>John Fitzgerald Kennedy (May 29, 1917 – November 22, 1963), often referred to by his initials JFK and the nickname Jack, was an American politician who served as the 35th president of the United States from 1961 until his assassination near the end of his third year in office. Kennedy was the youngest person to assume the presidency by election. He was also the youngest president at the end of his tenure. Kennedy served at the height of the Cold War, and the majority of his work as president concerned relations with the Soviet Union and Cuba. He was a Democrat who represented Massachusetts in both houses of the U.S. Congress prior to his presidency.
>On November 22, 1963, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. His vice president, Lyndon B. Johnson, assumed the presidency upon Kennedy's death. Lee Harvey Oswald, a former U.S. Marine, was arrested for the assassination, but he was shot and killed by Jack Ruby two days later. The FBI and the Warren Commission both concluded Oswald had acted alone. After Kennedy's death, Congress enacted many of his proposals, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Revenue Act of 1964.
Who actually killed this guy? Did the CIA or rogue elements of the CIA kill him? Was there a second shooter? Or was Oswald a patsy, as he always insisted? If so, does that mean a Marxist actually assassinated a president?
After all these years and all the theories, what's /leftypol/'s take on it?
>>573268This is from like a week ago
Article from yesterday:
Folks Are Still Finding CIA Rocks to Turn Over in Search of an Oswald Connectionhttps://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a42203730/lee-harvey-oswald-cia-connection/ >>573268Just look up Fidel interviews where he's like "yeah, we were convinced that ultra-forces in the U.S. never forgave Kennedy for not invading us when they tried to push him into it, so they considered him a traitor… also we have a lot of experience in marksmanship and did our own experiments and we don't believe Oswald did it, and he tried to come to Cuba but we didn't let him in because we thought he was a provocateur." That's not an exact quote but it's pretty similar to what he said on multiple occasions.
Oswald had also run a fake pro-Cuba group in New Orleans of which he was the only member, with a listed address to a building owned by an FBI agent named Guy Banister who published literature for Cuban anti-communist groups. I don't know if Oswald shot Kennedy or not and I don't get too caught up in the bullet theories, but he struck me as a kinda stupid guy who was led around, and it's quite possible he was just put in the right place at the right time when the serious people shot him. Oliver Stone believes he was shot from the front, the Grassy Knoll being the most likely place. I've been there and it's an interesting thing because it's a recessed position and you can lean back and pretend like you're aiming a rifle at where JFK was when this impact happened and it would've been a near straight shot. Oswald himself said "I'm a patsy" as they were dragging him to the parking lot where a mobster shot him.
As for why they did it, I think JFK had a liberal (and rather Catholic seeming) foreign policy "vision" which was anticommunist, but he reasoned that communism was a reaction to technological shock in poor countries, and that it wasn't worth fighting communists in countries where they had majority support because you couldn't expect to win against a whole population anyways. So, instead, the U.S. should support non-aligned third-world leaders to help them hold out as long as possible like Sukarno in Indonesia (who were also critically supported by communists in those countries), basically try to avoid a direct confrontation and be this "progressive" third way in the world. And I think the ultra-right forces in the intelligence services, with connections to the Mafia and anticommunist Cuban exiles and mercenaries figured this would be a disaster for the U.S. and they were triggered by what they considered to be a betrayal by JFK not to lend enough support to the Bay of Pigs invasion, and a lot of their buddies died on the beach and were taken prisoner because of that.
Another weird thing, Oswald was holding up two newspapers in that photo of himself with the rifle, the Daily Worker and The Militant, so the newspapers of the CPUSA and the SWP. What kinda communist holds up copies of the CPUSA paper and a Trotskyist paper? Most people would have no idea that doesn't make any sense.
>>573285It's just /pol/.
Frankly, I'm kinda blackpilled that Americans would even believe "the truth" were it to come out. That basically the people who killed JFK were the (Ret.) Gen. Michael Flynns of the early 1960s. The reason is because the liberals have come to believe in the CIA as the good guys. They don't wanna believe that hard-right anti-communist forces in the U.S. produced *by* their beloved institutions are willing and able to operate outside the bounds of legality and the Constitution to get rid of "traitors" including a liberal president if deemed necessary. Like, look at that Jan. 6 capitol putsch thing, you couldn't throw a snowball without hitting some ex-military guy.
