John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY EDWARD CURTAIN IN UNZ REVIEW

 

“The United States of America’s Doll House

“A Vast Tapestry of Lies and Illusions”

 

https://www.unz.com/article/the-united-states-of-americas-doll-house/

 

A nice piece of work.

I love the Harold Pinter quote.

And Jim Garrison, despite some mistakes made and a great deal of libel heaped on him, was simply a remarkable man. I read his very articulate books and saw him in interviews.

He never had quite the complete picture, as you might expect with all the clever, well-paid people of CIA and FBI working against him. And America’s mainline press was dedicated to diminishing and defaming him. So how else could it be?

But he got an awfully lot right, and his efforts should have made more of a difference to more Americans, but he was literally portrayed as a person with mental problems and as a crook. Just the intensity of the efforts to do so should tell you something.

I was long a fairly serious student of the Kennedy Assassination, and I understand many of the details that were routinely glossed over or misrepresented.

The fact is Kennedy was the only President in modern American history to oppose the unelected establishment. He did so on several important matters.

And he did so at a time when the CIA, under the pleasant and avuncular Eisenhower who wanted to avoid open military hostilities, had given the Agency free rein pretty much to do as it pleased in many parts of the world.

The CIA was arrogant with its success and privilege and deeply resented Kennedy’s approach to exerting Presidential authority. Kennedy’s threats and firings after the Bay of Pigs fiasco plus his later efforts to establish good backchannel communication with Russia and, to a lesser extent, Cuba, made him a doomed man. His relations with Israel and its determination to acquire nuclear weapons went against the grain of the establishment. His important relationship with Mary Pinchot Meyer was also a dark cloud over him, and Mary was murdered a year after Kennedy, her murder never solved.

An important bottom line consideration concerning the Warren Commission was Bertrand Russell’s profound question, never answered, “If, as we are told, Oswald was the lone assassin, where is the issue of national security?”

Over the years, I’ve done a good deal of serious writing on the assassination. Readers will find some intriguing material in the following:

 

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/07/13/john-chuckman-comment-the-first-genuine-information-in-the-kennedy-assassination-records-release-to-give-us-some-genuine-information-about-what-happened/

 

https://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2011/10/18/1544/

 

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2019/01/23/john-chuckman-comment-on-re-opening-the-kennedy-assassination-investigation-why-it-would-be-a-waste-of-time-the-nature-of-truth-where-empire-or-great-power-is-involved-some-truth-about-the-fbi/

 

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2017/12/14/john-chuckman-comment-further-thoughts-on-the-kennedy-assassination-someone-suggests-the-involvement-of-israel-a-real-possibility-but-cia-still-is-involved/

 

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/05/25/john-chuckman-comment-an-article-on-parts-of-the-last-century-of-american-history-raises-thoughts-of-the-deadly-mix-of-ingredients-for-war-brewing-now-in-americas-establishment-note-on-kennedy-as/

 

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2017/10/29/john-chuckman-comment-the-guardian-offers-an-impoverished-list-of-kennedy-assassination-books-i-offer-a-few-of-the-best-although-a-couple-of-them-are-now-hard-to-get/

 

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2017/10/10/john-chuckman-comment-a-new-book-on-cia-murders-of-western-leaders-plus-another-important-book-lead-to-my-revaluation-of-the-kennedy-assassination/

 

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2017/10/23/john-chuckman-comment-some-really-interesting-historical-stuff-on-the-assassination-of-john-kennedy/

 

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2017/10/28/john-chuckman-comment-heres-an-additional-batch-although-still-not-all-of-the-reasons-that-kennedys-assassination-had-to-be-a-conspiracy/

 

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/12/11/john-chuckman-comment-a-remarkable-dull-little-photograph-of-george-h-w-bush/

 

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2019/04/23/john-chuckman-comment-time-magazine-and-its-old-relationship-with-cia-most-glaring-example-decades-ago-was-times-ownership-and-treatment-of-the-zapruder-film-of-kennedys-assassination/

 

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2017/11/26/john-chuckman-comment-the-absolute-nonsense-of-suggesting-that-54-years-after-kennedys-assassination-similar-circumstances-now-work-against-trump-why-kennedy-actually-died-why-trump-wont/

 

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2019/09/11/john-chuckman-comment-the-kennedy-assassination-and-israels-nuclear-weapons-program-lyndon-johnson-almost-custom-tailored-to-israels-desires-of-the-time-the-book-final-judgment-jack-rub/

 

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2017/08/16/john-chuckman-comment-conspiracies-are-real-enough-especially-in-america-when-stakes-are-high-but-the-label-conspiracy-theory-is-just-a-dirty-little-game-to-help-cover-them-up/

 

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/01/22/john-chuckman-comment-writer-calls-lyndon-johnson-a-political-hero-in-fact-he-was-the-most-demonic-man-ever-in-the-oval-office-despite-lots-of-competition/

 

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2017/11/04/14114/

 

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2017/10/27/john-chuckman-comment-release-of-secret-jfk-files-why-was-this-junk-ever-secret-is-the-question-to-ask-i-offer-just-some-of-the-reasons-the-killing-had-to-be-a-conspiracy-here/

 

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2017/04/20/john-chuckman-comment-israels-1967-attack-on-intelligence-ship-u-s-s-liberty-during-its-six-day-war-of-conquest-the-only-mystery-has-always-been-lyndon-johnsons-bizarre-reaction-what-he-crea/

 

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2015/12/31/john-chuckman-comment-just-a-few-of-the-many-flaws-in-the-warren-commissions-report-a-sham-investigation-that-investigated-nothing/

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY DOUG SAUNDERS IN THE TORONTO GLOBE AND MAIL

“Mr. Putin’s Potemkin-village politics…”

Sorry, there’s almost no thought or analysis in this column.

