It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
For Black History Month I will look at some of the historically obscure but influential black intellectuals of the 19th Century.
Today I feature Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx's son in law who was a Mulatto and faced racial discrimination as well as being subjected to antisemitism. Paul Lafargue was born in Cuba in 1842. As he would later boast, he was an “international[ist] of blood before [he] was one of ideology.” By which he meant that of his four grandparents, only one was a Christian French citizen – one of his grandmothers was an Indian from Jamaica and one was a mulatto refugee from Haiti, and his maternal grandfather was a French Jew. He also liked to say that “the blood of three oppressed races runs in my veins” and when Daniel DeLeon asked him about his origins, he promptly replied, “I am proudest of my Negro extraction.”
Despite his family ties to Marx and his friendship and patronage by Engels we was no Marxist, he was a follower of Proudhon and an avowed anarchist/libertarian socialist.
He is known for his famous exhortation to the working class to struggle against work;The Right To Be Lazy (1883)
This would be the inspiration for the polemical proto-situationist text; The Right to Be Greedy and later Bob Blacks popular consumer version;The Abolition of Work Lafargue's critique that workers under capitalism were no better off than slaves rings true even today. He applied the term wage-slave literally, and literarily. He exhorts workers to not to demand the right to work but to demand the right to leisure. Something capitalism of his time could not provide, though today it is all around us in modern consumer society of the G8 countries.
His tongue in cheek sarcasm and ridicule makes his writing humorous, accessible and pointed. In this case he points out that those who advocate for the morality of animal rights would do well to advocate for the ultimate pack horse of capitalism, the worker.
Capitalist Civilization has endowed the wage-worker with the metaphysical Rights of Man, but this is only to rivet him more closely and more firmly to his economic duty.
"I make you free," so speak the Rights of Man to the laborer, "free to earn a wretched living and turn your employer into a millionaire; free to sell him your liberty for a mouthful of bread. He will imprison you ten hours or twelve hours in his workshops; he will not let you go till you are wearied to the marrow of your bones, till you have just enough strength left to gulp down pour soup and sink into a heavy sleep. You have but one of your rights that you may not sell, and that is the right to pay taxes.
Progress and Civilization may be hard on wage-working humanity but they have all a mother's tenderness for the animals which stupid bipeds call "lower."
Civilization has especially favored the equine race: it would be too great a task to go through the longs list of its benefactions; I will name but a few, of general notoriety, that I may awaken and inflame the passionate desires of the workers, now torpid in their misery.
Horses are divided into distinct classes. The equine aristocracy enjoys so many and so oppressive privileges, that if the human-faced brutes which serve them as jockeys, trainers, stable valets and grooms were not morally degraded to the point of not feeling their shame, they would have rebelled against their lords and masters, whom they rub down, groom, brush and comb, also making their beds, cleaning up their excrements and receiving bites and kicks by way of thanks.
Aristocratic horses, like capitalists, do not work; and when they exercise themselves in the fields they look disdainfully, with a contempt, upon the human animals which plow and seed the lands, mow and rake the meadows, to provide them with oats, clover, timothy and other succulent plants.
These four-footed favorites of Civilization command such social influence that they impose their wills upon the capitalists, their brothers in privilege; they force the loftiest of them to come with their beautiful ladies and take tea in the stables, inhaling the acrid perfumes of their solid and liquid evacuations. And when these lords consent to parade in public, they require from ten to twenty thousand men and women to stack themselves up on uncomfortable seats, under the broiling sun, to admire their exquisitely chiseled forms and their feats of running and leaping They respect none of the social dignities before which the votaries of the Rights of Man bow in reverence. At Chantilly not long ago one of the favorites for the grand prize launched a kick at the king of Belgium, because it did not like the looks of his head. His royal majesty, who adores horses, murmured an apology and withdrew.
It is fortunate that these horses, who can count more authentic ancestors than the houses of Orleans and Hohenzollern, have not been corrupted by their high social station; had they taken it into their heads to rival the capitalists in aesthetic pretentions, profligate luxury and depraved tastes, such as wearing- lace and diamonds, and drinking champagne and Chateau-Margaux, a blacker misery and more overwhelming drudgery would he impending over the class of wage-workers.
