaneously arming Iran in their Iran-Contra scheme.

*   The U.S. Has Killed More Than 20 Million People in 37 "Victim Nations" Since World War II - Global ResearchGlobal Research - Centre for Research on Globalization

Edited December 26, 2023 by W. Niederhut

[James DiEugenio]

BTW, Rick Sterling was just on Sabrina Salvati's video TV podcast, because the hostess wanted to talk about his JFK article.

She then cut to a short segment with Oliver Stone.

Maybe this is getting through? 

Edited December 27, 2023 by James DiEugenio

[Benjamin Cole]

13 hours ago, Greg Doudna said:

 

Speaking of genocide closer to home ... in 1982 I lived and worked in Eureka, California for about six months. It was a coincidence that during those few months I was there, news broke that a coup in Guatemala had occurred and a new general, Rios Montt, had taken power who was an evangelical Christian and member of a sectarian church headquartered none other than in Eureka, California, called Gospel Outreach. I had never heard of it before or the church's Lighthouse Ranch on some acreage in Humboldt County outside Eureka. 

Guatemala 1980s was the location of perhaps the worst and most horrible massacres of native peoples backed by US supported militaries perhaps in all of Latin American, in sheer numbers, exceeding the horrors of the more well-publicized El Salvador. I remember those days. In my linguistics undergraduate major at the University of Oregon in the 1980s there were in that department fieldworkers who worked in Central America studying indigenous languages and told firsthand some of the stories. 

What was going on in Guatemala was determined to be genocide by international definitions, and that was not long ago, this was western-hemisphere US, us, in our time (well, forty years ago). 

General Montt, a devout Christian, came to power in that coup in the midst of the ongoing carnage in Guatemala.

I saw Pat Robertson on TV on his national television program, the "700 Club", ecstatic that a fellow evangelical Christian was now in power in Guatemala. How God was moving in world affairs. Etc and etc. 

General Montt promised to restore order to Guatemala. As I recall he announced, everyone will obey the law, and any who do not will be shot. 

The reality was the genocidal actions carried out by the army continued and escalated under his time in power, and General Montt spent his old age in court facing criminal prosecution for crimes against humanity.

All of this holocaust was US supported. According to the Holocaust Museum Houston, during the full duration of what was considered a Maya holocaust which reached its peak intensity under General Montt, a reported 200,000 Maya Indians were massacred or disappeared and 646 Maya villages destroyed (https://hmh.org/library/research/genocide-in-guatemala-guide/). From a History Today article: 

While the genocidal killings have ended and dictator Efrain Rios Mott is dead, the United States has not atoned for its heinous actions in supporting the killings. The CIA is widely known to have understood its role in funding genocidal persecution whether intentionally or unintentionally. Regardless of the overarching goals of United States’ Cold War foreign policy in containing the spread of socialism throughout the world, the United States still bears responsibility in perpetuating genocide against the Mayan people of Guatemala. In combatting the denial of the Guatemalan genocide, citizens of both Guatemala and the United States must continue to stand up for the truth in remembering the atrocities of the past committed by both governments. By telling the stories of the Guatemalan Genocide and condemning the crimes against humanity perpetuated upon the Mayan people of Guatemala, further acts of genocide may be prevented in the battle against the violence of the state. (http://www.historyisnowmagazine.com/blog/2021/7/4/the-cold-war-era-guatemalan-genocide-and-americas-role-in-it)

Do most Americans know this history today? No. Just like Indonesia. The amnesia. So recent. No presidents, no CIA decision-makers, get held to account, criminally prosecuted, over things like this. It just goes on and on, again and again.   

It is hard to imagine JFK/RFK, not perfect, but that they would have gone along with that.  

GD-

Thank you for that grim reminder of US Latin American foreign policy. 

BTW, in the early 2000s I worked with a Mexican national in Los Angeles. I asked him about the Mexican government's persecution of Chiapas Native Americans, then in the news.  He described the Chiapas as troublemakers who do not speak Spanish, and who deserved their fate. 

After Mexican Independence, the national and local governments were generally genocidal, and for generations, against native peoples. 

None of this absolves US leadership or participation in various genocides. 

The US is complicit in leveraging and exploiting extant genocidal tendencies. 

I wish I had an answer as to how to stop these pogroms. 

And to cheer you up this holiday season---

"The (Syrian) war has resulted in an estimated 470,000–610,000 violent deaths, making it the second deadliest conflict of the 21st century, after the Second Congo War.^[21] International organizations have accused virtually all sides involved—the Assad government, IS, opposition groups, Iran, Russia,^[22] Turkey,^[23] and the U.S.-led coalition^[24]—of severe human rights violations and massacres.^[25]"

 

[Michael Griffith]

On 12/23/2023 at 12:09 PM, James DiEugenio said:

I just posted this last night at my substack and its getting a nice response.

