[Marxism] Re: conspiracies (Response to Alan Bickle)

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I completely agree with Alan Bickle.  My father, Harold Feldman, went
down to Dallas and wrote articles including "Fifty-one witnesses: the
Grassy Knoll" that showed that just about everybody heard at least some
shots coming from a different direction than the official theory,
including quite a few people who heard shots right behind them. His
friend Vincent Salandria dissected the bullet evidence in a string of
articles in Liberation magazine.  The attempts to reinflate the
single-bullet theory and so on have been completely tortured and
ideologically-driven.

But the trail petered out soon after that point. There was clearly a lot
done by the government to prop up the Oswald-as-lone-assassin, and some
assume that the scope of the coverup shows the scope of the conspiracy
to kill Kennedy, but the two do not have such a necessary connection.
And of course, there is not much percentage in speculating about why?
Sections of the rulers, sections of the government, groups of
individuals might have motives for doing this that had no world-historic
character at all. All we know is that the body of evidence clearly
indicates that more than one person fired shots, while the evidence that
Oswald was one of them is shaky and not conclusive.

The facts establish that more than one person killed Kennedy.  It is
wrong to counter that with "Why would they do it?" since the facts say
that some "they" did do it. The high point of the investigation was the
early stages, when Mark Lane adopted the correct stance of insisting on
Oswald's right to representation in the investigation.

Some time after that they arched out in various hyper-conspiratorial
directions which were speculative.  The facts disappeared far beneath
these constructions.  The ruin of the investigation was most of the
investigators' getting suckered in by the demagogue Jim Garrison and his
incredibly flimsy case -- basically a frame-up -- against Clay Shaw who
was targeted for being homosexual, for being rich and prominent, and for
having once worked for the predecessor of the CIA. In that sense, the
assassination investigators ended up doing what the government had done
in the first place -- trying to pin the killing on a "patsy." This
completed discredited the attempt to turn up the facts.

The nearest thing I have experienced to real prophetic inspiration was
the Thanksgiving after the assassination.  Our family spent the evening
at our close friends, the Salandrias.  My father, who was already
noticing some of the contradictions and the high-speed closing of the
case around Oswald as lone deranged gunman, got into a debate about it
with Vince Salandria, who rejected the idea of a conspiracy in the
assassination.

At one point, my father stated: "Look, they are going to have to kill
Oswald."  He paused, and then added, "And you know, they'll get a Jew to
do it because they all get a Jew into these things."  When this rather
awesome prediction came true in full that weekend, Vince Salandria was
convinced and they began their joint investigation.
Fred Feldman





This is my first post to this list.

I was about eighty yards from Kennedy's car when he was shot in Dallas,
although I realized that he had been shot only minutes later when I
reported
for work at WFAA, the radio and television property of the Dallas
Morning
News. [snip]

That having been said, it struck me at about 3:30 that afternoon that
the
story that was being spun by the authorities was flawed. Nothing that I
saw
or heard in the following days changed my view. By the time Lee Oswald
was
killed I had become convinced that he was, as he claimed during a police

station news conference, "a patsy." I subscribe to the theory that
Kennedy
was done to death by a conspiracy for the simple reason that two or more

persons "breathing together," which is to say conspiring, fired shots.
[snip]

Much that has been written about the Kennedy assassination is worthless
and
sensationalistic, but  the core of unrefuted doubts remains.[snip]

People do conspire. It happens all the time. Raising the cry of
"conspiracy
theorist" as a way of shutting down inquiry is intellectually vacuous,
silly, and profoundly unhistorical.

Alan Bickley
Madison, WI


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