Six Decades On, It’s Time to Disclose the Truth about the JFK Assassination
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Originally published at The Kennedy Beacon
By Aaron Good, columnist, The Kennedy Beacon
Sixty years ago today, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Over the course of his tenure in office, JFK was an extremely popular US president. In fact, he had the highest average approval rating of any US president since Gallup began polling Americans on the subject in the 1930’s. It is no coincidence that the most popular American president was assassinated under absurdly suspicious circumstances.
On this historic anniversary, I do not wish to recount the forensic evidence which exposes the Warren Commission’s fraudulent decree on the case. Two recent films do this so well that no objective viewer can doubt that JFK was killed as the result of a high-level plot carried out by people who knew that in the aftermath, they would be in control of the vital organs of the state. Specifically, if anyone wants to learn the forensic details of the case, he or she should watch Oliver Stone’s JFK: Destiny Betrayed and/or The Parkland Doctors. Additionally, I recommend the upcoming film series, Four Died Trying, to understand the deeper reasons behind the assassination of President Kennedy and three other anti-imperialist American leaders of the 1960’s—Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
Very shortly after President Kennedy was assassinated, people began suspecting a conspiracy behind the shots in Dallas. In fact, the first JFK “conspiracy theorist” was none other than Lee Harvey Oswald. When asked why he shot the president, Oswald shouted to reporters, “I’m just a patsy!” In other words, he tried to tell the world that he was being set up as a patsy by others who wanted him to take the fall for the murder. A day and a half later, Oswald was killed by a supposedly concerned local underworld figure, Jack Ruby. By that point, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy had become the second JFK conspiracy theorist. As David Talbot demonstrated in his book Brothers, Robert F. Kennedy immediately suspected that his brother’s murder was the work of the CIA — along with the agency’s mafia and Cuban exile friends. Eventually, even the “pimp for all seasons,” Jack Ruby, joined the conspiracy camp, telling reporters that powerful men had put him in the difficult position of having to kill Lee Harvey Oswald. After he had been granted a new trial, Ruby claimed he was being poisoned and he died in prison before his second trial commenced.
The Warren Commission was the US Establishment’s way to sanctify a farcical cover story to explain to the American public the assassination of the president they had elected three years prior. Its final report concluded that Oswald, acting alone, killed President Kennedy for no discernible reason before being assassinated himself by a random local nightclub owner named Jack Ruby in a room full of policemen. The public was incredulous, but the media and political class fell in line. The federal government locked away all of the Warren Commission’s files, but the public was free to examine the 26 volumes of the Warren Report.
The vast inconsistencies in those 26 volumes gave rise to a dedicated cohort of JFK assassination researchers. For the past six decades, these diligent American citizens have hammered away at the Warren Commission’s absurd JFK cover story. If the world survives the inexorably approaching end of US hegemony, the efforts of these researchers will stand as a monument to the spirit of American democracy. Summing up their collective efforts, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently told an interviewer, “There is overwhelming evidence that the CIA was involved in [JFK’s] murder… I think it’s beyond a reasonable doubt at this point.” And yet, the US government—in the name of national security—refuses to fully disclose and adjudicate the affair.
The late New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison grimly summed up the heart of the matter (dramatized by Oliver Stone using Garrison’s writings):
What kind of national security do we have when we’ve been robbed of our leaders? What national security permits the removal of fundamental power from the hands of the American people and validates the ascendancy of an invisible government in the United States? That kind of national security, gentlemen of the jury, is when it smells like it, feels like it, and looks like it, you call it what it is: Fascism!
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. himself has long warned of US fascism in high places. In a 2005 book, Kennedy wrote, “[F]ascism is the control of government by business… My American Heritage Dictionary defines fascism as ‘a system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership together with belligerent nationalism.’ Sound familiar?”
Kennedy in 2005 was writing about the Bush administration. Back then, he was still in a state of denial about the state-sanctioned murders of his uncle and father. Now, almost two decades later, he is still targeting fascist strains in our political system, vowing “to end the corrupt merger of state and corporate power.”
Why Did JFK Have To Be Removed?
The real motives for the JFK assassination trace back to World War II and are deeply intertwined with hidden fascist machinery within the US regime. This covertly fascist state was created after Wall Street oligarchs determined that the US should enter the second World War, win the war, and then become a global empire. Keeping with the corporate flavor of the whole project, US elites did not declare a global imperial dominion. Rather, they presented it as an “American Century,” in which the US would provide global leadership over the “free enterprise” system.
In practice, the architects of the US Empire knew that America’s New Deal democracy could not deliver the riches of the empire which they sought. While “freedom and democracy” were great ways to sell the American empire to American and global publics, the real architects of the US Empire — men like former CIA director Allen Dulles — knew they would need to rely on lawless violence to make the empire run smoothly. To that end, they rescued literal German, Italian, and Japanese fascists — saving them from the gallows so they could deploy their murderous craft for the new US empire. The creation of the CIA in 1947 gave the covertly fascist apparatus a “forever home” in the new US national security state. The agency subverted and overthrew governments across the world, many of them democratically elected. The American people were blissfully unaware of what their government was secretly doing in their name.
After taking office, President Kennedy sought to redirect the US away from global dominance and toward peaceful internationalist cooperation. The problem was that the US Empire had arisen from a consensus in the American oligarchy of corporate wealth. Kennedy may have been very popular with the American public, but he was decidedly unpopular among the .001%, i.e., among the American ultra-rich.