Thrice happy is it for proletarian humanity that these equine aristocrats have not taken the fancy of feeding upon human flesh, like the old Bengal tigers which rove around the villages of India to carry off women and children; if unhappily the horses had been man-eaters, the capitalists, who can refuse them nothing, would have built slaughter-houses for wage-workers, where they could carve out and dress boy sirloins, woman hams and girl roasts to satisfy their anthropophagic tastes.
The proletarian horses, not so well endowed, have to work for their peck of oats, but the capitalist class, through deference for the aristocrats of the equine race, concedes to the working horses rights that are far more solid and real than those inscribed in the "Rights of Man." The first of rights, the right to existence, which no civilized society will recognize for laborers, is possessed by horses.
The colt, even before his birth, while still in the fetus state, begins to enjoy the right to existence; his mother, when her pregnancy has scarcely begun, is discharged from all work and sent into the country to fashion the new being in peace and comfort; she remains near him to suckle him and teach him to choose the delicious grasses of the meadow, in which he gambols until he is grown.
The moralists and politicians of the "Rights of Man" think it would be monstrous to grant such rights to the laborers; I raised a tempest in the Chamber of Deputies when I asked that women, two months before and two months after confinement, should have the right and the means to absent themselves from the factory. My proposition upset the ethics of civilization and shook the capitalist order. What an abominable abomination -- to demand for babies the rights of colts.
As for the young proletarians, they can scarcely trot on their little toes before they are condemned to hard labor in the prisons of capitalism, while the colts develop freely under kindly Nature; care is taken that they be completely formed before they are set to work. and their tasks are proportioned to their strength with a tender care.
This care on the part of the capitalists follows them all through their lives. We may still recall the noble indignation of the bourgeois press when it learned that the omnibus company was using peat and tannery waste in its stalls as a substitute for straw: to think of the unhappy horses having such poor litters! The more delicate souls of the bourgeoisie have in every capitalist country organized societies for the protection of animals, in order to prove that they can not be excited by the fate of the small victims of industry. Schopenhauer, the bourgeois philosopher, in whom was incarnated so perfectly the gross egoism of the philistine, could not hear the cracking of a whip without his heart being torn by it.
This same omnibus company, which works its laborers from fourteen to sixteen hours a day, requires from its dear horses only five to seven hours. It has bought green meadows in which they may recuperate from fatigue or indisposition. Its policy is to expend more for the entertainment of a quadrupled than for paying the wages of a biped. It has never occurred to any legislator nor to any fanatical advocate of the "Rights of Man" to reduce the horse's daily pittance in order to assure him a retreat that would be of service to him only after his death.
The Rights of Horses have not been posted up; they are "unwritten rights," as Socrates called the laws implanted by Nature in the consciousness of all men.
The horse has shown his wisdom in contenting himself with these rights, with no thought of demanding those of the citizen; he has judged that he would have been as stupid as man if he had sacrificed his mess of lentils for the metaphysical banquet of Rights to Revolt, to Equality, to Liberty, and other trivialities which to the proletariat are about as useful as a cautery on a wooden leg.
Civilization, though partial to the equine race, has not shown herself indifferent to the fate of the other animals. Sheep, like canons, pass their days in pleasant and plentiful idleness; they are fed in the stable on barley, lucerne, rutabagas and other roots, raised by wage-workers; shepherds conduct them to feed in fat pastures, and when the sun parches the plain, they are carried to where they can browse on the tender grass of the mountains.
The Church, which has burned her heretics, and regrets that she can not again bring up her faithful sons in the love of "mutton," represents Jesus, under the form of a kind shepherd, bearing upon his shoulders a weary lamb.
True, the love for the ram and the ewe is in the last analysis only the love for the leg of mutton and the cutlet, just as the Liberty of the Rights of Man is nothing but the slavery of the wage-worker, since our jesuitical Civilization always disguises capitalist exploitation in eternal principles and bourgeois egoism in noble sentiments; yet at least the bourgeois tends and fattens the sheep up to the day of the sacrifice, while he seizes the laborer still warm from the workshop and lean from toil to send him to the shambels of Tonquin or Madagascar.
