J.R. Nyquist Blog

 

The best religion is communism.

Lee Harvey Oswald [i]

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Socialism is a fake, a comedy, a phantom, and a blackmail.

Benito Mussolini
Speech in Milan, 22 July 1919

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Our disease is democracy. It is not the skin that festers – our very bones are carious, and their marrow blackens with gangrene.

Fisher Ames

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The abnormal man, the damaged man, Lee Harvey Oswald, said, “The best religion is communism.” The disillusioned communist-turned-fascist, Benito Mussolini, said socialism “is a fake, a comedy, and a blackmail.” More than a century earlier, the great spokesman of the Federalist Party in America, Fisher Ames, said that democracy is “our disease.” All three of these quotes reflect the same problem; namely, our obsession with false ideas and false narratives. Soren Kierkegaard said that the present age began with understandings and reflections leading to a mighty leveling tendency. “In order that everything should be reduced to the same level,” he wrote, “it is first of all necessary to produce a phantom, its spirit, a monstrous abstraction, an all-embracing something which is nothing, a mirage – and that phantom is the public.”[ii]

Of course, modern politics is full of mirages and monstrous abstractions, phantoms and even specters. Marx and Engels began their Communist Manifesto by writing, “A specter is haunting Europe – the specter of communism.” This specter may be the most monstrous abstraction of them all, with adherents pretending to care about “the people”; especially the poor and disadvantaged. Yet, communism (as statism) is a cold altruism, bereft of real sympathy, marching from victory to victory. Why has this coldest of all cold monsters prevailed in so many countries and institutions? Kierkegaard’s answer: “It is only in an age which is without passion, yet reflective, that such a phantom can develop itself with the help of the Press which itself becomes an abstraction.”[iii] And here we have a second monster to serve the first. “The public is,” wrote Kierkegaard, “the real Leveling-Master rather than the actual leveler….” In other words, everything is done in the name of the people, or “the public.” The latest nuance, of course, is that “the public” consists of downtrodden women and minorities, homosexuals and illegal immigrants. This resonates even more, since Kierkegaard affirmed that the public is “a monstrous nothing.”

The rote formula of oppressor and oppressed relies on “unreal individuals who never are and never can be united in an actual situation or organization – and yet they are held together as a whole.”[iv] Here is a situation in which a shallow intellectuality “destroys everything concrete.” Father and mother, tribe and individual – all consigned to the flames. Even the soul has been emptied of its contents, subjected to a hollowing-out process. People no longer have souls, today. They have opinions. This is the basis of all belonging, of all group affiliation. You must adopt this or that set of group stupidities, or else. To become a monstrous nothing, one believes in nothing – in unrealities and untruths. The more one believes in untruth, the more monstrous and disfigured one becomes. And now society disfigures itself on the grandest scale imaginable. Reality is now determined, in the moment, by the public and its adjunct, the Press. “A public is everything and nothing,” wrote Kierkegaard, “the most dangerous of all powers and the most insignificant: one can speak to a whole nation in the name of the public, and still the public will be less than a single real man, however unimportant.”[v]

And here comes the politician who feeds on monstrous nothings. He is the creature of the Press and the public. He is no longer a man with serious thoughts. Inwardly hollow, he reflects and impersonates the monstrous nothingness of the thing he serves; for his ideas are without substance, his thoughts are without consistency as the world crumbles under his management. His inner world is a series of evasions and falsifications. He has been cut from his ancestors, his tribe, and his God. He is alienated from his children, who are being indoctrinated into the New Religion (the religion of mob rule, the religion of socialism). He loves humanity in general with a cold kind of love. He does not think. Instead, he repeats formulas and slogans.

