I very much can empathize with your first paragraph ... so, after avoiding the topic for a long time, I read with interest your summary of what is known and what is known to be not known.
There is also a lesson of larger interest. It has been said that the trust in US institutions, including mainstream media, is at an all time low. So the question of what these institutions can do to regain the trust of the people (a question essential to the survival of our democracy) is important. Being open, transparent and honoring the facts would at least be a starting point.
Nov 22, 2023·edited Nov 22, 2023Liked by Tim Barker
The problem with conspiracy theories, usually, is not that conspiracies don't happen, but that most don't pass an occum's razor test; humans love good stories so much that they believe, or pretend at believing so to speak, in some nonsense because it's a better story; something more diverting, or even something poetically true - but different, causally, from the boring brutal truth. I put nothing past the US gov during the Cold War. I had long assumed it was the mob that somehow got JFK, but hadn't thought about it in many years until I started reading Tim about it recently. That is a very canny quote from Lasch! Cheers
Good post Tim, as per. If you don't know it, you might like the novel The Shape of the Ruins, which is about similar matters in Colombia and touches on the JFK assassination as well.
I like your point about emphasizing structure vs individual actors and conspiracies, about how a commitment to thinking about the world in terms of the former doesn't mean the latter plays no role. Simon Clarke has a remark to this effect: "It is important not to underestimate the extent to which the capitalist class seeks directly to impose its class interests on the state, and indeed such direct political intervention by sections of the capitalist class is a normal aspect of the functioning of the state. Direct political intervention can acquire decisive importance in periods of crisis that call for a restructuring of the forms of political domination. There is a tendency for sophisticated intellectual Marxists to turn their backs on the evidence of such direct interventions in order to concentrate on more subtle mechanisms. The development of the capitalist state form is not a spontaneous unfolding of the logic of capital, it is something arrived at through trial and error in the unfolding of the class struggle, conditioned to a considerable extent by the direct agency of sections of the capitalist class and so, incidentally, conditioned by the outcome of struggles within that class." Of course the same goes for actions by state agencies.
I very much can empathize with your first paragraph ... so, after avoiding the topic for a long time, I read with interest your summary of what is known and what is known to be not known.
There is also a lesson of larger interest. It has been said that the trust in US institutions, including mainstream media, is at an all time low. So the question of what these institutions can do to regain the trust of the people (a question essential to the survival of our democracy) is important. Being open, transparent and honoring the facts would at least be a starting point.
The problem with conspiracy theories, usually, is not that conspiracies don't happen, but that most don't pass an occum's razor test; humans love good stories so much that they believe, or pretend at believing so to speak, in some nonsense because it's a better story; something more diverting, or even something poetically true - but different, causally, from the boring brutal truth. I put nothing past the US gov during the Cold War. I had long assumed it was the mob that somehow got JFK, but hadn't thought about it in many years until I started reading Tim about it recently. That is a very canny quote from Lasch! Cheers
Good post Tim, as per. If you don't know it, you might like the novel The Shape of the Ruins, which is about similar matters in Colombia and touches on the JFK assassination as well.
I like your point about emphasizing structure vs individual actors and conspiracies, about how a commitment to thinking about the world in terms of the former doesn't mean the latter plays no role. Simon Clarke has a remark to this effect: "It is important not to underestimate the extent to which the capitalist class seeks directly to impose its class interests on the state, and indeed such direct political intervention by sections of the capitalist class is a normal aspect of the functioning of the state. Direct political intervention can acquire decisive importance in periods of crisis that call for a restructuring of the forms of political domination. There is a tendency for sophisticated intellectual Marxists to turn their backs on the evidence of such direct interventions in order to concentrate on more subtle mechanisms. The development of the capitalist state form is not a spontaneous unfolding of the logic of capital, it is something arrived at through trial and error in the unfolding of the class struggle, conditioned to a considerable extent by the direct agency of sections of the capitalist class and so, incidentally, conditioned by the outcome of struggles within that class." Of course the same goes for actions by state agencies.
For people following this story, and Morley in particular, none of this is new.
If you wanted to, there are many, many places you could look. I list many of them here.
https://medium.com/@jylterps/ask-not-what-your-country-did-to-him-and-all-of-us-reflection-on-the-60th-anniversary-of-jfks-b00574e4c648