Laborers of all crafts, you who toil so hard to create your poverty in producing the wealth of the capitalists, arise, arise! Since the buffoons of parliament unfurl the Rights of Man, do you boldly demand for yourselves, your wives and your children the Rights of the Horse.
If you believe Republican governors, some 11 million jobless Americans will now be racing to fill the many job openings businesses say they can’t fill. That’s on top of 3.5 million idle workers who were supposed to start clamoring for jobs during the last couple of months.
Nearly 15 million Americans have now lost federal jobless benefits that Congress initially established in the CARES Act of 2020. Several follow-on coronavirus relief bills extended those benefits, including the American Relief Plan, which Congress passed this past March. Most of those benefits expired on Sept. 6, including an extra $300 per week in traditional jobless aid and other amounts for gig workers and others who don’t have a regular employer. The Sept. 6 expiration affects 11.3 million Americans, according to Oxford Economics.
Republican governors in 25 states ended those federal benefits early during the summer, claiming they were hurting businesses by paying people more to stay home than to work. That took roughly two months’ of federal benefits away from another 3.5 million Americans or so.
The math suggests the disincentive to work could be legitimate. The average state unemployment payout is about $400 per week, or $1,700 per month. Add another $1,200 in monthly federal aid, and the two combined might equal nearly $3,000 in monthly income. That’s equivalent to roughly $19 per hour (for a 40-hour-per-week job). So somebody who could only find work paying less than that might be better off taking the benefits instead.
That simple accounting leaves out many other factors, however, such as the fact that all jobless aid ends and most workers will need a job eventually. Many potential workers still worry about getting COVID-19 on the job. Some working parents still have their hands full with kids doing remote or hybrid schooling. Some older workers have retired early instead of hassling with the workplace in the time of COVID.
Several studies found that only a fraction of unemployed workers—probably no more than 15%—would rather accept benefits than work for a living. In July, Yahoo Finance interviewed a variety of workers in Republican states who lost federal aid early, and found a much more common problem was that people couldn’t find work in their field that paid enough to cover their bills. Some could have taken lower-paying, lesser-skilled jobs in other fields, but they viewed that as a career setback that might keep them from getting ahead indefinitely.
Lazy-worker theory
Employment trends in the GOP states that cut off benefits now show that the lazy-worker theory is mostly misguided. There’s been no notable boost in hiring or employment in those states, compared with states that continued the benefits. The early cutoff may even have hurt those states a little, because they gave up federal money that boosted incomes and would have cost them nothing.
Congress has made no move to extend jobless benefits again. The Biden administration hasn’t asked for an extension, and polls show Americans generally think it’s time for supplemental jobless benefits to end. That removes one variable from a puzzling labor market in which joblessness remains high even though employers struggle to fill existing openings.
Muhlenberg, PA - August 26: A help wanted sign that reads "Now Hiring!" in the window of the PetSmart location along 5th Street Highway in Muhlenberg Twp. Thursday morning August 26, 2021. (Photo by Ben Hasty/MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle via Getty Images)
The latest data shows a record-high 10 million jobs available in the US economy. Half of small businesses say they have jobs they can’t fill, the largest portion on record. Yet 8.4 million Americans are out of work and millions more qualified for federal jobless aid because they lost gig work or income in ways that don’t officially count as “unemployed” in the fairly narrow way the Labor Dept. defines it.
Shouldn’t all those unemployed people be filling all those open jobs? It might seem like it, except there are many mismatches in the labor market. The open jobs aren’t always where the job seekers are. The open jobs require qualifications the unemployed don’t have. Some posted jobs are probably employers fishing for overqualified workers they can get for cheap. Some employers simply can't or won't raise pay: While some big companies say they’re boosting wages, other data shows no notable jump in pay for workers both staying in their current jobs and moving to new ones.
Job-market trends for the next few months will begin to clarify whether federal jobless aid was too generous or should have ended sooner. If hiring jumps and employers finally fill some of those 10 million open jobs, that will be good news, but it may lead to tighter benefits the next time around. It seems more likely we’ll continue to have a stutter-step recovery with big job gains in some months, and disappointment in others. If lazy workers are a problem, they're probably not the biggest one.
