Reply #63: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy as Coup D'Etat

[Octafish]

Hunt and at least one of his sons (Nelson Bunker Hunt has been named as the guy behind the infamous "Wanted" flyer" distributed in Dallas the morning of the assassination) and many of the über-rich turdballs of America thought Kennedy to be a traitor to his class.



If I had to take the choice of what to betray, I know you and me'd choose "class" before "country."

Here's an excellent analysis of the assassination:

The Assassination of John F. Kennedy as Coup D'Etat

by Christopher Sharrett

It occurs to me that two lines of discourse currently affect public understanding of the John Kennedy assassination. Both narratives obscure the reality of the assassination as a state crime carried out by the official enforcement apparatus, a coup d'etat.

SNIP...

Let me make it country simple. The evidence in the assassination of John Kennedy was taken control of and represented to the public by those sectors of state and private power that despised Kennedy and his policies, and who saw them as representative of a long-term trend within the state to avoid the direct military interventionism that would be a great boon to many components of American capital. It is true that Mafia types and various exile groupings appear within the assassination scenario. These same groups appear within Watergate and Iran/Contra. Does appreciating the presence of these groups go very far in aiding our understanding of these events as state crimes, in fact as crimes against the Constitution and the people of the U.S. carried out by state authority? Does the presence of these groups make these crimes other than state crimes? More important, would the American media and much of officialdom continue to attempt to bolster the various official narratives as a favor to the Mafia and some Cuban exiles? Would they do this to prevent a member of the Kennedy clan, or Allen Dulles or J. Edgar Hoover, from being "embarrassed"? Would they do this to prevent hostile relations with other lands, even years after the collapse of the Soviet Union? Many critics suggest that data long in the hands of researchers, such as the Joseph Milteer tapes, point to the source of the plot within crazed rightist groupings. Did not the federal authorities have access to these tapes many years ago? Were they attempting to assist a southern racist group by hiding Milteer's connections to the assassination? I suggest that these provocative tapes, which have been ensconced in the public imagination as symbols of the plot, were another small attempt to divert public attention from the state's implication in the assassination.

I would hope that eventually we would have no more talk of Shadow Governments and Cabals. The invisible government discussed by various researchers is no more invisible than our political-economic system. This system is synonymous with the postwar national security state. Kennedy was killed when he became a flashpoint for a debate that began immediately with the creation of this state. The Great Depression brought U.S. capitalism to its knees; this terrible economic collapse was halted only by the wartime military build-up. The collapse threatened an immediate return after the war, and was prevented by the government's hooking the economy to military production. The public was forced to subsidize the biggest military expansion in history as corporations began to depend on public revenue for their survival. Many within state power saw the potential problems of the new "Pentagon system." Senator Arthur Vandenberg told President Harry Truman: "You are going to have to scare the hell out of the public" in order for them to accept a huge increase in taxes, and an economic system that would give extraordinary authority to the military and the intelligence agencies, who soon became essentially lobbyists for sectors of capital involved in military production. Indeed, fear became the currency of the national security state. Although the Soviet Union suffered twenty-seven million dead in World War II, with most of its major cities and industrial plant destroyed, the American public coughed up billions of dollars to support the U.S. "free enterprise" system and its expansionist aims, as public programs soon went begging.

Cold War propaganda gave legitimacy to the national security state, although debate raged on within state and private power against the backdrop of the sleepy fifties.22 Many felt that the creation of the "garrison state" would bring about an enormous deficit and weaken us in relation to our Western capitalist rivals. Kennedy was not the first victim of the fierce internecine battles that began almost immediately with the creation of the national security state. Secretary of Defense James V. Forrestal became a victim in 1949 of what was referred to as "the revolt of the admirals." As each sector of the military fought over their share of public revenues, with the Joint Chiefs "at each other's throat" in a climate of unbridled avarice, Forrestal attempted at least to inject a note of civility as the military sensed its unprecedented authority. Forrestal was eventually "ground down by the bickering and backstabbing in the Pentagon." He was "under constant attack from the admirals and generals he supposedly commanded." The national security state's lapdogs in the press, including Walter Winchell and Drew Pearson, ridiculed Forrestal, terming him a "liar and a coward."23 Forrestal suffered a nervous breakdown and eventually committed suicide.

Like many in the previous administration, Eisenhower faced problems in reigning in the national security state. Long before he spoke of the "military-industrial complex," Eisenhower warned America and the world "humanity was hanging from a cross of iron." He stated that "every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired," represented "a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."24

SOURCE:

http://home.earthlink.net/~jkelin1/coup.html

Well, we know who has paid the price since November 22, 1963 and who hasn't.