Crowdsourcing Murder: 50 Years After JFK, The History And Future Of Political Assassination

 Crowdsourcing Murder: 50 Years After JFK, The History And Future Of Political Assassination

By Zack Beauchamp over at Think Progress

“Crowdsourcing Murder: 50 Years After JFK, The History And Future Of Political Assassination”

Teddy Roosevelt didn’t fear assassins. Though his predecessor in the Presidency, William McKinley, was killed by anarchist Leon Czolgosz’s bullet, Teddy shook off security. If an assassin was cowardly enough to attack from behind, he would simply “go down into the darkness;” if the attack came from the front, President Neo planned to simply dodge the bullet. After all, as Roosevelt biographer Edmund Morris recounts:

He had confidence in the abnormal speed of his reflexes and the power of his 185 pound body. Last winter in Colorado, he had leapt off his horse into a pack of hounds, kicked them aside, and knifed a cougar to death. What a fight that had been!

Roosevelt’s plan worked, after a fashion. When John Schrank shot him during a speech in 1912, Teddy Roosevelt simply stood back up and finished the 90 minute speech. “I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot,” Teddy said, “but it takes more than that to kill a bull moose.”

Five decades later, JFK’s murder laid Roosevelt’s boasts to rest. Modern weapons technology is not exactly amenable to dodging. Yet a surprising thing happened since Kennedy: not one would-be Presidential assassin has found his mark.

Reagan, the only President to be injured in an assassination attempt since JFK, was lucid enough to narrate his own surgery. “You’re ruining my suit,” the Gipper snapped at the doctors slicing through his formalwear to begin operating.

The assassins’ rut is not unique to the United States. Around the world, the assassination of heads of state is on the wane. In advanced democracies, assassination, common as recently as the 70s, is now unheard-of — though those democracies may be targeting more people for death than ever.

The decline of assassination tells us a lot about our age, standing above all else a testament to democracy’s power to legitimize leaders and the government that anoints them. But while it may seem like assassination has gone out of style, don’t count it out just yet. There’s good reason, courtesy of the same awesome technology that powers FourSquare, to think assassination is merely in remission rather than cured. It may yet metastasize into something new, a style of assassination focused on prominent private citizens rahter than public officials.

The Assassins Have Forgotten Their Creed

You’ve heard of Cain and Abel, but have you met Ötzi? He’s a roughly 5,300 year old caveman, frozen and hence remarkably well-preserved for his age. As a consequence of his relative intactness, scientists have managed to identify Ötzi as one of history’s first recorded murder victims.

Naturally, he’s a media darling. “The First Assassinated Man In History Was Killed By an Arrow 5300 Years Ago,” blared a headline about poor old Ötzi on the tech blog Gizmodo. The phrasing is revealing, in that it points to two important truths about assassination: it’s been around forever, but it’s damn near impossible to define.

The English word itself comes from a breakaway 11th century Muslim cult notorious for their killing prowess, but The Assassins couldn’t exactly patent the idea of killing your political opposition’s leaders. The Romans did it (“et tu, Brute?”), and the Indian strategist Kautilya used it to great effect against two of Alexander the Great’s governors. “Great effect” is, on some accounts, an understatement: the Greek killings allowed Kautilya and his boss Chandragupta’s quest to unify the Indian Subcontinent under one banner for the first time in history.

“There was a high point with the anarchist campaigns in the 1890s,” Byman says, “and it’s all been downhill from there.”

But was Kautilya’s plot actually “assassination” or some other kind of killing? You tell me. Much like its cousin “terrorism,” “assassination” can and has been defined in lots of different ways. Do assassins need some kind of political motive — we have no proof Ötzi’s killers, for instance, did, but Gizmodo was comfortable calling that an assassination. Can governments assassinate people, or is it the province of non-state actors? Is targeting an enemy leader during wartime, a la the killing of Admiral Yamamoto in 1943, assassination or merely solid tactics?

Depending on how you answer these questions, you might end up with a different answer about the state of assassination today. “The question of what you count gets so messy,” Daniel Byman, a Georgetown professor whose work focuses on assassination and terrorism, told me. “Do you count the conflict in the Congo?” What about “attacks on diplomats, if they’re high profile enough, [or] attacks on religious figures?” Or, for that matter, the U.S. targeted killing campaign against suspected terrorists?

These are all important, fraught questions, and certainly worth thinking about. But, for the moment, let’s simplify things, and talk only about the targeted killing of heads of state. Are there any general trends we can point out there?

