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The Kennedy Myth Rises Again
by John Pilger
On 5 June 1968, just after midnight, Robert Kennedy was shot in my presence at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. He had just acknowledged his victory in the California primary. "On to Chicago and let's win there!" were his last public words, referring to the Democratic Party's convention that would nominate a presidential candidate. "He's the next President Kennedy!" said the woman standing next to me. She then fell to the floor with a bullet wound to the head. (She lived.)
I had been travelling with Kennedy through California's vineyards, along unsurfaced roads joined together by power lines sagging almost to porch level, and strewn with the wrecks of Detroit's fantasies. Here, Latino workers vomited from the effects of pesticide and the candidate promised them that he would "do something." I asked him what he would do. "In your speeches," I said, "it's the one thing that doesn't come through." He looked puzzled. "Well, it's based on a faith in this country ... I want America to go back to what she was meant to be, a place where every man has a say in his destiny."
The same missionary testament, of "faith" in America's myths and power, has been spoken by every presidential candidate in memory, more so by Democrats, who start more wars than Republicans. The assassinated Kennedys exemplified this. John F. Kennedy referred incessantly to "America's mission in the world" even while affirming it with a secret invasion of Vietnam that caused the deaths of more than two million people. Robert Kennedy had made his name as a ruthless counsel for Senator Joe McCarthy on his witch-hunting committee investigating "un-American activities." The younger Kennedy so admired the infamous McCarthy that he went out of his way to attend his funeral. As attorney general, he backed his brother's atrocious war and when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, he used his name to win election as a junior senator for New York. By the spring of 1968 he was fixed in the public mind as a carpetbagger.
As a witness to such times and events, I am always struck by self-serving attempts at revising them. The extract from British and prime minister-in-waiting Chancellor Gordon Brown's book Courage: Eight Portraits that appeared in the New Statesman of 30 April is a prime example. According to the prime minister-to-be, Kennedy stood at the pinnacle of "morality," a man "moved to anger and action mostly by injustice, by wasted lives and opportunity denied, by human suffering. [His were] the politics of moral uplift and exhortation." Moreover, his "moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence."
In truth, Robert Kennedy was known in the United States for his lack of moral courage. Only when Senator Eugene McCarthy led his principled "children's crusade" against the war in Vietnam early in 1968 did Kennedy change his basically pro-war stand. Like Hillary Clinton on Iraq today, he was an opportunist par excellence. Travelling with him, I would hear him borrow from Martin Luther King one day, then use the racist law-and-order code the next.
No wonder his "legacy" appeals to the Washington-besotted Brown, who has sought and failed to present himself as a politician with enduring moral roots, while pursuing an immoral agenda that has bankrolled a lawless invasion that has left perhaps a million people dead. As if to top this, he wants to spend billions on a Trident nuclear weapon.
Moral courage, Brown wrote of his hero, no doubt seeking to be associated with him, "is the one essential quality for those who seek to change a world that yields only grudgingly and often reluctantly to change."
A man with Blair as his literal partner in crime could not have put it better. All the world is wrong, bar them and their acolytes. "I believe that in this generation those with the courage to enter the moral conflict will [walk down] the road history has marked for us ... building a new world society ..." That was Robert Kennedy, quoted by Brown, celebrating a notion of empire whose long trail of blood will surely follow him to Downing Street.
anon wrote:Do you get the sense, Lisa, that we're turning the corner on the JFK case, that acknowledging conspiracy is becoming mainstream? It seems to me that even the moronic media has begun to come to terms with the obviousness of the JFK case. And it seems to me that the evidence in all the recent books (Mellen's Farewell to Justice, Talbot's Brothers, E. Howard Hunt's "speculations," even Ultimate Sacrifice)point to a small group which may have included Harvey, Rosselli, and assorted Cubans. Any thoughts? And that these same people may have stopped RFK from reaching the White House.
Off-Guardian
Opening the CIA’s Can of Worms
Edward Curtin
Feb 14, 2021
“The CIA and the media are part of the same criminal conspiracy,” wrote Douglas Valentine in his important book, The CIA As Organized Crime.
This is true. The corporate mainstream media are stenographers for the national security state’s ongoing psychological operations aimed at the American people, just as they have done the same for an international audience.
We have long been subjected to this “information warfare,” whose purpose is to win the hearts and minds of the American people and pacify them into victims of their own complicity, just as it was practiced long ago by the CIA in Vietnam and by The New York Times, CBS, etc. on the American people then and over the years as the American warfare state waged endless wars, coups, false flag operations, and assassinations at home and abroad.
