Saturday Matinee: JFK

Posted on November 25, 2023 by Reid Mukai

By Brian Eggert

Just moments after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963, the press and government officials assigned blame to a lone gunman. The popular theory: Lee Harvey Oswald, a bad man working alone, shot the young and handsome President with three bullets fired from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas. Shortly thereafter, Oswald was arrested, and then later killed by seemingly patriotic vigilante Jack Ruby. In the aftermath, Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren was tasked to investigate the assassination in 1964 and, along with seven committee members of the Warren Commission, concluded the assassination was the work of Oswald and Oswald alone. Meanwhile, Lyndon B. Johnson took over the country. Several years passed before the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations carried out the second investigation into the events. The HSCA stated, among many other conclusions that contradicted the Warren Commission report, that recorded police radio evidence proves at least two shooters fired that day, and there was probable cause to believe Kennedy’s assassination was a conspiracy. Throughout this period and beginning in 1966, District Attorney Jim Garrison of Orleans Parish, New Orleans, had his own ideas, and many of them are explored by Oliver Stone in his incredible film, JFK.

Hope for a factual and true account of the events surrounding Kennedy’s assassination remains improbable, if not impossible. Contradictory evidence and assessments have clashed since the Warren Commission report, including countless books and analyses written about the subject. Few other historical events have been debated so passionately by both the public and private spheres. By synthesizing these debates, Stone’s film takes considerable liberties with the facts and history surrounding the incident, using Garrison’s investigation as a lens through which his screenplay scrutinizes this watershed moment in American history, marking the loss of so-called “American Innocence”. JFK is not fact. Through bravura filmmaking, Stone fabricates a narrative out of truth, belief, and supposition. He breaks down a conspiracy so elaborate that anyone could get lost in its intricacies. He puts forth a singular filmic examination of the previous thirty years of theories, and in some cases exposes lies that were told surrounding Kennedy’s assassination. Where Stone’s 1993 picture remains a landmark is how it recapitulates varied assassination theories and commentary into a singular source, through which his audience can once again ask questions about what happened and why. And when those questions are inevitably given unsatisfactory or contradictory answers from official sources, Stone hopes we get angry and demand the truth.

If JFK serves another purpose beyond fulfilling the needs of rousing, electric cinema, the picture creates an intense and undeniable metaphor for how American culture reacted to and feared the truth of the JFK assassination. Stone embeds enough facts into his fiction that the audience cannot help but question the official story and, in turn, realize the federal government’s claims about what happened were either incompetent or intentionally false. Stone once admitted, “No one really knows what exactly happened on November 22, 1963, or who did it, but there sure are an abundance of flaws in the official investigation.” Stone’s film sets out to challenge the Warren Commission by creating a blueprint of JFK conspiracy theories of merit and packaging those ideas in the form of a detective story unlike any other. The film’s goals are simple, but its details are byzantine. Several ongoing strains in JFK force us to question the official story: the film puts Oswald’s life under the microscope, suggesting he could not have been the lone gunman; it examines the details of the assassination in Dealey Plaza; it considers Garrison’s government informant Mr. X; it entertains notions that the CIA and mafia played roles in a conspiracy; and, in perhaps its most famous sequence, the film rebukes the so-called “magic-bullet theory” introduced by the Warren Commission. Primarily, Stone wants his audiences to believe that forces conspired to carry out a political coup d’état. He compared the notion to Hamlet, saying, “It’s the untold story of a murder that occurred at the dawn of our adulthood… The real king was killed, and a fake king was put on the throne.”

Stone’s choice and depiction of his protagonist only further complicate matters. He represents Jim Garrison as an American hero—the driving force behind the only criminal trial ever to stem from the assassination. Garrison maintained a most fervent hypothesis that supposed businessman Clay Shaw, a suspected CIA agent, somehow took part in a CIA plot to carry out a coup d’état against Kennedy. Garrison eventually brought Shaw to trial and lost. However, Garrison’s investigative methods and accusations that he used JFK’s assassination for media attention and professional gain have been washed over by the filmmaker in order to provide his film with a stalwart heroic figure to dramatize the proceedings. Stone makes a conscious choice to avoid many of the actual hardships and ugly truths in Garrison’s personal life, such as how Garrison’s investigation and his subsequent criticism lead to his personal ruin through alcohol and womanizing. What’s more, Garrison was not present at much of the trial because of a double hernia, leaving Assistant D.A. James Alcock to address the courtroom. Stone made these decisions as an artist assembling a drama with real-life significance, as opposed to a historical documentary or exposé. As a result, the director’s artistic choices surrounding Garrison are often the ammunition his film’s detractors use against the factual integrity of his coup d’état hypothesis.

Indeed, Stone’s method of delivery contains expressive, if not sensationalist moments of cinematic flair. He’s unopposed to exaggerating for effect, using every device in his faculty to distribute a firm wallop to the viewer’s gut. The purpose behind his three-hour-and-twenty-six-minute (the Director’s Cut length) drama is to convince his audience, on an emotional level, that Kennedy was assassinated as part of a conspiracy. Stone sought to study the assassination through the eyes of multiple witnesses, though each perspective would be represented with conflicting details, like the characters in Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950). Stone also culled influence from Costa-Gavras’ feverish thriller Z (1969), which depicts a political assassination early on, and then through the course of the film reexamines what happened through eyewitness accounts and video footage. To achieve this approach, cinematographer Robert Richardson used multiple film stocks (35mm, 16mm, even Super 8) and aspect ratios, sometimes requiring several cameras with different stocks for a single scene, such as the film’s recreation of the assassination in Dealey Plaza. Editors Joe Hutshing and Pietro Scalia jump between these film stocks, creating JFK’s intense rhythm, the pace that makes over three hours of runtime feel like ninety minutes. The editors freely cut between real and recreated newsreel footage, black-and-white photography, overexposed flashbacks, and Richardson’s clean lensing on then-modern-day scenes. The entire film looks and feels like a triumph of montage (of JFK’s eight Academy Award nominations, it won for Best Cinematography and Best Editing).

Craft aside, development on JFK began in 1988 when Stone met Ellen Ray, a publisher for Sheridan Square Press, who had just published Garrison’s second book, On the Trail of the Assassins. She gave Stone a copy and, after reading it, he purchased the film rights. Garrison had many critics throughout the government, among historians, and even conspiracy theorists. But much of what Garrison wrote about—the extent of the alleged conspiracy—had extensive consequences in the American government. Regardless of Garrison’s oft-condemned methods or conclusions, for Stone the man epitomized his own passion to keep searching for the truth, no matter what. “I feel you have to keep digging into history to understand what happened to us and our generation,” Stone noted. He took the same approach to Garrison himself and, before he ever considered making a film based on Garrison’s book, he met a sixty-eight-year-old who had spent twenty-three years in the military, flew planes in World War II, was a former FBI agent, co-commanded his regional National Guard, and served three terms as a District Attorney. Stone’s mission: determine if Garrison had in fact used JFK’s assassination for media attention and professional gain, or if he was a crusader whose aim was true, even if his methods were at times flawed. Ultimately, Stone determined Garrison’s preliminary investigation went out on a limb and he trusted people he shouldn’t have; but after Garrison wrote a second book, he focused his theories more, because he cared about the truth, not political gain.

Garrison was never intended to be the subject of JFK; Stone used Garrison’s case against Clay Shaw as a catalyst to expose the inconsistencies in the Warren Commission and further explore the wealth of theories surrounding the assassination. Stone realized that placing Garrison at the center of his film would earn criticisms from Garrison’s detractors, but the director felt exposing truths that had been mired in lies for thirty years was more important. After all, Garrison’s presence within the film was not biographical; the character was merely a metaphor who represented the work of several key investigations. In addition to Garrison’s book, Stone purchased the rights to Jim Marrs’ 1989 text Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy; he also hired a group of independent researchers that would assist in compiling theories. The filmmaker kept his efforts secret, as he was just finishing work on Born on the Fourth of July (1989) and would next shoot The Doors (1991). He learned filming Salvador and Platoon (both released in 1986) that, when shooting potentially controversial subject matter, the fewer people aware of his plans in the preliminary stages meant fewer obstructions once the production was moving forward. And once he had fully delved into the evidence available to his team, he became more convinced of an elaborate cover-up from positions of power within the U.S. government. “When you begin to sift through it,” he said, “there’s no escaping the thread.” Only after Warner Bros. became involved did Stone’s wife at the time stop worrying that he would end up dead, as so many key witnesses had, for poking his nose where it didn’t belong.

In spite of the contentious subject matter, Warner Bros.’ top brass embraced Stone’s idea, particularly chairman and CEO Terry Semel, who oversaw All the President’s Men (1976), The Parallax View (1974), and The Killing Fields (1984) during his time at the studio. After the production had a home and an estimated $20 million budget, Stone worked on the script with his primary collaborators: Yale graduate Jane Rusconi headed his research team; Columbia School of Journalism professor Zachary Sklar, who had served as editor on Garrison’s second book, served as co-writer. At times, Stone’s proclivities as a dramatist and seeker of historical truth were at odds. Stone used composite characters that would later earn him criticisms among the press, who viewed JFK as an historical treatise instead of a motion picture. For example, there were two gay men who saw David Ferrie and Clay Shaw together, but Stone combined them into a single role played by Kevin Bacon. Stone also combined two essential meetings Garrison had in Washington D.C. into a single meeting with Mr. X, chillingly played by Donald Sutherland. The first of Garrison’s meetings was with Fletcher Prouty, a former Air Force colonel and Pentagon contact for the CIA; the second was Richard Case Nagell, an alleged CIA agent. Stone himself met with Prouty and incorporated much of what was said into the script. Regardless of his creative streamlining of the facts, Stone’s screenplay was becoming monumental and his budget was now double what he originally estimated.

Producer Arnon Milchan was there to smooth over studio roadblocks. Milchan sought out Stone and had to convince the director to allow him to produce. The producer was drawn to Quixotic projects such as Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy (1982) and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985), or later David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999) and Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014). Milchan is a maverick, much like Stone, and the producer’s appreciation of film as an art form meant he seeks to align with rare nonconformist filmmakers. Fortunately, he was the kind of producer who could convince Warner Bros. and European investors to double Stone’s originally quoted budget to $40 million; he persuaded the Dallas City Council to allow Stone to shoot in Dealey Plaza, which no one had ever done before; and he convinced the distributors to release an epic-length picture into theaters. Milchan also played a major role in the film’s casting, which includes many of Hollywood’s most well-respected performers of the 1990s. Foremost was Kevin Costner as Jim Garrison, who beat out dozens of other actors who were considered (Harrison Ford, Robin Williams, Willem Dafoe, Tom Berenger, Alec Baldwin, and so on). When the director was getting closer to casting Costner, he wrote a note to himself saying, simply, “Kevin Costner—Jim Garrison, all-American quality.” Nevertheless, Costner originally turned down the role and required some finagling. Stone heard a rumor that Costner promised his wife Cindy that he would take a year off after shooting Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991); and so, Stone sent Cindy a copy of Garrison’s books. She read them and, according to Costner, told him, “You have to do this.”

The production itself presented a challenge for Stone both physically and psychologically, since he was starting with a 156-page script. However, the script was actually longer, since pages were filled with notes, scribbles of dialogue, and arrows in the margins. While shooting, the director was methodical and detail oriented, keeping track of the film’s multiple strains, including what wasn’t even in the script. Frequent cutaways to documentary footage or black-and-white video, and half a dozen other video processes, rattled around in Stone’s brain. “I thought I might really go down on this one,” Stone said. “This could be a movie that totally misses it. Too talky, too difficult, too much information… Maybe this will be Heaven’s Gate. But goddamnit, it’s worth it. Because this is one I believe in. No doubt.” Indeed, long before reading Garrison’s book, Stone’s life was shaped by the JFK assassination. He was at the formative age of seventeen in 1963, and what’s more his parents were divorcing at the time. “It left me feeling that there was a mask on everything,” he once said. In subsequent years, Stone’s perception of his government continued to be shaped by “Vietnam, then the bombing of Cambodia and Laos, the Pentagon Papers, the Chile affair, Watergate, going up to the Iran-Contra in the eighties. We’ve had a series of major shocks.” These events shaped Stone and would deeply influence several of his projects, including Platoon, Wall Street (1987), Born on the Fourth of July, The Doors, and Nixon (1995). These films would provide a veritable catalog of his feelings during their respective periods. It almost goes without saying that JFK would become Stone’s passion project.

