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Given that today is the 59th anniversary of the JFK assassination, it is natural to ask what difference it makes. After all, that was a long time ago. Isn’t it time to just let it go and move on?
My answer is categorically no. The JFK assassination was a major political rupture in the history of our country. We are still bearing the consequences of that event 59 years later, just as the Iranian people are still bearing the consequences of the CIA’s regime-change operation in their country in 1953. If we are ever to move our country in a better direction, it is essential that we confront what happened on November 22, 1963, to understand why it happened, and then recognize what we need to do to get our nation back on the right track.
The second-biggest transformation in our nation’s history was the change to a welfare state. With the advent of Social Security, a socialist program whose concept originated among socialists in Germany, the primary role of the federal government became to take care of the American people. This new welfare-state role set the stage for massive out-of-control federal spending, debt, and monetary debasement (i.e. inflation).
But the biggest transformation came after World War II. That was when the federal government was converted from a limited-government republic, which was our founding governmental system, to a national-security state form of governmental structure. That was when we got the Pentagon, the vast military-industrial complex, the ever-growing army of “defense” contractors,” the CIA, and the NSA. This new warfare-state role added to the massive spending, debt, and monetary debasement (i.e., inflation) that the welfare state was already producing.
The national-security state came with omnipotent powers, including the power of assassination. From the very beginning, the CIA began orienting toward the use of assassination as a foreign-policy tool. It was a non-reviewable power. Neither the Congress nor the Supreme Court would dare to interfere with any CIA assassination.
For some years now, I have recommended a book entitled National Security and Double Government by Michael J. Glennon, who serves as a professor of law at Tuft’s University. He also served as counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Glennon’s thesis is a disturbing one. He holds that it is the national-security section of the government that is actually in charge of the government. The other three sections — the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary — are permitted to have the appearance of being in charge. Appearance doesn’t matter to the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA. What matters to them is that they are actually the ones running the show, especially with respect to foreign affairs.
If Glennon is right — and I am convinced he is — then that’s why our nation is now perilously close to life-destroying nuclear war with Russia. The Pentagon and the CIA, operating through NATO, have led us down this road. And they’ve done this while waging their deadly and destructive forever wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention their forever “war on terrorism,” which was a direct consequence of their interventionist antics in the Middle East.
At the same time federal spending, debt, and inflation are going through the roof, U.S. officials continue to send billions of taxpayer dollars or newly printed Federal-Reserve dollars into the coffers of Ukrainian officials, who are widely known for being among the most corrupt officials in the world. There is little doubt that much of that money is ending up in Swiss bank accounts.
This is no way to live. And we don’t have to live this way. We can lives of liberty, peace, prosperity, and harmony. But an essential prerequisite is the dismantling of the national-security state form of government and restoring a limited-government republic to our land.
By the time the Cuban Missile Crisis was over, President Kennedy understood the grave damage that the national-security state was doing to our nation. Having come perilously close to life-destroying nuclear war back then owing to the Pentagon’s and CIA’s insistence on invading Cuba, Kennedy was determined to move our nation in a different direction. No more anti-Russia hostility. No more anti-Cuba hostility. No more anti-China hostility. No more Cold War. No more anti-communist crusade. Instead, peaceful and friendly coexistence with Russia, Cuba, China, North Vietnam, North Korea, and the rest of the world.
The war between the national-security establishment and Kennedy had already started after the Bay of Pigs disaster. That was when Kennedy decided to tear the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds. For its part, the CIA was convinced that Kennedy was a traitor, a coward, and an incompetent who was leading America to a communist takeover. (See FFF’s book JFK’s War with the National-Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated by Douglas Horne, who served on the staff of the Assassination Records Review Board.)
When Kennedy delivered his Peace Speech at American University in June 1963, the battle turned into a full-force war. It was really no different from the war that the Chilean national-security establishment, with the full support of the Pentagon and the CIA, would successfully wage against Chile’s president, Salvador Allende, ten years later.
As both Kennedy and Allende found, they were no match for the omnipotent power of the national-security establishment. No president is. That’s one reason a national-security state is so dangerous. Once it’s called into existence, it is virtually impossible to get rid of it.
Yes, I know the standard line: That the notion that the Pentagon and the CIA took out Kennedy is a “conspiracy theory.” That line might have been effective for the first couple of decades after the assassination. But when the ARRB in the 1990s uncovered conclusive evidence of fraud in the autopsy that the military conducted on the president’s body, the “conspiracy theory” notion was effectively thrown out the window. That’s because there is no innocent explanation for a fraudulent autopsy. A fraudulent autopsy necessarily means criminal guilt in the assassination. There is no way around it. See my books The Kennedy Autopsy, The Kennedy Autopsy 2, and An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story.
We are obviously living in a very dysfunctional society. Massive killings on a regular basis. A deadly, destructive, and racist drug war. A socialist system of immigration controls that has brought death and an immigration police state to our nation. A welfare state in which millions are using the government to seize other people’s income. Sanctions and embargo that target innocent people with death and suffering with the aim of achieving a political goal. Coups. Alliances with dictatorial regimes. Entangling alliances that pledge the lives of our young people to foreign wars. And foreign interventionism that is getting us, once again, perilously close to life-destroying nuclear war.
Kennedy saw the way out of this. Unfortunately, they snuffed him out before he could put our nation back on the right tract, at least with respect to foreign affairs. We have a choice: Continue the road that the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA have made for us or get back on the right road by restoring a limited-government republic to our land. Our lives and well-being depend on the choice. That’s why the JFK assassination is still so important to our present and to our future.
The post The 59th Anniversary of the JFK Assassination appeared first on The Future of Freedom Foundation.
The Future of Freedom Foundation was founded in 1989 by FFF president Jacob Hornberger with the aim of establishing an educational foundation that would advance an uncompromising case for libertarianism in the context of both foreign and domestic policy. The mission of The Future of Freedom Foundation is to advance freedom by providing an uncompromising moral and economic case for individual liberty, free markets, private property, and limited government. Visit https://www.fff.org