And now, democracy is approaching its terminal stage where personal resentments are mixed with utopian dreams. The ruling plutocracy seeks to profit by selling cheap Chinese goods. The middle class has declined into a semi-literate rabble. The common people worship celebrities, even in politics. Ideology declines into conspiracy theory. Every major event is viewed through a paranoid schizophrenic lens. One is obligated to paint horns and a tail on history itself – on every war, on every economic downturn, on every assassination and election. Everything is reduced to an all-encompassing Devil Theory. There is no human agency in anything, and Providence has been supplanted by Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Enter, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Let us take a concrete example. It is painful to watch Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. repeating one Russian lie after another during his Tucker Carlson interview. How can this be understood? Surely, Kennedy knows better. Yet, he wallows in ignorance, proving that he knows almost nothing. Armed in this fashion he goes forth to challenge that monstrous nothing of a president, Joseph Biden. In this revelatory interview with Carlson, Kennedy confuses the city of Vladivostok (in the Far East) with Sevastopol (in the Black Sea). He calls the misnamed Black Sea naval base Russia’s only warm-water port, which is one of those commonplace misunderstandings that statesmen should not indulge.[vi] Kennedy blunders through this interview from one outrageous untruth to another. What we want from Kennedy is a higher level of general knowledge. What we get is half-baked and half-digested half-truth.

Kennedy’s mind is in thrall to the cold altruism of the left. As such, he is a self-hating American. In large part, his ideology reduces to conspiracy theory.[vii] Perhaps he is right in his crusade against Big Pharma; yet he discredits himself in the end. His value judgments are those of a social justice warrior. His insistence that anticommunists within the CIA killed his uncle, President John Kennedy, is frightening on two counts: first, it suggests an irrational hatred of anticommunists; second, he nowhere acknowledges that communists killed his father and uncle. This is not a man of the right. This is a man of the left; for he wants to stop illegal immigration – not for the sake of preserving America, but to prevent illegal immigrants from being robbed and exploited. He has no idea that his first responsibility, as a statesman, is to his country. Kennedy shows more concern for foreigners in this presentation than for Americans. Like other liberals, his need to appear compassionate is pathological. The ideal statesman is a father of his country, not the father of poor folks everywhere. To grasp how inappropriate Mr. Kennedy’s position is, imagine a father with five children who is more concerned with the neighbor’s children than with his own. That is Kennedy.

People who do not identify with their own self, with their own family, with their own country, are not patriots. Kennedy is such a one. He prefers to identify with a broader humanity; that is, with an unreal abstraction, with the suffering masses. Kennedy’s fatherland, then, is the world’s downtrodden and oppressed. Yet these do not a nation make. His ideology derives from a perfervid guilt that rejects any identification with his own privileged position. On account of this, he feels more compassion for the murderers of his uncle and father than he feels for himself, his family, or his country. We may wonder if this compassion is a pose adopted for political advantage. Yet Kennedy does not appear cynical. He does not come off as a poseur. What is he, then?

Kennedy is an anti-anticommunist. The centerpiece of his rhetoric is a blood libel against communism’s enemies. Kennedy’s rhetoric is in keeping with his attitude towards his father’s murderer, Sirhan Sirhan. The latter asked for the death penalty during his trial and attempted to change his plea from “not guilty” to “guilty.” But Kennedy does not think Sirhan murdered his father. He does not connect that murder with the assassin’s stated ideology (communism); for Sirhan wrote in his journals, “Long live communism…. I firmly support the communist cause and its people…. American capitalism will fall and give way to the worker’s dictatorship.”[viii]

In 2018 Robert Kennedy, Jr. met with Sirhan Sirhan in prison. After a long conversation Kennedy declared Sirhan’s innocence. Yet Sirhan confessed to killing Kennedy’s father in court. His motive for the killing was freely admitted on his arrest. “I can explain it,” he said. “I did it for my country.” Sirhan’s diary contains the following entry for 18 May 1968: “My determination to eliminate R.F.K. is becoming … an unshakable obsession … Kennedy must die before June 5^th.”[ix] And despite this, despite overwhelming evidence, Robert Kennedy, Jr. believes Sirhan did not kill his father. Here is a case for Kierkegaard, where the death of a beloved father becomes an abstraction (i.e., reconfigured as conspiratorial fiction). Here, concrete reality fades into the background for the sake of anti-anticommunism. When your father and uncle are murdered by communists, and you insist on blaming anticommunists, the resulting falsification of reality suggests a profound inversion of the soul.  

