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I assume that readers do not believe that the CIA, the Mafia, the military-industrial complex or some other manifestation of the System ordered the murder of JFK. Conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination, once everywhere, are now confined to the diminishing audience for Oliver Stone's movies. I am not sure, however, that you can say, hand on heart, that you have not thought for a fleeting moment that maybe there just might be something in the following propositions: 

  • That Nato governments and their tame journalists invented the "atrocities" committed by Slobodan Milosevic's Serbia and her allies in order to justify a war to expand the empire of neo-liberalism into the southern Balkans;
  • That Prince Philip, along with the British and French intelligence services, arranged the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, because she was about to marry a Muslim;
  • That the 9/11 atrocities in New York and Washington were an "inside job" organised by a rogue faction within the US intelligence agencies or maybe the Bush administration itself to justify war in the Muslim world;
  • That Israel warned Jews to stay away from the World Trade Centre on 9/11 but allowed the slaughter of gentiles to stoke up hatred of Muslims;
  • That the Jews, once again, formed a "lobby" in the US that pushed America into a needless war against Saddam Hussein;
  • And that the Bush and Blair administrations knew in advance that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction worthy of the name but lied and went to war under a false prospectus.

In the past 15 years, vast numbers of people have believed one or more of the above. For a decade after Diana's death, polls reported that between one-fifth and one-third of the British public thought she had been murdered — even though to sustain that conviction they had to accept that the conspirators must have known in advance that she would decide not to stay in Mohamed Fayed's Paris Ritz, what car she and Dodi Fayed would leave in once they had resolved to move on, who would be driving the car, where and by which route it would travel and — finally and bafflingly — that the poor woman would forget to put on her seatbelt.

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Dan Martins
June 14th, 2009
4:06 AM
Mr Cohen's understanding of Marxist 'false consciousness' is wrong. This had nothing to do with the masses being misled by the media, but described the alleged confusion of proletarians who thought bourgeois liberalism could work in their favor, or of bourgeois Marxists who failed to see what Communism had in store for them (Lenin called them 'useful idiots').

gtegg
June 14th, 2009
12:06 AM
Conspiracy theories are the work of nutjobs, agreed...except the murder of J.F. Kennedy. That is the one "conspiracy theory" it is hard to discount. Why did all of the subsequent presidents express interest in the details of the Warren Report and other accounts of the murder? There are just too many discrepancies in the "one-crazy-shooter" theory to make sense. Please don't link this one in with the rest.

GregS
June 14th, 2009
12:06 AM
Conspiracy theories are a ladder the insignificant use to scramble for significance.

Xenophanes
June 13th, 2009
9:06 PM
It's just a coincidence that the majority of the architects of the 2nd Gulf War targeted their hereditary enemy. ps Ad Hominem arguments are a waste of everyone's time.

Tim Bitts
June 13th, 2009
7:06 PM
You say that the Mafia didn't order the hit on JFK? Really? Then why did JFK have the same mistress as Sam Giancanna? Sam was Mafia boss in Chicago. Remember the election between JFK and Nixon? JFK won by a few votes, in Chicago. The mob was strongest in Chicago, and the mob-union connections got out the vote for JFK. JFK owed his presidency to the mob. Naturally, the mob expected payback. Instead, they got RFK, the President's brother, who tried to take down the mob, when he was Attorney General. Then Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK. And who killed Oswald, to cover up the cookie crumbs? Jack Ruby, a mobster. Sure looks suspicious to me.

michael roloff
June 13th, 2009
2:06 PM
No, none of the atrocities committed in the now former Yugoslavia by various parties - para-militaries/ ethnic cleansers, heads of governments, etc etc - can be ascribed to any kind of conspiracy. However, the can be traced to what happens when the US [there are national security directives to prove this] committs economic warfare against a region where various tribes are ready to go at each others throat when the economic life blood has been drawn out of it. see http://www.trend.infopartisan.net/trd0399/t400399.html for direction to the US national security directives under Reagan.

Duh!
June 13th, 2009
1:06 PM
One of the tricks of anti-conspiracy theorists is to lump the baroquely absurd in with the reasonable, the persuasive. That makes them all look nutty. But what's really nutty is mediocre-at-best marksman Lee Harvey Oswald aiming through a tree, firing a "magic bullet" from an unreliable bolt-action antique at a faraway receding target, and then being conveniently whacked before there can be any trial. What's nutty is James Earl Ray somehow getting from Memphis to London entirely on his own, with a hundred bucks in his pocket. And what's nutty is the future King Mother of England, who's running around the world spouting off politically and perhaps about to marry a Muslim and maybe even give the future monarch a mixed-race, possibly Muslim half-sibling, ever-so-conveniently dying in an unbelievable "accident." (Sure, Queen Elizabeth said something like, "Who will rid me of this meddlesome Princess?" It's not like the British Royal Family has never, ever killed to protect somebody's line of succession, you know.)

David M Ross, MD
June 13th, 2009
12:06 PM
Before dismissing the possibility of a JFK assasination conspiracy, please read "JFK and the Unspeakable" by James W. Douglass (Orbis Books, NY, 2008).

Josh
June 13th, 2009
11:06 AM
The best part is how many nutjobs were roused to comment by this article. I like it here in the real world, though I admit it gets lonely sometimes.

ANTIPODES
June 13th, 2009
6:06 AM
Nick Cohen's article and the work he quotes is good, if rather obvious. However, most of the comments are priceless. I genuinely thought that the first few were meant to be sarcastic, but reading on one can see more and more examples of genuine conspiracy theories.These guys really believe it nastily, illogically,stupidly, incurably, inconsistently. The only thing worth investigating is whether this tendency is increasing or more-or-less perennial.

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