The American Coup?

The film JFK by Oliver Stone is one of the best movies I have ever seen. The movie is based on the book On The Trail of the Assassins; the account of Jim Garrison, New Orleans District Attorney in the 1960s who after the Kennedy assassination brought the only criminal charges in American history against a group of people for the Kennedy assassination. After reading parts of the book and watching the movie, I don't see how anyone could come to the conclusion that there was not some type of massive conspiracy involved in the Kennedy assassination.

This week marks what would be the 90th birthday of JFK. As I listen to interviews on NPR, MSNBC, and other news programs, I am again reminded of the strange world we live in. For all of the paranoia in America about supposed 'liberal' bias in news and academia, I was once again reminded of how silly this charge is in certain ways. The American media is first and foremost a propagator of the status quo. This is not necessarily of bad thing, especially in a country like ours. I expect the news to mock Castro for example, because empirically you can demonstrate that life in America is basically better than life in Cuba. However, what cracks me up in watching these shows is how crazy the pundits get whenever someone begins talking about anything that could loosely be called a conspiracy. There is major logical fallacy at play here. The case against Oswald is weak at best, yet if someone argues for a 'conspiratorial' approach to the Kennedy assassination, their arguments are dismissed unless they can 'prove their case' definitively. This is not sufficient; failure to prove one argument does not necessarily validate a competing argument.

A recent poll showed that the majority of Americans believe there was some kind of conspiracy involved in the JFK assassination, and while the puzzle is not complete, reading a book like On the Trail of the Assassins makes you at least realize there are enough glaring holes in the consensus story regarding Lee Harvey Oswald that one could only conclude there is something awry.

Those who have not seen JFK must see it. The film is one of a rare breed, the kind of movie that after you watch it you almost feel afraid because you realize that you have now acquired some measure of knowledge that will in a very real way alter the way you view the world. And if possible, read On the Trail of the Assassins, the amount of 'nuggets' of bizarre coincidental or otherwise information contained in it's pages has made me conclude that the Kennedy assassination was quite likely a domestically engineered coup, and that thought should be frightening to anyone.