Yes, as it turns out. “There was a high point with the anarchist campaigns in the 1890s,” Byman says, “and it’s all been downhill from there.” From 1881-1908, anarchists managed to kill a Russian Tsar, both a French and American President, a Spanish Prime Minister, an Austrian Empress, and a Portuguese King and Crown Prince. “The propaganda of the deed,” as it was often called, took Europe and North America by storm. It was assassination’s high water mark in modern history.

Today, the picture is rather different. Benjamins Jones and Olken, economists at Northwestern and MIT respectively, put together a database of 298 assassination attempts directed at national leaders from 1874 till today. They found a higher number of attempts over time, but that’s misleading: there are more countries in the modern world than there were when the anarchists walked the earth, so there are more leaders around to piss off their citizens. Jones and Olken find that, when you control for number of leaders, Byman was right: there’s been a decline in both overall attempts and successful assassinations that goes back “really till the end of World War I,” Jones told me.

Jones and Olken’s work results in something like actuarial assessments for political leaders (if you find that prospect exciting, then congrats — like me, you are a freaky nerd). “At the peak in the 1910s, a given leader had a nearly 1 percent chance of being assassinated in a given year,” Jones and Olken write. “Today, the probability is below 0.3 percent.”

So Europe and North America, once playgrounds for anarchist killers, now almost never see their leaders killed. Assassination, it seems, really has gone out of fashion.

So what happened?

You Come At The King, You Best Not Miss

When Ugandan dictator Idi Amin seized power in a coup d’etat, he developed a nasty way of disposing of soldiers who weren’t quite yet loyal to the new regime. Amin’s forces would round up the prisoners, stick them in a room, and chuck a bushel of live hand grenades in with the ill-fated grunts.

So when some would-be assassins tried to blow him up with one during a parade outside the Nsambya Police Barracks on June 10th, 1976, it seemed like poetic justice. Opinions differ on what happened next: depending on who you believe, the grenade(s) bounced off of Amin’s chest or his “fat stomach;” it either exploded harmlessly, killed bystanders in the crowd, or offed Amin’s driver, prompting the self-styled Last King of Scotland to drive himself to safety.

Amin killed roughly two thousand people in the ensuing crackdown. Some whispered he staged the attempt on his life as an excuse to consolidate power in the face of a secret coup plot.

Whatever the truth, the Nsambya attack itself tells us a lot about assassinating political leaders — how it works, when it doesn’t, and why, outside of war zones, people have stopped trying it.

Start with the simplest point: assassinating a head of state has gotten harder. One does not simply walk up to a presidential parade and chuck grenades into the First Towncar; political security precautions have gotten much tougher than they were in Amin’s Uganda.

In the United States, the Kennedy assassination was the catalyst. Since 1963, the Secret Service’s staff grew by a factor of 10, and its budget by a whopping 273 times. Obama, according to Yahoo’s Chris Moody, rides in a hunkered-down fortress with a mobile blood transfusion lab. It’s a far cry from JFK’s open-top aparade.

Extremist groups, for their part, appear to have recognized this. “There are certain targets that are logical, but hard to hit,” Byman says. “The U.S. Embassy in Saudi Arabia is a prime target, but if you’ve ever been there, it’s a friggin fortress.”

Will McCants, a scholar at the Brookings Institute who spends his days reading al-Qaeda web forums and other jihadi communications, agrees. “When they have an opportunity, they go for it,” but “in many of the countries where they’re operating, the police state is so strong that they have limited ability to get access to those officials.”

But, McCants says, it’s not that they discuss the idea and dismiss it: it’s that al-Qaeda and likeminded groups don’t appear to consider trying to assassinate Western leaders at all. “It is really interesting that a lot of terrorist organizations, at least the jihadi kind that I watch, don’t really make it a high priority in the West.” He pauses. “You don’t see them talk about, you know, ‘let’s rub out President Obama’ or Vice President Biden. I’ve never seen it.”

It’s not just al-Qaeda. While anarchists continue to fixate on the leader-killing glory days, it doesn’t seem like any major extremist faction of any kind nowadays focuses on assassinating democratically-elected leaders. Why?

Well, it might be that asssassination simply isn’t worth the risks — which go well beyond the mere risk of plots being thwarted by the Secret Service.

Jump back to Jones and Olken, the economists who studied assassinations of major leaders. The real goal of their study wasn’t to track the number of assassinations; it was to figure out whether assassination worked.

