11-01-2012, 04:55 AM
Greg Burnham Wrote:As one who considers Jim Fetzer among my closest friends and collaborators I found it difficult to write what I did early in the thread. The reason for this is because Jim is not only a treasure to me personally, but a treasure to the research community in general. In the past I have been accused of siding with him BECAUSE he is my friend, which is simply impossible for me to do. It is not how I work.
There are various topics that Jim has extensively researched, but I have not. I therefore remain mostly agnostic about those because I am unable to endorse them due to my not being qualified to render an informed opinion. However, it would be equally inappropriate for me to dismiss his findings for the same reason. I would only be competent if I actually put in the time and effort to thoroughly investigate the subject, which I am unwilling to do.
I regret my comments earlier referencing "desperation" because, taken out of context, it could easily be misinterpreted. The connotation that I was intending to convey was linked to Jim's presentation of his case and not the actual case itself. I have an informed opinion regarding tact, but not about all of his studies. In fact, even that could be clearer. It is mostly Jim's brashness that I see as coming across rather desperate. His presentation of the material itself is not.
Charles, I fail to see the point of the challenge, though. Truth is not decided by a show of hands...not in Galileo's day and not now.
Greg,
The point of the challenge is not to decide/determine truth, but rather to counter Jim's de facto arguments from authority by putting them to the test of peer review, so to speak.
I certainly do not consider myself to be Jim's peer in terms of either the quantity of quality of the lion's share of his JFK work. But his pre-LBJ mastermind/Hunt-is-to-be-trusted oeuvre is now almost fatally tainted by, among other public failings, his utterly mad endorsements of the bona fides of E. Howard Hunt's "confession" and the aforementioned "mastermind" characterization.
Jim can attempt to squirm off his own petard by employing all the rhetorical tricks in his bag. But his reckless, senseless defenses of the indefensible demand to be challenged. So I ask the very scholars Jim chose to publish in his aforementioned anthologies to step forward and be heard on the issues at hand.
And as for deciding the truth: If those scholars were unanimously to declare, absent presentation of compelling supporting evidence, that Hunt's "confession" should be accepted as a deathbed statement of facts as Hunt knew them and/or that LBJ was the "mastermind" or prime mover/initiator/Sponsor of the assassination, my positions would not change.
I am shocked and saddened by what I perceive to be Jim's decline. But as I've previously stated, what's at stake here is far greater than any man's reputation.