Posted on 06/12/2007 3:40:40 AM PDT by Kaslin
Vincent Bugliosi's remarkable 20-year work on who killed John F. Kennedy has just been published. Containing about a million and a half words and thousands of footnotes, "Reclaiming History" is probably the most detailed examination of one moment in time ever written. It reconfirms that a man named Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing the American president.
As one who never doubted the original U.S. government report that Oswald acted alone, I am deeply grateful to Bugliosi for the service he has rendered our country. But I also regret that he had to.
Why did he have to? Because it was necessary to definitively refute all those who believe, despite bipartisan government reports and excellent books such as Gerald Posner's "Case Closed," that there was some conspiracy to kill President Kennedy and that Oswald was not the only shooter.
There is not a shred of evidence that there was a conspiracy to kill John F. Kennedy, but that is entirely irrelevant to those who choose to believe that there was one. The lack of evidence only reinforces their belief that a conspiracy has been hidden.
One would think that someone would have come forward in the last 44 years to tell the world about the conspiracy. He or she would become a major figure in history, not to mention the likelihood of becoming very wealthy. But somehow, despite the fact that the government can rarely hide for months even what it wishes to hide, both Democratic and Republican administrations acting in cooperation with each other have hidden these facts.
As Bugliosi pointed out to me, it would in fact have had to be a double conspiracy -- first, the plot to assassinate, and then the plot by a much larger group, including many honorable people involved in the investigation, to cover up the original conspiracy.
Likewise, given the vast amount of planning and implementation -- and the large number of people -- that would have been involved in arranging the 9/11 destruction of the World Trade Center towers and part of the Pentagon, not one person has come forward -- not one American or foreigner, not one leftist or rightist -- to reveal a U.S. government plot to murder thousands of Americans and bring down two of the tallest buildings in the world.
Why, then, do people believe in these and other conspiracies? (Of course, there are known conspiracies -- Osama bin Laden and others conspired in the 9/11 plot -- but there are no successful hidden conspiracies. I cannot think of one in my lifetime.) There are at least six major reasons:
1. Many people find it impossible to believe that a few utterly unimpressive individuals can do so much damage. Lee Harvey Oswald, a man who can best be described as simply a loser, could change history all by himself? It doesn't seem to make sense.
2. Many people want to blame those they loathe for as much of what they do not like as possible. Just about everyone who believes in hidden conspiracies attributes those conspiracies to those they hate. People who hate President George W. Bush blame him and his administration for 9/11. Egyptians who hate Israel have blamed AIDS on Israeli prostitutes. Indeed, attributing to Jews hidden conspiracies -- the "world Jewish conspiracy," the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" -- is the oldest and most common belief in a hidden conspiracy.
3. One should never underestimate the power of boredom -- and the subsequent yearning for excitement -- to affect people's thinking and behavior. Belief in a hidden conspiracy is far more exciting than accepting prosaic truths. Figuring out the "mystery" of who killed JFK is a much bigger thrill than accepting that one jerk was responsible. Deciphering who was "really" responsible for 9/11 is a lot more interesting than accepting that 19 Arabs with box cutters did it.
4. People who feel powerless over their own lives are far more likely to believe that some invisible force controls their fate than people who believe that they are the masters of their lives.
5. There is, apparently, a great yearning among many people to believe that there is hidden knowledge and that they have access to it. It makes them feel special, perhaps even superior to the rest of us who do not have access to this hidden knowledge.
6. In Western societies, it appears that secular people are more likely to believe in hidden conspiracies than the more religious. It may be that the religious already believe in an invisible power that governs the universe -- God -- and therefore seem to have much less of a psychological or emotional need to believe in invisible powers on earth.
Whichever reason or reasons apply, the bottom line about those who believe in hidden conspiracies is this: They choose to believe in them. Their psyche, their emotions, and/or their political agenda bring them to their belief in a hidden conspiracy. Never the facts.
Let's take the current immigration bill. If you got a room full of ordinary Americans together and went through the provisions in this bill. They would be astounded. Why would anyone propose such a destructive action?