They came up with a clever way to test this, scientifically speaking. Jones and Olken limited their dataset to cases where the assassin actually managed to fire a gun or detonate a bomb, the theory being that once an assassin gets close enough to use their weapon, the success or failure of any given attempt is more-or-less random. This makes for a natural experiment of sorts, allowing Jones and Olken to compare the effects of “successful” assassinations against failed attempts without worrying about confounding factors like the strength of a nation’s intelligence system.

“You can easily tell a story for decline [in assassinations] largely because of representative government.”

So what did the economists find? First, the vast majority of assassination attempts against major leaders, 75 percent, failed. Second, the effects of both successful and failed attempts can be dramatic — depending on the type of government that’s being targeted.

Aiming at an autocrat is a huge gamble. Jones and Olken find that successfully killing dictators can take down the entire system: killing an autocrat, according to one measure of democracy, tends to make autocracies significantly more likely to translate to democracy. But in the bulk of the cases, the assassin fails, prompting a moderate crackdown on freedoms. Idi Amin’s post-Nsambya killing spree is an extreme example, but it gets the point across.

In democracies, by contrast, assassination attempts, successful or otherwise, simply have no effect on the structure of government. “The successful assassination of democrats produces no change in institutions,” Jones and Olken write. This makes sense, of course: democracies, unlike autocracies, aren’t one-man systems. The entire point of a democracy is that power is concentrated in the people and institutions, not any one person. If you kill a President, there’s always a veep.

In an interview about their research, Jones argued that this democratic resilience tells us something crucially important about the broader decline in assassinations. Democracies don’t just survive because there’s a successor in place; autocracies often have those. Rather, it’s about legitimacy: when people feel like they can change their government through electoral rather than violent means, the death of a leader is less likely to create a vacuum for radical political change. While killing an autocrat may feel like the death of a tyrant to citizens, the murder of a democratically elected leader feels like an attack on the people as much as an attack on the government.

This effect, Jones suggests, also explains why people are less likely to try to kill their leaders nowadays. There are more democracies than there used to be, so there are fewer people dissatisfied with their power to change their governments. “Certainly, the shift towards democracy — while far from complete in the world — has definitely been a main story of the 20th century,” Jones says (he’s right). “You can easily tell a story for decline [in assassinations] largely because of representative government.”

This theory fits with what we know about the psychology of assassins. In 1999, the Secret Service put together a study of everyone who tried to kill an American “prominent public official or figure since 1949.” The 83 subjects, some of whom are referred to only by initials in the study because their identities remain confidential, “rarely had ‘political’ motives.” Only one, in fact — Robert Kennedy’s murderer, Palestinian extremist Sirhan Sirhan — had a classically political motivation, the others being more interested in fame or something more idiosyncratic (a personally developed conspiracy theory, for instance).

So Jones is right, we should expect the pacifying, legitimizing effect of democracy to keep the assassination rate low. But democracy and the 21st century have barely had time to get acquainted. And there may be trouble on the horizon.

Crowdsourcing Murder

“Tiller is the concentration camp ‘Mengele’ of our day and needs to be stopped before he and those who protect him bring judgment upon our nation.”

Scott Roeder wrote those chilling words on an anti-abortion web-forum two years before he assassinated prominent abortion provider George Tiller. Roeder had long been active in right-wing extremist movements, but had grown increasingly extreme over the 2000s.

Roeder is hardly alone in his beliefs. Just this year, another anti-abortion activist, David Leach, interviewed Roeder and posted the video on YouTube. “If someone would shoot the new abortionists, like Scott shot George Tiller,” Leach said, “hardly anyone will appreciate it but the babies.”

If assassination is going to make a comeback in the democratic world, its poster children will look a lot more like Scott Roeder and David Leach than early 20th century anarchists: loosely networked, internet-savvy, and targeted at prominent private citizens rather than heavily guarded political leaders.

Modern anarchists, for their part, get the memo. Andy Greenberg, a Forbes technology reporter, recently profiled Kuwabatake Sanjuro, a “crypto-anarchist” who runs a site called Assassination Market. Assassination Market is basically Kickstarter for murder: People put names on a kill list and others donate money (in Bitcoins, naturally) towards each individual’s demise. Anyone who can successfully prove they were responsible for a hit collects the pot. So far, the most “popular” target — Fed Chair Ben Bernanke — has a $75,000 price on his head.

“At some point, someone is going to be killed based on something like this,” Daveed Gartenstein-Ross told me. “That will absolutely happen.”