The Right To Be Lazy BEING A REPUDIATION OF THE “RIGHT TO WORK” OF 1848 By Paul Lafargue Translated and adapted from the French by Dr. Harriet Lothrop. Published by …
Sunday, July 04, 2021
THE RIGHT TO BE LAZY ABOLISH WORK! Some Chinese shun grueling careers for
'low-desire life'
FROM FUEDALISM TO LATE CAPITALI$M IN 100 YEARS
People walk across an intersection during rush hour in Beijing. (AP)
Updated: 04 Jul 2021, Beijing needs skilled professionals to develop technology and other industries
BEIJING : Fed up with work stress, Guo Jianlong quit a newspaper job in Beijing and moved to China's mountain southwest to “lie flat."
Guo joined a small but visible handful of Chinese urban professionals who are rattling the ruling Communist Party by rejecting gruelling careers for a “low-desire life." That is clashing with the party's message of success and consumerism as its celebrates the 100th anniversary of its founding.
Guo, 44, became a freelance writer in Dali, a town in Yunnan province known for its traditional architecture and picturesque scenery. He married a woman he met there.
“Work was OK, but I didn't like it much," Guo said.
“What is wrong with doing your own thing, not just looking at the money?"
“Lying flat" is a “resistance movement" to a “cycle of horror" from high-pressure Chinese schools to jobs with seemingly endless work hours, novelist Liao Zenghu wrote in Caixin, the country's most prominent business magazine.
“In today's society, our every move is monitored and every action criticized," Liao wrote. “Is there any more rebellious act than to simply lie flat?'"
It isn't clear how many people have gone so far as to quit their jobs or move out of major cities. Judging by packed rush hour subways in Beijing and Shanghai, most young Chinese slog away at the best jobs they can get.
Still, the ruling party is trying to discourage the trend. Beijing needs skilled professionals to develop technology and other industries. China's population is getting older and the pool of working-age people has shrunk by about 5 per cent from its 2011 peak.
“Struggle itself is a kind of happiness," the newspaper Southern Daily, published by the party, said in a commentary. “Choosing to lie flat' in the face of pressure is not only unjust but also shameful."
The trend echoes similar ones in Japan and other countries where young people have embraced anti-materialist lifestyles in response to bleak job prospects and bruising competition for shrinking economic rewards.
Official data show China's economic output per person doubled over the past decade, but many complain the gains went mostly to a handful of tycoons and state-owned companies. Professionals say their incomes are failing to keep up with soaring housing, child care and other costs.
In a sign of the issue's political sensitivity, four professors who were quoted by the Chinese press talking about “lying flat" declined to discuss it with a foreign reporter.
Another possible sign of official displeasure: T-shirts, mobile phone cases and other “Lie Flat"-themed products are disappearing from online sales platforms.
Urban employees complain that work hours have swelled to “9 9 6," or 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week.
“We generally believe slavery has died away. In fact, it has only adapted to the new economic era," a woman who writes under the name Xia Bingbao, or Summer Hailstones, said on the Douban social media service.
Some elite graduates in their 20s who should have the best job prospects say they are worn out from the “exam hell" of high school and university. They see no point in making more sacrifices.
“Chasing fame and fortune does not attract me. I am so tired," said Zhai Xiangyu, a 25-year-old graduate student.
Some professionals are cutting short their careers, which removes their experience from the job pool.
Xu Zhunjiong, a human resources manager in Shanghai, said she is quitting at 45, a decade before the legal minimum retirement age for women, to move with her Croatian-born husband to his homeland.
“I want to retire early. I don't want to fight any more," Xu said. “I'm going to other places."
Thousands vented frustration online after the Communist Party's announcement in May that official birth limits would be eased to allow all couples to have three children instead of two.
The party has enforced birth restrictions since 1980 to restrain population growth but worries China, with economic output per person still below the global average, needs more young workers.
Minutes after the announcement, websites were flooded with complaints that the move did nothing to help parents cope with child care costs, long work hours, cramped housing, job discrimination against mothers and a need to look after elderly parents.
Xia writes that she moved to a valley in Zhejiang province, south of Shanghai, for a “low-desire life" after working in Hong Kong. She said despite a high-status job as an English-language reporter, her rent devoured 60% of her income and she had no money at the end of each month.