Another way of putting this is to say for all practical purposes when it comes to matters that bear on important foreign and domestic matters, the CIA and the corporate mainstream media cannot be distinguished.
For those who read and study history, it has long been known that the CIA has placed their operatives throughout every agency of the U.S. government, as explained by Fletcher Prouty in The Secret Team; that CIA officers Cord Myer and Frank Wisner operated secret programs to get some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom among intellectuals, journalists, and writers to be their voices for unfreedom and censorship, as explained by Frances Stonor Saunders in The Cultural Cold War and Joel Whitney in Finks, among others; that Cord Myer was especially focused on and successful in “courting the Compatible Left” since right wingers were already in the Agency’s pocket.
All this is documented and not disputed. It is shocking only to those who don’t do their homework and see what is happening today outside a broad historical context.
With the rise of alternate media and a wide array of dissenting voices on the internet, the establishment felt threatened and went on the defensive. It, therefore, should come as no surprise that those same elite corporate media are now leading the charge for increased censorship and the denial of free speech to those they deem dangerous, whether that involves wars, rigged elections, foreign coups, COVID-19, vaccinations, or the lies of the corporate media themselves.
Having already banned critics from writing in their pages and or talking on their screens, these media giants want to make the quieting of dissenting voices complete.
Just the other day The New York Times had this headline:Robert Kennedy Jr. Barred From Instagram Over False Virus Claims.
Notice the lack of the word alleged before “false virus claims.” This is guilt by headline. It is a perfect piece of propaganda posing as reporting, since it accuses Kennedy, a brilliant and honorable man, of falsity and stupidity, thus justifying Instagram’s ban, and it is an inducement to further censorship of Mr. Kennedy by Facebook, Instagram’s parent company.
That ban should follow soon, as the Times’ reporter Jennifer Jett hopes, since she accusingly writes that RFK, Jr. “makes many of the same baseless claims to more than 300,000 followers” at Facebook. Jett made sure her report also went to msn.com and The Boston Globe.
This is one example of the censorship underway with much, much more to follow. What was once done under the cover of omission is now done openly and brazenly, cheered on by those who, in an act of bad faith, claim to be upholders of the First Amendment and the importance of free debate in a democracy. We are quickly slipping into an unreal totalitarian social order.
Which brings me to the recent work of Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, both of whom have strongly and rightly decried this censorship. As I understand their arguments, they go like this.
First, the corporate media have today divided up the territory and speak only to their own audiences in echo chambers: liberal to liberals (read: the “allegedly” liberal Democratic Party), such as The New York Times, NBC, etc., and conservative to conservatives (read” the “allegedly” conservative Donald Trump), such as Fox News, Breitbart, etc.
They have abandoned old school journalism that, despite its shortcomings, involved objectivity and the reporting of disparate facts and perspectives, but within limits. Since the digitization of news, their new business models are geared to these separate audiences since they are highly lucrative choices. It’s business-driven since electronic media have replaced paper as advertising revenues have shifted and people’s ability to focus on complicated issues has diminished drastically.
Old school journalism is suffering as a result and thus writers such as Greenwald and Taibbi and Chris Hedges (who interviewed Taibbi and concurs: part one here) have taken their work to the internet to escape such restrictive categories and the accompanying censorship.
Secondly, the great call for censorship is not something the Silicon Valley companies want because they want more people using their media since it means more money for them, but they are being pressured to do it by the traditional old school media, such as The New York Times, who now employ “tattletales and censors,” people who are power-hungry jerks, to sniff out dissenting voices that they can recommend should be banned.
Greenwald says,
They do it in part for power: to ensure nobody but they can control the flow of information. They do it partly for ideology and out of hubris: the belief that their worldview is so indisputably right that all dissent is inherently dangerous ‘disinformation.’”
Thus, the old school print and television media are not on the same page as Facebook, Twitter, etc. but have opposing agendas.
In short, these shifts and the censorship are about money and power within the media world as the business has been transformed by the digital revolution.
I think this is a half-truth that conceals a larger issue. The censorship is not being driven by power-hungry reporters at the Times or CNN or any media outlet. All these media and their employees are but the outer layer of the onion, the means by which messages are sent and people controlled.
These companies and their employees do what they are told, whether explicitly or implicitly, for they know it is in their financial interest to do so. If they do not play their part in this twisted and intricate propaganda game, they will suffer. They will be eliminated, as are pesky individuals who dare peel the onion to its core.