Flynn himself was the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency under…. Obama… and that retired general believes in a bunch of stuff that wouldn't be out of place in Dr. Strangelove with the rogue general trying to carry out a rebellion to save America from communists who are putting flouride in the water. These guys start to believe their own psyop bullshit, which they applied abroad, and then turn it around and apply it at home. The Jan. 6 thing was a color revolution-style set of methods, which liberals support when done abroad by similar people who attempted it at home. Like assassinating heads of state in the 1950s/1960s.
For /pol/, they're probably more likely to believe in a conspiracy, but they don't realize – or don't wanna realize – that they're the Deep State (basically). Or the patsies for it anyways, or that their politics was produced by it. Because the stuff they do or support could be (depending on your perspective) "traitorous" because it goes outside the bounds of institutional norms, to get rid of "traitors." The JFK assassination was a long time ago, so now they can believe that they're fighting the people who also killed Kennedy, even though their contemporaries in the early 60s considered Kennedy a traitor. That to me is proof of the success of the psyop. Or they blame "the Israelis," some other group from without, not from within, because that doesn't implicate their own politics.
There were villagers in Guatemala that came to believe that anti-communist death squads which killed their family members were "communists," because they engaged in black propaganda to blame communists for those false-flag attacks, and that communism is "authoritarian and when the government shoots people," and since the right-wing junta government was doing that, it must have been "communist."
>>573291No, it's illegal for them to do involve themselves in domestic issues.
They would get Canadian intelligence to do it.
>>573294IKR? Assassinations happened so often I was wondering why there wasn't a law against it.
Turns out there was.
I DON'T KNOW WHO KILLED JFK, BUT, I THINK THIS IS RELEVANT CONTEXT. MUCH MORE IMPORTANT THAN ANY THEORY ABOUT "MAGIC BULLETS" AND SO ON IS THE STRANGE PEOPLE OSWALD WAS HANGING OUT WITH.
<(audio included for those too lazy to read)
In 1976, more than a decade after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a letter arrived at the CIA, addressed to its director, the Hon. George Bush. The letter was from a desperate-sounding man in Dallas, who spoke regretfully of having been indiscreet in talking about Lee Harvey Oswald and begged George Herbert Walker "Poppy" Bush for help:
>Maybe you will be able to bring a solution into the hopeless situation I find myself in. My wife and I find ourselves surrounded by some vigilantes; our phone bugged; and we are being followed everywhere. Either FBI is involved in this or they do not want to accept my complaints. We are driven to insanity by this situation . . . I tried to write, stupidly and unsuccessfully, about Lee H. Oswald and must have angered a lot of people . . . Could you do something to remove this net around us? This will be my last request for help and I will not annoy you any more.
The writer signed himself “G. de Mohrenschildt.”
scans of these letters are attached. they are real
The CIA staff assumed the letter writer to be a crank. Just to be sure, however, they asked their boss: Did he by any chance know a man named de Mohrenschildt? Bush responded by memo, seemingly self-typed: “I do know this man DeMohrenschildt. I first men [sic] him in the early 40’3 [sic]. He was an uncle to my Andover roommate. Later he surfaced in Dallas (50’s maybe) . . . Then he surfaced when Oswald shot to prominence. He knew Oswald before the assassination of Pres. Kennedy. I don’t recall his role in all this.” Not recall? Once again, Poppy Bush was having memory problems. And not about trivial matters. George de Mohrenschildt was not just the uncle of a roommate, but a longtime personal associate. Yet Poppy could not recall—or more precisely, claimed not to recall—the nature of de Mohrenschildt’s relationship with the man believed to have assassinated the thirty-fifth president. This would have been an unusual lapse on anyone’s part. But for the head of an American spy agency to exhibit such a blasé attitude, in such an important matter, was over the edge.
At that very moment, several federal investigations were looking into CIA abuses—including the agency’s role in assassinations of foreign leaders. These investigators were heading toward what would become a reopened inquiry into Kennedy’s death. Could it be that the lapse was not casual, and the acknowledgment of a distant relationship was a way to forestall inquiry into a closer one? Writing back to his old friend, Poppy assured de Mohrenschildt that his fears were entirely unfounded. Yet half a year later, de Mohrenschildt was dead. The cause was officially determined to be suicide with a shotgun.
Investigators combing through de Mohrenschildt’s effects came upon his tattered address book, largely full of entries made in the 1950s. Among them, though apparently eliciting no further inquiries on the part of the police, was an old entry for the current CIA director, with the Midland address where he had lived in the early days of Zapata:
>BUSH, GEORGE H. W. (POPPY), 1412 W. OHIO ALSO ZAPATA PETROLEUM, MIDLAND.
