The JFK Conspiracy Theory Is the Conspiracy

By Daniel Greenfield

Sometimes a conspiracy theory exposes a conspiracy. Sometimes the conspiracy theory is the conspiracy.

JFK assassination plots are the only conspiracy theories to be widely accepted by the general public. The moon landing filmed in a studio, the Lincoln conspiracy or the World Trade Center being blown up by lasers from outer space never gained much credence because they lacked mainstream backing. Conspiracy theories ordinarily remain on the margins. The JFK theories were too important to the liberals who were really running things to allow them to die out.

There are probably more Americans who could tell you the ins and outs of the “magic bullet” than can recite the Bill of Rights from memory. More books have been sold about the Kennedy assassination than about any of the real government abuses taking place today.

The 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination brings with it the usual weighty tomes, speculative articles and nostalgic reminiscing about the utopia that might have been. The political messianism of JFK was as doomed as that of any other liberal savior. Unlike Obama, it conveniently ended in a martyrdom which excused a generation of liberal failures.

The JFK assassination became a liberal martyrdom in search of a conservative inquisitioner. Oliver Stone’s JFK was a laborious effort to connect the murder of a liberal icon to the despicable conservative villains that his political martyrdom demanded.

The endless search for the real killers was not done to find them, but to perpetuate the myth. The search could never be complete; the conspiracy theories could provide no closure; though the lynching of Nixon for daring to try and make JFK’s ideas work helped put to rest the ghosts of Camelot for many angry liberals.

JFK was not killed by some miasma of right-wing hatred, by a confederacy of Cuban exiles, CIA agents and Sicilian mafia bosses.

The directions in which the JFK conspiracy theories point reveal what they are trying to hide. John F. Kennedy was not murdered by a miasma of hatred on the right, but on the left. Before liberals became leftists, leftists had a propensity for killing liberals.

And Lee Harvey Oswald was as far to the left as you could go.

There was never really any disagreement about Lee Harvey Oswald’s politics. The media has avoided the issue by characterizing him as a screwball, but Lee Harvey Oswald was a militant Socialist screwball who defected to the USSR and plotted the murders of people he considered “right-wing.”

Lee Harvey Oswald was part of a continuum of left-wing terror in America. The murder of JFK was a bridge between the explosions of violence in the twenties by anarchists and by the Weathermen in the seventies. Oswald was the leading edge of American left-wing violence.

Like so many radicals, Oswald was bored and shiftless. The reality of the Soviet Union with no revolution, just factories to work at, did not appeal to him. Instead he drifted back to America, a weapon in search of a target. The actual murder may have shocked the nation, but it would not be very long before left-wing violence would once again become part of life in America.

JFK was not killed by a military-industrial complex or a vast right-wing conspiracy. No group of men in suits sat around a table plotting his death. The forces that killed him were the same political ideas of the left that led young American men and women to cheer for the Viet Cong, plant bombs and wage war against their own country.

To understand why JFK died, you must understand the Weathermen and Leon Czolgosz who murdered President McKinley. You must understand the Atom Bomb Spies and Sacco and Vanzetti and a century of left-wing sabotage and terrorism in America.

It’s much safer to talk about magic bullets, than magical thinking ideologies that promise that a workers’ paradise is only a bomb away.

The assassination was a warning of the consequences of the ideas that the left was unleashing on the country. Instead of searching for Cubans in the CIA, liberals should have looked to the left. Instead they covered up the complicity of the left and blamed the right.

JFK was the martyr of the dangerously unstable new America that the left was bringing into being.

Three years after the Kennedy assassination in Dallas, an engineering student and another former marine would climb a tower at the University of Austin and open fire. The killing spree would become a starting point in an accelerating trend of mass killings.

The murder of John Lennon, another liberal icon, in a new decade that closed the door on the chaos of the counterculture, would be a death undignified by any larger meaning. From Charles Manson to Jim Jones, these were the mad horrors spawned by a damaged culture where the monsters and madmen were suddenly the only ones who understood the rules.

Kennedy was killed in a more innocent time when it was still possible to deny that the wave of change was not ushering in a brave new world, but the destruction of a culture that had kept the worst human instincts in check.

The real Kennedy conspiracy was an effort to suppress the basic truths of what had happened and to replace them with a recursive loop of conspiracy theories that could never resolve anything while convincing everyone that the basic truths of what happened could be safely ignored.

The conspiracy did not cover up the work of the secret organization that killed JFK, but the secret organizations of the left whose ideas led to his murder. The real JFK conspiracy concealed the deeper secret that the left is destructive and that its ideas carry a dark wind of violence.

The left cannot make history come out the way that it wants to, but it can always lie about it. Its myths of the past are tawdry attempts at refusing to learn the lessons of history so that it will be given the freedom to repeat its terrible mistakes.

Lee Harvey Oswald was the stepchild of the left’s destructive ideas. The same madness that led to Guyana and the bombing of the Pentagon had its day fifty years ago in Dallas.