As Robert Kennedy, Jr. is a self-admitted liberal, Eric Voegelin’s analysis of liberalism may provide the key: “if liberalism is understood as the immanent salvation of man and society, communism certainly is its most radical expression….”[x] It is, in fact, this relationship between liberalism and communism that prevents the latter-day liberal from seeing communism for what it is. In the case of Kennedy, liberalism’s relationship to communism prevents him from holding communists accountable for murdering JFK and RFK. Kennedy shares the same basic faith as the communists; namely, the faith of perfecting society through politics. The inner logic of this situation, wrote Voegelin, is that the primary danger from communism is not Russian and Chinese armies or nukes. The West can build better weapons than the communists. But the West chooses not to build those weapons because the West’s liberals are intellectually paralyzed and morally confused in the face of an enemy they will not recognize as enemy. According to Voegelin: “The problem of Communist danger, thus, is thrown back on the problem of Western paralysis and self-destructive politics through the gnostic dream” [i.e., the dream of making heaven on earth.] Insofar as communism is a more violent and consistent form of the dream, liberalism cannot oppose communism and must secretly or openly sympathize with it. Liberalism, according to Voegelin, is right-wing communism. Liberals like Kennedy are right-wing communists. As such they are predisposed like all communists to disregard the structure of reality, ignore facts, falsify history, and irresponsibly criticize society from “sincere conviction.”[xi] The key takeaway is: They will not defend themselves or their country from communism. In the end, they will join the communists.  

“The function of Gnosticism as the civil theology of Western society,” wrote Voegelin, is all about the “destruction of the truth and the soul, and its disregard for the problem of existence….” When God affirmed that His creation was good, the communists (i.e., latter-day Gnostics) sneered. Theirs is a form of speculation that takes all grace from the world by making the Devil master and God a truant. In their system, man must become God. Catastrophe will then follow catastrophe. This is the faith and practice of Lenin, of Stalin, of Mao. Kennedy’s anti-anticommunism partakes of this same faith. This is why Kennedy sympathizes with his father’s assassin, why he declares that assassin to be innocent. Only anticommunists are guilty. Only anticommunists stand in the way of progress. Kennedy has reconfigured the world into a giant capitalist conspiracy, where government is the solution and private property the problem.

Kennedy is not alone in his views. His brand of conspiracy theory (as defined in footnote 7 below) is growing in popularity because leveling has become instinctive. As a technique for falsification, conspiracy theory enables the leveling process. Here is a vicious cycle. As the individual is reduced, he more and more becomes a creature of the state. He clings to the state because the state has reduced him. The state grows stronger as he clings to it.

    

Conspiracy Theory as Leveling

Let us accept, for the moment, that we are called upon to be honest in our analysis of the JFK assassination. If we are to stand for truth and the soul, we must be truthful. What does honesty require in this case? A readiness to follow the evidence wherever it leads; that is, real evidence rather than speculation or confabulation, or sensationalism for its own sake, or outright lies purporting to be evidence, or arbitrary hostility to reasonable inference. Real evidence means credible testimony backed by physical discoveries such as bullets fired as well as the weapons that fired them. Real evidence includes fingerprints and photographs, video footage and autopsies. Real evidence includes witnesses at the scene, reporting what they saw the day they saw it (not years or decades later). In evaluating the whole, one must also possess consummate common sense; that is, by avoiding the arbitrary assumption that all investigators are corrupt, that all institutions are controlled by powerful conspirators.

First point: – if anyone besides Lee Harvey Oswald was shooting at President Kennedy on 22 November 1963, no credible evidence has emerged. Out of 177 witnesses present and questioned, almost 90 percent heard only three shots fired at Kennedy. We know that Oswald fired the three shots because one witness, across the street from the shooter, saw Oswald firing from the window, and three witnesses were directly below that window, hearing everything at an ear-splitting distance. The three shots came from Oswald’s sniper’s nest, built out of books, on the sixth-floor corner window of the School Book Depository building where Oswald’s rifle was found. All attempts to concoct a second shooter by identifying other blasts, coming from other directions, have been debunked. No alternate murder weapon has been found. No witnesses claimed to see another shooter on the day of the shooting. No spent rounds or shell casings were found from a second shooter. And the area was thoroughly searched.