She rejects the argument that young people who “lie flat" are giving up economic success when that's already is out of reach for many in an economy with a growing gulf between a wealthy elite and the majority.
“When resources are focused more and more on the few people at the head and their relatives, the workforce is cheap and replaceable," she wrote on Douban. “Is it sensible to entrust your destiny to small handouts from others?"
The Right To Be Lazy BEING A REPUDIATION OF THE “RIGHT TO WORK” OF 1848 By Paul Lafargue Translated and adapted from the French by Dr. Harriet Lothrop. Published by the INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHING CO., 23 Duane Street, New York 1898 PAUL LAFARGUE (1841–1911) AUTHOR’S PREFACE. In 1849, Thiers, as member of the Commission on Instruction in Elementary
2020-11-28 · The Abolition of Work No one should ever work. Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you’d care to name comes …
Monday, January 10, 2022
Working was pointless at best and 'degrading, humiliating and exploitative' at worst, says Reddit moderator behind the influential 'antiwork'
The moderator of a viral, "anti-work" Reddit thread said most work is pointless, and humiliating. Doreen Ford is a moderator of r/antiwork, which has gained 1.4 million users since October 2020. "There's a lot of positions that just don't make any sense," Ford told the FT.
A moderator of a viral "anti-work" Reddit thread has said she left traditional employment because much of her work was "degrading, humiliating and exploitative."
The thread – r/antiwork – has nearly 1.6 million members and is part of a movement towards the "antiwork" rejection of the traditional idea of a nine-to-five job in favor of more leisure and fulfilment.
"I think there's a lot of positions that just don't make any sense, that do not have to exist," Doreen Ford, a moderator of the channel, told the FT.
"You're just pushing around papers for no good reason. It doesn't really help anybody," she said.
Ford, 30, spent 10 years working in retail, but left her job in 2017 after her grandmother advised her to follow her passion for dogs.
She now walks dogs part time and has never been happier, she told the FT.
"Usually, at best, [working was] pointless," said Ford. "And at worst it was degrading, humiliating and exploitative."
She added: "Most of us are just normal people. We have jobs that we don't like, which is the whole point of why we're in the movement to begin with."
The thread, whose the full name is "Antiwork: Unemployment for all, not just the rich!", was started in 2013.
For years its membership numbered in the low thousands, before growing exponentially since the onset of the pandemic, which fueled a reassessment of work and its value and prompted a "Great Resignation" of resignations.
The Right To Be Lazy - The People www.slp.org/pdf/others/lazy_pl.pdf · PDF file The Right To Be Lazy BEING A REPUDIATION OF THE “RIGHT TO WORK” OF 1848 By Paul Lafargue Translated and adapted from the French by Dr. Harriet Lothrop. Published by the
By work we mean what Bob Black says in his classic essay, The Abolition of Work, “Work is production enforced by economic or political means, by the carrot or the stick.” In other words, we are against the notion that people should be structurally limited and optioned out of a better, more peaceful and playful life by the powers that be. About - Abolish Work abolishwork.com/about/
2020-11-28 · Bob Black The Abolition of Work No one should ever work. Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you’d care to name comes from working or from
Publication date 1974The Right To Be Greedy: Theses On The Practical Necessity Of Demanding Everything is a book published in 1974 by an American Situationist collective called "For Ourselves: Council for Generalized Self-Management".
Post-left anarchist Bob Black describes it in its preface as an "audacious attempt to synthesize a collectivist social vision of left-wing origin with an individualistic (for lack of a better word) ethic usually articulated on the right".
Its authors say that "[t]he positive conception of egoism, the perspective of communist egoism, is the very heart and unity of our theoretical and practical coherence". It is highly influenced by the work of Max Stirner. A reprinting of the work in the eighties was done by Loompanics Unlimited with the involvement of Bob Black who also wrote the preface to it.