Gartenstein-Ross is an expert on violent extremism, fresh off a stint at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism at The Hague. He’s not particularly worried about Bernanke, given that the full weight of the United States intelligence services has got the Chairman’s back. Rather, Gartenstein-Ross fears for the George Tillers of the world: prominent, intensely controversial private citizens who don’t have the resources to fund Secret Service-like security. “Normal people who have unpopular opinions,” in Gartenstein-Ross’ phrase.

The most obvious way new technology enables this sort of assassination is by making it easier to identify where people are. Suppose, Gartenstein-Ross offers, you want to kill someone famous, and you learn they’re about to give a speech in New York City.

“You take some of the data mining technology that’s already been developed, and you follow Twitter. You can probably follow [her] location throughout Manhattan,” as people will tweet about the person going by. Even something as vague as “‘I just saw a convoy of cars coming by,’ it must be important” could be used to pinpoint their location, Gartenstein-Ross suggests.

The target doesn’t have to be famous for Gartenstein-Ross’ point to hold. Apps that locate the user — most obviously something like Foursquare, but some social apps add a location tag to the user’s post automatically — can help a would-be assassin identify a target’s location, either by following the target or her friends and family.

If someone would shoot the new abortionists, like Scott shot George Tiller,” Leach said, “hardly anyone will appreciate it but the babies.”

More simply, someone could find someone’s address and simply post it on a site that murderers might read. “Tiller’s address had been broadcast multiple times before he had been killed online,” Gartenstein-Ross notes.

McCants thinks this scary picture is relatively plausible. “Look at [jihadis] continually trying to kill the Muhammed cartoon guys,” he told me. “That’s high on the wish list.” But, he suggests, anyone who a group would want to target like this would almost certainly know it, and would be able to secure enough security in advance to protect themselves.

Byman, for his part, sees both potential and pitfalls in information technology for terrorist groups. “It enables communication, it enables coordination, it enables learning” between groups of assassins, but “these things are very vulnerable to, as we know from [the] NSA, tremendous surveillance.”

On balance, the proliferation of Web technologies is “probably good for individuals, but bad for groups.” Groups must communicate online to coordinate when using new technology, and online communication is incredibly easy for law enforcement to track. Individuals, by contrast, can make use of data mining and similar technologies with relative ease without any need to send emails the NSA might be reading.

This means, in Byman’s estimation, Gartenstein-Ross’ concerns about the targeting of private citizens are quite well-founded. He recalls a site that put together a list of abortion doctors, together with their home addresses. If anything happened to one of the doctors, the site — designed to appear as if drenched in blood — would cross their name off the list. The information on that site, Byman says, “would not necessarily be easy to access” absent a home on the web.

“There are different skill sets associated with terrorism,” Byman explains. “One is being able to fire a gun, one is being able to live below ground, [and] another is surveillance.” The internet allows people with different skill sets to compliment each other, and not necessarily intentionally: someone may provide surveillance information on an abortion doctor online for the purposes of organizing a protest, but a trigger-puller might well take that information and put it to deadlier use.

So it could be that both Jones’ optimism and Gartenstein-Ross’ pessimism are right. While democracy may be slowly eroding the power of traditional assassinations of political leaders, the internet technologies that flourish alongside democratic freedoms might well enable a new wave of assassinations targeted at citizens rather than states. Though a federal appeals court ultimately ruled that the blood website wasn’t protected speech, the grounds for the court’s ruling would protect other, similar sites.

So fifty years after the JFK assassination, we may be entering a new era of assassination, one that poses unprecedented challenges for law enforcement around the globe just as the old ones are starting to wither away.

Neither the Secret Service nor the FBI responded to requests for comment on this story.

 

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‘They’ did this! | JFK Conspiracies

‘They’ did this!

By James Carroll

Associated Press/Assassination Records Review Board, Dave Powers

President Kennedy’s limousine in Dallas, in footage taken by presidential aide Dave Powers and photographed from a television screen.

That afternoon in 1963, I was in the cellar of a Catholic seminary, a crenellated Gothic building in Washington, D.C. I was seated in the ad-hoc barber’s chair, while an untrained yet officially designated classmate was hacking at my hair, a normal part of the monkish life. Suddenly, one of our fellow seminarians stormed through the doorway to yell the news from Dallas. With a half-finished haircut, I rushed with the others to the common room for its television. A hundred of us were crowded there by the time the usually stolid Walter Cronkite choked up. One by one, we drifted to the chapel.