Second point: – In the decades following the original investigation by the police, FBI, and Secret Service, roughly 2,000 JFK conspiracy books and tracts have been written. These writings have done nothing but spread confusion, far and wide. One may untangle fifteen minutes of erroneous confabulation from a JFK assassination buff in two hours, but in the next ten minutes he will present you with even more work. The favored approach of JFK conspiracy theorists is turning honest police mistakes into proofs of conspiracy; for example, the police originally mistook Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano for a Mauser because these rifles are remarkably similar. This mistake was used to claim that a Mauser was used to kill Kennedy, then it was swapped out for Oswald’s rifle. There is no evidence for this alleged swap. Conspiracy theorists simply assert things, demanding that someone prove them wrong. They are oblivious to the larger context – to the mass of witness testimony. Their tactic is to put the investigators on trial. But there is no substantial evidence that the investigating agencies were engaged in a coverup.

Third point: – Someone needs to demolish the “epic political thriller,” JFK, written and directed by Oliver Stone. This movie is an obscenity. It lionizes a psychologically unbalanced publicity seeker named Jim Garrison – a district attorney who falsified evidence, intimidated witnesses, ruined innocent lives, and was finally rebuked by the courts. Kevin Costner may be likable in the role of Jim Garrison, but Garrison was not a good guy. Furthermore, if the JFK movie was not made as a communist active measure, it nonetheless functioned as one. We are given to believe that Kennedy was killed so that Lyndon Johnson could escalate the war in Vietnam (which was a war against communism). We are told that JFK was killed by the military-industrial complex and the CIA (since JFK supposedly wanted to disband the CIA). Many or most of these notions are seconded by Robert Kennedy, Jr. – and they are false.

In the Tucker Carlson interview, Robert Kennedy, Jr. alleges that the CIA’s William King Harvey was Oswald’s “handler.” Of course, this accusation is preposterous. It was originally given legs by E. Howard Hunt’s sons, who extracted a “confession” from their dying and mentally deranged father. In fact, the mother and siblings of the Hunt boys said these boys had exploited their dying father for financial gain.[xii] Since the JFK assassination, small fortunes have been made from alleged “evidence” and altered “testimony.” Greed and attention-seeking behavior is to be expected; but now, we are hearing these same false narratives repeated by Robert Kennedy, Jr., someone who ought to be sensitive to the truth. Why accuse William Harvey when there is no evidence? Harvey and Kennedy’s father hated each other, it is true. During the Cuban missile crisis Harvey angered President Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy by blaming the missile crisis on their lack of nerve during the Bay of Pigs invasion.[xiii] A guy who has the guts to tell the President off in a phone call isn’t going to sneak around and shoot him from a grassy knoll. Besides, Harvey ran OPERATION MONGOOSE along with USAF General Edward Landsdale. The operation included a plan to assassinate Fidel Castro, with oversight from Attorney General Robert Kennedy. As Joseph J. Trento tells the story in The Secret History of the CIA, “After the Bay of Pigs, John Kennedy sent his brother Robert to the CIA to punish the Agency for its failure. Like so many others before him who had arrived behind those closed doors, Robert Kennedy fell in love with the world of espionage.”[xiv] As Trento explained,

While his brother enjoyed hearing war stories from Berlin Base, Robert, always intense, became the force to oust Castro. He met with CIA officials daily. Despite the lesson he presumably learned from the Bay of Pigs, he was taken in by the illusion that the CIA understood more about the world than any other organization. [xv]

Of course, the CIA was penetrated by the KGB from the start, and Robert Kennedy was clueless. His false confidence explains why his brother’s presidency ended in rifle fire. The Kennedys had no idea that the KGB was anticipating their every move. The man that Robert Kennedy, Jr., accuses of being Lee Harvey Oswald’s handler, William King Harvey, was tasked by President Kennedy, with rebuilding everything the CIA had lost in the bungled Bay of Pigs invasion of April 1961. The idea was to build up the anti-Castro forces and capabilities so that by October 1962 everything would be ready for the liberation of Cuba. But the Soviets knew all about it. Khrushchev preempted MONGOOSE by placing troops and nuclear missiles in Cuba, precipitating the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. President Kennedy postponed OPERATION MONGOOSE in the face of the missile crisis. The plot against Castro’s Cuba would resume later, only Kennedy would be stopped again, permanently. How could it have turned out otherwise? There were KGB moles in the U.S. Government. They could anticipate every move the White House made. Besides the KGB’s successful penetration of the NSA at the time, John Sherwood warned his superiors at CIA that Castro had penetrated MONGOOSE “up the kazoo.”[xvi]