Most libertarians think of themselves as in some sense egoists. If they believe in rights, they believe these rights belong to them as individuals. If not, they nonetheless look to themselves and others as so many individuals possessed of power to be reckoned with. Either way, they assume that the opposite of egoism is altruism. The altruists, Christian or Maoist, agree. A cozy accomodation; and, I submit, a suspicious one. What if this antagonistic intedependence, this reciprocal reliance reflects and conceals an accord? Could egoism be altruism's loyal opposition? Yes, according to the authors of this text. What's more, they insist that an egoism which knows itself and refuses every limit to its own realization is communism.
Contents: Preface by Bob Black 1. Wealth 2. Individualism and Collectivism 3. The Dialectic of Egoism 4. The Resonance of Egoisms 5. Communist Society 6. Radical Subjectivity 7. Pleasure 8. Sexuality 9. Authority 10. Morality 11. Revolution Appendix: Preamble to The Founding Agreements of For Ourselves: Council for Generalized Self-Management
Thursday, June 16, 2022
How Islam Settled Roe v. Wade Centuries Ago
Equating its repeal to ‘Shariah’ drags Muslims into a culture war they do not deserve
Anti-abortion advocates kneel and pray outside of the Supreme Court during the March for Life / Drew Angerer / Getty Images
As soon as the news broke that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is trying to overturn Roe v. Wade, familiar — and troubling — Islamophobic tropes began to emerge in the discourse.
“America’s Taliban really hates women and minorities,” wrote Daily Beast editor Naveed Jamali on Twitter, harkening back to late September when dozens of commentators, including MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, started referring to Texas lawmakers as the “American Taliban” — a trope that Muslim leaders are still trying to come back from.
Meanwhile, The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah gave it his own comedic twist: “All across the country, women in places like Missouri or even Texas will have the same abortion rights as women under the Taliban in Afghanistan. Think about it. We just evacuated people out of Afghanistan, and now we are going to evacuate them out of Tennessee?” he quipped — up until this point walking the fine line between humor and accidental Islamophobia. “After all these years of the right screaming about Shariah law, it turns out they were just jealous.”
Never mind the fact that this comparison is insulting to Muslims — it is also blatantly false. Rather than point out the hypocrisy of the way that the far right has spent the past 20 years criticizing the Taliban for its record on women’s rights only to turn around and enact its own brand of religious fundamentalism, this commentary misses the mark and lands as a lazy insult, akin to “you crazies are even crazier than those brown crazies!” It unwittingly drags Muslims into the so-called “culture wars,” hurling them into the fray of the right wing’s crackdown on LGBTQ and women’s rights, their faith no more than an argument to prove a point.
It wouldn’t be the first time that Muslims have had their faith exploited as a political pawn in bipartisan politics. Sometimes it is left-leaning Democrats who uphold them as an underrepresented minority in a sea of white supremacy, all the while refusing to take account of their faith and values that might not as cleanly line up with their agenda. Other times, it is the Christian far right that superimposes its conservative viewpoints onto them as fellow people of faith, assuming their faith-based politics will align.
Some conservatives are taking the bait. Jordan Peterson, who is openly suspicious of modern science, also conveniently believes that the truth and wisdom found in religion are the guidance that lost young men need in the world. He believes this so much that he has even defended anti-democratic, Salafi preachers. Other Muslims — even some scholars — have adopted the extreme far right stance that abortion is the equivalent of murder.
Ironically, these views could not be further than the actual Islamic views on abortion—which are extremely diverse, and historically a subject of constant debate and consideration across schools of thought, from fringe Islamic jurists to the mainstays of Sunni and Shia scholarship. Often it is considered from both a religious and practical standpoint — guided by the hadith (the Prophet Muhammad’s sayings and acts) but also informed by someone’s ability to give birth, and any complications that a pregnant woman might face. It is hotly debated — but it is the presence of this debate — and the breadth of nuance among different schools of thought — that makes it so different from the polarizing forces of the U.S. culture wars that is driving the debate to the brink of absolutism.
If Muslims are going to get dragged into this particular front of America’s culture wars, it is time to set the record straight. There is no debate today in Muslim-majority countries about the permissibility of abortion when the mother’s health is in jeopardy, which means that abortion remains an integral and noncontroversial part of women’s health. Modern states may grapple with social and moral dilemmas when the abortion is elective, but there is a rich tradition of Islamic law to draw on that has addressed many of the questions with which the U.S. Supreme Court is grappling.