Across ensuing days, when we weren’t downtown standing on the curbside of Pennsylvania Avenue or in the Capitol grounds, mute witnesses to one funeral march or another, we were planted in front of the television, or on our knees before the tabernacle. Prayer had never come more naturally. I have no memory of that haircut being finished.

I was 20. The day President Kennedy was murdered marked the beginning of my adulthood. It was the first time I realized that hopes can be dashed suddenly and catastrophically — and, soon enough, that even the most vital of questions may go unanswered forever.

That weekend made the nation whole in its grief. Television sealed the bond. Elegantly enacted military obsequies formed one bracket of experience — the riderless horse with boot reversed in its stirrup, muffled drums, a bugle, the bagpipe; the timeless rubrics of Catholic liturgy formed the other — ubiquitous priests, black vestments, the veiled heads of women, power brokers on their knees. Why, if not for this, had suffering defined the essence of Christian faith? In the stately St. Matthew’s Cathedral, such historic figures as Charles de Gaulle, Haile Selassie, and Eamon de Valera filled out the front pews, but my parents were in there, too. Gruff old Cardinal Cushing touched the casket. He spoke for a merciful God by saying simply, “Dear Jack.”

But, the whole time, there was a loathsome distraction: the bulletins about the misfit crackpot gunman. Texas seemed guilty at first, and so did the Ku Klux Klan, the John Birch Society, the wild-eyed Cuban exiles, the US hate machine. It wouldn’t be long, we thought, before we knew who had really done this, and why. We could not imagine in those early days that our collective anguish, instead of passing, would calcify around questions to which every answer opened into yet more questions. About what happened that day in Dallas, all we know for sure even now — 50 years later — is that we don’t know it all. And in the years that followed, that lack of knowledge helped push America’s entire public dialogue in poisonous directions.

The assassination’s thicket of unresolved ambiguities became a hospitable niche for a profound American insecurity. Who killed the president? The disproportion between the punk Lee Harvey Oswald and the hero Kennedy surely meant that the assassin could not have acted alone. A gut instinct told everyone that Oswald was a mere instrument wielded by a hidden hand, but whose?

In the search for answers, facts lurking below the surface suddenly took on dark significance: Former Marine Lee Harvey Oswald had previously defected to Moscow; the Kennedy administration had locked its sights on Havana again; mobsters had been the Kennedy brothers’ archenemies. When a local man named Jack Ruby — a strip-club owner? really? — found it possible to enter Dallas police headquarters that Sunday and shoot the heavily guarded Oswald at close range, the story took its decisive turn into the realm of the truly deranged.

The connivance of Reds was an obvious theory: Why shouldn’t the demonic Kremlin have begun its openly stated project of burying America by burying the nation’s now universally beloved president? Newly sworn-in President Lyndon Johnson foresaw the problem of an unleashed impulse to lay blame. Johnson, sensing the danger of the question left unanswered, quickly moved to check a coming torrent of paranoid scapegoating. He appointed the Warren Commission, which, ultimately prompting more questions than it answered, would prove to be the disease that called itself the cure.

Soon, everyone knew these plot points: The Texas School Book Depository. Oswald not a drifter, but a calculator. JFK’s autopsy interrupted. Secret Service lapses. Oswald a Communist. No, a right-wing nut. Eyewitness accounts in conflict. The grassy knoll. Contested bullet trajectories. The unlikelihood of three accurate shots in little more than five seconds, especially by a man known for poor marksmanship. Then there was Oswald’s mystery wife — a Red, for sure.

If the first pieces of the story to emerge seemed jagged, they would fit together eventually, wouldn’t they? Less than a year after the assassination, Chief Justice Earl Warren delivered the commission findings: Oswald was an unhinged lone gunman, and so was Ruby. Because Oswald was dead, the commission said, it was not “possible to arrive at the complete story” of the murder. The nation would have to live with questions. The president had been killed for nothing larger than an accidental act of insanity. A second such act, the killing of Oswald, cut short society’s capacity to reckon with the full truth of it. When even Robert Kennedy publicly accepted this explanation, who were the rest of us to wonder?

Subsequent news events, though, kept fueling deeper suspicions about the commission’s work. Official lies about Vietnam widened a credibility gap.  Demonstrations became rebellions. When Malcolm X was murdered in 1965, it could seem remote to white America, but the shooting of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 was a blow to the nation — and assassination all at once felt familiar. When Robert Kennedy was gunned down two months later, it was no longer possible to rank such perdition as mad accidents of history. We knew it, we knew it: The murder of JFK had started something. Lone gunmen all — yet these killers had to have some deeper significance than purposeless madness, right? Otherwise we would all be mad.