Related to this, a memo from General Landsdale has been found suggesting that President John Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy discussed and apparently sanctioned an assassination attempt “against Fidel Castro during a 1962 meeting in the Oval Office.”[xvii] It was, of course, related to OPERATION MONGOOSE. Several experts weighed in on this evidence, saying it “has the earmarks of an assassination plot.” A former CIA director said of the memo, “The language of the memo speaks for itself. The only thing Robert Kennedy can be referring to is the assassination of Castro. This paragraph should never have been written.”[xviii]

In 1962, when CIA Director John McCone read the Landsdale memorandum, he summoned William Harvey to his office. The CIA Director waved his copy of the memo at Harvey demanding to know who had ordered Castro’s assassination. After all, McCone was a serious Catholic who could be excommunicated if murder was done in his name.[xix] A lot of folks learned, in various ways, that the Kennedy’s had been plotting to kill Castro. Among insiders, it was an open secret. Even Vice President Lyndon Johnson, after having lunch with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in 1961, told top aid Walter Jenkins, “Bobby Kennedy has turned the damn CIA over into some Murder Incorporated.” In 1962 Johnson reportedly said the Kennedys were playing with fire. “Someone is going to try and get even.”[xx]

Part of the story of Oswald, which has not been well-covered in the media, is Oswald’s attempt to infiltrate OPERATION MONGOOSE when he went to New Orleans in April 1963. An account of this episode is related in the book, Brothers in Arms. The authors make the case that Oswald attempted to sell himself to the anti-Castro Cuban Revolutionary Committee (CRC) as an anticommunist. In other words, Oswald was trying to infiltrate the CIA’s anti-Castro operation. It is well known that Oswald wanted to immigrate to communist Cuba in 1963. If he learned something worth knowing about the anti-Castro movement, he might go to Cuba as a hero. Oswald had been disappointed after his defection to the Soviet Union in 1959 because the Russians gave him a job as a sheet metal worker. This did not accord with Oswald’s grandiose self-conception. In effect, Oswald was eager to make a name for himself as a revolutionary communist, spy, or assassin. But Oswald was an amateur. He never graduated from high school. But he was determined and persistent.

While the CIA rejected Oswald’s attempts at infiltration, the CIA’s Sam Halpern was managing a prospective Castro assassin named Rolando Cubela. Halpern was told by Cubela that the latter was in direct contact with Bobby Kennedy. “I always believed Cubela. I don’t think he ever lied to us at all. He had no reason to lie to us about Bobby’s involvement, we all believed him, and had no reason to go questioning Bobby as to why he was doing it.”[xxi] In Edward Jay Epstein’s book, Killing Castro, we read how Cubela was recruited by the CIA as the perfect assassin – appearing to be a disaffected Castro insider. But on 18 August 1962 Cubela refused to take a CIA lie detector test. This led Richard Helms, the CIA’s Director of Plans, to veto him as Castro’s assassin. Things changed, however, by September 1963. The Kennedys were putting Helms under pressure, so he reactivated Cubela. A meeting with Cubela took place in Brazil. Would Cubela assassinate Castro? Cubela had one condition: a personal meeting with a high-ranking official of the Kennedy Administration. Cubela was assured that confirmation would be provided. ^[xxii]  

A day or so later, Fidel Castro went to the Brazilian Embassy in Havana and talked to an AP reporter. Castro said, “If US leaders are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe. Let Kennedy and his brother Robert take care of themselves since they too can be the victims of an attempt which will cause their death.”[xxiii]