I think its because, like most of Kennedy's policies, very few people know what his Middle East policy really was.  The letters Monica Wiesak uncovered from when JFK was in Palestine are really something.  They explain Kennedy's backing of the right of return for the Palestinians.

One of the comments I got is that people do not understand how far to the right the Democratic Party has gone.  I agree and that is one thing I am trying to show.  The other thing is that the JFK case is not a subject for a museum.  If you know what Kennedy was trying to do and how much he opposed Foster Dulles, it impacts today's headlines.  In other words, it lives.

https://jamesanthonydieugenio.substack.com/p/gaza-and-jfk

I think this is sick, revolting radical trash that grossly distorts JFK's position on Israel, the Palestinians' so-called "right of return," and the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is especially sickening that you would post this garbage so soon after Hamas's barbaric attack on Israel in which Hamas tortured and murdered women and children, routinely used civilians as human shields, and used hospitals and medical clinics as shields.

Just a little history refresher here: The Palestinians were offered their own homeland in the 1947 UN partition plan for Palestine. After the terrible slaughter of the Jews in the Holocaust, most of the world recognized that the Jews needed a nation of their own, and so the UN voted to create a small Jewish nation in Palestine. The partition plan gave the majority of the best land to the Palestinians. But Palestinian leaders rejected the UN plan because they were so certain that their Arab buddies could easily maul the Jews and expel them once and for all.

I might add that in several areas, Palestinian leaders urged Palestinians to temporarily vacate their homes so as to make it easier for the Arab armies to sweep in and maul the Jews. Palestinian leaders expressly promised that those vacating their homes would soon be able to return, and that there would be plenty of Jewish property to divide among them after the Jews were driven out. 

But, lo and behold, the Jews defeated the invading Arab armies and the Palestinian forces. The Palestinians would have never become refugees in such mass numbers if their leaders had not treacherously rejected the UN partition plan and invited Arab armies to attack the Jews. 

 

 

[Jonathan Cohen]

2 hours ago, Michael Griffith said:

The Palestinians would have never become refugees in such mass numbers if their leaders had not treacherously rejected the UN partition plan and invited Arab armies to attack the Jews. 

I don't agree with Michael Griffith on much of anything other than his critiques of Fletcher Prouty, but the above is a hugely important point rarely mentioned in current discourse on this subject.

[Sandy Larsen]

3 hours ago, Michael Griffith said:

Just a little history refresher here: The Palestinians were offered their own homeland in the 1947 UN partition plan for Palestine.

 

But isn't it true that the British pretty much stole the Palestinian region from the Arabs (Ottoman Empire) near the end of WWI? And unilaterally decided that much of the land would be given to the Jews (Balfour Declaration)?

If that's the case, then the UN partition plan you speak of would return to the Palestinians only a portion of what had earlier been theirs.

 

[W. Niederhut]

On the subject of Netanyahu's ethnic cleansing of Gaza, JFK's American University Peace speech, and RFK, Jr., Edward Curtin has published two recent articles.

People may recall that Curtin published a favorable, accurate review of JFK Revisited.  He was also an RFK, Jr. supporter, prior to RFK, Jr.'s defense of Netanyahu's recent Gaza war crimes-- where the civilian death toll has now surpassed 21,000, including more than 8,000 murdered children.

I posted the first Curtin article on the Political Discussion board last night, because I thought it deserved its own thread.

An Epistle to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., by Edward Curtin - The Unz Review

 

Edited December 28, 2023 by W. Niederhut

[James DiEugenio]

To Mike and Jonathan:

The struggle for control of Palestine started way before the so called Exodus of 1948.

And JFK mentions some of it in his letters from the late thirties.

The idea you are trying to put forth was exemplified by a book called From Time Immemorial by Joan Peters, championed by people like Alan Dershowitz and Martin Peretz.

That book was demolished twice, once by Yehoshua Porath in Ny Review of Books and by Norman Finklestein  in an article for In These Times.

Let us not get into the whole long story that goes back for literally centuries and picks up the pace with Herzl and his followers.

What I liked about Kennedy's approach was his ability to see both sides of the argument, something that he was good at. And his stalwart intent at maintaining a relationship with Nasser in the face of monumental odds. Plus the fact that he never gave up on the Johnson Plan.  And how that differs in every aspect from what happened later.

I am convinced after studying all this that the 1967 war would not have happened if Kennedy had lived, due to his relationship with Nasser.

Edited December 28, 2023 by James DiEugenio