Yet the quest for answers proved even madder. The uncorked New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison launched a sensational JFK assassination investigation in the late 1960s, culminating in the 1969 trial of a businessman named Clay Shaw. By then John Kennedy’s nemesis Richard Nixon was in the White House — from which some Kennedy admirers deduced that a malevolent current was running below the surface of national consciousness, especially when Nixon expanded the war in Vietnam that Americans had been told was ending. In New Orleans, Shaw was quickly acquitted by a unanimous jury, but in that dismally tumultuous year Garrison’s charge that Kennedy was murdered by a conspiracy had unexpected resonance.

Conspiracy books began rolling off the presses — ultimately hundreds of them. After the Pandora’s box of Watergate was thrown open, with revelations of true government criminality, Congress itself returned to the question of President Kennedy’s assassination, with investigations in both the House and Senate. The Warren Commission report was revisited, and now serious inconsistencies, lapses, and even deceptions were exposed. What the American people had been told about Oswald had fallen far short of the full truth.

But rather than restoring public confidence, these revelations further damaged it. Open congressional testimony produced no hard evidence to contradict the Warren commission’s essential conclusion that both Oswald and Ruby had acted alone. But while the Senate and House committees had made many secrets public, others remained sealed, fueling still more conspiracy theories. Those who rejected conspiracy theories out of hand had come to seem naive.

Through the 1980s, Ronald Reagan, for whom destruction of faith in government was a political purpose, cultivated cynicism on the right by demonizing social services, and on the left by pursuing secret wars in Central America. Thus the whole government-hating country was primed for the arrival of Oliver Stone’s 1991 film “JFK.” With Kevin Costner as Garrison, it turned the New Orleans DA from a crackpot self-aggrandizer into a lonely seeker of truth.

In the movie’s centerpiece scene, a long walking sequence shot at the reflecting pool in Washington, a mysterious Pentagon insider, played by Donald Sutherland, explains to Garrison, and by extension the nation, that Kennedy was killed in a carefully orchestrated act of “black ops” involving the US Army, the CIA, the Secret Service, the FBI, and top-level Washington officials — all acting to protect the Cold War national security elite and its military-industrial partners and, especially, to make sure that their much desired war in Vietnam could proceed. An all-too-dovish Kennedy had to be removed, Stone’s film makes clear, because he was a threat to the “establishment.” Dozens, if not hundreds, of conspirators were actively involved in this crime. And they all kept the secret.

It was nonsense. Critics said so. Still, many took the movie as history. Never mind that Stone’s hypothesis, offered up as fact, amounts to a ghastly slander of numerous identifiable people — one of whom, as it happens, was my father. He was the Pentagon’s intelligence chief, a character bound to be at the center of such a plot. Not given to weeping, to put it mildly, Dad had wept that November weekend. He felt the loss of Kennedy more acutely than anyone I knew. By 1991, luckily, Dad was not aware.

Stone’s film resonated, though, because it salved what had by then become an intolerably painful national wound — not the memory of JFK’s death, but our failure to fully explain it. That we’d been invited to regard the assassination merely as a cruel turn of fate was the work of malevolent forces. The government did this to us, Stone’s film explained.

His narrative was a roaring rejection of the contingency of life, of how great consequences can follow from the petty deeds of wholly insignificant individuals acting with weightless motive more or less alone. “JFK” would prove to be the master template for all assassination conspiracy theories, right down to those 50th anniversary books being published this month. Such elaborate fantasies would be nation-destroying if they were true. Yet, ironically, they offer us a rescue of the moral order — an insistence that massive social and political heartbreak must be the result of intentional design.

In their own way, these conspiracy theories prepared the soil in which took root the broad distrust in government that curses the nation to this day. More than that, conspiracy-mindedness undercuts the civic maturity that is necessary for a commonwealth to function responsibly. Every tug in the direction of conspiracy — “they” did this! — is a signal of the test we have been failing. The compulsion to keep asking the question “why?”, replying to every answer with another “why?”, until the final conjuring of a satisfactory explanation is forced, is a mark of childhood. More recent conspiracy theories, from the supposed murder of Vince Foster to “9/11 was an inside job” to insinuations about missing birth certificates, are also rooted in a callow refusal to get real.