On 29 October 1963 Desmond FitzGerald was dispatched from the White House to meet with Cubela in Paris. According to a report from the CIA’s Inspector General, the contact plan for the Cubela meeting stated: “FitzGerald will [present] himself as personal representative of Robert F. Kennedy who traveled to [Paris] for the specific purpose of meeting AMLASH [code name of Cubela] and giving him assurances of full support….”[xxiv] During the meeting FitzGerald discussed the elimination of Castro. Cubela “asked for a high-powered rifle with a telescopic sight – the same type of weapon Oswald would use 23 days later in Dallas – but FitzGerald told him the CIA would provide a safer weapon.”[xxv] The final proof of presidential support for the assassination of Castro came in the form of a coded message, inserted in a speech given by President Kennedy in Miami, on 18 November 1963. Cubela was satisfied that John Kennedy had ordered Castro’s death. But the head of the CIA’s counterintelligence staff, James Angleton, suspected that Cubela was a double agent. According to Epstein,

Angleton, as he later told me, could not accept that it was merely a coincidence that, first, AMLASH is reactivated in Brazil for a mission to assassinate Castro … and, only a day or so later, Castro goes to Brazilian territory … to tell an American AP reporter that he knew the American government was behind plots to kill him. [xxvi]

If Cubela was a double agent, then Castro knew the Kennedy’s were sending at least one assassin to kill him. How many assassins, besides Cubela, might be on their way? Perhaps Castro thought the best defense was to hit Kennedy before Kennedy could hit him. Meanwhile, Lee Harvey Oswald was a great admirer of Fidel Castro. Oswald read the newspapers every day, attentive to stories about the Cuban dictator. According to Oswald’s wife, Marina, he read Castro’s assassination warning in “the New Orleans Times-Picayune … [causing] … him to go to the Cuban Embassy in Mexico.”[xxvii] In Mexico Oswald contacted agents of Cuban and Soviet intelligence. Did they turn him away, or did they employ him?[xxviii] All we know is that Oswald shot and killed JFK on 22 November 1963.

It is no wonder, then, that Bobby Kennedy’s reaction to his brother’s death was “grief and guilt.”[xxix] Contrary to the self-serving statements of Bobby Kennedy, Jr., there never was any credible evidence against William King Harvey or the CIA or the military-industrial complex. The Kennedys had plotted Castro’s death and John Kennedy fell victim instead. Here is Russo and Molton’s account of what Robert Kennedy suffered in the wake of his brother’s death:

Bobby was so devastated after Jack’s death that he left the Justice Department to Nick Katzenbach’s care for months. When he did finally return, he was a morass of pain, his eyes perpetually red, his concentration shattered. He could barely bring himself to speak…. When he could steel himself to ask Harry [Ruiz] Williams, point-blank, what he thought about Dallas, Harry told him that he thought Castro did it. Bobby didn’t reply, but his face told Harry that he was beginning to accept it. [xxx]

Did Bobby Kennedy ultimately accept that Castro did it? Or did he blame the CIA? Russo and Molton wrote, “Had the CIA (or even a rogue element within it) been proven to have unseated a president, Bobby, or someone near him with less to lose, would not have hesitated to tell the world about it. And had anti-Castro Cuban elements been responsible, they too would have been charged.”[xxxi] In the Wake of John’s death, Jackie Kennedy tried to console her brother-in-law with books – Camus, the Greeks, Edith Hamilton. Bobby copied out a telling passage: “The gods … hated beyond all else the arrogance of power….” And, “All arrogance will reap a harvest rich in tears.” And from Camus, he copied, “I feel rather like Augustine did before becoming a Christian when he said, ‘I tried to find the source of evil and got nowhere.’”[xxxii] These lines are telling – more pregnant with true regret than the glib nonsense about a CIA plot.

The ghost of Lee Harvey Oswald cannot be happy. For all that he sacrificed, in the end, he is not fully credited with his greatest deed (i.e., great in his own mind). The nephew of his target, even now, takes away Oswald’s agency, reducing Oswald to a CIA stooge. Given this, Oswald has lost his rightful place in Hell. The death of President Kennedy was supposed to be Oswald’s story, Oswald’s achievement. But Robert Kennedy, Jr. wants to take that achievement away from the ever-downtrodden Oswald. Perhaps Kennedy has inadvertently inflicted a uniquely cruel form of revenge on the assassin.  