Perhaps due to the subject matter or simply Stone’s radical approach to all his films, most of mainstream Hollywood and the media was hoping the wildly ambitious, controversial film would overwhelm Stone and spin out of control, taking the director with him. Before shooting even began, George Lardner of The Washington Post arrived on-set uninvited, snooping around, and later published a 5,000-word reaction to his visit entitled “On the Set: Dallas in Wonderland: How Oliver Stone’s Version of the Kennedy Assassination Exploits the Edge of Paranoia”. Amid his censures, Lardner critiqued a stolen first draft of the JFK script as a series of “absurdities and palpable untruths” in what seemed like a preemptive smear campaign. Given Lardner’s history as a CIA investigator with contacts in the agency still, Stone began to feel like Garrison, as if forces in the government were trying to stop him. Likewise, Garrison had tried to subpoena various members of the CIA, governors, and crucial witnesses, but his requests were unreasonably denied. In the meantime, Garrison’s offices were bugged, his files copied and given to the defense, and attempts were made to bribe Garrison to stop his investigation. Similarly, various editorials in The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and Time magazine picked apart Stone’s production and the early draft of his script, forming opinions about a film that had not yet been shot.

The screen story unfolds with Garrison’s investigation into Lee Harvey Oswald’s alleged friend David Ferrie (Joe Pesci), following a lead from witness Willie O’Keefe (Kevin Bacon), a convicted male prostitute, that Ferrie and Clay Shaw (Tommy Lee Jones) had discussed killing Kennedy. At the same time, Garrison’s team investigates how the shooting from the Book Depository could not have been carried out for a number of reasons. They also investigate Oswald (played by Gary Oldman, but also two other actors), a former Marine who defected to the Soviet Union, and yet suspiciously was able to return to U.S. soil during the Cold War without much hassle. As Garrison’s team learns more about Oswald, it seems he was indeed a “patsy” as he claimed to be, having become a low-level member of various anti-Castro Free Cuba Committee rallies, some held by former FBI agent-turned-private-investigator Guy Bannister (Ed Asner), as attested to by Bannister’s employee Jack Martin (Jack Lemmon). Or consider Jack Ruby (Brian Doyle-Murray), Oswald’s killer, who later called Kennedy’s assassination “an act of overthrowing the government”. These loose strains and leads discovered by the investigating team congeal into something more cohesive after Garrison meets with the so-called Mr. X (Sutherland), a colonel in the U.S. Air Force who suggests a vast governmental conspiracy conceived by the CIA and the U.S. military to maintain a thriving military industrial complex under Lyndon B. Johnson. Garrison finally takes aim at Shaw, hoping to shed light on the coup d’état conspiracy in open court. Though changing testimonies and dead witnesses weaken his arguments and he loses the case, he brings a new awareness to the facts by showing the footage shot by witness Abraham Zapruder for the first time in public, and detailing the absurdity of the Warren Commission’s “magic-bullet theory”.

When JFK was released on December 20, 1991, the polarized response from critics called Stone’s picture everything from “an insult to the intelligence” to “dubious” to “seditiously enthralling”. Discussions put Stone’s approach under the microscope for his blend of fact and tabloid-worthy fiction. Scenes of Clay Bertrand and David Ferrie donning costume attire—the former gilded to look like Mercury, the latter even more absurd-looking than his usual crooked wig and painted eyebrows—slapping and pinching each other’s nipples in the presence of the boyish male prostitutes hardly boasts credibility. Though the gay community recoiled at such scenes, moments like this show Stone at his frenzied best, using his hyperbolic style to wrangle his audience into hysterics over the official story. A few critics such as Roger Ebert or Time magazine’s Richard Corliss realized what Stone was trying to do. Corliss put it best: “Part history book, part comic book, the movie rushes toward judgment for three breathless hours, lassoing facts and factoids by the thousands, then bundling them together into an incendiary device that would frag any viewer’s complacency.” Elsewhere, MPAA president Jack Valenti compared JFK to Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda documentary, Triumph of the Will (1941). Likewise, an attorney for the Warren Commission, David Belin called the film “a big lie that would make Adolf Hitler proud.” Others missed the point entirely. Anthony Lewis of New York Times described the film with incredulity, writing it “tells us that our government cannot be trusted to give an honest account of a Presidential assassination”—as if no government had ever betrayed the trust of its people before. By the time the dust settled around JFK, most agreed that, formally speaking, JFK was an amazement, but as history it was nothing more than a three-hour conspiracy theory.

However, the term “conspiracy theory” comes with its own negative associations that, quite unjustly, dismiss all integrity of the associated claim as paranoia. Theories about the U.S. government faking the first moon landing or the Holocaust being an elaborate setup remain laughable examples embraced by crackpots. And yet, instances of relevant and true conspiracy theories exist throughout history, confirmed long after the fervor of their origination has passed. Accusations from the Martin Luther King Jr. camp that he was being monitored by the FBI may have sounded paranoid at the time, but J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO initiative speaks to the contrary: Hoover wanted “to pinpoint potential troublemakers and neutralize them before they exercise their potential for violence.” This included feminist organizations, anti-Vietnam protesters, and civil rights movements. Elsewhere, those who consider The Manchurian Candidate (1962) to be far-fetched would find the CIA’s secret mind control experiments (codenamed MK-Ultra) alarming. Information on the Top Secret project was unveiled in 1977 when the Freedom of Information Act exposed the existence of the project, the details of which remain in question after CIA director Richard Helms destroyed many of the files on the program in 1973. Nevertheless, President Bill Clinton gave a speech in 1995 on a Bioethics Report that detailed the CIA’s mind control experiments conducted at U.S. hospitals, universities, and military facilities during the Cold War. (It should be noted that the former CIA director Helms later admitted Clay Shaw was indeed in the CIA, an admission that can only moderately validate Garrison’s in-court claims so many years after the fact.)

The point is, a conspiracy theory should not be disregarded simply because of its association by name with other, more fantastic conspiracy theories. Nor should JFK be disregarded as a work of pure fiction. Even looking at a few details within the film that happen to be true, unanswerable questions arise that contradict the Warren Commission and any lone gunman theory. Some would argue that any measure of fiction implanted into fact results in a work of fiction, but the degree to which JFK is fact or fiction is ultimately up to the viewer. Of course, not every detail in the film is clean and untarnished. But there’s a lot of truth in JFK, leading to a log of questions. The lingering questions Stone raises: “Why didn’t Oswald shoot when Kennedy was coming straight at him instead of waiting for a worse shot from the rear through a tree? What was Oswald’s history? How come he knew these people in New Orleans [Bannister, Ferrie, Shaw, etc.]? What about Ruby’s history? Oswald’s connections to Cuba? Ferrie’s connections to Oswald? Oswald’s military history, which seems to border on intelligence work? What about all the dead witnesses?” The answers to these questions, and the implications of those answers, are almost too big to contemplate.

JFK gets swept up in these questions and brings the viewer along for the journey. Some of these questions lead nowhere and cannot be supported by facts. Consider the scene where Pesci’s fervent David Ferrie raves to Garrison and his team in a hotel room about his involvement with Oswald and the CIA, plainly under the influence of multiple substances. “This is too fuckin’ big for you, you know that? Who did the president, who killed Kennedy, fuck man! It’s a mystery! It’s a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma! The fuckin’ shooters don’t even know!” But his guard is down, and in his ravings he confesses to helping carry out Kennedy’s assassination. Garrison’s own books admit that Ferrie never made such an outright admission, even though Garrison believed Ferrie and Oswald were indeed associates. Though the scene never occurred in real life, it illustrates for the viewer the level of unbridled paranoia Garrison saw in his witnesses, and the general feeling of suspicion and terror in the wake of the assassination. To be sure, for every erroneous fact in JFK, there’s a measure of undeniable truth the film’s harshest critics are quick to overlook. Stone takes what Garrison believed and propels it into a drama, which in turn leads to an open discussion about the facts and suppositions of Kennedy’s assassination.

Along the way, Stone sets out to establish a number of facts, or truths. First, he establishes that Oswald did not act alone. He comes to this conclusion by forming a concrete argument against the Warren Commission’s belief that only three bullets were fired, largely using the Zapruder film combined with the topography of the bullet’s trajectory. Herein, we see with our own eyes how three bullets from behind could not have caused the damage inflicted on both Governor Connolly and Kennedy, whose head follows the trajectory of a bullet back and to the left, as though his shooter was in front of him to the right. Furthermore, Stone supposes that an organized assassination could not be pulled off by amateurs. There are less factual suppositions about the events leading up to the assassination, and less tangible evidence, largely based in accusation and suspicion. But Stone suggests that the CIA found an enemy in Kennedy, who fired three major CIA players at the time (Charles Cabell, Richard Bissell, and Alan Dulles) and tried to restrict CIA paramilitary activities to the Pentagon, giving them motive to conspire against their leader. Who else but the government could arrange for Kennedy’s Secret Service and military escorts to be so skeletal in Dallas? The facts after the assassination are also suspect, specifically in how LBJ ran the country. He did not follow Kennedy’s policies, and instead aligned his policies with those of the Joint Chiefs, who clashed with Kennedy on virtually every major political issue of the time. Kennedy wanted to ban nuclear testing; to end the Cold War; to avoid violent confrontations with Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam. And then there were the hours after the shooting, when the press’ wire stories circulated around the globe in locations like New Zealand. The media was quickly provided with complete profiles on Oswald, despite there being utter chaos amid authorities in the aftermath of the shooting and no announcements made by those interviewing Oswald. This suggests a carefully prepared cover story.

Because Oswald had not yet been convicted or properly interviewed for his accused crime, the nation’s opinion on the subject was already set by the press, which pinned Oswald as the lone shooter—not the alleged shooter. History was already made for the media and American people. No investigation needed. Those who still believe the lone gunman theory (a mere 30% of Americans, based on a 2013 Gallup poll) harbor an alarming disregard for the facts. But the reactions among many of those who believe there was some manner of conspiracy, governmental or otherwise, have an even more alarming response: apathy. Which is to say, the majority people (81% of Americans at its highest rate, according to the same Gallup poll) accept that Kennedy’s assassination was a conspiracy. Most accept this theory without anger or action. After all, Americans aren’t demanding the declassification of unreleased documents from the Warren Commission in any great number. How frightening and, to put it mildly, saddening, that Americans would believe in a conspiracy to assassinate their supposedly beloved President Kennedy, but then refuse to act in response or demand the truth. Regardless of how Americans feel about the false conclusions and their seemingly ingrained belief that a conspiracy did indeed take place, apathy takes over as history becomes almost mythologized into a distant bedtime story. Anger over the lies and the crime itself is subdued by the acceptance that we will probably never learn the truth about what happened. And once our anger is curbed to a mild grumble, whether it was a lone gunman or a conspiracy, the conclusion elicits the same defeated, unsatisfied response.