When Poppy told his staff that his old friend de Mohrenschildt “knew Oswald,” that was an understatement. From 1962 through the spring of 1963, de Mohrenschildt was by far the principal influence on Oswald, the older man who guided every step of his life. De Mohrenschildt had helped Oswald find jobs and apartments, had taken him to meetings and social gatherings, and generally had assisted with the most minute aspects of life for Lee Oswald, his Russian wife, Marina, and their baby. De Mohrenschildt’s relationship with Oswald has tantalized and perplexed investigators and researchers for decades.
In 1964, de Mohrenschildt and his wife Jeanne testified to the Warren Commission, which spent more time with them than any other witness—possibly excepting Oswald’s widow, Marina. The commission, though, focused on George de Mohrenschildt as a colorful, if eccentric, character, steering away every time de Mohrenschildt recounted yet another name from a staggering list of influential friends and associates. In the end, the commission simply concluded in its final report that these must all be coincidences and nothing more. The de Mohrenschildts, the commission said, apparently had nothing to do with the assassination.
>>573304the point of no return was reconstruction. America was firmly on the capitalist road from that point onward. reconstruction was the last opportunity america had to avoid capitalism. New Deal was succdem reformism that procrastinated on dealing with the contradictions of capital. Neoliberalism was reactionary economics that procrastinated on dealing with the contradictions of capital. Whether or not America has strong labor unions and good welfare, whether or not America is outsourcing jobs and importing immigrants, the contradictions of capital will have to be dealt with eventually. But America can't deal with the contradictions of capital because its ruling class is bourgeois and would have to disempower themselves. They never want to do that. Even when they accepted the New Deal it was to avoid revolution and guarantee a generation of prosperity.
I suppose in the long term you can view The crushing of labor militants in 1877, the co-opting of the labor movements of the 20s and 30s into the New Deal Coalition, The assassination of Kennedy, Reagan neoliberalizing the economy and crushing the Air Traffic Controllers, Citizens' United, etc. not as "points of no return" but as
waypoints along a
Path of No Return that was already taken while Lincoln was still alive.
>>573304>>573306part 2
while I did say lincoln was the point of no return (since the civil war presented a real opportunity to avoid capitalism, pic 1 related) I would be remiss to point out that this probably wouldn't have happened anyway since the seeds of industrial capitalism were planted by the slave-owning proto-bourgeois leaders of the war of independence (pic 2 related). Whether you're talking about the federalists, who viewed the rabble as beasts who needed to be controlled, or the anti-federalists, who were often slave owning planters, the seeds of capitalism were already planted.
>>573310the birth of the deep state began before WW2 but culminated in the NSC directives after WW2
watch this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOviqBC3o-0 >>573304I don’t think Capitalism was really avoidable in America. But I think FDR’s death sealed the deal on any remotely peaceful transition towards a kind of managed or “planned” capitalism/socialism.
Like, we had the ingredients right there. FDR had a personal friendship with Stalin, mass popularity, he’d laid the infrastructure that could’ve overseen a general control of the economy, and IIRC he was even planning for the rebuilding of Europe to include the Soviet Sphere.
Then he died, Truman came to power, and you had everything laid for the Cold War.
>>573334These letters are public knowledge, as are the relationship between De Mohrenschildt, Bush, and Oswald, which was dismissed by the Warren commission (literally run by CIA officials with a clear conflict of interest) as a "mere coincidence."
https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/finding-aids/jfk-key-personsthe letters are discussed in detail in Russ Baker's book "Family of Secrets" which is about the Bush family. that author sourced the letter from a separate non-government archive. Here's the footnote from Russ Baker:
>Letter from de Mohrenschildt to Bush, available through the Mary Ferrell Foundation Web site(www.maryferrell.org). It includes the official routing slip where Bush checks “yes” after “do you know this individual?” (104-10414-10013). Also available is a memorandum from Inspector General John Waller to Bush summarizing what is in the CIA files on de Mohrenschildt (104-10414- 10378); and a letter from Bush to de Mohrenschildt 104-10414-10134).Mary Ferrell's website is very early 00s energy and hard to navigate, so I forget precisely how I got to the letters, but they are contained somewhere in PDF form on that website. there's a database explorer with tons of public records that to this day are under-studied.
https://www.maryferrell.org/php/jfkdb.php?field=all&filters=contains:subjects.demohrenschildt >>573268>who killed jfkOswald was a fall guy for the mob, who was paid by lyndon johnson to kill kennedy, so he could become president.