According to Islamic tradition — and the view of the majority of Sunni Muslim scholarship — life begins not at the moment of conception nor even in the first stage of development (known as the “nutfa,” or drop) nor with the presence of the “alaqa” (that which hangs) or the “mudgha,” which literally translates to a clump of flesh that looks like chewed skin. Rather, it is the “khalqan” that describes the moment that it becomes a separate creation. This is the moment that the Archangel Gabriel breathes a soul into the embryo, creating a connection with God and the universe that gives it life. According to the hadith, this moment happens at 120 days — or approximately four months — into the pregnancy. While Islamic scholars are known for debating scripture at length, the idea that a cluster of cells does not become a person until the soul meets the body is widely agreed upon, a rare moment of almost absolute consensus.
Based on this idea, Muslim scholars largely agree that abortion should be illegal after 120 days into the pregnancy. However, it is the debate surrounding abortion before the 120-day mark where it becomes interesting. According to the Hanafi School of thought — one of the four major Sunni schools of Islamic rite and religious law — abortion should be permissible so long as there is a sound reason for the abortion. In contrast to today’s conservative positions, some Hanafi scholars permitted abortion without any restrictions at any point. Traditionally, reasons have often been a fear of being unable to provide for the child, such as the case with a lack of wet nurses or the presence of other children that depend on the mother’s milk. “Zina” or sex outside of marriage also falls into this category — and on the Indian subcontinent, there is a fatwa from the prominent scholar Ahmad Raza Khan that states that abortion is fine for a single mother and maybe even better given social stigma. It is also permissible in cases of rape. Meanwhile, the Shafi school didn’t need a reason at all.
Others are more restrictive, such as some scholars within the Shafi and Hanbali schools popular in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, as well as prominent Shia schools, which typically limit abortion to up to 40 days after conception. Other schools, like the Maliki, forbid it entirely. But it has never been compared to murder — and, even in most conservative views, it is permitted if it is needed to save a woman’s life. This is theologically justified as being a “lesser of two evils,” according to scholars such as the late chief cleric of Egypt’s Al Azhar institution Mahmud Shaultut, Syrian cleric Mustafa al-Zarqa and Egyptian cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi.
Meanwhile in the United States, the pro-life movement has a long history of referring to abortion as murder, even in instances where it could save a woman’s life. Roe v. Wade pushed back against this narrative by establishing that foetuses are not people under the U.S. Constitution. Now that it could be repealed, politicians like Louisiana state Rep. Danny McCormick are jumping on the opportunity to push forward legislation that would establish that fetuses are unborn children whose right to life is protected by law, making abortion — no matter how soon after conception — a homicide. It follows a troubling trend that has seen a woman in Texas handed over to the police after needing to go to the hospital following a self-induced abortion, though charges have since been dropped.
It doesn’t stop at abortion, either. Last year, a woman in Oklahoma was convicted of manslaughter after she suffered a miscarriage and was sentenced to four years in jail. Prosecutors said her methamphetamine use caused the miscarriage; the defense argued that other factors could have been at play. Now that the right to life is being reconsidered in the Supreme Court, pro-life groups are starting to push the narrative that emergency contraception — or as it is commonly known, Plan B — is akin to an abortion pill. Recently, U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene told the House floor that Plan B kills a baby in the womb once a woman is pregnant, a statement that reproductive health advocates have long demonstrated to be a lie. Meanwhile, Idaho state Rep. Brent Crane recently gave an interview in which he announced that he is considering a state law to ban both emergency contraception and intrauterine devices (IUDs). These moves arise from the worst nightmares of an assault on reproductive freedoms, and no comparison to the Taliban is needed to make this point.
