20-08-2013, 01:10 PM
Mitchell Severson Wrote:In the years that I've listened to the man speak and read his books and articles, I can only find one less than honorable tendency. Not a lie, but a willful ignorance that we would not find honorable. Namely, he will not admit (even to himself, I think) to the existence of political conspiracies. There are two obvious answers to compete with the "gatekeeper" interpretation: his "structural" interpretation of our politics and he is already lambasted as a paranoid mush-headed Marxist by those in the press and politics. He is semi-regularly referred to as a conspiracy theorist for rightly claiming that propaganda extensively exists in our media. I would rather he continue to get out the points that he can than sink his medium to small ship by admitting that JFK, RFK and MLK were killed by conspirators for political purposes or that the 1980 election was clearly stolen. I can live with that and I think we all can. And, for Christ's sake, he's been a stubborn old man for decades, maybe you're all just expecting too much out of him.
I think that the two reasons you give, Mitchell, may very well both have truth to them. The latter particularly in view of the fact that there was a period briefly (in the 70s? I don't remember precisely) when he actually did entertain the notion of conspiracy in the death of JFK.
The problem, as I see it, is not so much the JFK (or other) assassination(s) -- whether he believes there is a conspiracy or not -- but the historical distortions he will utter to support his claim of continuity between JFK & LBJ. Those should not go uncontested.