Alex Constantine - December 7, 2024
Editor's note: In October, 2010, CR ran a story entitled, "Is the John Birch Society Responsible for Spreading Most of the JFK Assassination Conspiracy Theories?" A comment was left by a Birch Society sympathizer who defended the far-right organization's conspiracy canon. John Judge. founder of Washington, D.C.'s Hidden History Museum and Committee to Open the Archives, patiently replied with a comment that I only discovered and read for the first time a few days ago -- a Christmas present from John, who passed on a decade ago and is sorely missed by all who were enlightened by him:
Judge: Mae Brussell pointed out long ago that there were John Birch society ties to the JFK assassination. In fact, the first complete set of early critical books and the Warren Commission volumes I ever saw was on a visit with my family to the home of the head of the JBS in Texas. Of course they spread disinformation, as did the planted critics like Mark Lane.
The intelligence and government agencies have to cover both ends, and do damage control by appearing to be the critics themselves. James Earl Ray was not a racist, as this article implies. I recommend the new book Memoir of Injustice by T Carter due in January from Trine Day, written with Ray’s brother Jerry for more insight into this patsy.
The whole point of the Birch society anti-Communist analysis was to cover the tracks of the fascists and the rise of the Military Industrial Intelligence Complex Eisenhower saw coming, and the power shift to the Southern Rim economy that followed WWII. Birchers point only to the eastern establishment, never to the oil, aerospace, munitions and other money that paid for the Kennedy assassination.
Mark Lane has been a lawyer for John Hinckley, E. Howard Hunt, Jim Jones of Jonestown infamy, Grace Walden Stevens, and most recently for the hack plagiarist Gerald Posner who defends the lone nut thesis on JFK and MLK, in direct opposition to Lane’s supposed beliefs.
While the Birchers and their assets blew smoke to cover the tracks of ONI, the Pentagon and the Nazis that Garrison and Mae pointed to (not some fuzzy dishonest government as implied here, but specific people in the Joint Chiefs and down the chain) involved in killing JFK, the real JFK researchers went unpublished, scorned and ignored but they won their case with the public anyway.
The earliest ones were mostly women, save for Oliver who had his own reasons to cover the killers’ tracks.
You can read about them in John Kelin’s excellent In Praise of An Earlier Generation. Field appointed Brigadier General Penn Jones, Jr. in Texas, investigator and writer Josiah Thompson, Sylvia Meagher who deconstructed the Accessories After the Fact early on, Richard Popkin who noticed The Second Oswald, academician Peter Dale Scott who is still dissecting the hidden state and deep politics and connections forward, courageous forensic scientist and coroner Dr. Cyril H. Wecht, political analyst Carl Oglesby who discerned a Yankee Cowboy War, and the indefatigueable Mae Brussell, housewife and daughter of Rabbi I. Magnin in Los Angeles who took apart the Commission volumes and then clipped and read the news making weekly connections on her radio shows that not only shone light on the past but predicted the horrid future we now live in.
Nowadays, all conspiracies are lumped together. But the hard evidence only leads in one direction, to the Pentagon. Marchetti and Prouty have to be seen in their context as lifelong intelligence agents who may have represented factions within the agencies that wanted to get out the truth, but linking up with the Holocaust deniers was clearly not the way to do it.
On the other hand, the left press never wanted to touch the real stories behind the news or seem to believe in conspiracies, which by then was seen as your writer sees them, a purview only of the right wing. Chip Berlet, Michael Albert of Z magazine and the Chomsky acolytes love to lump all conspiracy research into either irrelevance or right wing fantasy. I study historical conspiracies that arise from the class structure itself and its divisions, and the rise of global fascism that we live under.
I indict the right wing for their part in all this. I am a progressive activist. I have nothing to do with John Birch or the Holocaust deniers and none of the real JFK researchers mentioned above did either. This convoluted little smear on our work fails to recognize the role disinformation plays in any covert operation. It is like the cute ploy of our critics who say we name so many groups as responsible that it would be impossible to keep secret or coordinate.
Part of the right wing smoke is to obfuscate the reason for the murder, so the Birchers love to point to a small run of silver certificates JFK approved to claim the Federal Reserve must have had him killed. Hardly, but it avoids, as always talking about the war in Vietnam, the Cold War, the Joint Chiefs, the MIC, the military intelligence apparatus that consumes 85% of its budget since it started (out of $80 billion now admitted) and makes the CIA and FBI into the think tank toys they are, the oil tax depletion allowance the Kennedy brothers wanted to kill, the Castro assassination plots they tried to stop, the moves toward ending the nuclear arms race and detente with the USSR which the same plotters had foiled with the U-2 incident when Eisenhower met Kruschev, the civil rights movement, the JFK plan to withdraw from Vietnam in 1964, the push to end organized crime which was closely linked to both ONI and CIA, the international drug traffic connection that was being discovered, the wish to scatter the CIA to “the four winds”, the abandonment of General Lansdale’s failed approach to use covert operations in place of overt wars, the wish for real peace, and the sense of hope for social justice against the old order that JFK and RFK began to create and support.
It was these same factors that led to the same forces killing Dr. King and Robert Kennedy in 1968, as well as their fear that the JFK case would be reopened. Read Talbot’s book Brothers to understand. Jim Douglass gets it in JFK and the Unspeakable, who killed JFK and why.
The why is everything and that is what the right wing and the DIA want to hide the most. The people who broke open the Kennedy case and exposed the Warren Commission were progressives not right wingers. It was their hard work over the years that convinced nearly 90% of the public that there was a conspiracy.
Oliver Stone did not do a John Birch society movie, he wrote from the work of the real critics in the case. Mae Brussell assisted Jim Garrison’s case, not the right wing. Just because someone tells you the government is lying to you does not mean they are telling the truth. But just because someone says the government is lying does not make them a right wing nut. The Coalition on Political Assassinations holds annual meetings in Dallas each year near November 22 and presents the best real evidence in these political murders then and now. See http://www.politicalassassinations.com [defunct link] and realize that not all conspiracies are created equal. -- John Judge