Oswald was detained and arrested, then killed by jack ruby in broad daylight, who later was also assassinated. It was all set up.
Nixon later alluded to the idea that johnson had kennedy killed, in conspiracy with the "deep state", which also forced him out with the watergate scandal.
>>573268Clay Shaw.
https://news.italy24.press/trends/amp/273621>Almost sixty years after the assassination of the president John F. Kennedy, the US State Archives has released a new batch of documents once classified as “confidential” and linked to the murder. The files, almost 13,000 pages, are visible on the National Archives website, archives.gov. But not all. 30% of the sixteen thousand overall files remain top secret
>The secret files on JFK
>President Joe Biden said releasing the files is very important to show government transparency. In 1992 Congress had declared that all “government documents” concerning the attack that took place in Dallas in ’63 had to be made public”, but under pressure from intelligence agencies, starting with CIA and FBI publication had been postponed
>Among the files declassified today by the White House and concerning the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the newspapers Messaggero and Corriere della Sera and the Parliamentary Yearbook are cited. In a report dated March 8, 1967, copies of articles from the two newspapers are attached which, speaking of the investigations, refer to the involvement of Clay Shaw. This is the American entrepreneur and secret agent who was later the only one indicted for the Kennedy murder. Shaw was later found not guilty
>During the trial, in ’69, a witness indicated in Shaw the man she met at a party she had attended Lee Harvey Oswald, considered the material executor of the president’s assassination. Shaw died in ’74 at age 61. The articles cited by Intelligence in the “secret” file also mention the World Trade Center, a subsidiary suspected of having been used by the CIA to transfer funds to Italy for espionage activities and of which Shaw was a member. The 1963-64 edition of the Parliamentary Yearbook is cited in which a link is attributed between the World Trade Center and Permindex, a Swiss commercial holding company
>The CIA has always denied that this holding company was a front company for American intelligence operations Just in time:
Ben Norton's Deep State Series episode on JFK is out now
https://youtu.be/5N5bs1IGLQo>>573344Most don't think about it much, but I'd say the majority would say there was a conspiracy, and if you asked "whodunnit" a lot of them would say the CIA or something but they wouldn't really be able to articulate why. I think that's an important thing, the lack of a theory to understand the why, not necessarily the who or the what.
Also I strongly suspect the propensity for believing that Oswald was just a lone nut goes up the more affluent you are. The more you buy in / benefit in the "system" the less likely you're gonna believe that "the system" (or forces produced by it) killed JFK, because that creates a lot of cognitive dissonance about the nature of "the system" in which you're benefiting from. I think higher propensity to believe in a conspiracy is related to distrust in "the system," so it reached a high in the mid-late-1970s, declined, but then has gone up again. Might be at an all-time high.
There has also been new work on it, like Oliver Stone's new film (narrated by Whoopi Goldberg, who is someone liberals will relate to). I think blacks btw are gonna be more open to the idea "yeah, they killed that guy," because they're just more skeptical of glowies than white liberals are even if they – on the whole – are in the same "party." They have their own history of that happening to their leaders. But the interest in JFK was also a "boomer" thing for awhile, and I don't think the left paid much attention to it either, and I remember just a few years ago how it was common for leftists to say "who cares, JFK was just another imperialist," and while I think that's true it's also kinda stupid. I think that's changed, because there's more of an awareness that even if you were a nice "liberal" imperialist or a social democrat doesn't mean there wasn't a military-threaded ultra-right that is taking your number and thinking about how to take you down for not being hard enough on the commies.
Which is what I think it was really about, and why most Americans lack a theory to understand the why. It was sort of like McCarthyism by other means. Like a lot of "communists" in America were not really that red. The ones in the thick of it were, but there were plenty of "fellow travelers" who were basically liberals on the periphery of it, in media circles or in public service who thought Stalin was weird but socialism sounded like a good idea and a likely future form of society, and maybe they read Monthly Review and then BAM – they got hit by a hammer in the early 50s and they dropped all of that. Not the ones who went to prison, but the ones on the outer orbit.
People like AOC. She interned for Ted Kennedy and she's a "socialist" now because it's sorta okay now, but she might've been in the Communist Party in the 30s. There were a lot of people like that. Some ended up coming back, getting jobs in the State Department during the Kennedy administration, now as anti-communist technocratic liberals, and they fucked it up and the situation escalated and now there are Soviet missiles in Cuba and so… what were the ultra-right guys thinking? They might've thought, these guys are either incompetents, or they're crypto-commies, Kennedy is compromised, maybe HE'S ONE TOO. You see how these paranoid freaks act.