In many ways, Stone creates a Capra-esque story, a dreamy sort of tale set to John Williams’ classicized score, about a noble man who served in WWII and Korea, but sees the assassination as the death of an idyll. A servant of his country, Garrison begins to investigate when he suspects something is amiss with the Kennedy assassination. The bulk of his investigation, conducted after 1966, leads him into dark territory, shattering his ideals and perceptions about his own country. And for seeking the truth, he is finally accused, disgraced, and beaten by the opposition. On these basic levels, the story of Stone’s version of Jim Garrison has an almost Mr. Smith Goes to Washington quality that devolves with the hero’s disillusionment—recounting the death of American idealism. How appropriate that Stone wrote in his original casting notes for Garrison, “Find a real person—new Gary Cooper, create him yourself. A James Stewart, like old days.” Elsewhere, Stone was well aware that Garrison’s evidence was sometimes questionable, his conclusions broad, and his personal life troubled (as shown in squabbles with his wife, played by Sissy Spacek). On the job, he was accused of using truth serums, bribing witnesses, and making promises for reduced sentences. But throughout JFK, Stone transforms him into a metaphor for American idealism, depicting Garrison as an American hero so devoted to his cause that he occasionally overlooks his wife and child, while certain members of Garrison’s team (namely District Attorney Bill Broussard, played by Michael Rooker) refuse to believe the all-encompassing nature of his conspiracy theory. Costner, who had already played iconic (actual and otherwise) heroes like Elliot Ness, Ray Kinsella, Lt. John J. Dunbar, and Robin Hood, was perfectly suited for Stone’s intentions for the role.

As Garrison’s delusions about American innocence are crushed by the end of JFK, we see before us the end of idealism, the destruction of hope for America. The glory of Stone’s intensely subjective film is that it remains angry. “Sure, we are showing you our theories and saying that we believe them to be true,” Stone remarked, “but we clearly differentiate between fact and theory in the film.” Working in such theory, JFK reminds viewers, most successfully during the film’s analysis of the “magic-bullet theory”, that inconsistencies run rampant in the Warren Commission—and not only regarding Lee Harvey Oswald. Stone assigns varied measures of culpability to the Pentagon, the CIA, the FBI, and the soon-to-be-sworn-in President Johnson—all to maintain and grow the economic viability of the military industrial complex by continuing a prolonged conflict in Vietnam, largely in response to Kennedy’s determination to pull troops out of Vietnam, and not to invade Cuba. Today, as the U.S. continues to find convenient reasons to invade or police other countries for oil and other natural resources, the potential of an elaborate scheme to perform a coup seems not so unlikely. If indeed Kennedy wanted to put an end to Vietnam, the dollar value attached to such a proposition would be catastrophic. Only after a tragic amount of death, and a now-unfathomable degree of stateside civil unrest and protest, was the conflict finally put to an end by the U.S. in 1973—just in time to prevent the country from falling apart at the seams.

Not having answers has instituted new characteristics into the American consciousness that remain alive and well today, which are: apathy and the dismissal of healthy paranoia, and their combined toxicity. Consider how reactions to JFK focused on everything unverifiable, but refused to deal with the facts put forth by Stone’s film, perhaps because they represent an uncertainty. People despise uncertainty, and they will believe just about anything in place of it. The populace feels a sense of apathy because they have long since accepted they will never know what really happened behind Kennedy’s assassination. Such apathy is noxious, poisoning Americans with the defeatist notion that The Powers That Be are all-powerful, undoubtedly duplicitous in one way or another, and therefore “What am I supposed to do about it?—after all, it’s not as though the government is breaking down my door.” So as long as we can live our quiet lives in peace, what does history matter? And besides, most of the people associated with the original investigation are either dead or too aged to be considered reliable. But all hope is not lost. Answers may still come, someday. The JFK Act of 1992, instilled in large part as a response to Stone’s film, demands all government records pertaining to JFK’s assassination to be made public by October 2017. But there’s a caveat. The President at the time, no doubt receiving briefings from the intelligence community, has the power to keep the records sealed.

Two statues welcome visitors to the National Archives building in Washington D.C., personifications of the Past and Future. The Past statue placard asks that you “Study the Past,” while the Future tells you “Past is Prologue”. Oliver Stone wants his audience to remember that, historically, the U.S. is not above carrying out an action that supplants one government for another. And so, JFK cannot be thought of as just a motion picture—though, what a fine motion picture it is on purely cinematic terms. Rather, it must also be regarded as an urgent and aggressive reflector of American culture’s distrust for its government, since most viewers walk away from the film believing, at the very least, that the lone gunman theory is either too simple or has been entirely fabricated to cover-up a coup d’état. Whether the viewer embraces one of the countless conspiracy theories, or merely accepts that the Warren Commission remains negligent (or worse, a series of lies), the film taps into our subdued anger, reignites it, and asks that we demand to know what actually happened. There’s a moment at the end of Garrison’s closing arguments where Costner looks directly into the camera, seemingly breaking the fourth wall, and he says, “It’s up to you.” Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s quote from the opening of the film, also used in JFK marketing materials, comes to mind: “To sin by silence when we should protest makes cowards out of men.” JFK does not stand as a historical document or marker of fact; rather, with an incredible degree of formal audacity and skill, it compels us on an undeniable emotional level and asks that we continue to search for the truth.

Bibliography:

Hamburg, Eric. JFK, Nixon, Oliver Stone and Me: An Idealist’s Journey from Capitol Hill to Hollywood Hell. PublicAffairs, 2002.

Riordan, James. Stone: A Biography of Oliver Stone. New York: Aurum Press, 1996.

Salewicz, Chris. Oliver Stone: Close Up: The Making of His Movies. Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1998.

Stone, Oliver. JFK: The Book of the Film. New York: Applause Books, 2000.

Toplin, Robert Brent. History by Hollywood “JFK: Fact, Fiction, and Supposition,” pp. 45–78. University of Illinois Press, 1996.

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Watch JFK on Tubi here: https://tubitv.com/movies/602256/jfk

Do People Change?

Posted on August 27, 2023 by Reid Mukai

By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

Because there is so much personal anguish, unhappiness, and human mental and physical suffering in the world, many people often wonder how they might personally change to find happiness, contentment, or some elusive something. Or even how to change other people, as if that arrogant illusion could ever work.

This question of significant personal change is usually couched within the context of narrow psychological analyses. This is very common and is a habit of mind that grows stronger over the years. People are reduced to their family upbringings and their personal relationships, while the social history they have lived through is dismissed as irrelevant.

The United States is very much a psychological society. Sociological and historical analyses are considered insignificant to people’s identities. It’s as if economics, politics, culture, and propaganda are beside the point.

Yes, it is often admitted that circumstances, such as illness, death, divorce, unemployment, etc. affect people, but such circumstances are not considered central to who people are and whom they become. These matters are rarely seen contextually, nor are connections made. They are considered inessentials despite the fact that they are always connected to larger social issues – that biography and history are intertwined.

In writing about what he termed the sociological imagination, C. Wright Mills put it clearly when he described it as “the idea that the individual can understand his own experience and gauge his own fate only by locating himself within his period, that he can know his own chances in life only by becoming aware of those of all individuals in his circumstances. In many ways it is a terrible lesson; in many ways a magnificent one.”

Without learning it, one cannot know who one is or whom one might become if one chose to change and were not just blown by the winds of fate.

We now live in a digital world where the uncanny nature of information pick up sticks is the big game. Uncanny because most people cannot grasp its mysterious power over their minds.

What was true in 1953 when Ray Bradbury penned the following words in Fahrenheit 451, is exponentially truer today:

Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damn full of ‘facts’ that they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. . . . Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.

That it is all noise, all signal – no silence. That it prevents deep reflection but creates the habit of mental befuddlement that is consonant with the mental derangement of the mainstream media’s 24/7 news reports.

When almost everything you hear is a lie of one sort or another, it becomes barely possible to keep your wits about you.

These bits of bait are scattered all over the mind’s floor, tossed by an unknown player, the unnameable one who comes in the night to play with us. Their colors flood the mind, dazzle and razzle the eye. It is screen time in fantasy-land.

This summer’s two hit movies – “Oppenheimer” and “Barbie” – while seemingly opposites, are two sides of this same counterfeit coin. Spectacles in The Society of the Spectacle as Guy Debord put it:

The spectacle is a social relation between people that is mediated by an accumulation of images that serve to alienate us from a genuinely lived life. The image is thus an historical mutation of the form of commodity fetishism.

“Oppenheimer,” while concentrating on the man J. Robert Oppenheimer who is called “the father of the atomic bomb,” omits the diabolic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as if there were no innocent victims, while “Barbie” plays the coy game of satirizing the doll that celebrates women as sex objects while advertising its same sex doll status. It’s just great “fun.” Colorful salt water taffy for a summer hoot. “Little Boy” meets sexy sister in the land of dreams where existential crises lead to expanded consciousness. Yes, Hollywood is the Dream Factory.

There is so much to attend to, multi-colored tidbits begging to be touched carefully, to grab our full consideration as we delicately lift them into the air of our minds. So many flavors. Call it mass attention disorder order or paranoia (beside the mind) or digital dementia. The names don’t matter, for it is a real condition and it is widespread and spreading madly. Everyone knows it but represses the truth that the country has become a comic book travesty sliding into quicksand while bringing the world down with it.

“Oppenheimer” plays while a mumbling and bumbling U.S. President Biden pushes the world toward nuclear annihilation with Russia over Ukraine.

“Barbie” struts on her stilettos while men receive guidance from the CDC on “chest feeding” and millions of young people are not sure what sex they are.

What’s up?

It’s all noise, all signal – no silence.

The instinct of self-defense has disappeared. “Not to see many things, not to hear many things, not to permit many things to come close,” this, Nietzsche told us, is the instinct of self-defense. But we have let all our defenses down because of the Internet, cell phones, and the digital revolution. We have turned on, tuned in, and dropped into computerized cells whose flickering bars note signal strength but not mental bondage. Not the long loneliness of distant signals barely heard, but “Cause” what Rodriquez sings for us:

Cause my heart’s become a crooked hotel full of rumours
But it’s I who pays the rent for these fingered-face out-of-tuners
and I make 16 solid half hour friendships every evening

It’s all noise, all signal – no silence.

I recently had the arduous task of reviewing nearly fifty years of a writer’s personal journals. The thing that stood out to me was the repetitive nature of his comments and analyses of people he knew and the relationships he had. His political, literary, and historical comments were insightful, and his keen observations into the decades long diminution of the belief in existential freedom captured well the growing domination of today’s deterministic ethos with its biological emphasis and its underlying hopeless nihilism. But it was also very clear that the people he wrote about were little different after forty to fifty years. Their situations changed but they did not – fundamentally. They were encased in long-standing carapaces that protected them from change and choices that would force them to metamorphosize or undergo profound metanoias. Most of them saw no connection between their personal lives and world events, nor did they seem to grasp what William James, in writing about habits, said, “if we suffer the wandering of our attention, presently it will wander all the time. Attention and effort are … but two names for the same psychic fact.”

The notebooks, of course, were one man’s observations. But they seemed to me to capture something about people generally. In the notes I took, I summarized this by the words “social addiction,” a habit of living and thinking that has resulted in vast numbers of people locked in their cells, confused, totally bamboozled, and in despair. This condition is now widely recognized, even by the most unreflective people, for it is felt in the gut as a dazed death-in-life, a treading of water waiting for the next disaster, the next bad joke passing for serious attention. It is impossible to fail to recognize, if not admit, that the United States has become a crazy country, mad and deluded in the worst ways and leading the world to perdition on a fool’s dream of dominance and delusions.

The psychoanalyst Allen Wheelis, an intriguing writer who questioned his own profession, put it well in his 1973 book How People Change:

Often we do not choose, but drift into those modes which eventually define us. Circumstances push and we yield. We did not choose to be what we have become, but gradually, imperceptibly, became what we are by drifting into the doing of those things we now characteristically do. Freedom is not an objective attribute of life; alternatives without awareness yield no leeway… Nothing guarantees freedom. It may never be achieved, or having been achieved, may be lost. Alternatives go unnoticed; foreseeable consequences are not foreseen; we may not know what we have been, what we are, or what we are becoming. We are the bearers of consciousness but of not very much, may proceed through a whole life without awareness of that which would have meant the most, the freedom which has to be noticed to be real. Freedom is the awareness of alternatives and of the ability to choose. It is contingent upon consciousness, and so may be gained or lost, extended or diminished.

