[Marxism] conspiracy: credulous left of today

["Charles Brown" <cbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Welcome to the list, Alan,

I agree with your last paragraph. Much of today's left has uncritically
adopted the monopoly media's concept and term "conspiracy theory" . I can
read the same sarcastic dismissals of socalled conspiracy theory on left
email lists that I hear on the television news. Something is evidently wrong
with that.

Capitalism is a system not a conspiracy, however, it's nonsense for leftists
not to be involved in the public curiosity about who actually "done it" in a
major public event like the assassination of Kennedy or 9/11. Of course, in
9/11, the "official" story is a conspiracy theory , so left discouragement
of discussion of conspiracy theories other than the official one are not
very logical.

The key class issue in the Kennedy assassination is that it was most likely
a hardline coup d'etat against Kennedy for failure and weakness in the Cuban
missile crisis ( Cuban rev was not overthrown) and especially the Nuclear
Test Ban treaty with the Soviets. The front line of the class struggle in
the period was the Cold War. Ergo...

In the "60's' , skepticism about the official story of the JFK
assassination, and then the King and RFK assassination, and much else
disillusioned many who were then politically activated. A general sense of
distrust of the government for COINTELPRO and the like contributed to
political consciousness. That seems lessened today, and that less seems
reflected in the left fad to mock "conspiracy theory." The credulous Left of
today.

Charles



Alan Bickley
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. Although I had hired on as a disk jockey, I was pressed into duty at
12:35 as a news voice, and for the rest of the day I fed the ABC and NBC
radio networks, ABC television, and stations around the country and the
world the developing story. Walter Cronkite likes to think that he was the
first to announced JFK's death. He was not, as a review of the time stamped
tapes will show.

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. One
person, acting alone, might decide on Wednesday night to murder a president
and then arise to do the need on Thursday. When two or more persons agree to

an action as weighty as killing a president they take their time, first in
learning to trust each other, then in plotting action and escape. I included

my doubts and speculations in a documentary which was presented on WFAA-AM
one year later.

Much that has been written about the Kennedy assassination is worthless and
sensationalistic, but  the core of unrefuted doubts remains. For what it's
worth, my subscribing to this view crippled my career in broadcasting. I
never was the first to bring it up, but once it became know that I was a
serious skeptic on the JFK killing, managements buried me on overnight
shifts, concocted disciplinary issues, and in various ways connived at
limiting my income and my prospects for advancement. I continued to be
employed, and in fact ended my career with a 24-year run at a CBS owned and
operated AM in a top-three market, but I felt the effects of the blacklist
long after the blacklist in broadcasting and entertainment was supposed to
have ended.

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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