Virtual JFK

[MinM]

Virtual JFK: Vietnam if Kennedy Had Lived

http://www.jfklancer.com/blogger/2008/04/blog-post.html

http://www.virtualjfk.com/


http://www.ctka.net/reviews/virtual_jfk.html

...The film is less than ninety minutes long. And I have added a lot of background detail in the above that is not actually in the film in order to flesh it out more for the reader. I actually wish the film had been longer so it could incorporate more of these facts and more of the revelations of the Assassination Records Review Board. Since these all but closed the book on this ersatz debate about JFK and Vietnam. The only two people who probably think Kennedy was not getting out at the time of his death are Noam Chomsky and Alex Cockburn. And they are not historians. They are political polemicists.

This now makes four mainstream historians who have come around to the view of Kennedy's intent to withdraw from Vietnam as expressed in Oliver Stone's film JFK. First there was David Kaiser's American Tragedy in the year 2000. Second, there was Robert Dallek's An Unfinished Life in 2003. Third was Howard Jones' Death of a Generation published in 2004. And now there is Blight in this film and also an accompanying book. (I should also mention in this regard a volume that preceded these, yet was clearly in line with them: 1995's In Retrospect, by Robert McNamara.)

Let me take a moment to pay tribute to the man I believe is behind this paradigm shift, which is one of the hardest things there is to achieve in the field of history. Clearly, but without naming him, this film owes its genesis to John Newman's splendid 1992 volume JFK and Vietnam. That book was packed with so much factual data that no serious and interested person could dismiss it. Newman took ten years to complete that book. And finally it has begun to take hold in the halls of academia. Just three years after that masterly performance, Newman wrote another extremely important book called Oswald and the CIA. Perhaps no author achieved as much in such a short time as John did in this field. I understand he is retired from it now. He is therefore probably leading a much happier life. If so, works like this film are an homage to his earlier effort. We all owe him thanks.

Should be a good one. :popcorn:

[Octafish]

1. Thank you, John Newman.

Thank you, too, MinM. I'm looking forward to this film.

JFK wanted a peaceful exit from Vietnam.

Gee. The guy who put the kabosh on that idea was the same guy who was partners with Prescott Bush in arming Hitler, Averell Harriman.

Regarding the polemicists Chomsky and Cockburn:

JFK CONSPIRACY: THE INTELLECTUAL DISHONESTY AND COWARDICE OF ALEXANDER COCKBURN AND NOAM CHOMSKY

by Michael Worsham

When JFK came out in 1991, I felt Oliver Stone hit the nail on the head. During 1992, some progressive/liberal writers, including Alexander Cockburn of The Nation, criticized Stone, and said there was no conspiracy, and even if there was, it did not matter because Kennedy, despite his great personal charisma, dynamic speaking, etc., was underneath, the same as all the other power-hungry and money-loving capitalists.

I asked Alexander Cockburn about JFK when he visited TAMU in 1992 (with the help of Danny Yeager and The Touchstone), but he seemed bored talking about Kennedy. As I sat and chatted with Mr. Cockburn along with the rest of the Touchstone gang (as it existed back in 1992) around a table at a local College Station restaurant, I was extremely puzzled and just could not understand how someone as educated, well-read, and perceptive about so many national and world affairs as Mr. Cockburn could really believe a complete load of crap like the Warren Commission report. It just did not make sense.

I learned a little later that Noam Chomsky also took the position that there was no conspiracy. Most of what I know about Mr. Chomsky is what I read in his occasional editorials in the now-defunct Lies Of Our Times magazine, and through the movie Manufacturing Consent (a biography of Mr. Chomsky worth watching, especially for the section on the N.Y. Times and East Timor).

Now, an answer as to why these and other progressive writers smart enough to know better, support (at least publicly) the Warren Commission has surfaced in the Jan-Feb issue of Probe (the newsletter of Citizens for Truth about the Kennedy Assassination, http://www.webcom.com/ctka).

According to a Probe article by Ray Marcus, back in early 1969 Mr. Chomsky met with several Kennedy experts and spent several hours looking at and discussing assassination photos. Mr. Chomsky even cancelled several appointments to have extra time. There was a followup meeting with Mr. Chomsky, which also lasted several hours. These meetings were ostensibly to try to do something to reopen the case. According to the Probe article, Mr. Chomsky indicated he was very interested, but had to give the matter careful consideration before committing.

After the meeting, Selwyn Bromberger, an MIT philosophy professor who had sit in on the discussion, said to the author: "If they are strong enough to kill the President and strong enough to cover it up, then they are too strong to confront directly . . . if they feel sufficiently threatened, they may move to open totalitarian rule." According to the author, Mr. Chomsky had given every indication that he believed there was a conspiracy at these meetings. However, Mr. Chomsky never got involved with trying to reopen the case.

