Why "Left Gatekeeping" is the single biggest obstacle to making JFK research "actionable intelligenc

[Tracy Riddle]

http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-legacy-...gy/5362090

Another example of left gatekeeping, a particularly ignorant one.

For all the wishful thinking about what Kennedy would have done in Indochina had he lived, the inescapable truth, as opposed to the fantasy, is that he escalated the war and initiated increasing levels of terror that eventually resulted in the deaths of millions. Significantly, there is no mention of withdrawal short of victory in the many Camelot memoirs, biographies and histories until after the tide had turned dramatically against U.S. aggression. Only then did the myth of "Kennedy the Peacemaker" emerge.

Perhaps the JFK cult can be explained by the odious legacies of his two immediate successors, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, both of whom massively escalated the carnage in Indochina and ultimately abdicated in disgrace. Odious their legacies may be but there's no way around the fact that Kennedy's legacy smells just as foul. Such an explanation also obscures the fact that it was Kennedy who established the terms for the domestic conflict that would rage throughout the 1960's outraged hostility on the part of the ruling class to the democracy movements that shook the empire to its foundations. It is those movements that will be remembered and celebrated long after the JFK cult hopefully, eventually, finally, finds its rightful resting place in the proverbial dustbin of history.


Andy Piascik is a long-time activist and award-winning author who writes for Z, Counterpunch and many other publications and websites. He can be reached at andypiascik@yahoo.com.

[Albert Doyle]

Piascik sounds like he has something unspeakable on his conscience...

[Magda Hassan]

Just sounds completely uneducated on the matter to me.

[Tracy Riddle]

I suspect he is a disciple of Alexander Cockburn.

It's infuriating because otherwise Alexander (and Leslie) Cockburn did a lot of great work on other subjects.

I.F. Stone, who I otherwise admire greatly, stuck his head in the sand on the JFK assassination. Here's a guy who was the first to suspect that the Gulf of Tonkin was a lie. His Hidden History of the Korean War reveals things about that war that mainstream histories still don't talk about.

Sylvia Meagher: "In his weekly newsletter he published a heated defense of the Report...Two years later questions about the Warren Report and demands for a re-opening of the investigation issued from every quarter of the political spectrum, and such men as Max Lerner, Harrison Salisbury and Alistair Cooke exhibited the good grace of admitting that their first enthusiasm had been ill-founded, yet Stone never revised his original strange partisanship." She theorizes that Stone supported the WR because he and other elements of the Left were relieved that the assassination was not blamed on a communist conspiracy, which might have led to a witch hunt.

These are examples of people who don't need to be controlled or paid to be gatekeepers; they do it out of fear or because they have certain ideological fixations or political prejudices they can't get over.

[Kara Dellacioppa]

As someone who works in the University, I see this 'lobotomization' everyday, although I think that people are generally willing to talk about cointelpro and the assasination of MLK but thats generally as far as it goes. (i suspect people accept govt involvement in the MLK assasination because they can attribute his assasination to racism rather than a grander agenda) ... I know when I talk to my "leftist" colleagues about the JFK assasination, all i get are blank stares... as Nathaniel regularly points out, Foundations fund certain kinds of social research and not others... and they fund social movements and university scholarship.... this funding is key to controlling the narrative coming from the universities and the NGO/social movement sector... the creation of "civil society" as an "independent' actor is ... im often reminded of the emergence of SDS and how the ford foundation literally picked off activists and offered them "grants" to re focus their energies from transforming society to projects of university reform...

David, I think part of the reason is 1) censorship and 2) new modes of academic fashion that made analyzing the Military Industrial Congressional Complex unfashionable.

As an example--one among millions possible-- lets look at the discoveries of Bill Kelly re Collins Radio and their role in Dallas, Air Force One , Vietnam and the the CIA's Indonesian Genocide (the last connection is made by Douglass not Kelley)

Now today this sort of article would be confined to very small circulation sites. Was this always the case? Wasn't there a time -- say late 1960s to mid seventies -- when this grey area between corporations and government was investigated way more by media and ALSO considered the proper domain of the left?

Not anymore.

How and why did that change happen?

Marketing.

Similar shifts have happened in academia to change what was once considered the rational domain of the left from public expenditures involving the MICC to culture wars. Leading writers on left sites, some of which are excellent like Glen Ford, are seemingly lobotomized when it comes to their writing about the the JFK and RFK. MLK is permissible exception because if feeds into the wealth of division, but this , ironically misses the reason that the National Security State had him assassinated: the coalition politics he threatened with his Vietnam activism and his poor people's campaign. That is never mentioned in academia anymore.