Fifty years later, it is hard to convey how most Americans felt— and how I felt — about John F. Kennedy. In his first summer as president, a crisis over Berlin had ignited the lethal nuclear standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union. Kennedy told us to prepare for war, and we did. In fear, we felt bound to him.

The climax came, of course, not over Berlin but Cuba. During that October in 1962, an unflinching Kennedy dispelled the danger for which he had primed us. When he and Nikita Khrushchev, equally chastened, agreed to a partial nuclear test ban the following summer, we glimpsed the opening — arms-control negotiations — through which a peaceful end of the Cold War would eventually come.

Less than three months later, when the shots rang out at Dallas, it seemed the post-Cuba reprieve from terror had been revoked. In the death of one man, as we felt it, a far more catastrophic fate had shown itself, an armageddon after all. That the fabric of the nation so quickly unraveled seemed somehow unsurprising. And why shouldn’t we have sought ways to put off maturity — by filling in the gaps in the record with grandiose theories whose vast scope reflected the depths of our sorrow?

At some point, though, a grown person has to say, “I do not know, and never will.” That is the reply to life’s most important questions. For me, it was also the terrible lesson of Kennedy’s death.

James Carroll writes regularly for the Globe.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2013/11/10/jfk-conspiracy-theories-sent-america-poisonous-direction/aFImxTdOdETuaJMFUa8YxO/story.html

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The Rise Of America’s Lunatic Fringe

Submitted by Tyler Durden

Authored by chindit

The Rise Of America’s Lunatic Fringe

Anyone who spends any amount of time on the internet has seen them.

They are the moonbats, the wingnuts, the whackjobs, the Conspiratorialists.  They are America’s new Lunatic Fringe, and their numbers are growing.

While the rise of the internet fed a segment of society that has always existed, when the cyberworld became an increasingly important source both of entertainment and information, an entirely new demographic joined what was already amongst us.

Who are they and what do they believe?  The Lunatic Fringe is not uniform in either its background or beliefs.  Some clearly seem to be emotionally disturbed.  Some are racist and hateful.  Others are simply naïve and gullible, or uninformed.  Still more are frustrated by an economy and a government that are behaving out of whack with what most people expected from life and from leadership.  They want to believe America stands for something noble, but it is increasingly felt by them that it does not.  They are confused, frustrated, and disappointed.  They feel violated and betrayed.  They grow angrier by the day.  Some harbor a diffuse rage which could blow at any time. Others have figuratively thrown in the towel and have joined the ranks of what are called Preppers and Survivalists.

Collectively, though individually they differ, the beliefs of the Fringe conspiracies behind the JFK assassination, the lunar landing, and 911.  The collective also includes the Birthers, and believers in everything from FEMA Camps to chemtrails to that retro old favorite of Colonel Jack Ripper, fluoridation.  The Fringe holds beliefs that have the world controlled variously by the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, the Bilderbergers, Bohemian Grove, Skull and Bones, the Council on Foreign Relations, 33rd Degree Freemasons, the Vatican, the Queen of England, or just The Illuminati.  Every event and every incident in the world is affected by some Master Plan carried out by whomever the believer chooses from the aforementioned gallery of rogues.  For many, al Qaeda is really al CIAda, and the prime directive of that organization, along with all the other USG alphabet agencies, is to further the goals of the elite, usually through some “false flag” operation or “psy-op”, and funded through illicit drug sales.

Believers can “prove” each and every one of their claims via a series of cross-referenced and circular internet links, the source of many undoubtedly just someone’s fertile imagination, but very real to the believers.

To the uninitiated this all seems rather humorous, albeit slightly unsettling.  It would be both wrong and unwise, however, just to slough it off as the ramblings of the insane.  The reason such beliefs are gaining favor is because many Americans have lost faith and lost trust in the government and America’s elected leadership.  Given what has happened over the last decade, this is not only understandable, it is even, in an odd way, reasonable.  A continual drift to the fringe can be expected because of the many very real things that make the foolish things suddenly more believable.

Why have the people lost faith and trust?  There is a host of reasons, perhaps beginning with the war of choice in Iraq and the vociferous and passionate claims of WMD that turned out to be false.  That war cost lives, cost sympathy and diplomatic capital, and cost trillions even when America was told by former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz that the war “would pay for itself from oil sales” and that “Americans would be welcomed with garlands”.  Neither was anything close to accurate.  Instead the US has war dead, war wounded, a huge bill, fewer friends, and many more enemies.