He correctly warned that insight does not necessarily lead to change. It may help initiate it, but in the end the belief in freedom and the power of the will is necessary. This has become harder in a society that has embraced biological determinism as a result of decades of propaganda. Freedom has become a slogan only. We have generally become determined to be determined.

To realize that one has choices is necessary and that not to decide is to decide. Decisions (from Latin de = off and caedere = to cut) are hard, for they involve deaths, the elimination of alternatives, the facing of one own’s death(s) with courage and hope. The loss of illusions. This too has become more difficult in a country that has jettisoned so much of the deep human spirituality that still animates many people around the world whom the U.S. government considers enemies.

Such decisions also involve the intellectual honesty to seek out alternative voices to one’s fixed opinions on a host of public issues that affect everyone’s lives.

To recognize that who we are and who we become intersect with world events, war, politics, the foreign policies of one’s country, economics, culture, etc.; that they cannot be divorced from the people we say we are. That none of us are islands but part of the main, but when that main becomes corporate dominated mainstream news pumped into our eyes and ears day and night from little machines, we are in big trouble.

To not turn away from what the former CIA analyst Ray McGovern calls this propaganda machine – the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academic-Think Tank Complex (MICIMATT) – is a choice by default and one of bad faith in which one hides the truth from oneself while knowing one is doing so.

To not seek truth outside this complex is to deny one’s freedom and to determine not to change even when it is apodictic that things are falling apart and all innocence is being drowned in a sea of lies.

It’s all noise, all signal – no silence.

Change begins with desire, at the personal and public level. It takes courage to face the ways we have all been wrong, missed opportunities, shrunk back, lied, refused to consider alternatives. Everyone senses that the U.S. is proceeding down a perilous road now. Everything is out of joint, the country heading for hell.

I recently read an article by Timothy Denevi about the late writer Joan Didion who, together with her husband John Gregory Dunne, was at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu in June 1968 when Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in Los Angeles a few days previously, had died. The thing that struck me in the article was what Didion described as the sickening indifference of so many vacationers to the news about RFK’s death and funeral. Because television reception was sketchy in Hawaii, Didion and Dunne, not Kennedy supporters, were only able to watch a three-hour ABC taped special on June 8 that covered the assassination, funeral, and train ride of the body to Arlington Cemetery as millions of regular people kept vigil along the tracks. A television had been set up on a large veranda where guests could watch this taped show. But few vacationers were interested; the opposite, actually. It angered them that this terrible national tragedy was intruding into their vacations. They walked away. It seemed to Didion and Dunne that something deep and dark was symbolized by their selfish indifference. As a result, Didion suffered an attack of vertigo and nausea and was prescribed antidepressants after psychiatric evaluation. She felt the 1960s “snapping” as she too snapped.

I think those feelings of vertigo and nausea are felt by many people today. Rightly so. The U.S.A. is snapping. It is no longer possible to remain a normal person in dark times like these, no matter how powerfully that urge tempts us. Things have gone too far on so many fronts from the Covid scam with all its attendant deaths and injuries to the U.S. war against Russia with its increasing nuclear risks, to name only two of scores of disasters. One could say Didion was a bit late, that the snapping began in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963 when President Kennedy was assassinated by the CIA. As Billie Joel sings, “J.F.K. blown away, what more do I have to say?” And why was he assassinated? Because he changed dramatically in the last year of his life to embrace the role of peacemaker despite knowing that by doing so he was accepting the real risk that he would be killed. He was courage and will personified, an exceptional example of radical change for the sake of the world.

So I come back to my ostensible subject: Do people change?

The short answer is: Rarely. Many play at it while playing dumb.

Yet is does happen, but only by some mixture of miracle and freedom, in an instant or with the passing of time where meaning and mystery can only exist. Where we exist. “If there is a plurality of times, or if time is cyclic,” the English writer John Berger muses, “then prophecy and destiny can coexist with freedom of choice.” Time always tells.

The last entry in the writer’s notebooks that I reviewed was this:

I read that Kris Kristofferson, whose music I love, has said that he would like the first three lines of Leonard Cohen’s “Bird on a Wire” on his tombstone:

Like a bird on the wire
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free

It seemed apposite.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: To Heal the Great Divide

Posted on April 21, 2023 by Reid Mukai

By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

It has been fifty-five years since Senator Robert F. Kennedy stepped onto the presidential nominating stage to try to mend the massive breach that had opened in American society. The country was torn asunder by the Vietnam War, racism, poverty, the assassination of President Kennedy and the soon-to-be assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Chaos reigned as Lyndon Johnson lied and Richard Nixon matched him in verbal and actual treachery. A war between Middle America and the elites running the government was breaking out across the country. A great divide between whites and blacks, rich and poor, the working class and the upper class was opening wide. The Tet Offensive had just ripped the face off the official lies about the course of the war in Vietnam and the emperor, Lyndon Jonson, stood naked and would soon announce that he would not run again.

On March 16, 1968, Senator Kennedy declared his candidacy with these words:

I do not run for the presidency merely to oppose any man but to propose new policies. I run because I am convinced that this country is on a perilous course and because I have such strong feelings about what must be done, and I feel that I’m obliged to do all that I can.

I run to seek new policies – policies to end the bloodshed in Vietnam and in our cities, policies to close the gaps that now exist between black and white, between rich and poor, between young and old, in this country and around the rest of the world.

By the end of 1968, a plague year if there ever were one, Richard Nixon, together with his goon squad, prepared to occupy the White House, Vietnam raged on, and everything King and Kennedy stood for seemed lost. Ignorance, vituperation, and the divide-and-conquer technique long practiced by the power elites set into the body politic like a deadly cancer. Something died, all hope seemed lost, and the perilous course RFK spoke of was never stopped. Jackals with polished faces have sat in the White House ever since.

Today hope is resurrected. Enter Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. center stage who will declare his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for president on Wednesday, April 19, in Boston, Massachusetts.

The wheel of history has turned and 2023 resembles 1968 in many ways while getting worse in others. The divide in the country remains but has greatly widened. The CIA and the intelligence agencies totally control the mainstream media now. The Pentagon’s budget has increased exponentially. The U.S. wages a savage war against Russia in Ukraine under the blatant lie of defending freedom while supporting Nazis and greatly risking nuclear war. It provokes war with China. Permanent war is government policy with military bases and CIA and special forces all over the world, waging semi-clandestine wars, or maybe just wars that people don’t want to know about. The gap between the rich and the poor has widened while the elites mock working class people as moronic deplorables. The Department of Defense controls the development, manufacturing, clinical testing, supply, production, and distribution of the mRNA vaccines, while the criminal pharmaceutical companies reap obscene profits. Lies are piled upon lies in what amounts to an Orwellian nightmare. And while LBJ and Nixon have been replaced by Joe Biden, the warfare state roll on.

Some things have changed, of course. In 1968, liberals were turning against the U.S. war against Vietnam and were growing wary of the CIA. Today they support all the Democratic-led wars and love the CIA. They trust the obvious media lies and those of a proven liar such as Anthony Fauci. Nowhere is this sadly truer than with the extended Kennedy family, who in their support for Biden, Fauci, the CIA, etc. have betrayed JFK and RFK. Their smugness and support for Biden against their brother who is carrying on his uncle’s and father’s legacy is betrayal of the worst kind.

Despite a family actively opposed to his candidacy, despite all the media lies about him, and despite the odds makers giving him little chance, RFK, Jr. is entering the race. It is an act of supreme moral courage.

Like his father in ’68, he is the only candidate who can heal this nation’s great divide.

That he is opposed by a huge array of people who will lie about him because he is a truthteller does not deter him. Those lies immediately started up again as soon as word got out that he might run. It’s an old story.

Trash will be thrown at him. Every blemish of his nearly seventy years will be dredged up to paint him as a villain, a flawed man, a hypocrite – name all the negative terms you can think of and the real hypocrites, in their self-righteous rage, will use them against him. They will bounce off him. He is ready.

When Bobby, Jr. was young, his father handed him a book and said with urgency, “I want you to read this.” It was Albert Camus’s The Plague. He read it and it has informed his life ever since. Just as in 1968, we live in plague times, and the plague is US, it runs through all our institutions and, as in Camus’s books, the rats are running wild, devouring truth and the values that can redeem us. As he has written in his beautiful and important book, American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family, Camus’s analysis of Sisyphus and the ancient Greeks has taught him an important lesson:

It is neither our position nor our circumstances that define us, according to the Stoics, but our response to those circumstance; when destiny crushes us, small heroic gestures of courage and service can bring us peace and fulfillment. In applying our shoulder to the stone, we give order to a chaotic universe. Of the many wonderful things my father left me, this philosophical truth was perhaps the most useful. In many ways, it has defined my life, and has allowed me to find serenity and purpose even in the most trying and tragic circumstances. (p.287)

Despite its brilliance, American Values (see this) was completely ignored by the mainstream press. Why? Because it revolves around “Chapter 9, Senator Robert F. Kennedy” and the long war between the Kennedys and the CIA that resulted in the deaths of JFK and RFK. In this chapter, RFK, Jr. brilliantly shows that he fully grasps the CIA’s evil history. All the other chapters, while very interesting personal and family history, pale in importance. No member of the Kennedy family since JFK or RFK has dared to say what RFK, Jr. does in this book. He indicts the CIA. This is probably not a small part of his extended family’s animosity toward him. Family taboos must be protected, as if they were state secrets.

But his indictment of the CIA is the fundamental reason why it and the media will at all costs try to prevent him from getting the nomination. The character assassination will be intense.

Kennedy knows he faces an uphill battle for the presidency, but no matter what forces are aligned against him, political and familial, he will not back down.

He will surprise all the pundits, for his appeal crosses party lines. He is tough and very smart. He has been so hated and falsely maligned by the mainstream media for so long that he is skilled at keeping to his message, which I think will be positive and inspirational, something that this country is desperate for after so many years of lies and treachery.

Even Biden’s supporters in the Democratic party know he is a flawed candidate on his last legs, laboring to keep his words straight and his steps solid. While he may have long served as the establishment’s war puppet, there are many nervous Democrats who want to finally cut their strings with him. And the Republicans are a party in disarray, internally torn and tired of the Trump saga which will not end.

Two clowns don’t make for a pretty picture running the country and the world into the ground. Biden and Trump and their predecessors are naked now and not just does one boy see it and shout it only to be ignored. There is a growing feeling throughout the country that truth and goodness spoken clearly are desperately needed to unite the country through common values. Bob Dylan got it right back a few years:

While preachers preach of evil fates
Teachers teach that knowledge waits
Can lead to hundred-dollar plates
Goodness hides behind its gates
But even the president of the United States
Sometimes must have to stand naked

Every day Americans are bombarded with bad news: the U.S. war against Russia via Ukraine, the lies about the “threats” from Russia and China, the collapsing economy, toxic spills, gun violence, corporate gangsters ripping off the average American and funneling those monies to the politicians who pimp for them, the egregious Covid-19 and “vaccine” lies that are daily being exposed as deadly frauds, the growing threat of nuclear war, etc.

Bad bad news, and with it a growing public sense of hopelessness. A pall of unacknowledged depression smothers the country. People are dying for hope, as they were in 1968. In their inner hearts there is this desperate yearning for one brave soul to stand up and tell Americans the truth about what has happened to their country. Bobby Kennedy, Jr. is the only one who can move Americans to hope again.