SNIP...

To some extent Mr. Chomsky and Mr. Cockburn practice what the Kennedy research community is often accused of—they have created a cottage industry—standard left-wing/liberal criticisms of power. Their critiques are well-meaning and accurate, and provide a comfortable if not wealthy living, but don't really make a substantial dent in the problems they write about. Mr. Chomsky has been writing for over 30 years now, yet how many people have even heard of Noam Chomsky—even after the feature film about him (Manufacturing Consent) was produced? Has corporate power been reigned in any? How many Americans know about East Timor?

CONTINUED:

http://www.rtis.com/reg/bcs/pol/touchstone/february97/worsham.htm

More on this important question ...

Alexander Cockburn and Noam Chomsky vs. JFK: A Study in Misinformation

INTRODUCTION
In early 1992, after the release of Oliver Stone’s film JFK a media thundercloud erupted.

After early attacks in mainstream media like the Chicago Tribune and Washington Post, many other alternative media of both the left and right began to run articles on the film including outlets like “The Village Voice”, for which Alexander Cockburn used to write. To the surprise of many, when some of these supposed leftist media organs did chime in, they savaged the film as wildly as the mainstream press did. These outlets were, specifically, The Progressive, Z magazine, and The Nation. The writers were, respectively, the late Erwin Knoll, Noam Chomsky, and Alexander Cockburn. Chomsky then wrote a book, Rethinking Camelot to specifically attack one of the main theses of JFK, namely that Kennedy had intended to withdraw from Vietnam by 1965.

But of the three, by far the most bitter and vicious polemics about the film were by Cockburn in three pieces in The Nation dated January 6/13, March 9, and May 18, 1992. The first piece was entitled “J.F.K. and JFK” in which he attacked not only the film, but the publishers of the book by Jim Garrison on which it was based, author Peter Dale Scott_who originated the Kennedy withdrawal thesis_and John Kennedy himself.

The next two issues cited were Cockburn’s response to several of scores of letters The Nation received in response to the original article. Cockburns’s response to the first group of letters was less than detached and academic. He said that Scott and author John Newman (“JFK and Vietnam” and an advisor on the film) suffered from “fantasies” and that Scott’s letter was basically “silly” and showed “evidence of a rather pathetic persecution mania” (P. 319).

But perhaps the worst performance by Cockburn was in the last round of letters. He responded to correspondence by Oliver Stone, John Newman and Philip Green. He accused Stone of being a fascist (p. 678), said Newman’s letter was a “confession of defeat” and called him “a very bad historian” (p. 678)_even though in the earlier issue he had called his tome “a serious book” (January 6/13 p. 7). He called Green’s letter “the silliest of the lot” and full of “self-regarding blather” (p. 678). He concluded by accusing Garrisonand his publisher, and Stone and his producer, of being in it for the money. Not satisfied, he even stated that his colleague at The Nation, Chris Hitchens, of liking the film solely because he wanted to sell a script to Stone (p. 320). We should also add here that he characterized the Warren Commission critics as mostly “conspiracy mongers” who were either “imbeciles or mountebanks” and that the Warren Commission members and staff came to conclusions “more plausible and soundly based than is commonly supposed.” Cockburn’s trust of the Warren Commission was exhibited when he gave assistant counsel Wesley Liebeler a nearly three page interview in the March issue to defend the Commission’s main conclusions.

Since Cockburn and Chomsky are good friends and colleagues, it is fair to say they communicated and compared notes during the many months the controversy raged. Now Cockburn has reprinted edited versions of some of his pieces plus another separate piece on Oswald in his new book “The Golden Age is in Us.” These two hold an exalted status on the left and many progressives implicitly trust them even though neither has done any specific, extended work on the issues of the Kennedy assassination, Kennedy’s intent to withdraw from Vietnam, the Garrison investigation, or the Kennedy presidency. We feel that its time to question that status in regard to the past writings, and the emerging record, and then let the reader decide who is closer to the truth: the film or its debunkers

CONTINUED...

http://192.220.64.45/media/cockburn.htm

I wonder if the "liberals" were afraid of getting the same "treatment" as JFK, MLK and RFK? If they held back because they were afraid, that doesn't necessarily make them cowards -- they could fear for their families' safety. What I don't like are those who intentionally dis- and misinform the public. They are just as much traitors as the people behind the killings.

[defendandprotect]

2. Don't have time right now to watch, but thank you! Also Fletcher Prouty made withdrawal clear. . ..