Thought You Might Want To Know

[Keith Millea]

From Alexander Cockburn

http://www.counterpunch.org/


On the other hand, there’s the matter of Lee Harvey Oswald – certainly, in my judgment, the lone assassin of John F. Kennedy. Let a CounterPuncher state what I’ve written about myself from time to time down the years.

Dear Alex,
In your brilliant survey of achievements and failures of American left from 1960 to 2010 you forget to mention about one signal achievement of left. That of eliminating an American president by one of them.
I have read some of the diary entries by Oswald when he was in Soviet Union. He was an idealistic left-wing young man, like most the Left which made the Sixties an exciting decade.
I can't imagine how anyone can deny he was a leftist. He was definitely angry that Kennedy was tormenting Cuban Communism and decided to stop Kennedy, a super war criminal like all American presidents, and succeeded.
William Manchester was right, The prevailing right wing anti-Kennedy atmosphere in Houston has nothing to do with Kennedy death. Unlike that rightwing, Oswald hated Kennedy for the right reasons.
It is difficult to imagine Israeli right wing denying Yigal Amir (who killed Rabin) was a rightwinger. They proudly accept Amir was a rightist. But not the American leftists.
Instead of accepting Oswald as their own, American leftists developed sudden compassion for arch criminal Kennedy and started the deplorable cottage industry of his Assassination cult which is still going strong.
Ajit Hegde

:heeeelllllooooo:

[Magda Hassan]

Oh, yes, AC has some strange thoughts on a few issues and this is one of them. Why he is using Ajit Hegde to back him up I don't know. S/he seems pretty deluded about Oswald also. I think some reading is in order for them. You don't have to do too much to work out that Oswald was no lefty. And the reason he was never 'claimed' by the left was that they had never heard of him as he never hung around with them or worked for them. and that would be because he wasn't one of them. He was too busy hanging out with those well known leftists the White Russians and John Birchers and all sorts of intel types.

[Ed Jewett]

I finished "JFKU".

The operative phrase was "beyond peradventure of doubt".

Thank you, Mr. Douglass. Thank you, Orbis Books.

[Magda Hassan]

Hey, Ed, are you up for doing a review of JFKU? In the JFK forum and Books?

[Ed Jewett]

Magda, my review of "JFKU" was in the works. I was going to tell you to be patient, that I would try to have it done and posted within a week. There are, of course, other reviews out there by far better and more knowledgeable researchers and writers than I.

Earlier interviews I'd seen with the author suggested Douglass does not work online much (if at all), but I'd love to have him here. There are people in the world -- Peter Dale Scott, David Ray Griffin, this fellow, perhaps a handful of others -- with whom we should be collaborating.

But, here, spontaneously, in short terms:

The book by James Douglass entitled "JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters" is one of the best and most important books I've read in some time, ranking with the work of Peter Dale Scott and David Ray Griffin. He addresses superbly all four elements in the title.

I learned things about the event(s) I did not know, mostly because I was unaware of the depth, breadth and proof of information that emerged in the 90's. What someone else has described as repetition I took as layering, a spiral re-coating. Douglass' work is a tapestry in whihc he left and then returned to tape up again an important thread so as to advance it and tie it to another.

While Douglass does not discuss 9/11, the parallels in terms of black ops, cover-up, media silence, etc. are obvious. He does a superb job of explaining how the CIA, even back then let alone today, has infiltrated all corners of the government and the media, how compartmentalization works (putting to rest all those "debunking" themes that such a conspiracy would have taken too many people, and especially the one about 'how come no one has spoken up?'), and how cover-up was/is accomplished.

One of the more powerful things about this book (they do not detract from the rigor of the research) is that Douglass gives the reader gets a feeling for JFK -- the man, the leader, the human-- that has perhaps been missing in much of the research and commentary of late because it focused on the minutiae. Douglass was clearly informed by Vincent Salandra's perspective and stepped back away from the detail and painted with a broad brush.

It is a very moving book. After forty some odd years, one would think the tear ducts had been emptied; Douglass fills them up and makes them flow without being maudlin or gaudy about it, or using it as a literary device.

The most powerful thing about the book for me personally, having been an adolescent in the early 60's who remembers well the nuclear tensions and the specific events -- the B-58 Hustlers flying treetop missions over the hedgerows in my backyard, my future brother-in-law detained in the Navy to work the blockade -- is the focus, borne of Douglass' own witnessing, on the nuclear issues. Those issues and the very same internal US political tensions and questions are alive today in some dark and quiet corners. While waiting for the delivery of "JFKU", I read Douglass' first book "Resistance and Contemplation" which called to me as a human and a Christian; indeed, I would not crack "JFKU" until I could better understand the unlikely person called to write it. The themes in JFKU of "Pacem in Terris", the American University speech, and JFK's growing awareness or turning were first explored and exposed in "R&C".

JFK said, in that important commencement address that the media ignored then and continues to ignore now, that -- in the end -- we are all mortal, and we all cherish our children's future. The book showed us the human in him that cherished his children and who was mortal.

Even after having been gripped by the fervor and passion of trying to figure out what happened in Dealey Plaza, I as reader came to great clarity. The issue, especially for me, however, was not closure, but a renewal, a beginning, a re-commitment in the face of the inexorable and infernal military machine that today continues to kill at will and threaten the globe in so many ways. We missed the opportunity to take up the banner that fell in Dealey Plaza back then; we cannot afford to fail to do so now. Douglass asks "Have we reached the point where the state itself has become an enemy of the people....?"

I suspect I shall return again, and again, to the pages of these two books by Douglass (and no doubt will read his others in good time) in order to harvest and sow its seeds. Douglass' book focuses on the President and his death, the governmental nexus that was responsible for it and accomplished its cover-up (an effort still underway nearly half a century later), but he leaves the focus on the reader through the question left hanging in the air :

So what are you going to do now?

[Phil Dragoo]

The pronunciamento from Ajit Hegde as Cockburn's designated spokesperson is ignorance and arrogance in equal measure.

A double shot of myopia masquerading as profundity: a) that Oswald was a leftist; b) that Kennedy was "a super war criminal".

Oswald took on an intelligence job as a penetration agent, then served to damage the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, all while eschewing any outright membership in any party or organization of the left, while remaining BFF with Guy Banister, David Ferrie, and (per Antonio Veciana) David Atlee Phillips. Who can forget that awful leftist Georges de Mohrenschildt.

Kennedy the "super war criminal" was publicly executed for daring to remove America from the Road to the Vietnam War, having refused to film Road to Havana, and Dr. Strangelove II: How I Stopped Worrying and Went Preemptive on Nikita.

Thanks to the superlative Douglass JFK and the Unspeakable nobly reviewed herein we are again presented with Kennedy the peacemaker and Oswald the Spy Who Tried to Come In From the Cold War when he called to warn of the Chicago attempt.