But you couldn't talk about communism in the United States. Or what these guys were willing to do to stop anything that smelled like it.
Lastly, this is why I believe that ~conspiravision~ brain is a distraction, like Q-Anon people. I went to Dealey Plaza one time, the building Oswald was in is now a museum, and then there a handful of local guys who mill around on weekends, and independently give conspiracy-themed street tours and sell conspiracy literature to people – some of it quite good actually. But I was talking to one guy, and he was an older black dude, and I said in so many words that Kennedy was killed by hardliners within the "national security" state because they didn't think he was tough enough on the communists, and this guy became visibly uncomfortable. Like the "communist" word is still taboo for that older generation, and then he said something about the Rothschild bankers and the Trilateral Commission being involved and something about how the Vietnamese weren't "really" communists. That has to be written out of the story, even the conspiracy theorists do it.
Like talking to someone in Deus Ex who is right that it was a conspiracy but also sorta gets it wrong (although in Deus Ex the Illuminati is very real).
It's interesting though. The JFK assassination has become part of the American folklore, because the circumstances of the assassination have shaped the country and the world we live in today. A lot of people get the sense that there's something deeply *wrong* about the country and that moment is part of the reason.
It was almost certainly Jean Rene Souetre working on behalf of the CIA.
Souetre was a high ranking member of OAS in Algeria. After Algerian independence, OAS members mostly fled to Spain, Portugal, and South America; Souetre made contact with Howard Hunt in Madrid in April-May 1963 and was trying to get CIA support for OAS as the only viable alternative to communism in France.
Souetre was then in New Orleans and Dallas, known to have met with General Edwin Walker; he was training anti-Castro Cuban exile forces in the US before returning to Spain in July 1963. He was arrested by Dallas police within one or two days of the Kennedy assassination, but for unknown reasons he was ordered to be released. He then escaped to Mexico. French intelligence were trying to find him in Mexico because de Gaulle planned to make a state visit there in 1964, and Souetre had been behind multiple assassination attempts of the French president. While the FBI and INS had no information on Souetre, the CIA had records and photographs of the man.
Souetre slipped away to Madrid in 1964 and re-emerged in Lisbon in 1966, organizing mercenaries to overthrow the government of the Congo on behalf of the Portuguese government.
The enmity between OAS and JFK is well-documented; as a senator, JFK was extremely pro-Algerian independence and shaped de Gaulle's stance on Algeria as president. However I don't believe Souetre was acting on behalf of OAS as revenge against Kennedy for Algeria, given Souetre's extensive collaboration with the CIA in the months prior to the assassination, and the fact that he was arbitrarily released from police custody in Dallas the day after the assassination.
https://archive.org/stream/nsia-SouetreJean/nsia-SouetreJean/Souetre%20Jean%20063_djvu.txt>>573361>Was Oswald the fall guyYes, and the anti-Castro Cubans thing is an important linkage.
Ex-FBI man Guy Bannister trained anti-Castro Cubans in New Orleans after his retirement and published the right-wing "Louisiana Intelligence Digest" journal. He was responsible for financing OAS via the World Anti Communist League, particularly the Anti Communist League of the Caribbean which was headquartered in New Orleans. According to Banister's secretary and others, he employed Lee Harvey Oswald in the summer of 1963 in New Orleans, or at the very least his intelligence company was in the same building and right next to the office of Oswald's pro-Castro org.
Bannister organized the raid on the Houma, LA munitions dump and the stolen weapons were seen stashed in his offices. I have read in a few places that the weapons were originally meant for the OAS before plans changed and they were reallocated for Bay of Pigs. I'm at least willing to believe that could be true just because of Bannister's role in financing OAS. Bannister worked with David Ferrie, in particular the two coordinated the Houma raid together, and Ferrie who knew Oswald from their time in Civil Air Patrol together.
I believe Oswald was an unfortunate victim who was drawn into the plot by random chance. He was on the radar of these people and probably just seen as an easily manipulated mope. His fellow CAP guys seemed to have never liked him and just thought he was stupid and edgy for talking about Communism and defecting all the time. He had a dossier initially because of his work with the U2 spy planes, and his file was just randomly chosen as bait for a mole hunt–basically the CIA would pretend to believe that Oswald was a Russian spy, and if an American spy in Moscow received information about a suspected mole matching Oswald's description, then it would indicate to the CIA that there was a leak. I believe that this random selection snowballed over the years and developed Oswald into a pawn of the CIA in various other activities and he was never fully aware of any of it.
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