General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Let's have a poll on JFK [View all]moondust
(20,017 posts)I think a lot of CTs got started back at that time because people had trouble believing, in the wake of the McCarthy era, the narrative that one little guy would prefer to live in Soviet Russia over the U.S. (gasp!), actually try to move there and give up his U.S. citizenship (but failed), and in the process become so radicalized that he would return to his homeland and be screwed up yet competent enough to kill the all-powerful U.S. President all by himself.
That was back before global jihad and suicide bombers made individual terrorism an everyday news story; people didn't do crazy stuff like that in prosperous post-war America. These days the radicalization problem is more common with Americans turning up in terror groups in Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, etc. It's much more believable now that Oswald may have essentially been an early version of Tamerlan Tsarnaev who happened to stumble into a more consequential target opportunity.
But it's still a matter of what one chooses to believe.