It was this oligarchy which had set in motion the creation of the postwar US Empire — and the creation of the covertly fascist arm of the national security state. Under overt fascism, Nazi Germany operated under the “Fuhrer principle” by which the Nazi state could act unilaterally without regard for the rule of law. Since an American “Fuhrer principle” was a non-starter in the US thanks to democratic norms, US oligarchs created a form of clandestine fascism so that US elites could have their cake and eat it too. In other words, by making the state’s lawlessness covert, US leaders could claim to be champions of democracy and the rule of law while also lawlessly running a global empire. On November 22, 1963, those clandestine fascist chickens came home to roost, to paraphrase Malcolm X.
While there have been innumerable US intelligence agency scandals over the years, the guiltiest officials have been rarely if ever held to account. The JFK assassination is an example of this, and there are countless others. The overriding power of corporate wealth explains this impunity. Those who pay the piper call the tune. Because the clandestine state is the creation and servant of corporate wealth, and since corporate wealth animates our sense-making institutions like academia and the media, people do not rise as journalists or academics if they seek to illuminate subjects that the Establishment wants obscured. The liberal democratic façade must be maintained.
With the possible exception of US officials with ultra-high level security clearances, no one can say precisely when JFK was marked for assassination. It may have been in June of 1963 when he delivered a speech calling for world peace and stating that his goal was “general and complete disarmament — designed to take place by stages, permitting parallel political developments to build the new institutions of peace which would take the place of arms.” Then again, perhaps it was earlier. As I asked in the headline of a recent article: “Why did a high-ranking US military officer meet with a Nazi assassin in 1962 to complain about JFK?” Specifically, the Air Force officer — Curtis Lemay, perhaps — complained that military brass had concluded that the people in the Kennedy administration were “’wusses’ who [did] not believe in the supremacy of the west over the east [and who were foolishly giving] millions […] to ‘n****r states’ [i.e., to African nation-states].”
Whatever the genesis of the plot, its execution was a horrific spectacle with momentous historical consequences. Around the world, President Johnson reversed Kennedy’s foreign policies, taking an imperial hard line in places like Vietnam, Indonesia, Brazil, Congo, Italy, Greece, and Israel/Palestine. Despite the tragic horrors that followed Kennedy’s demise, the world owes JFK a debt of gratitude. Most notably, we are in President Kennedy’s debt for avoiding nuclear armageddon during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the murderous inertia of the US nuclear “doomsday machine” nearly ended the world.
Even sixty years after his murder, President Kennedy offers us a chance for redemption. With his assassination — an execution of a sort — he has allowed us to bear witness to the truth of the regime that rules us. The US Constitution does not authorize the creation of any type of sovereign decider which may intervene murderously and secretly so as to veto democracy. Such prerogative power derives precisely from an actual Nazi doctrine. Specifically, the Nazis’ top legal theorist, Carl Schmitt, famously wrote, “Sovereign is he who decides the exception [to the rule of law].” In the post-World War II US formulation, the sovereign is covert, and denial of its existence is enforced among “respectable” journalists and scholars. But with the JFK assassination, and with the total debunking of the state’s cover story over six decades, we can see the sovereign — the dark force at the apex of the regime.
When the US Establishment decided to pursue global dominance after World War II, it was apparently decided that democratic and lawful institutions were not sufficient to carry out the plan. When JFK went against the Establishment’s imperial consensus, the empire’s clandestine apparatus was called upon to violently veto the elected President of the United States. Whether we call it “fascism” or “parafascism” (since it is covert) or “empire” or the “deep state,” that dark force which stepped into the light on November 22, 1963, has since unleashed staggering amounts of death and destruction around the world. After JFK was assassinated in Dallas, the world saw millions killed in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Indonesia. In recent decades, the world has seen horrific US imperial violence in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, and Gaza.
In 2023, as US global dominance continues to evaporate and is no longer tenable, what need is there to continue the JFK assassination cover up? Why not disclose the truth and use the revelation as a catalyst for an American Truth and Reconciliation process, as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has called for? Such an undertaking should be done in tandem with unwinding the empire — since it is obviously happening regardless.
In this way, disclosing the truth of the JFK assassination could function as an exorcism for the American soul and a catalyst for world peace. What better way to honor the sacrifice of the very statesman whose words illuminate the true motive behind his assassination?
In a summer 1963 speech, President Kennedy chose to talk about, “…the most important topic on earth: world peace.” He continued:
What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children–not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women–not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.
We cannot undo the damage wrought by decades of US global imperialism. However, by confronting dark truths — beginning with the JFK assassination — we can begin a process of unwinding the whole imperial enterprise. Make no mistake, the empire cannot be salvaged at this late date. Without the largesse of the global empire, America’s imperial myths are as untenable as Oswald’s “magic bullet.” As such, it is now clearly in the national interest to disclose the truth of the JFK assassination. What better way to demonstrate that democracy and the rule of law are not mere cover stories for top-down rule? Why shouldn’t we look back at people like John F. Kennedy and others who “died trying” to achieve peace?
The work of scholars, researchers, and journalists has served to thoroughly debunk the US regime’s account of the JFK assassination. Why not confront the truth of what happened in Dallas as a way to begin making real the myths we have been fed about the supposedly lawful and democratic United States of America?
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