For years he has been telling harsh truths that many who profit from the lies do not want to hear. That our waters are polluted and the chemical companies are criminals; that the pharmaceutical companies are criminal enterprises polluting people’s bodies; that the CIA is organized crime polluting people’s minds and assassinating its anti-war leaders; that the Pentagon is a criminal enterprise not defending but risking American’s lives and their livelihood; that the U.S. government has joined with mega-corporations to run a Mob-like fleecing of the American people; that not one of Sirhan Sirhan’s bullets killed his father, Senator Robert Kennedy, who was shot from behind at close range by a CIA hit man; that the so-called Covid vaccines are very dangerous and have never been appropriately tested and many people are dying and being injured as a result; that Anthony Fauci is a liar and fraud who fronts for Big Pharma (see this) in the Covid-19 crisis that is an intelligence-run operation controlled by spooks working with medical technocrats; and that we are close to losing our country and any semblance of its democratic ideals.

These are not liberal or conservative positions. They are self-evident conclusions of a patriot, as they should be for everyone.

And because they have become such to more and more Americans who can think without reacting, Kennedy’s voice and his candidacy will grow in strength across the great divide.

The media attacks will be intense and simply full of lies. They love to call him an “anti-vaxxer,” when he is not opposed to all vaccines. But no matter how many times he has explained this, the media twist it to serve their masters.

For example, The New York Post recently published a slimy piece that could serve as a template for all the propaganda aimed at Kennedy. Let me quote:

Robert has said Sirhan did not actually participate in the murder of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy during a Los Angeles presidential campaign stop in 1968.

This of course is a lie. RFK, Jr. has said that Sirhan fired a pistol but none of his bullets hit the Senator. He has said a CIA hit man shot his father at close range from behind as the official autopsy clearly showed, while Sirhan was standing in front of the Senator.

Lie number two. The Post writes:

In it [a speech], he implied that those who oppose vaccines are being persecuted more severely than Anne Frank, the German teen who hid from the Nazis in Amsterdam before being sent to her death at Auschwitz.

He never implied that. His point was clear: that in the coming digital surveillance state there will be nowhere to hide, not even in an attic, because the surveillance technology will track everyone everywhere, day and night.

These are but a few examples. Look and you will find them everywhere now and in the coming days.

The hyenas with polished faces will try like hell to dismiss Robert f. Kennedy, Jr. as a flake, a fraud, and a conspiracy nut on an ego-trip. Too many people can now see through such propaganda. He is the real thing, our best hope to bridge the great divide that has been created by the elites to divide the American people.

He will not back down, and all people of good will who believe the U.S. can still find its way out of the morass we find ourselves in, should back him up. He has warned us, he has given us his voice, and his moral courage should be followed by all who hope to hope.

The pundits who dismiss his chances will then be shocked.

On the Edge of a Nuclear Abyss

Posted on April 14, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

Two days after Russia attacked Ukraine and the day before Vladimir Putin put Russia on nuclear alert, I wrote a little article whose first sentence was: “Not wanting to sound hyperbolic, but I am starting to conclude that the nuclear madmen running the U.S./NATO New Cold War they started decades ago are itching to start a nuclear war with Russia.”

It was an intuition based on my knowledge of U.S./Russia history, including the U.S engineered coup in Ukraine in 2014, and a reading of current events. I refer to it as intuition, yet it is based on a lifetime’s study and teaching of political sociology and writing against war. I am not a Russian scholar, simply a writer with a sociological, historical, and artistic imagination, although my first graduate academic study in the late 1960s was a thesis on nuclear weapons and why they might be someday used again.

It no longer sounds hyperbolic to me that madmen in the declining U.S. Empire might resort, like rats in a sinking ship, to first strike use of nuclear weapons, which is official U.S. policy. My stomach is churning at the thought, despite what most experts say: that the chances of a nuclear war are slight. And despite what others say about the Ukraine war: that it is an intentional diversion from the Covid propaganda and the Great Reset (although I agree it achieves that goal).

My gut tells me no; it is very real, sui generis, and very, very dangerous now.

The eminent scholar Michel Chossudovsky of Global Research agrees that we are very close to the unthinkable. In a recent historical analysis of U.S.-Russia relations and nuclear weapons, he writes the following before quoting Vladimir Putin’s recent statement on the matter. “Vladimir Putin’s statement on February 21st, 2022 was a response to U.S. threats to use nuclear weapons on a preemptive basis against Russia, despite Joe Biden’s “reassurance” that the U.S. would not be resorting to ‘A first strike’ nuclear attack against an enemy of America”:

Let me [Putin] explain that U.S. strategic planning documents contain the possibility of a so-called preemptive strike against enemy missile systems. And who is the main enemy for the U.S. and NATO? We know that too. It’s Russia. In NATO documents, our country is officially and directly declared the main threat to North Atlantic security. And Ukraine will serve as a forward springboard for the strike.” (Putin Speech, February 21, 2022, emphasis added)

Putin is absolutely correct. It is why he put Russia’s nuclear forces on full alert. Only those ignorant of history, which sadly includes most U.S. Americans, don’t know this.

I believe that today we are in the greatest danger of a nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, something I vividly remember as a teenager. The same feelings return. Dread. Anxiety. Breathlessness. I do not think these feelings are misplaced nor they are simply an emotional response. I try to continue writing on other projects that I have started but feel stymied. The possibility of nuclear war, whether intentional or accidental, obsesses me.

In order to grasp this stomach-churning possibility within the context of Ukraine, we need to put aside all talk of morality, rights, international law, and think in terms of great power politics, as John Mearsheimer has so clearly articulated. As he says, when a great power feels its existence is threatened, might makes right. You simply can’t understand world politics without thinking at this level. Doing so does not mean justifying the use of might; it is a means of clarifying the causes of wars, which start long before the first shots are fired.

In the present crisis over Ukraine, Russia clearly feels existentially threatened by U.S./NATO military moves in Ukraine and in eastern Europe where they have positioned missiles that can be very quickly converted to nuclear and are within a few minutes range of Russia. (And of course there are U.S./NATO nuclear missiles throughout western and southern Europe.) Vladimir Putin has been talking about this for many years and is factually correct. He has reiterated that this is unacceptable to Russia and must stop. He has pushed for negotiations to end this situation.

The United States, despite its own Monroe Doctrine that prohibits another great power from putting weapons or military forces close to its borders, has blocked its ears and kept upping the ante, provoking Russian fears. This fact is not in dispute but is shrugged off by U.S./NATO as of little consequence. Such an attitude is pure provocation as anyone with a smidgeon of historical awareness knows.

The world was very lucky sixty years ago this October when JFK and Nikita Khrushchev negotiated the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis before the world was incinerated. Kennedy, of course, was intensely pressured by the military and CIA to bomb Cuba, but he resisted. He also rejected the insane military desire to nuke the Soviet Union, calling such people crazy; at a National Security Council meeting on September 12, 1963, when the Joint Chiefs of Staff presented a report about a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union which they wanted for that fall, he said, “Preemption is not possible for us.”

Such leadership, together with the nuclear test ban treaty he negotiated with the USSR that month, inter alia (such treaties have now been abrogated by the U.S. government), assured his assassination organized by the CIA. These days, the U.S. is led by deluded men who espouse a nuclear first strike policy, which tells one all one needs to know about the danger the world is in. The U.S. has been very sick with Russia hatred for a long time.

After the terror of the Cuban Missile Crisis, many more people took the threat of nuclear war seriously. Today very few do. It has receded into the ”unimaginable.” In 1962, however, as James W. Douglass writes in JFK and the Unspeakable:

Kennedy saw that, at least outside Washington, D.C., people were living with a deeper awareness of the ultimate choice they faced. Nuclear weapons were real. So, too, was the prospect of peace. Shocked by the Cuban Missile Crisis into recognizing a real choice, people preferred peace to annihilation.

Today the reality of nuclear annihilation has receded into unconsciousness. This despite the recent statements by U.S. generals and the U.S. Ukrainian puppet Zelensky about nuclear weapons and their use that have extremely inflamed Russia’s fears, which clearly is intentional. The game is to have some officials say it and then deny it while having a policy that contradicts your denial. Keep pushing the envelope is U.S. policy. Obama-Biden reigned over the U.S. 2014 coup in Ukraine, Trump increased weapon sales to Ukraine in 2017, and Biden has picked up the baton from his partner (not his enemy) in this most deadly game. It is a bi-partisan Cold War 2, getting very hot. And it is the reason why Russia, its back to the wall, attacked Ukraine. It is obvious that this is exactly what the U.S. wanted or it would have acted very differently in the leadup to this tragedy. All the current ringing of hands is pure hypocrisy, the nihilism of a nuclear power never for one moment threatened but whose designs were calculated to threaten Russia at its borders.

The media propaganda against Russia and Putin is the most extreme and extensive propaganda in my lifetime. Patrick Lawrence has astutely examined this in a recent essay, where he writes the same is true for him:

Many people of many different ages have remarked in recent days that they cannot recall in their lifetimes a more pervasive, suffocating barrage of propaganda than what has engulfed us since the months that preceded Russia’s intervention. In my case it has come to supersede the worst of what I remember from the Cold War decades.

Engulfed is an appropriate word. Lawrence rightly points to this propaganda as cognitive warfare directed at the U.S. population (and the rest of the world) and notes its connection to the January 2021 final draft of a “diabolic” NATO study called “Cognitive Warfare.” He quotes it thus: “The brain will be the battlefield of the 21^st century,” . . . “Humans are the contested domain. Cognitive warfare’s objective is to make everyone a weapon.”

This cognitive warfare, however, has a longer history in cutting edge science. For each successive decade beginning with the 1990s and a declaration from President (and ex-Director of the CIA) George H. W. Bush that the 1990s would be the Decade of Brain Research, presidents have announced additional decades long projects involving the brain, with 2000-2010 being the Decade of Behavior Project, followed by mapping of the brain, artificial intelligence, etc. all organized and funded through the Office of Science and Technology Project (OSTP) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). This medical, military, and scientific research has been part of a long range plan to extend MK-Ultra’s mind control to the population at large under the cover of medical science, and it has been simultaneously connected to the development and funding of the pharmaceutical industries research and development of new brain-altering drugs. RFK, Jr. has documented the CIA’s extensive connection to germ and mind research and promotion in his book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. It is why his book is banned from the mainstream media, who do the prime work of cognitive warfare for the government. To put it clearly: these media are the CIA. And the issue of U.S. bio-weapons research and development is central to these many matters, including in Ukraine.

In other words, the cognitive warfare we are now being subjected to has many tentacles connected to much more than today’s fanatical anti-Russian propaganda over Ukraine. All the U.S. wars of aggression have been promoted under its aegis, as have the lies about the attacks of September 11, 2001, the economic warfare by the elites, the COVID crisis, etc. It’s one piece.

Take, for example, a book written in 2010 by David Ray Griffin, a renown theologian who has written more than a dozen books about 9/11. The book is Cognitive Infiltration: An Obama Appointee’s Plan to Undermine the 9/11 Conspiracy Theory. It is a critique of law professor Cass Sunstein, appointed by Obama to be the Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Sunstein had written an article with a plan for the government to prevent the spread of anti-government “conspiracy theories” in which he promoted the use of anonymous government agents to use secret “cognitive infiltration” of these groups in order to break them up; to use media plants to disparage their arguments. He was particularly referring to those who questioned the official 9/11 narrative but his point obviously extended much further. He was working in the tradition of the great propagandists. Griffin took a scalpel to this call for cognitive warfare and was of course a victim of it as well. Sunstein has since worked for the World Health Organization (WHO) on COVID psychological responses and other COVID committees. It’s all one piece.

Sunstein’s wife is Samantha Power, Obama’s Ambassador to the United Nations and war hawk extraordinaire. She gleefully promoted the U.S. destruction of Libya under the appellation of the “responsibility to protect,” a “humane” cover for imperialism. Now she is Biden’s Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), an arm of the CIA throughout the world. It’s all one piece.

The merry-go-round goes round and round.