Just how, in any way, do Putin’s photo-ops differ from what we experience?

Virtually every headline in our major news sources is synthetic.

And our leaders turn virtually one-hundred-and-eighty degrees once they’re in office after an election, often doing precisely what they condemned.

The truth is that Putin is exceptionally intelligent and energetic, and that alone marks him out from many of our leaders.

He has flaws, but are you telling me that our PM, who was held in contempt of Parliament and has lied to us countless times about large or small things and is known for a furious private temper, does not?

And if you want photo-ops even more faked up than Putin’s look to Harper in a parka up north.

He puts on periodic shows to earn nationalist credentials even while he’s busy negotiating away a great deal of Canada’s sovereignty to Americans, the only people who are a serious threat to both northern sovereignty and the Great Lakes.

And the stuff about revolutions is utter nonsense.

Genuine revolutions, like the French or the Russian, virtually never succeed over time. The French had the monarchy back in no time, as did the Russians under a different name.

Revolutions like that in America are often successful, but then they aren’t correctly called revolutions at all. The so-called American Revolution was only a revolt of the locals against foreign lordship and indeed a very conservative event, leaving such godawful institutions as slavery a thriving concern. It basically saw a small group of petty American aristocrats – Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, slaveholders all – replace a group of foreign aristocrats.

And it is a fact that America wasn’t anything like a democracy after its “revolution.” The Senate was appointed until 1913. The President was not elected by the popular vote, but by the propertied aristocrats admitted to the Electoral College. The Supreme made no effort at all to enforce the Bill of Rights – for a very long time, it was only a high-sounding and empty statement of principles, what you might call green-wash.

Blacks, of course, could not vote (effectively not until the 1960s). Women could not vote (not until 1921). Most white males could not vote because they did not own enough property to qualify.

America took about two centuries to become something vaguely resembling a democracy, and even now it has a government within the government – the military, intelligence, security establishment serving giant corporate interests.

Look at America’s recent experience to understand the role of the government within a government.

Bush was likely the most ill-informed and bad-intentioned person ever to be president, and he wasn’t even cleanly elected. Then the people elected a man who sometimes wore sandals, didn’t immediately wear an American-flag pin on his lapel, and taught Constitutional law. After less than three years, you would not know in almost any important detail that Bush was not still president.
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All genuine democracies develop slowly – that is a salient fact of European and North American history.

Always, we first have aristocrats or lords or family compacts – always.

Then through the gradual growth of the middle class under steady economic growth, a large class with substantial resources emerges who do not see their interests being represented by the aristocrats or family compact members.

Then we see a gradual change in political institutions to accommodate the new sizable and growing middle class. The process takes different forms in different countries, owing to cultural and historical circumstances, but it always takes this general pattern.

The same is underway in Russia. At least Putin represents a rather enlightened aristocrat to guide the nation through some of its most tender years. Yeltsin, who blubbered about democracy, was a helpless buffoon and a constant drunk.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY JOHANN HARI IN THE INDEPENDENT

 

Yes, absolutely, the secret prisons in Afghanistan, and those in other places, cast a grim shadow across Obama’s smiling face.

I believe that decisions like keeping America’s torture gulag operating abroad are the greatest source of people’s disappointment with Obama.

But I’m afraid people were being unrealistic to expect much else.

America is an empire, not a dreamy “shining city on a hill,” but a rather brutal society which feels entitled to run the affairs of others in all parts of the planet.

It does this through a combination of its immense economic and military might.

America’s own population lives under a version of Social Darwinism, as relatively few people abroad fully appreciate. There is relatively little sympathy or patience for the concerns of foreigners, a simple but brutal fact.

The American establishment – the intelligence industry, the Pentagon, the defense contractors, and the huge multi-national corporations – do quite literally form a government within a government.

That is not a left-wing fantasy or a slightly paranoid delusion – after all, it was a Republican president and former general, Eisenhower, who first sounded the warning. It is the ineluctable result of this stupendously wealthy and largely unaccountable set of institutions.

A great many dark and devious men hold high positions in this establishment, and they have billions at their disposal plus a general population which is passive in accepting their actions.

Think only of the pointless holocaust in Vietnam. Countless billions wasted, an estimated 3 million Vietnamese murdered in an orgy of killing, and a devaluation of the dollar afterwards to help pay the bill. All of it done for nothing more than the fears and prejudices of that establishment.

The last American President who truly challenged that establishment died on November 22, 1963.

Obama wants to be the elementary civics-class textbook version of a president, the kind of president which the establishment tolerates from either party, not end up being either driven from office in shame or worse.

To talk with genuine expectations about change of any real consequence today in America is utterly naïve. It’s just about as meaningful as talking about change in the France of the late eighteenth century with its dukes and cardinals and princes, whose carriages simply thumped over the bodies of peasants who happened to be in their way.

Yes, a revolution did happen then, but try that in an empire with a military establishment pushing two million, all armed with unbelievably powerful weapons and a set of at least fourteen intelligence services which spy on every phone call and e-mail and even check the books you read at the library.

The French Revolution will never be repeated, and the pathetic American libertarians who naively believe that holding on to their beloved rifles and pistols secures their freedom surely only bring a quiet chuckle from those who know better.