Noam Chomsky and the JFK Assassination. Noam Chomsky is perhaps the best–known public critic of US government policy and actions. He is famously unconcerned about the JFK assassination, and is often accused of failing to recognise the importance of the event. Chomsky’s Knowledge of the Assassination. A JFK assassination researcher, Raymond Marcus, attempted in 1.
Chomsky and Howard Zinn, interested in the assassination: I had assembled a portfolio of evidence, primarily photographic, that I could present briefly but adequately in 3. Soon after our discussions began, he asked his secretary to cancel his remaining appointments for the day. The scheduled one–hour meeting stretched to 3–4 hours. Chomsky showed great interest in the material. We mutually agreed to a follow–up session later in the week. His opinion of the JFK assassination follows from his conclusion that there was no substantial change in policy between the Kennedy and Johnson administrations: The core issue in the current Kennedy revival is the claim that JFK intended to withdraw from Vietnam, a fact suppressed by the media; and was assassinated for that reason, it is prominently charged. Some allege further that Kennedy was intent on destroying the CIA, dismantling the military–industrial complex, ending the Cold War, and opening an era of development and freedom for Latin America, among other forms of class treachery that led to his downfall. He finds no evidence of the significant political changes which surely would have happened had the assassination been the result of a high–level conspiracy. Because the assassination was not the result of a high–level conspiracy, it is not of any real importance. For more on this topic, see The Political Context of the JFK Assassination. The JFK Assassination Was Not Important. Michael Parenti is the author of, among other things, . He shares Chomsky’s political outlook but, in contrast to Chomsky, he does consider the assassination to be a significant political event. Born: Avram Noam Chomsky December 7, 1928 (age 87) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. Fields: Linguistics, analytic philosophy, cognitive science, intellectual history. Avram Noam Chomsky (Filad Noam Chomsky: Noam Chomsky, 2004. Persoonlijke gegevens: Volledige naam: Avram Noam Chomsky: Geboortedatum: 7 december 1928: Geboorteplaats: Philadelphia. The following article first appeared at Architecture MPS; AlterNet has removed the introduction and the early citations. Noam Chomsky:In order to understand the. Chomsky was asked about this in an online discussion, and replied: I know very little about the assassination. The only thing I’ve written about it is that the claim that it was a high–level conspiracy with policy significance is implausible to a quite extraordinary degree. History isn’t physics, and even in physics nothing is really . Given that conclusion, which I think is very well founded (that I have written about, a lot), I have no further interest in the assassination, and while I’ve read a few of the books, out of curiosity, I haven’t given the matter any attention and have no opinion about how or why JFK was killed. People shouldn’t be killed, whether they are presidents or kids in the urban slums. I know of no reason to suppose that one should have more interest in the JFK assassination than lots of killings not far from the White House. The evidence is so overwhelming that questions of interpretation hardly arise. If someone can show that they do, I’ll gladly look. But what I have looked at on this question (for example, various elaborate theories about JFK’s alleged intentions on Vietnam, or policy changes resulting from his death, or similar things about Cuba, the Cold War, etc.) simply does not begin to withstand rational inquiry. That’s true even of work by personal friends who are serious scholars on other issues, but who become so irrational on this issue that they cannot even read the words that are before their eyes, sometimes in the most remarkable ways. As for whether “power elites perceived JFK to be a threat to the status quo,” the statement is close to meaningless. If someone can produce some coherent version of the statement, and then some evidence for that version, I’ll be glad to look at it. I don’t know Parenti’s work well, but most of what I’ve read is quite good and useful, except on this topic. That’s not unique to him. The JFK assassination has engendered a kind of cult–like reaction, and ordinarily rational people act in what seem to me very strange ways.(http: //archive. The remark about “personal friends who are serious scholars on other issues” may refer to, among other people, Peter Dale Scott, with whom Chomsky edited the Pentagon Papers. Scott believes that Kennedy had planned to withdraw US troops from Vietnam; see his Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, University of California Press, 1. Chomsky in his . There’s a lot of self–destruction in my opinion. Take for example all this frenzy about the JFK assassination. I mean I don’t know who assassinated him and I don’t care, but what difference does it make? It’s not an issue of any general political interest. And there’s a huge amount of energy and effort going into that. If somebody could show that there was some general significance to the assassination, that it changed policy, or that there was some high–level involvement or whatever, then it would be an important historical event. Other than that it’s just like the killing of anyone else. Naturally you’re upset when somebody gets killed, but why is it an issue for the popular movements any more than the latest killing on the streets of Hoboken? The Left (I use the term loosely), the whole array of popular movements and dissident groups and so on have spent huge energy and effort in this.