We have a fake left, and have had one for a long time. They often write great stuff, but it is quid pro quo and the quo is never again looking at the National Security State AS A SYSTEM, the way the left did in the 1960's and 70s. If you read, say, a book about the Brazil Coup of 1964 published in 1977 there will be all kinds of references to CIA and military intel. Not one published in 1985 or later.

[Tracy Riddle]

I've had a few interesting debates in Amazon comments with lone-nutters recently. One copied and pasted from Bugliosi and told me that Oswald's room at Beckley had no windows, so why would he need curtain rods? Yup, no windows, except for the one entire wall of his room.

It's like they give these people a basic crash course and just send them out there unprepared to really debate the subject.

[Nathaniel Heidenheimer]

https://deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/sho...r89WWRDtU0

NOAM CHOMSKY, JOHN FOSTER DULLES AND CONRAD ADENAUER VS JFK AND KHRUSHCHEV: WHOSE SIDE ARE US """""LEFT"""""""""""""" PUBLICATIONS REALLY ON?

[Nathaniel Heidenheimer]

Any analysis of "Alternative News" sites like Truthout, Counterpunch , TomDispatch etc. must OF NECESSITY also take into consideration the quid pro quo factor of their Foundation funding.

Compare what the leading "leftists?" of the last 30 years-- Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, Seymour Hersh and now it seems Glen Ford-- have written on non- National Security State issue with what they write about the key moments of National Security State history involving POLITICAL ASSASSINATIONS.

These assassinations are not about individuals, but rather about mouthpiece (formal politics) and french horn (the since rotted away social movements that these mouthpieces are THEORETICALLY SUPPOSED TO represent).

Go ahead compare the often outstanding quality of their writing on the policies of non-Assassinated vs. their writing on the assassinated Democrats of the left-liberal coalition that was made extinct THE LAST TIME IN AMERICAN HISTORY THAT THE COUNTRY WAS NOT MOVING RIGHTWARDS.

There is a huge sample size of their writings to make this comparison easy enough, should one want to take what I call "The Encounter Magazine Test" i.e . the informed questioning as to whether or not these writers are writing to steer real leftist readers away from inquiry into why the mouthpieces were all shot and crashed to death.

Both the mouthpiece and the French Horn are needed to make notes that waft full-spectrum. For 50 years, the left has been the target of deliberate sparing of key truths re The National Security State. See Fred Cook-- the lead investigative reporter for The Nation -- and his comments about how that magazines editor Cary McWilliams censored and blocked his coverage of the JFK Assassination. Also see more recently the historian Joseph McBride about how The Nation inflicted a CIA connected editor on his articles re George Bush In Dallas on November, 1963 [not that I personally jump to all the conclusions that some have regarding this perhaps too Zambonied ice-rink]

Let's make 2014 the year we put mouthpiece and french horn together.

To make that happen we will have to ask some hard questions, and not assume that we know the answers. We will also have to OURSELVES MEDIATE the discussion, because the internet, whether OSTENSIBLY left, OSTENSIBLY right, or OSTENSIBLY center, has a way of finding "wealth in division" in the words of the once melodious-over-moats Lou Reed.

The quo's the thing that makes the quid not ring.

[Nathaniel Heidenheimer]

On the one hand the "left" claims to be opposed to the MICC. But for them NOW (but not always) the MICC remains an abstraction. The writers of the controlled left are published on condition that they help KEEP IT AN ABSTRACTION.

This explains why the biggest lies and or distortions re JFK always seem to come from the ostensible left. You need the Cerberus on the left cave because THAT IS WHERE THE POLITICAL ASSASSINATIONS will take the general population, UNLESS leading foundation funded OSTENSIBLY left writers do not scare them away from there!
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Historical Brainwashing v Historical Dry-Cleaning

Historical brainwashing: censoring genocides n such
Historical dry cleaning: scattering the cause and effect and policy implications of events with fake dissidents, so that the alternative narration to the state's will remain infinitely scattered into a false, top-down, administered "anarchism"

[Tracy Riddle]

A huge insight for me in recent years has been that "conspiracies" are only of interest to people in the political world if they are politically useful to them somehow. For example, "Watergate" (the official version) was useful to the Democrats, and they jealously guard the official story.

For people whose business is politics (ideological or partisan, not Deep Politics), news events are only important to the extent that they can be exploited in some way. Republicans don't really want to know what happened at Benghazi (which probably had something to do with CIA gun-running and supporting false flag terrorist groups) - they only want a weapon to beat Hillary Clinton with.

People like this, and there are many of them in the media, blogosphere, talk radio, academic world, are never going to be interested in the real truth. They only care about "political truth."

As I said on another thread, for liberals who believe in "good government," or conservatives who believe in "American exceptionalism," how does the truth about assassinations and conspiracies do anything but destroy their delusions and fantasies? The truth would force them to admit that their world view is totally wrong.