There is no good reason for it, so one is likely to come up with a conspiracy theory.
Specifically, in the JFK murder case, the Dallas PD had interviewed Oswald for a period of a couple of hours. No recording was made, no notes were taken. Why? Oswald had suspicious connections to US and possibly KGB intelligence services. This was kept covered up. The investigation was bungled in other ways. The crime scene of JFK's limo was cleaned by the Secret Service. Why? Why was JFK's body hijacked by the Secret Service and taken to Bethesda for the autopsy? Lot's of inexplicable actions with no good explanations given.
No difference. Kennedy would have been killed by one of the other two dozen assassins that have been identified as being at Dealy Plaza, but who didn't fire a shot (except possibly one missed shot by the half dozen assassins behind the picket fence on the Grassy Knoll)
This has been a trait in Humans since the Snake (Satan) told Adam and Eve that God was not telling them the truth about the Tree of Life.
What is different is that now days conspiracies are fed by the world wide web. At the speed of light news about deadly toilet spiders, AIDS needles on theater seats, Microsoft giveaways if you forward this to 10 people, The new North American Flag, and even Hogzilla. With this new technology, we all have to examine these stories more carefully before we panic and send it to everyone we know.
I wonder how he knows this?
If one is "hidden", then how on earth would anyone know about it?
And if we don't know about it, we wouldn't know if it was successful or not! So how could he claim that none were "sucessful"?
He's so dumb!
What about Hogzilla?
I think that's the biggest reason. It's cool to "know" something that no one else knows.
I worry about people who take dietary advice from reptiles.
I got called a conspiracy theorist a LOT during the Clinton years. I didn’t and don’t believe the official stories about Vincent Foster, Flight 800, or Oklahoma City.
But 9/11 is in a totally different category. If the official version of things is not true, you are left with the question of what happened to the four planes that were hijacked that day and their passengers. Too much has to be explained away.
My rule is to go with whatever does the least violence to Occam’s Razor. Much of the time that means going with the official version. But sometimes its the conspiracy theory.
W/o preplanted timed charges, the buildings couldn't have fallen that fast.
Debate that, wise men.
The reason people believe in conspiracies is that the reptilian shape-shifters who control the CFR have implanted them in our butts using microchips.
Much that goes on is kept hidden and out of sight. That's how it has always been and how it will always be. The ones who need to concern themselves with conspiracies are Kings and Sultans and autocratic rulers of Venezuela who sometimes find themselves dumped out of their cozy palaces with no warning.
Large numbers of people can keep some secrets, or at least keep knowledge from most people. Lots of people who voted for FDR didn’t know he was half paralyzed. Until recently, powerful politicians could live scum-bag lives and the press wouldn’t let the cat outta the bag, even though it was well known to them. The vast majority of Americans were stunned when they first saw the stealth bomber.
Can large numbers of people keep a secret forever? The only way to know for sure is to be one of the secret keepers.
Freegards
OK... you're on the list.
They tell of seeing a head wound that was considerably different from the one officially documented and photographed. What they tell of is an entry wound in the right-front of the skull, and a massive blowout exit wound in the back, the opposite of what is traditionally described and ascribed to Oswald's Mannlicher-Carcano, fired from the right-rear and above.
The claim then is that the photos we have seen were either "doctored" or more likely just faked to fit the single gunman circumstances. I've not seen these testimonies mentioned, much less debunked, by any of the new single gunman theory books. Am I correct, or have I missed crucial evidence that debunks this aspect of the story?
bump.
Such beliefs vary over time. Something is never unexpected by itself: it is only such with respect to a reference point.
The more the Western world becomes a la-la-land, where there is a chicken in every pot and everything is nice and dandy, the more even simplest, common things SEEM unexpected. People who know that there is evil in this world, recognize it as such and do not feel a shock when they encounter it. Americans had such knowledge at the time of assassinations you mention. The difference with JFK and subsequent events lies in that we entered the la-la-land in 1960s. It is not the events that are new --- it's the people.
Yeah right
However, as non-falsifiable hypotheses, they are pretty much useless, except as mental m*st@rb&tion
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