For each media company is one part of a large interconnected intelligence apparatus – a system, a complex – whose purpose is power, wealth, and domination for the very few at the expense of the many. The CIA and media as parts of the same criminal conspiracy.
To argue that the Silicon valley companies do not want to censor but are being pressured by the legacy corporate media does not make sense. These companies are deeply connected to U.S. intelligence agencies, as are the NY Times, CNN, NBC, etc. They too are part of what was once called Operation Mockingbird, the CIA’s program to control, use, and infiltrate the media. Only the most naïve would think that such a program does not exist today.
In Surveillance Valley, investigative reporter Yasha Levine documents how Silicon Valley tech companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google are tied to the military-industrial-intelligence-media complex in surveillance and censorship; how the Internet was created by the Pentagon; and even how these shadowy players are deeply involved in the so-called privacy movement that developed after Edward Snowden’s revelations.
Like Valentine, and in very detailed ways, Levine shows how the military-industrial-intelligence-digital-media complex is part of the same criminal conspiracy as is the traditional media with their CIA overlords. It is one club.
Many people, however, might find this hard to believe because it bursts so many bubbles, including the one that claims that these tech companies are pressured into censorship by the likes of The New York Times, etc. The truth is the Internet was a military and intelligence tool from the very beginning and it is not the traditional corporate media that gives it its marching orders.
That being so, it is not the owners of the corporate media or their employees who are the ultimate controllers behind the current vast crackdown on dissent, but the intelligence agencies who control the mainstream media and the Silicon Valley monopolies such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. All these media companies are but the outer layer of the onion, the means by which messages are sent and people controlled.
But for whom do these intelligence agencies work? Not for themselves.
They work for their overlords, the super wealthy people, the banks, financial institutions, and corporations that own the United States and always have. In a simple twist of fate, such super wealthy naturally own the media corporations that are essential to their control of the majority of the world’s wealth through the stories they tell.
It is a symbiotic relationship.
As FDR put it bluntly in 1933, this coterie of wealthy forces is the “financial element in the larger centers [that] has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson.” Their wealth and power has increased exponentially since then, and their connected tentacles have further spread to create what is an international deep state that involves such entities as the IMF, the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, those who meet yearly at Davos, etc.
They are the international overlords who are pushing hard to move the world toward a global dictatorship.
As is well known, or should be, the CIA was the creation of Wall St. and serves the interests of the wealthy owners. Peter Dale Scott, in “The State, the Deep State, and the Wall Street Overworld,” says of Allen Dulles, the nefarious longest-running Director of the CIA and Wall St. lawyer for Sullivan and Cromwell:There seems to be little difference in Allen Dulles’s influence whether he was a Wall Street lawyer or a CIA director.”
It was Dulles, long connected to Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, international corporations, and a friend of Nazi agents and scientists, who was tasked with drawing up proposals for the CIA. He was ably assisted by five Wall St. bankers or investors, including the aforementioned Frank Wisner who later, as a CIA officer, said his “Mighty Wurlitzer” was “capable of playing any propaganda tune he desired.”
This he did by recruiting intellectuals, writers, reporters, labor organizations, and the mainstream corporate media, etc. to propagate the CIA’s messages.
Greenwald, Taibbi, and Hedges are correct up to a point, but they stop short. Their critique of old school journalism à la Edward Herman’s and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing of Consent model, while true as far as it goes, fails to pin the tail on the real donkey. Like old school journalists who knew implicitly how far they could go, these guys know it too, as if there is an invisible electronic gate that keeps them from wandering into dangerous territory.
The censorship of Robert Kennedy, Jr. is an exemplary case. His banishment from Instagram and the ridicule the mainstream media have heaped upon him for years is not simply because he raises deeply informed questions about vaccines, Bill Gates, the pharmaceutical companies, etc. His critiques suggest something far more dangerous is afoot: the demise of democracy and the rise of a totalitarian order that involves total surveillance, control, eugenics, etc. by the wealthy led by their intelligence propagandists.
To call him a super spreader of hoaxes and a conspiracy theorist is aimed at not only silencing him on specific medical issues, but to silence his powerful and articulate voice on all issues. To give thoughtful consideration to his deeply informed scientific thinking concerning vaccines, the World Health Organization, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, etc., is to open a can of worms that the powerful want shut tight.
This is because RFK, Jr. is also a severe critic of the enormous power of the CIA and its propaganda that goes back so many decades and was used to cover up the national security state’s assassination of both his father and his uncle.
It is why his wonderful recent book, American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family, that contains not one word about vaccines, was shunned by mainstream book reviewers; for the picture he paints fiercely indicts the CIA in multiple ways while also indicting the mass media that have been its mouthpieces.
