And thus I clothe my naked villainy
With odd old ends stolen forth of holy writ;
And seem a saint, when most I play the devil.
—Richard III, Act 1, Scene 3
Government, as it exists, is a predatory institution whose sovereignty encompasses its asserted territorial boundaries, though in the case of the United States, it seeks to expand its sovereignty without limit. As a predator, it naturally depends for its existence upon the production of others—extracting wealth through taxation, fees, court decisions, and currency devaluation. Since it’s a gangster organization, it works tirelessly to convince us of its good nature, that the rationale for its unquenchable lust for power is in reality a deep concern for our well-being and safety.
To such an organization, plausible lies become a means of deflecting criticism. Court historians and others bury, polish, or twist the lies as necessary. A market organization that tried to live on lies and violence wouldn’t last long—either that or it would become the government.
Crises tend to expose government’s soul. Propaganda becomes hard-coded fact. We read and hear things like the Civil War was fought to free the slaves, and Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation proves it. Never mind that he had told newspaper editor Horace Greeley “What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.” He wanted to keep white southerners as tax serfs, with or without their slaves. Since the North was heavily reliant on protective tariffs, a more fitting explanation of Lincoln’s invasion was to prohibit “the effects of a low-tariff Confederacy adjacent to the Federal union.” The tariff controversy somehow got subdued in Lincoln’s post-mortem deification.
The idea that “truth is the first casualty of war” is said to date back in sentiment to the Greek playwright Aeschylus, who wrote, “God is not averse to deceit in a just cause.” Truth may be the first casualty but is never listed in official accounts. Thus, it was evil Spain that blew up the US battleship Maine in Havana harbor on the evening of February 15, 1898, though Spain had no known motive for doing so; the decoded telegram from German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmermann in which Germany would provide military and financial support for Mexico if it attacked the US, capped years of US agitation for war when President Wilson asked Congress for permission to attack Germany in April, 1917; then there was Pearl Harbor and US entrance into WWII, as James Perloff explains:
Roosevelt dispatched his closest advisor, Harry Hopkins, to meet British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in January 1941. Hopkins told Churchill: “The President is determined that we [the United States and England] shall win the war together. Make no mistake about it. He has sent me here to tell you that at all costs and by all means he will carry you through, no matter what happens to him — there is nothing he will not do so far as he has human power.”
Like Wilson, FDR was getting reelected for his promise to keep the country out of war while doing everything he could to join the war. On July 26, 1947, President Harry Truman signed the National Security Act, thereby instituting the national security state and creating the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The world was thus declared too dangerous for liberty. As historian T. Hunt Tooley tells an interviewer:
It is grimly ironic that the modern structure of the aggressive American warfare state really came into its own when the management of military issues assumed the name of “defense” rather than “war.” The Cold War cemented the perpetual war scheme.
JFK’s First — and Last — Years as President
Prior to Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961, Fidel Castro had overthrown US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista and, by 1960, was making friends with the Soviet Union. Eisenhower had cut off diplomatic relations with Cuba by January 1961, and the CIA-Pentagon were making plans to remove Castro to keep the Soviets away from American soil.
What followed were a series of well-known failures to get rid of Castro, beginning with the CIA’s Bay of Pigs invasion of April, 1961. When Kennedy refused to provide further air support for the invading Cuban exiles, they surrendered three days after landing. Feeling betrayed because he felt he had been set up, he fired CIA chief Alan Dulles. Then came Operation Mongoose—a plan for destabilizing Castro’s regime through terrorism, including poisoning his cigars; a plan devised by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in March, 1962—called Operation Northwoods—involving fake Cuban attacks against the US, otherwise known as false flag operations, that included shooting down civilian aircraft; the unplanned Cuban Missile Crisis in October, 1962—the Cold War’s near miss—that JFK secretly resolved with Khrushchev by promising to remove US missiles from Turkey in exchange for his agreement to take Soviet missiles out of Cuba.
Many JFK revisionists regard his June 10, 1963 Peace Speech at American University the point of no return for the Cold War militants in government. Too much money was at stake to live and let live. Why negotiate for peace when they had a war and propaganda machine that, at this point in its history, had never been defeated? In his speech, the president of the United States said he wanted to “reexamine our attitude toward the Soviet Union.” He cautioned Americans “not to see conflict as inevitable, accommodation as impossible, and communication as nothing more than an exchange of threats.”
Today, should total war ever break out again, no matter how, our two countries will be the primary targets. It is an ironic but accurate fact that the two strongest powers are the two in the most danger of devastation. All we have built, all we have worked for, would be destroyed in the first 24 hours.
To the militants, this was intolerable heresy. The US was a superpower in mortal combat with another, possibly greater superpower. It was unthinkable that the US should settle for peace through negotiations rather than the Soviets’ surrender. And, if anyone thought his speech was a one-off moment of fantasy, Kennedy approved NSAM 263 on October 5, 1963 calling for the removal of “1,000 US military personnel [in South Vietnam] by the end of 1963.”
Conclusion
God knows what really happened a month later in Dallas. But as humans, we need to consider not only the hard evidence arising from the assassination, such as why the Secret Service was waved off just before bullets started flying or how Jack Ruby managed to slip into the Dallas police station in time to murder Oswald. Government’s history of lies and eagerness for war, and as mentioned earlier, its funding by theft and deception, thereby established its character. The Warren Commission, which included a man Kennedy fired, produced the expected whitewash. It’s the government, by virtue of its criminal nature, that shoulders the burden of proof of its innocence, not the murdered accused. Until and unless it does, it stands guilty of yet another crime.