I have gone off on this slight tangent to emphasize how vast and interconnected are the players and groups on Team Cognitive Warfare. They have been leading the league for quite some time and are hoping their game plan against Team Russia will keep them there. So far they are winning, as Patrick Lawrence says:

Look at what has become of us. Most Americans seem to approve of these things, or at least are unstirred to object. We have lost all sense of decency, of ordinary morality, of proportion. Can anyone listen to the din of the past couple of weeks without wondering if we have made of ourselves a nation of grotesques?
It is common to observe that in war the enemy is always dehumanized. We are now face to face with another reality: Those who dehumanize others dehumanize themselves more profoundly.

Perhaps people are too ignorant to see through the propaganda. To have some group to hate is always “uplifting.” But we are all responsible for the consequences of our actions, even when those actions are just buying the propaganda and hating those one is told to hate. It is very hard to accept that the leaders of your own country commit and contemplate unspeakable evil deeds and that they wish to control your mind. To contemplate that they might once again use nuclear weapons is unspeakable but necessary if we are to prevent it.

I hope my fears are unfounded. I agree with Gilbert Doctorow that the Ukraine-Russia war separates the sheep from the goats, that there is no middle ground. This is not to celebrate war and the death of innocent people, but it does demand placing the blame squarely where it belongs and not trying to have it both ways. People like him, John Mearsheimer, the late badly missed Stephen Cohen, Ray McGovern, Scott Ritter, Pepe Escobar, Patrick Lawrence, Jack Matlock, Ted Postol, et al. are all cutting through the propaganda and delivering truth in opposition to all the lies. They go gentile with fears of nuclear war, however, as if it is somewhat possible but highly unlikely, as if their deepest thoughts are unspeakable, for to utter them would be an act of despondency.

The consensus of the experts tends to be that the U.S. wishes to draw the Russians into a long protracted guerrilla war along the lines of its secret use of mujahideen in Afghanistan in 1979 and after. There is evidence that this is already happening. But I think the U.S. strategists know that the Russians are too smart for that; that they have learned their lesson; and that they will withdraw once they feel they have accomplished their goals. Therefore, from the U.S./NATO perspective, time is reasonably short and they must act quickly, perhaps by doing a false flag operation that will justify a drastic response, or upping the tempo in some other way that would seem to justify the use of nuclear weapons, perhaps tactical at first.

I appreciate the input of the Russia experts I mentioned above. Their expertise dwarfs mine, but I disagree. Perhaps I am an excitable sort; perhaps I am one of those Patrick Lawrence refers to, quoting Carl Jung, as too emotional and therefore incapable of clear thinking. (I will leave the issue of this long held but erroneous western philosophical belief in the division of emotions and thoughts for another day.) Perhaps I can’t see the obvious that a nuclear war will profit no one and therefore it cannot happen. Yet Ted Postol, MIT professor of technology and international security, while perhaps agreeing that an intentional nuclear war is very unlikely, has been warning of an accidental one for many years. He is surely right on that score and well worth listening to.

But either way, I am sorry to say, perhaps because my perspective is that of a generalist, not an expert, and my thinking is informed by art as much as social science and history, my antennae pick up a very disturbing message. A voice tells me that the danger is very, very real today. It says:

Beware, we are on the edge of a nuclear abyss.

Robert Francis Kennedy, Jr.’s Heroic Resistance to the CIA’s Continuing Covid Coup D’état

Posted on December 17, 2021 by Reid Mukai

By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

A Meditation

With his extraordinary new book, The Real Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, RFK, Jr. has made it very clear that he will not allow Orwell’s 1984 totalitarian boot to stamp on his face. His is a very rare moral courage, and he is asking us to join him, before it is too late and we enter into a new dark age, in recognizing and resisting the evil forces intent on stamping out democracy around the world. He is not pulling his punches with language as he accuses the political-intelligence-media-money-medical-corporate-pharmaceutical conspirators of executing “the controlled demolition of American constitutional democracy.” For a brilliant and highly accomplished lawyer and excellent writer and speaker, the choice of those words “controlled demolition” is clearly intentional.

For anyone who doubts that the Covid-19 crisis is an intelligence-run operation controlled by spooks working with medical technocrats like Anthony Fauci, billionaires such as Bill Gates, the military, media, Big Pharma, the World Economic Forum, etc., a close reading of this book – with its 2,194 references – will disabuse one of that illusion.

The CIA has long been deeply involved with vaccines, viruses, drugs, weaponizing cancer, biological weapons, and of course massive mind-control operations – deadly propaganda in plain English – for use in controlling U.S. Americans and foreigners alike. As Kennedy writes in an ironically understated way, “The pervasive CIA involvement in the global vaccine putsch should give us pause.” Yes, a long pause. He continues:

There is nothing in the CIA’s history, in its charter, in its composition, or in its institutional culture that betrays an interest in promoting either public health or democracy. The CIA’s historical preoccupations have been power and control. The CIA has been involved in at least seventy-two attempted and successful coup d’état between 1947 and 1989, involving about a third of the world’s governments. Many of these were functioningd democracies. The CIA does not do public health. It does not do democracy. The CIA does coups d’état. [my emphasis]

Just as it does Kennedy assassinations.

Character assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is what the CIA and its media mouthpieces have been doing for years. This has become more and more necessary as they have realized the great growing danger he poses to their agenda. Calling him an anti-vaxxer, conspiracy theorist, and names far worse, is part of a concerted smear campaign to turn the public away from his message, which is multi-faceted and supported by deep research and impeccable logic. Like his father and uncle, he has become an irrepressibly eloquent opponent of the demonic forces intent on destroying the democratic dream.

With The Real Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, he has pinned his indictment of those forces to the world’s wall for all to read.

Just as this new book will not be reviewed by the corporate mainstream media, not even negatively for fear of promoting it by doing so, so too the last book he wrote, American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family, was completely ignored by such media.

As I wrote three years ago in the only review of that book:

When a book as fascinating, truthful, beautifully written, and politically significant as American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family, written by a very well-known author by the name of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and published by a prominent publisher (HarperCollins), is boycotted by mainstream book reviewers, you know it is an important book and has touched a nerve that the corporate mainstream media wish to anesthetize by eschewal.

American Values is part memoir, part family history, part astute political analysis, and part-confessional, and is in turns delightful, sad, funny, fierce, and frightening in its implications.

What implications? It is the heart of that book that had the obedient reviewers avoiding it like the plague, a plague introduced by a little mockingbird, as in Operation Mockingbird. No member of the Kennedy family since JFK or RFK had dared to say what RFK, Jr. did in that book. He indicted the CIA in a carefully crafted and fully factual way for a vast array of crimes. He spelled out the long war between the Kennedys and the CIA that resulted in the deaths of his father, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and his uncle President John Kennedy. He threw a gauntlet down in the midst of telling an entertaining and touching family saga, which included a critique of his own youthful transgressions.

But the nation’s spooks smelled danger in the tale and they are now more acutely aware that they must censor him because his message is finding an expanding audience of people sick of government lies and very hungry for the truth. More and more people are willing to follow this brave man into the darkness of our history and the ongoing coups d’état underway at home and abroad. They smell a demonic author behind the Covid-19 propaganda.

While Dr. Anthony Fauci understandably stands at the center of this new book, and deservedly so for his evil machinations over so many decades, it is important to recognize that he is an obedient, albeit very powerful, underling in a systemic structure of evil, who has greatly materially profited from the sale of his soul. Yet while this is true, to read Kennedy’s chapters on Fauci’s commanding role in the HIV/Aids fraud, the AZT shakedown, illegal experiments on children that killed at least 85, etc., is enough to make your blood boil and to realize that such actions must spring from a source far deeper than the thirst for lucre. Something fiendish and sinister is at work with all this with the suffering and death it has caused, and in the ways it has foreshadowed the COVID-19 propaganda and the complicity of the mass media in fronting for Fauci and his allies, then and now.

Kennedy exhaustively details Fauci’s work as a drug dealer for Big Pharma, even while his job at NIAID is to protect and improve the people’s health, which has deteriorated dramatically over his tenure. (It is important to mention parenthetically but not at all incidentally that the CIA “manages” the so-called war on drugs in a similar manner.) Thus we have a war of drugs and a “war on drugs” working in tandem in a perfect scheme to drug as many people as possible. Here are a few details:

Fauci has an annual $6 billion budget, most of which goes toward the research and development of new drugs.
He is the highest paid federal employee, more than the President, with an annual salary of $417, 608.
He controls 57 percent of global biomedical medical funding directly and indirectly via the NIH, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Wellcome Trust, and therefore controls the scientists looking for research money.
He has for decades overseen the regulatory capture of government health agencies by Big Pharma.
The CDC, a paramilitary organization, spends $4.9 billion of its $12 billion budget buying and distributing vaccines, the vaccines that Fauci has been pushing. It also owns 57 vaccine patents.
Fauci and other officials receive yearly emoluments of up to $150,000 in royalty payments on products that they help to develop and push through the approval process.
He has for many years promoted false pandemics to promote novel vaccines, drugs, and pharmaceutical company profits.
Forty-five percent of the FDA’s budget comes from the pharmaceutical industry through what are euphemistically called “user fees.”
Fauci has a “strange fascination with,” and has invested in “gain of function” experiments to engineer superbugs, which is part of a long CIA history of weaponizing viruses, etc.

RFK, Jr.’s detailed exposure of Fauci’s role reminds me of reading Moby Dick and meditating on Melville’s description of Ahab – one has to enter a different mental space to begin to comprehend such evil, and even then one is struck dumb by its extent and the media’s complicity in covering it up for so long.

When I use the word evil, I am not using that word loosely, but very precisely, for the actions of Fauci and his ilk are evil, although the human being Anthony Fauci is still capable of contrition and redemption. Anything is possible if not probable, but I am not holding my breath. Just as the actual people who shot JFK, RFK, MLK,Jr., et al. were obedient servants of the system that produced them – listen to Bob Dylan’s Only A Pawn in Their Game – Fauci is a product of a structural system of evil. This is not to excuse him but to place his actions in an historical and structural context.

Obviously he is not a poor southern unschooled white man used by the KKK as in Dylan’s song, but a sophisticated and Jesuit-educated New Yorker brought to political consciousness within a system that amply rewards obedience to the authorities. He is a graduate of the same Jesuit high school I attended, the elite Regis High School in NYC (and then the Jesuit College of the Holy Cross), and is considered by many of my classmates to be a national hero bordering on a saint. Such schooling made me well aware of how the system gobbles up its youth with promises of wealth and prestige if they yoke their intellectual acumen to allegiance to the rules of the game and become what Hannah Arendt termed “schreibtischtäter” – desk killers, or what the great American poet Kenneth Rexroth called hyenas with polished faces in the offices of billion dollar corporations devoted to “service.”

That such socialization is presented as being “a man for others” within the Jesuit tradition of mind-control, doubles its effectiveness as a confidence game. That is why so many decent young people succumb to this siren call. It then, however, demands the quelling of an uneasy conscience.

Jean Paul Sartre called this bad faith (mauvaise foi), a form of mental trickery in which one tries to “lie” to oneself – an impossibility since the liar and the one lied to are the same person – which means the deceiver must really know the truth that he is trying to conceal from the deceived. This form of split consciousness allows those who serve a rapacious system to attempt to deceive themselves and others that they are serving a just cause. Such attempts demand an actor’s skill and the quelling of one’s inner voice. But there are very many actors among us, as Nietzsche said, not genuine ones, but bad actors. Fauci, Gates, et al. are bad actors in a propaganda film, at least for those who know how propaganda is produced and bad acting exposed. Robert Kennedy is such an astute critic.