These worms must be kept in the can, just as the power of the international overlords represented by the World Health Organization and the World Economic Forum with its Great Reset must be. They must be dismissed as crackpot conspiracy theories not worthy of debate or exposure.
Robert Kennedy, Jr., by name and dedication to truth seeking, conjures up his father’s ghost, the last politician who, because of his vast support across racial and class divides, could have united the country and tamed the power of the CIA to control the narrative that has allowed for the plundering of the world and the country for the wealthy overlords.
So they killed him.
There is a reason Noam Chomsky is an exemplar for Hedges, Greenwald, and Taibbi. He controls the can opener for so many. He has set the parameters for what is considered acceptable to be considered a serious journalist or intellectual. The assassinations of the Kennedys, 9/11, or a questioning of the official Covid-19 story are not among them, and so they are eschewed.
To denounce censorship, as they have done, is admirable. But now Greenwald, Taibbi, and Hedges need go up to the forbidden gate with the sign that says – “This far and no further” – and jump over it. That’s where the true stories lie. That’s when they’ll see the worms squirm.
Edward Curtin is an independent writer whose work has appeared widely over many years. His website is edwardcurtin.com and his new book is Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies.
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https://off-guardian.org/2021/02/14/ope ... -of-worms/
March 24, a Sunday
RFK’s Defenses Perhaps Tested by Robo-Washers
After landing in Los Angeles the afternoon of the 24th,
a huge crowd followed RFK through
a lengthy tunnel at the airport out to the street
and then on the way to the rally
bumper-to-bumper traffic w/
autos abandoned along the roadsides.
RFK spoke to 11,000 filling
& spilling beyond the Greek Theater in LA.
Nearing the close of his talk that day
RFK said, “The failure of national purpose
is not simply the result of bad policies
and lack of skill.
It flows from the fact that for almost the first time
the national leadership is
calling upon the darker impulses
of the American spirit—not, perhaps
deliberately, but through its action & the example
it sets—an example where integrity, truth, honor
and all the rest seems like words
to fill out speeches
rather than guiding beliefs.”
Those who robo-washed Sirhan
may have tested RFK’s defenses at the Greek Theater:
The day before the rally, a young man named Steven Ahern
called the Greek Theater & announced,
“There is a bomb inside.
It will go off tomorrow afternoon at 4:30 p.m.”The first campaign trip flying to California
Ahern later told the FBI: “I knew prior to making this bomb
threat that the Senator was to address a rally at the Greek Theater
at 4:15 p.m. the
day after I made the telephone call.
“Later that same day (i.e. the day before Senator Kennedy
was to appear at the Greek Theater) at approximately 4:00 p.m.
I telephoned the Los Angeles Times and told
whoever answered the telephone that
‘Senator Kennedy will be shot.’
“At approximately 1:00 p.m., I telephoned American Airlines
at Los Angeles International Airport and told whoever answered the
telephone, ‘Senator Kennedy
will be shot when he lands.’
“This call to the airport was made from a public
phone booth on Laurel Canyon Blvd.
“Immediately after making the telephone call to the LA Airport
I drove to the airport and saw Senator Kennedy land and
was even able to shake his hand.
“After having seen the Senator at the airport, I drove to the
Greek Theater where I observed the entire Kennedy rally.
“I originally made the three calls involving the
aforementioned threats in order to
see what news that it would create.”
Ahern told the FBI that on Monday, March 31,
he made an appointment with his psychiatrist
at Olive View Sanatorium, a Dr. Cagle.
(Olive View is located in San Fernando,
not far from LA.)
Ahern wanted “to explain that he had an urge to kill Senator Kennedy
for some reason which he was unable to explain within himself.”
The FBI reported that Dr. Cagle, hearing of Ahern’s
threats and his urge to kill RFK,
informed Ahern’s probation officer,
a man named Gottleib in Van Nuys,
“and Gottleib arranged to have Ahern’s probation suspended
on May 3, 1968, in Division 20,
Municipal Department number 95, Superior Court,
LA County for a Sanity Hearing.
“Ahern was interviewed by two court-appointed psychiatrists
who declared Ahern legally sane on May 10, 1968.” On May 15,
a Municipal Court judge sentenced Ahern to 3 years
“active probation under the supervision of Officer Gottleib on
condition that Ahern regularly see a psychiatrist.
Harvey wrote: Some actually construct imaginary scenarios making it seem as if Kennedy Jr forgives Sirhan for his crime and that Sirhan is repentant.
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