(http: //www. Political/Chomsky. There are parts of the country, like California, where incredible amounts of energy go into things like trying to figure out exactly which Mafia figure might have been involved in killing John F. Kennedy or something — as if anybody should care. The energy and passion that goes into things like that is really extraordinary, and it’s very self–destructive. Mitchell and John Schoeffel, eds., Understanding Power: the Indispensible Chomsky, Vintage, 2. Of course they’re there, of course rich people get together and talk to each other, and play golf with one another, and plan together — that’s not a big surprise. But these conspiracy theories that people are putting their energies into have virtually nothing to do with how the institutions actually function. The Kennedy–assassination cult is probably the most striking case. I mean, you have all these people doing super–scholarly research, and trying to find out just who talked to whom, and what the exact contours were of this supposed high–level conspiracy — it’s all complete nonsense. As soon as you look into the various theories, they always collapse, there’s just nothing there. But in many cases, the left has just fallen apart on the basis of these sheer cults.(ibid., p. I mean, the Civil Rights Movement made great achievements, but it never lived up to the hopes that many people invested in it. People are working harder, they have to work longer hours, they have less security — things are just looking bad for a lot of people, especially young people. So really there have to be serious efforts to get past this, I think.(ibid., pp. The Creation of the Hero Myth. In his interview with Cogswell, Chomsky talks about his book, Rethinking Camelot, which Cogswell describes as a “powerful indictment of the theory that JFK was intending to pull out of Vietnam.” Chomsky makes the point that the official verdict on Kennedy’s intentions changed in accordance with the need to be seen to be opposing the Vietnam war: Really the book is not about the Kennedy assassination. What it’s about is the build–up to the war in Vietnam, which we now know a lot about because of recent documentation, and it shows very clearly what was going on. Kennedy just launched an attack against South Vietnam and hadn’t the slightest intent of ending it short of victory. Also interesting, at least I thought it was interesting, in the last chapter I went through the accounts that have been given of that period, and it’s very striking to see. There were a lot of memoirs written at the time by people like Arthur Schlesinger and others and all of these memoirists completely revised their account after the Tet Offensive. The Tet Offensive in January of 1. American corporate elites decided at that point that it just wasn’t worth it, it was too costly, let’s pull out. So at that time everybody became an opponent of the war because the orders from on high were that you were supposed to be opposed to it. And after that every single memoirist radically changed their story about what had happened. They all concocted this story that their hero, John F. Kennedy, was really planning to pull out of this unpopular war before he was killed and then Johnson changed it. If you look at the earlier memoirs, not a hint, I mean literally. Like Schlesinger in his 9. New York Times did. And it’s not that any new information came along, it didn’t. The new information that came along just showed more that he had no intention of withdrawing. But the war became unpopular, therefore people had to rewrite the story. And they did it in the most amazing way. I mean this is the kind of thing you might have found in Stalinist Russia and it happened right here in a free country.(http: //www. Political/Chomsky? And that’s a question of fact: do significant things happen because groups or subgroups are acting in secret outside the main structures of institutional power? Well, as I look over history, I don’t find much of that. I mean there are some cases — for instance, at one point a group of Nazis thought of assassinating Hitler. Okay, so that’s a conspiracy. But things like that are real blips on the screen, as far as I can see.(Peter R. Mitchell and John Schoeffel, eds., Understanding Power: the Indispensible Chomsky, Vintage, 2. Kennedy, who was working within the boundaries set by established institutions, and Martin Luther King, who was an outsider and a threat to established power, especially so when King turned his attention from racial discrimination to the more central question of economic inequality. I mean, the mechanisms were there, maybe they would have hired somebody from the Mafia or something to do it — but that conspiracy theory is perfectly plausible, I think.
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