American politics has become ridiculous. The Carlson interview with Robert Kennedy, Jr., is a shocking disgrace. Our expectations are low, and we are not keen on holding each other to account. In his essay, “The Present Age,” Kierkegaard wrote, “A demon is called up over whom no individual has any power, and through the very abstraction of leveling gives the individual a momentary, selfish kind of enjoyment….” This enjoyment, said Kierkegaard, signifies the individual’s doom. “Enthusiasm may end in disaster,” he explained, “but leveling is eo ipso the destruction of the individual.”[xxxiii] We have sought salvation in political equality, in economic equality, in sexual equality, and more. Where has this leveling gotten us? Even the assassination of John Kennedy is part of this leveling. It is intrinsic to it. Even the career of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., follows the logic of this leveling. The right and the left follow this logic. Where will all this lead? Kierkegaard spoke of “prophecies and apocalypses.” But, he said, we are too weak for such things, preferring feeble “prognostications” instead.

“The change that will come about is this,” wrote Kierkegaard. “In the old order … the officers, generals, heroes … were recognizable, and everyone … with his little detachment … supported the whole. From now on the great man … will be without authority because he will have understood the leveling process; he will be unrecognizable; he will keep his distinction hidden like a plain-clothes policeman, and his support will only be negative, i.e., repelling people….”[xxxiv] And so, it is.

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Links and Notes

[i] Gerald Posner, Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK (Audible), Chapter 2.

[ii] Soren Kierkegaard translated by Alexander Dru, The Present Age (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 59.

[iii] Ibid, p. 59-60.

[iv] Ibid, p. 60.

[v] Ibid, p. 63.

[vi] The Russian ports of Murmansk, Vladivostok and Kaliningrad are all ice-free ports. For that matter, Sevastopol is not Russia’s only major port on the Black Sea. There is also Novorossiysk. All in all, Russia has year-round ice free ports opening to the world’s two largest oceans, and to three seas.

[vii] The term “conspiracy theory” refers to a routine falsification of reality by ideologists who link every major event to their Devil Theory. In doing this they have no eye for hidden enemies, real conspiracies, or real history. Thus, the most outrageous and transparent assaults can be carried out against society, but the real perpetrators are dismissed as patsies or proxies of an all-powerful and invisible cabal, vaguely drawn, conforming to a maligned and unreal stereotype (i.e., the bourgeoisie, the Jews, the Illuminati, or reptilian shapeshifters). The formula of the conspiracy theorist is an expression of paranoid ideation, alienation, and despair.

[viii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirhan_Sirhan[ix]Ibid.[x] Eric Vogelin, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 5, p. 231.

[xi] Ibid, p. 233.

[xii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_King_Harvey [xiii] Gus Russo and Stephen Molton, Brothers in Arms: The Kennedys, the Castros, and the Politics of Murder (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008), p. 213.

[xiv] Joseph J. Trento, The Secret History of the CIA (New York: MJF Books, 2001), p. 207.

[xv] Ibid, pp. 207-8.[xvi]Ibid, p. 209.

[xvii] https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/old-man-and-cia-kennedy-plot-kill-castro/

[xviii] Ibid.

[xix] Trento, p. 214.

[xx] Ibid, p. 212.

[xxi] Russo and Molton, p. 297.[xxii] Edward Jay Epstein, Killing Castro (Kindle), loc. 77.

[xxiii] AP and New Orleans Times-Picayune, September 9, 1963.

[xxiv] Ibid, Loc. 85.

[xxv] Ibid.

[xxvi] Ibid, Loc. 101.

[xxvii] Ibid, Loc. 117.

[xxviii] The subject of Oswald’s connections to Soviet and Cuban intelligence are controversial.  

[xxix] Russo and Molton, p. 388

[xxx] Ibid, p. 389.

[xxxi] Ibid, p. 390.

[xxxii] Ibid, p. 391.

[xxxiii] Kierkegaard, p. 54.

[xxxiv] Ibid, p. 80.

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