What truly exacerbated the rush to the fringe were the Financial Crisis and the subsequent railroaded bailouts, which “democratic” America opposed to the tune of 97%, and which were, and still are viewed as rewarding the very people who caused the collapse.  The oft-spoken official claims that “the taxpayer made a profit on the bailouts” just adds salt to the taxpayers’ wounds, as it conveniently fails to take into account the host of programs—from TALF to ZIRP to QEI, II, and III and Twist—that virtually handed the banks the money with which they could “pay back” the bailout cash.

America sees backroom deals and favors to insiders every step of the way, and rightfully so they see this, because that is exactly how the bailout was affected.  No one had to pay for his mistakes, and equally significant, no one has been prosecuted despite overwhelming evidence of fraud, malfeasance, and corruption.  Americans cannot help but subscribe to the cynical quip, “everyone is equal under the law, except for those who are above it”.  Fines don’t count, especially when the money to pay them comes right back through another door.

America’s prisons are filled with people who did little more than use a banned substance.  It’s time some bankers and officials faced the possibility of similar accommodations, as their crimes are greater and victims substantially more.

The belief that all is not fair is further cemented when the Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer can be taped (PBS, “Frontline”) saying, “Well, I think I am pursuing justice. And I think the entire responsibility of the department is to pursue justice. But in any given case, I think I and prosecutors around the country, being responsible, should speak to regulators, should speak to experts, because if I bring a case against institution A, and as a result of bringing that case, there’s some huge economic effect — if it creates a ripple effect so that suddenly, counterparties and other financial institutions or other companies that had nothing to do with this are affected badly — it’s a factor we need to know and understand.”

No matter how one parses that quote it still says the same thing: some are above the law.

The American people are well aware they have been lied to by the leadership.  They know that a lobbyist has an infinitely greater chance of getting his way than an entire nation of voters.  They know who pays the bills—the taxpayer—as well as who pays the politicians—the lobbyists.  They see the Federal Debt ballooning to Greek-like proportions, and the best Congress can do, other than take vacation or kick the can, is to tell Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke to “get to work, Mr. Chairman”, which means print more money, monetize the deficit, and further dilute the value of the dollar.

Even some people within the government are undoubtedly growing frustrated.  Imagine someone in DEA, FBI, CIA, or the military, who sees the slap on the wrist fine handed to a certain non-US bank for a decade or more of drug money laundering and laundering money for Iran, some of which might well have found its way to Hezbollah or to parties aiding the Iraqi insurgency.  There are people in Waziristan who face the wrath of a drone-fired Hellfire missile with less evidence to back up the attack.  This bank, incidentally, received a $3.5 billion payment-in-full upon the US taxpayer bailout of insurer AIG.

When trust is gone, everything becomes an affront, a conspiracy, a power grab by the elite.  The recently passed National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which gives the President incredibly broad powers, seems to obviate both habeas corpus and the entire Bill of Rights.  When the trust is gone, people are less willing to believe that such a bill would never be used recklessly, or vindictively to put down vocal opponents of whatever Administration happens to be in power at the time.  When trust is gone, the people question new efforts to alter the Second Amendment, even if many are personally outraged at the rash of gun violence that has come to epitomize the United States, so they rush to guns rather than run from them.  When the trust is gone, the message of the Lunatic Fringe is afforded greater reception.  When the trust is gone the Fringe grows into the mainstream.  When trust is gone in some aspects of governance, all governance is questioned.

The government can no longer afford to ignore the Lunatic Fringe, because it is becoming less loon and more understandably and righteously indignant every day.  The government did not create the Fringe, but through callous disregard, incompetence, blatant self-interest, cronyism, selective enforcement, and pandering to its financial support base, the government has fertilized the fringe until it has grown to redwood-like size.  The nation’s leadership is viewed not with respect, but with distrust.  It is not the solution, but the problem.  It has morphed from friend to enemy, at least for a not insignificant portion of the citizenry.   The fringe is not going to go away, but instead it will grow.  Its wounds will fester.  It will continue to hammer away at an already fragile society.  It may well lead to significant social unrest, even violence, and that violence is likely to be directed at those seen as responsible for the fiscal, financial and moral decay, which means the elite and the government that is seen as catering to it.  New records in the Dow will not alter the focus, nor ameliorate the bubbling rage, even if the financial media or the Federal Reserve thinks it will.  This growing demographic of citizens must have its concerns addressed before it is too late.

Woe to those who ignore it, because they will become the targets, rightfully or not.

To paraphrase a certain career New York Senator, “Mr. Government, get to work!”  Or better yet, get out of the way.