General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Justice for JFK [View all]Peace Patriot
(24,010 posts)I don't know if he's trying to be a gadfly or a crank, trying to annoy his friends, playing a game or just has a visceral dislike of the Kennedy's and can't help being nasty toward them. His writings/comments on JFK have a very false feel to them and he simply ignores the voluminous evidence that Douglass has researched and included in "JFK and the Unspeakable" that JFK really was in a deadly struggle with the militarists and they did him in.
It's Chomsky's Achilles heel, to me--the flaw in Chomsky that prevents me from being a reverent follower. He's human! Maybe that's good--to see that someone so brilliant can be dead wrong!
I wonder if it's the Catholic angle that puts Chomsky off (he's such a fervent secularist). Thomas Merton (the anti-nuke Trappist monk), and Ethel Kennedy (Bobby's wife, a devoted Catholic--and JFK's conduit to Merton), were very influential in JFK's changed view of "the Cold War" and the use and possession of nuclear weapons. JFK had to face that terrible demon alone, as president, with his finger on the button. But a lot of things went into his turn toward peace and his religion was certainly one of them. This would probably make Chomsky throw up his eyes and wail "Pa-leese!" and tell dirty jokes about the tunnel between the nunnery and the bishop's quarters. I do love Chomsky's irreverence! But I also see the defensiveness and prickliness and just plain wrongness on the subject of JFK and I wish he would think it through, get over whatever his blockages are on the subject and look at the evidence. Douglass has done a superb job on this evidence--JFK's turn toward peace and the price he paid for it--and to miss this, to ignore it and to maintain the false view that JFK was just another imperialist, is to miss quite a lot of truth about the 20th Century and about our world today.