Chomsky, the Fraud
by DCDave

I think Chomsky expresses himself quite clearly, and you have thoroughly mischaracterized it. Is that why you snipped the quote, so people could not readily see how you had mischaracterized it? Let's look at it again.

Chomsky Comment re JFK Assassination

I haven't read the Parenti transcript you mention or what he has published on the same topic (I understand that there are articles, also a book, if I recall). You asked me to comment on his statement that (1) neither Cockburn nor I "knows a damn thing about the assassination" and that (2) we "are looking at the issue from a left wing perspective..."

I can't answer for Cockburn, but for me, statement (1) is close to true and statement (2) is gibberish, neither true nor false.

On (1), it's true that 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 "proven," but the evidence against this claim is overwhelming, from every testable point of view, remarkably so for a historical event. 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.

Given the plain facts about (1), I think it is clear why (2) is gibberish. Parenti or anyone else who reads what I have written can readily determine, if rational, that (2) is gibberish, because of the plain facts about (1). That's simple logic. One cannot adopt a left-wing perspective (or any other perspective) on an issue that one has no interest in and nothing to say about.

On the single matter just mentioned, there is no "left-wing" or "right-wing" perspective. 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.

Noam Chomsky

He has nothing to say here about "lots of poorly formed theories" about the Kennedy assassination. Certainly there are, which has nothing to do with the fact that there is obviously a high-level conspiracy here. From the first hour to the present, the entire American press has been trying to sell us on the absurd notion that Lee Harvey Oswald, with a wretched excuse for a rifle with a mismounted scope pulled off not just a superhuman feat of rapid-fire marksmanship, but acually performed black magic to kill the President. What's more, he did it without a single trace of a motive, and then this young man with intelligence-flunky written all over him is then silenced by a man with tight connections to Meyer Lansky's mob. The motive for that, we are given to believe, is that the sentimental strip-joint operator, Jack Ruby, wanted to spare poor Jackie Kennedy a trial.

If you want to see the black magic, go to your video store and rent the Zapruder film, which is now available to the public in its original form. We are told, because of time constraints, Oswald only fired three shots. One of them missed and chipped a curb far ahead of the Kennedy vehicle. It is too wild for it to have been a simple miss by Oswald. Shill Gerald Posner says that was Oswald's first shot, which he waited until a tree was between him and Kennedy to fire, and the shot hit a limb and wildly ricocheted. Yeah, right. But that's still not the black magic. That comes on the second shot. That's the one they say entered Kennedy's back about 6 inches below his collar, exited upward at his throat (?) and then changed directions somehow to pass downward through John Connally's back, passed through his wrist, and lodged in his left thigh. This was the "magic bullet." The real magic of it, though, is that it hestitated a few seconds, as you can clearly see from the film, between the time it hit Kennedy and when it hit Connally. The government/press shills that the would-be dissident, Chomsky, would have us believe in here tell us that Connally manifested a delayed reaction in the film. Well, here, Noam my boy, history is physics. The puffing out of Connally's cheeks is not neurological, it is purely physical and could not be a delayed reaction. It comes from the bullet blasting the air out of one of Connally's lungs, the one that it collapsed. Nothing could be clearer than that it is a separate shot, that is, a fourth shot and, therefore, we must have at least two gunners.

The third shot looks like it almost makes Kennedy's head explode and it knocks him backward and to the left. That that bullet came from the 6th floor of the Schoolbook Depository is about as unlikely as the first one coming from there, but these two unlikelihoods pale behind the utter and complete impossibility of the magic bullet shot.

The Navy then participated in the cover-up with a fraudulent autopsy, and the FBI did its usual job of intimidating witnesses and misreporting what they said in its work for the Warren Commission. Nothing compares, though, to the work done by the press. The best one example of press cover-up you will ever see was performed by Chomsky's fellow fake leftist critic of the system, Ben Haig Bagdikian, who has matched Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent with his much-cited The Media Monopoly. Bagdikian cut his teeth in journalism by blatant and obvious cover-up work on the Kennedy assassination which you can see here: whatreallyhappened

And this is not a high-level conspiracy? What, pray tell, is it, then? But interviewer Adam Jones is typical of the legions of well-meaning admirers of the man when he says beginning his March 7, 1996, interview, "Noam Chomsky is one of the great moral and intellectual figures of the century." adamjones.freeservers.com

Now I ask you, could anyone truly meeting such a description have written such pernicious nonsense about the pivotal political event of the 20th century for the United States and perhaps for the world? No, the man is an out and out fraud, fraud, FRAUD.