My purpose here is not to go into detail about Fauci and Gates’s connections to the U.S. intelligence and defense industries, for this is a meditation, not a review. But those connections are massive. Read the concluding chapter 12 in The Real Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. Check his sources, 298 for this chapter alone. This is not speculation or theory, but fact. Do your homework. Study. Kennedy says:

After twenty years [since the insider anthrax attacks following September 11, 2001: see Graeme MacQueen’s, The 2001 Anthrax Deception (isbn.nu)] of modeling exercises, the CIA – working with medical technologists like Anthony Fauci and billionaire internet tycoons – had pulled off the ultimate coup d’état: some 250 years after America’s historic revolt against entrenched oligarchy and authoritarians rule, the American experiment with self-government was over. The oligarchy was restored, and these gentlemen and their spymasters had equipped the rising technocracy with new tools of control unimaginable to King George or any other tyrant.

Yet the fight is far from over, and those with the tools and the mechanistic, material mindsets must contend with a rising tide of opposition to their plans for a “Great Reset” and a transhuman world. We may be in the final battle of this war, but the human spirit is stronger than those who wish to stamp out human freedom. Robert Kennedy, Jr. is leading the fight for the soul of the world, and it is both a political and spiritual one.

It does not take great intelligence to realize that when countries throughout the world act in a synchronized way in locking down their populations and repeat the same message on cue that such events are centrally coordinated. The entire COVID-19 propaganda campaign, culminating with its push to enforce multiple vaccines that are not vaccines and are based on fraudulent PCR tests, has been long in preparation and the intelligence agencies’ fingerprints are all over its planning. War game scenarios, weaponized vaccines, the CIA, the NIH, Gates, Fauci, the NIAID, DARPA, Wired magazine, the financial elites and their power centers such as the World Economic Forum, etc. – they are all involved in a conspiracy to impose a rigid global tyranny over regular people for the benefit of the world’s super-rich. Since Fauci’s coordinated lockdowns early in 2020, there has been a 3.8 trillion dollar shift in wealth upwards to the super-rich, creating 500 new billionaires, while pulverizing the middle class, destroying small businesses, enriching Fauci and his Pharmaceutical and robber baron corporate partners, and causing vast suffering and death all around the world. None of this is accidental. Kennedy documents it all. He writes:

Dark Winter, Atlantic Storm, and Global Mercury were only three of over a dozen Germ Games staged by military, medical, and intelligence planners leading up to COVID-19. Each of these Kafkaesque exercises became uncanny predictors of a dystopian age that pandemic planners dubbed the “New Normal.” The consistent feature is an affinity among their simulator designers for militarizing medicine and introducing centralized autocratic governance.
Each rehearsal ends with the same grim punchline: the global pandemic is an excuse to justify the imposition of tyranny and coerced vaccination. The repetition of these exercises suggests that they serve as a kind of rehearsal or training drill for an underlying agenda to coordinate the global dismantlement of democratic governance….Virtually all of the scenario planning for pandemics employ technical assumptions and strategies familiar to anyone who has read the CIA’s notorious psychological warfare manuals for shattering indigenous societies, obliterating traditional economics and social bonds, for using imposed isolation and the demolition of traditional economies to crush resistance, to foster chaos, demoralization, dependence and fear, and for imposing centralized and autocratic governance.

U.S. and foreign intelligence agencies have dominated the COVID-19 military project from the start. The CIA and Fauci are central to the official “conspiracy theory” – accurately called fact – including “Operation Warp Speed” under Trump. Trump simply carried on the work of his predecessors, including Obama, but acted as if he was opposed to it. It has always been a bi-partisan program because the CIA runs both parties.

When he was in prison in Germany after returning in 1939 from Union Theological Seminary in NYC to oppose Hitler, the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote the following from his prison cell before he was executed:

Against stupidity we have no defense. Neither protests nor force can touch it. Reasoning is of no use. Facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved — indeed, the fool can counter by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be pushed aside as trivial exceptions. So the fool, as distinct from the scoundrel, is completely self-satisfied. In fact, they can easily become dangerous, as it does not take much to make them aggressive. For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.

By stupid he did not mean that such people lacked intellectual ability, for they were often very smart, but that they had fallen under the spell of public power and lost all independence of mind. Thus he adds, “He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil.”

Robert Francis Kennedy, Jr. is still trying to reach these people. His is an heroic task. No wonder Kennedy is named for St. Francis to whom he is devoted; St. Francis taught him and us that courage and sacrifice are what God asks of us all.

One of his father’s favorite quotes defines the son as well; it is from Edith Hamilton, the author of The Greek Way, who wrote:

Men are not made for safe havens. The fullness of life is in the hazards of life…. To the heroic, desperate odds fling a challenge.

Robert Francis Kennedy, Jr. has stepped up to the challenge. He is brave and brilliant. We are blessed to have his witness.

Saturday Matinee: From JFK To 911 Everything Is A Rich Man’s Trick

Posted on November 27, 2021 by Reid Mukai

Source: Top Documentary Films

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy lingers as one of the most traumatic events of the twentieth century. The open and shut nature of the investigation which ensued left many global citizens unsettled and dissatisfied, and nagging questions concerning the truth behind the events of that fateful day remain to this day. Evidence of this can be found in the endless volumes of conspiracy-based materials which have attempted to unravel and capitalize on the greatest murder mystery in American history.

Now, a hugely ambitious documentary titled Everything is a Rich Man’s Trick adds fuel to those embers of uncertainty, and points to many potential culprits whose possible involvement in the assassination has long been obscured by official historical record.

Authoritatively written and narrated by Francis Richard Conolly, the film begins its labyrinthine tale during the era of World War I, when the wealthiest and most powerful figures of industry discovered the immense profits to be had from a landscape of ongoing military conflict. The film presents a persuasive and exhaustively researched argument that these towering figures formed a secret society by which they could orchestrate or manipulate war-mongering policies to their advantage on a global scale, and maintain complete anonymity in their actions from an unsuspecting public. Conolly contends that these sinister puppet masters have functioned and thrived throughout history – from the formation of Nazism to the build-up and aftermath of September 11.

The election of President Kennedy in 1960 represented a formidable threat to these shadowy structures of power, including high-profile figures within the Mafia, crooked politicians, and the world’s most influential and notorious war profiteers. Thus, a plot was hatched which would end Kennedy’s reign prior to any chance of re-election, thereby restoring the order and freedoms of these secret societies.

At nearly three and a half hours, Everything is a Rich Man’s Trick examines a defining event of our times from a perspective not often explored. While it may or may not win over viewers who remain skeptical of mass-scale conspiracy, it presents its findings in a measured and meticulous manner which demands attention and consideration.

To Conspiracy Theory or to Not Conspiracy Theory (That is the Question)

Posted on March 1, 2021 by Reid Mukai

By Scott Owen

Source: CounterPunch

Ever since the words were first introduced, conspiracy theories have carried the weight and stigma of mysterious enigmas wrapped in multiple layers of intrigue, deception, black-ops and lies. The very notion of conspiracy theories is itself considered by some to be a conspiracy theory. There are those who maintain that the CIA invented the term or at least brought it into our common language as a way of ridiculing those who questioned the Warren Report account of the murder of president JFK.

Whether the CIA did or did not intentionally use those words, conspiracy theory, to discredit those who were non-believers of the official Warren Report line, we will never know. And that’s the thing about a conspiracy theory, as to its truth, we may never know. What should be known however, what we would be better to believe, is that in this world of intrigue, deception, black-ops and lies, that there are without a doubt conspiracies. If the CIA ever had the desire to de-legitimize someone or some entire group, then or especially now, this moment is certainly ripe for supplying them with all the necessary ingredients for pulling off a grand conspiracy of mass de-legitimization of those they see as being political rabble-rousers.

The group who stormed the capitol on Jan.6^th is one such group who follow conspiracy theories but although they are unique in being the ones who stormed the capitol, they are not unique in their beliefs in conspiracy theories. It might be hard, if one were to look, to find someone who does not believe in some conspiracy theory or another and it would be right for that to be the case because surely, one or the other of those theories is true, based on facts and even provable if the right material evidence could be produced. In this world of intrigue, deception, black-ops and lies however, it is sometimes very hard, impossible even for most of us, to get our hands on the right material evidence and those shady CIA operators are loving it. Nothing produces the environment where conspiracy theories thrive like reams of hidden or redacted evidence.

Are many of the conspiracy theories we hear nothing but pure bunk made-up by who knows who for no other reason than to confuse and distract? Yes, many of them are. Are some of those theories the result of half understood notions that are used in an effort to understand hidden truth? Yes, many of them are. Are some of those theories true but only the tip of even greater conspiracies that we still haven’t even begun to suspect? It’s likely so. Would it be of some value to the public to keep an open mind where conspiracy theories are concerned? Yes, as it would be one of the tyrants greatest moments in psy-op history if we were not keeping an open mind where conspiracy theories are concerned. Are conspiracy theories currently being down-played and ridiculed as being absurd and the domain of idiots and fools? Yes they are!

Is this treatment of conspiracy theories as some form of mental illness or instability, coupled with corporate and government censorship of things that they and they alone deem as being conspiracy theories with no redeeming even harmful value to the public, a smart way to go in societies hoping to retain some shred of truth and freedom? No it is not. Let us ask ourselves then, would we be wise to write off as unacceptable any theories that suggest conspiracy and to then allow government and corporate control of censorship of those theories? I think not. Would you then prefer to live in a society where people are allowed to freely suggest conspiracies where there may or may not be conspiracies or would you prefer to live in a society where no conspiracy theories are allowed even though they may or may not be true?

Do you wish to live in a society where you and you alone are allowed to discern truth from fiction according to the evidence you yourself are able to uncover or do you want corporations and government to do that for you?

REVIEW: Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies by Edward Curtin

Posted on February 28, 2021 by Reid Mukai

By Ray McGinnis

Source: Off-Guardian

Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies is a selection of essays. They reveal what stirs author Ed Curtin’s heart, his mind, and his path toward clarity. With each chapter he passionately reflects on the state of his country and what matters most to him. It is a compelling read.

The epigraph at the beginning of Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies, “In a dark time, the eye begins to see,” comes from Theodore Roethke’s poem “In A Dark Time”. Here the poet describes a state of disorientation and dislocation of identity. Roethke asserts this is essential to achieve clarity, insight and wisdom. In a dark time, one discovers the fragmented and broken state of things. With this fitting epigraph, Ed Curtin proceeds to alert his readers to the fragmented and broken state of things in America, and the task of its citizenry to begin to see more clearly.

The topics Curtin, a former professor at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, takes up are not original to him. But they are marked with his own articulate original stamp. One aspect of his novel contribution is that Curtin steps beyond standard frameworks of political analyses.

Three themes have permeated his attention from a young age: truth, death and freedom. He cites an excerpt from an interview with the poet Kenneth Rexroth who told journalist Lawrence Lipton in 1959:

Since all society is organized in the interest of exploiting classes and since if men knew this they would cease to work and society would fall apart, it has always been necessary, at least since the urban revolutions, for societies to be governed ideologically by a system of fraud.

Rexroth referred to this system of fraud as the “social lie.” And in Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies, Curtin takes on the task of describing the roots of the fraud, and its more recent manifestations. He also takes time to point out, despite the burdens society grapples with in an age of deceit, that beauty, art, love, and whimsy are among the qualities that persist as signs of grace.

In his essay “Inside America’s Doll House: A Vast Tapestry Of Lies” Curtin cites Jim Garrison, the District Attorney of New Orleans who in 1969 brought to trial a case naming persons connected to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Garrison attempted to show that the assassination of JFK was the work of the CIA and Allen Dulles.

However, Garrison was routinely described as a lunatic by CIA-connected media spokespersons. It was Garrison’s conclusion that American citizens passively consumed television news that was laced with propaganda. Such propaganda was manufactured to preclude Americans from “understanding…what is really happening….”

Garrison warned that Americans were living “in a doll’s house.” Building on the hard lessons Jim Garrison learned from the trial in 1969, Ed Curtin observes:

In the doll’s house into which America gradually has been converted, a great many of our basic assumptions are totally illusory.

His book was also released in winter 2020, some 57 years after JFK’s assassination.

Curtin notes that in 2009:

[President] Obama backed the 2009 coup d’état in Honduras that has resulted in so many deaths at the hands of U.S. trained killers, and now [followers of Trump complain about] all these ‘non-white’ people fleeing to the U.S. to escape a hell created by the U.S…

After 2009. it was learned that U.S. officers at the Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies trained members of the Honduran military to oust democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya. In 2009 and the years following Honduras has had one of the highest rates of murder in the world. These have been driven by death squads connected to the Honduran military. But this coup mattered little to both President’s Obama and Trump, while Hondurans have paid the price in murder, increased debt and poverty.

Examples of what Curtin raises continue since his book was published in late 2020. For Venezuelans it matters little whether a Republican or a Democrat is president in the USA. Under Donald Trump there was a failed attempt in May 2020 to kidnap Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. And on the first day of his presidency, Joe Biden signed an executive order declaring the United States recognizes Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó as the nations’ President. This despite Maduro winning over 67% of the popular vote in 2018; That the second candidate in the election results was Henri Falcón who won 21%; And Juan Guaidó wasn’t even a candidate in 2018. Imagine if Venezuela protested the result of the 2020 United States election, and recognized Mitt Romney as president (who ran in 2012 but didn’t run in 2020).

With Biden there is a change of tone from Trump, but many American foreign policies remain the same. Former President Jimmy Carter said of Venezuela’s 2012 elections when Hugo Chavez was re-elected:

…of the 92 elections that we’ve [Carter Centre Foundation in Atlanta] monitored, I would say the election process in Venezuela is the best in the world.

But that story that doesn’t conform with the media’s narrative. So, it goes down the memory hole.

Curtin notes that while average Americans have not constructed the doll’s house they live in, they are complicit. It is average Americans who have accepted “decades of fabricated reality for so-called peace of mind.” A consequence of accepting illusory narratives is that people are not really free.

In order to cope with a plausible lie, consumers of the news play dumb. And Curtin notes most Americans…

want to be nice (Latin, nescire, not to know, to be ignorant) and to be liked.

As they become a people of the lie, repeating the lies they are fed, a memetic desire arises in society. And the repetition of these lies fuels violence and scapegoating. The doll’s house that Americans (and many citizens of other countries who consume the news uncritically) live in, are reinforced by contracts they have made with the world. This is in order to enhance their social standing, financial status, professional advancement and maintain familial harmony. That kind of peace of mind and contentment require individuals not to venture out far from the doll house, in case they encounter truths they find hard to handle.

Curtin notes that the Central Intelligence Agency began to use the term “conspiracy theory” in a memo on April 1, 1967. This was to discredit assassination theories about other plausible actors in the death of the slain president on November 22, 1963. And he notes that it just so happens that the term “9/11” was first used on September 12, 2001, by future New York Times editor Bill Keller to designate the language for how to refer to the day of the attacks. By using a term synonymous with dialing an emergency number in the United States, the term became fused with feelings of “anxiety, depression, panic and confusion.”

It is useful to note that at the time of the attacks on September 11, 2001, the emergency number in Saudi Arabia was 999. In Afghanistan the emergency numbers were 102, 112 and 119. The numbers in Yemen were 191 and 194. The emergency numbers in the United Arab Emirates were 112, 998 and 999. The emergency number in Libya was 1515. The number in Kuwait was 112. The numbers in Iraq were 104, 115 and 122. In Syria emergency numbers were 110, 112 and 113. In Lebanon the numbers variously were 112, 140, 175 and 999. The emergency numbers in Egypt were 122, 123 and 180. Across continental Europe the emergency number to call on September 11, 2001, was 112. The emergency numbers in Iran were 110, 112, 115 and 125.

Curiously, 911 was a number to dial an emergency uniquely in the United States, Canada, Mexico (as well as 065, 066 and 068), and South America. 911 was not an emergency number in the states where Arabs were alleged to have plotted to attack the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

In some future scenario – were it to ever happen – might rogue American terrorists fly planes into skyscrapers in Tehran, Iran? And in such a scenario, might such terrorists plot an attack on a January 10th, 12th or 15th of a given year, fusing the day of the atrocity with the abbreviation for a date synonymous with one of the numbers Iranians dialed in case of an emergency?

In his essay “Why I Don’t Speak of 9/11 Anymore,” Curtin notices that by “referring to September 11 as 9/11,” Keller ensured…

an endless national emergency became wedded to an endless war on terror aimed at preventing Hitler-like terrorists from obliterating us with nuclear weapons that could create another ground zero or holocaust. It is a term that pushes all the right buttons evoking unending social fear and anxiety. It is language as sorcery; it is propaganda at its best.

Because Curtin suspects that the repetition of the term “9/11” is embedded in an advanced form of mind-control, he refuses to use the term in relation to the attacks. Instead, he uses the phrase “the attacks of September 11, 2001.” Whatever vocabulary we use to refer to the attacks, Curtin advises that we find one that can unbind us from the mesmerizing impact of its official shorthand repeated endlessly, subliminally evoking confusion, depression and panic in its hearers.

As our post-modern society has evolved, the task of creating propaganda is more complex. And so, the complexity of society drives a majority to want ready-made frameworks for understanding their reality coherently. Curtin shows that…

people want to be provided with myths to direct them to the ‘truth,’ but that so-called truth has been preconceived within the overarching myth provided by propaganda.

Nonetheless, the propaganda is efficient enough to allow most people to deduce that they’ve reached their conclusions of their own free will. Most people will assume that they’ve been provided with a suitable range of information about the key points of a given topic in order to decide what is trustworthy. However, the same consumers of the news will regard as inconceivable that the narrative they’ve been led to accept contains cherry-picked news that omits perspectives that are off-message. Surely, wouldn’t any dissenting voices that are worth knowing about would be given a hearing on the six o’clock news?

Curtin concurs with author Lisa Pease who wrote in her book A Lie Too Big To Fail: The Real History of the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy:

The way the CIA took over America in the 1960s is the story of our time, and too few recognize this. We can’t fix a problem we can’t even acknowledge exists.

To support his assessment, Curtin points to numerous examples in different chapters across his book. This includes a chapter on “The Message From Dallas, JFK and The Unspeakable,” where he summarizes JFK author James W. Douglass’ layer-by-layer excavation of a CIA-backed assassination of a president who had turned from war-making toward peace-making.

In another chapter titled “What Are We Working For ‘At Eternity’s Gate’,” Curtin writes about the rat-race. He recalls a summer job as a clerk in a General Motors office in Manhattan. The “bait” was the salary, and so his youth was spent that summer confined to a boring job.

As I read Curtin’s description, I thought about some of the jobs I had: working a night shift as a hotel security guard, a cleaner at a private golf club, and working at a vehicle repair shop for the Ministry of Forests for the Province of British Columbia. The latter I spent a summer affixing forestry vehicle identification serial numbers on the side of government trucks.

The author mentions a film about the life of Vincent Van Gogh, titled At Eternity’s Gate, which offers a vision of new possibilities for what it means to work, to be alive. For Van Gogh it was the “act of painting” that was “the stroke of genius.” And so, for the impoverished painter it was not the completion of paintings that was important, but immersing himself in painting. This was the key to life.

In this essay, Curtin invites the reader to contemplate what it means to live and to ask ourselves why we work. He tells us:

For Vincent the answer was simple: reality. But reality is not given to us and is far from simple; we must create it in acts that penetrate the screens and clichés that wall us off from it.

One of the screens that Curtin had to penetrate was a slogan he was taught as a United States Marine:

My rifle is my life.

Curtin saw through the slogan, recognizing that being human meant to be a lover of life and being committed to waging peace.

In yet another essay, “The Sexual Passion of Winston Smith”, Curtin details the commodification of society, where everything can be bought and sold. As he speaks about the body’s commodification, Curtin reminds us that part of the body – “the tongue is a bell, tolling out its [language’s] meaning.” It is finally the tongue that helps us in speech to “tell the truth that propagandists try to deny.”

In his book, the author offers suggestions for pointing a way forward that can help us search for truth in a landscape of falsehoods. One of these is poetry. He points out that citizens in Chile, Ireland and Russia know their national poets and can quote their works “by heart.” But in America poets and poetry are ignored. A new generation is too busy checking Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. But Curtin argues:

Poetry is the search for truth. It marries outer to inner.

The best of what poetry can offer helps a society…

address questions of value and ultimate concern…of truth and lies.

He contrasts these with…

screen and selfie culture [where] these matters are irrelevant.

In addition to truth and lies, Curtin points to myriad oddities that dot the landscape of America’s cultural past. Many of the rock n’ roll bands in the mid-sixties were viewed as part of a countercultural/anti-war protest movement against the establishment. There are books like one by Alex Constantine, The Covert War Against Rock, that document operations by the CIA and FBI to discredit and disrupt the lives of pop-rock stars identified as subversive. Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon and others had extensive intelligence files on them. Constantine cites a leaked intelligence memorandum discussed in testimony before the Church Committee on April 26, 1976.

Regarding certain recording artists, the FBI wrote to its agents:

Show them as scurrilous and depraved. Call attention to their habits and living conditions, explore every possible embarrassment. Send in women and sex, break up marriages. Have members arrested on marijuana charges….Send articles to newspapers showing their depravity. Use narcotics and free sex to entrap. Use misinformation to confuse and disrupt….Provoke target groups into rivalries that may result in death.

But was another arm of the intelligence community simultaneously grooming anti-establishment recording artists? In Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies Curtin notes that Buffalo Springfield performed in concert, along with the Beach Boys, at the United States Military Academy at West Point, in Orange County, New York, on November 25, 1967.

Curtin points out that this is “a very odd venue for a ‘dissident’ rock group.” Their Top Ten hit in the spring of ’67 – “For What It’s Worth” – invited radio listeners to consider, though it wasn’t “exactly clear” what was “happening,” to “stop,” and “look” at what was “going down.”

How did members of Buffalo Springfield feel about performing at the military academy when there were “battle lines being drawn?” And what an odd thing for cadets at West Point to be listening to lyrics that warn:

step out of line, the man come and take you away.

Citing David McGowan’s Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon, Curtin notes that “Papa” John Philips of the Mamas and the Papas attended the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland, and that his dad was a Marine Corps Captain:

John’s wife had worked at the Pentagon and her father was involved in covert intelligence in Vietnam.

The Doors Jim Morrison, a neighbor and friend of Philips, was the son of U.S. Navy Admiral George Morrison who was the commander of American Naval ships during the Gulf of Tonkin incident that accelerated the Vietnam War.

Frank Zappa’s father happened to be a chemical warfare specialist.

Curtin notes others like David Crosby and Stephen Stills were also from military family backgrounds. And many of these young musicians all converged at Laurel Canyon:

Although they were draft age, none of them [were] drafted as they played music, dropped acid, and created the folk-rock movement…

Were these musicians’ part of intelligence community operations, as much as the agents who were harassing them? Or as David McGowan asks, was…

the entire youth culture of the 1960s…created not as a grass-roots challenge to the status quo, but as a cynical exercise in discrediting and marginalizing the budding anti-war movement and creating a fake opposition that could be easily controlled and led astray…?

With each chapter, Ed Curtin takes us into different rooms in the doll’s house, and helps us connect the dots. His stories and reflections, in an age of “fake news”, are essential reading.

In the quest for truth, readers of Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies will be advised to take the road less travelled. This road requires we quiet our minds, and welcome silence. It is a road less travelled where each must ask: what can I do to help transform our terrible, corrupt, beautiful world longing to be more human, just and peaceful?

Curtin does not intend for us as readers to simply finish his book unfazed. He hopes his chapters might rouse us to find ways to resist in this age of permanent war and oligarchy, in a world still longing for peace and justice.

Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies is available in digital and paperback versions at Amazon and other retailers. For more info and praise for the book, visit Ed Curtin’s website: www.edwardcurtin.com

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