Needless to say, miscarriage and birth control are treated much differently in Islamic jurisprudence. One of the most famous stories involves the seventh-century second caliph, Umar ibn al-Khattab, summoning a woman to his court and then learning that, upon his summons, she suffered a miscarriage. Consumed with guilt, he consulted the Prophet Muhammad’s son-in-law and the would-be fourth caliph, Ali ibn Abi Talib, who had high stature and reverence in the court and whose opinion he respected. As the caliph expected, Ali told him that he needed to recognize that he held a position of power, which inevitably colored his summons, even when that was not his intention. Ali argued that Umar should pay the woman an indemnity to compensate for her miscarriage. It is a legal decision that went on to form the basis for determining that should a woman miscarry due to circumstance, it is her right to be compensated for being harmed. Islamic jurists also considered that the father should also have the right to compensation. However, the famous conservative jurists from the 14th-century Ibn Taymiyya and 19th-century Deobandis, the scholars of the Indian subcontinent that allegedly gave rise to the Taliban, ruled that as long as both the man and woman agreed with each other, it would not be necessary.
As for birth control, most attitudes were relatively liberal. While bearing children was often seen as the preferable outcome of sex, contraception was largely seen as normal as was the idea that it is God’s decree to give people control over when they start a family. Still, some treated it as “makruh” (undesirable), as it interfered with building a family, which was seen as the preferable path, the one more conducive to building the Muslim community or umma.
One of the most entertaining examples of this particular attitude comes from 12th-century historian Ibn ul-Jawzi’s book “Talbis Iblis” (The Trappings of the Devil), in which a man sleeps with a woman outside of marriage, then discovers that she has fallen pregnant. When he confesses his sin to a compatriot, the compatriot asks why he did not practice coitus interruptus. “But isn’t coitus interruptus undesirable?” he asks. His compatriot laughs. “Didn’t it reach you that adultery was forbidden altogether?”
In Islam, discussions about abortion or miscarriage have traditionally been legal — not moral — debates. While opinions varied, most conversations were grounded in an intellectual effort to consider the practicalities of a pregnancy in addition to the Quranic narrative and hadith. While “ensoulment” is the moment life begins, a mother’s life is just as important as that of the unborn child, allowing for most an abortion even after 120 days if the mother’s life was in danger, a view that values the woman’s life in ways alarmingly missing among some parts of the “pro-life” movement in the U.S.
Americans themselves often have mixed views about abortion. A recent Pew Research study found that the majority of Americans believe that abortion should be legal in some cases and illegal in others, yet the far right evangelical movement, along with those making the nation’s laws, has plundered this debate of any common sense or nuance. Instead, they are paving the way forward for an absolutist view by which people are arrested for homicide for undergoing or providing abortion or suffering a miscarriage.
So again, rather than smear the Christian far right as “no better than the Taliban,” pro-choice advocates in the United States could turn to the Islamic tradition — and for that matter, the Bible itself — for an example of how religiosity doesn’t always have to be diametrically opposed to a person’s right to choose. While a terminated pregnancy — whether an abortion or miscarriage — was given value in Islam, either legally or financially, it was never treated as “munkar” (an absolute religious evil), and those seeking them were never seen as morally repugnant. As the well-known Islamic scholar Imam al-Izz bin Abdul-Salam explained in his two-volume work, moral goodness or even awareness of something that is beneficial is rarely an absolute or without its negative consequences, and not every religious injunction is rational or moral.
What might it look like if we applied this kind of flexibility to the abortion debate in the United States? While we are discussing religious edicts that were devised before the nation-state, many of these edicts have been revised to inform Islamic law today, meaning that many people across the Middle East are able to access legal and safe abortion, as long as it is early in the pregnancy. With this in mind, it is useful to think about how this holistic approach to the intersections of faith and an unwanted — or unsafe — pregnancy could be applied to the abortion debate in the United States. A wet nurse might not be as much of a concern in the age of baby formula and breast pumping, but a person’s finances, or whether or not they will have to raise the child as a single parent, are just as important to a child’s future and a parent’s ability to provide for them. An unplanned pregnancy can get in the way of a young person’s plans to pursue an education, putting dreams on hold, often forever. Enjoying the right to choose can make the difference between raising a child in poverty or in comfort, between a person being satisfied with their choices or living with regret. When it comes to abortion, traditional Islamic authorities have much to teach us about being both “pro-choice” and “pro-life.”
Rashad Ali is resident senior fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue
Anna Lekas Miller is a London-based journalist, covering borders and migration
The media, including significant elements of Left media, gave a great deal of attention to the 60th anniversary of JFK’s assassination, with a great deal of the focus on the alleged “deep-state” plot to kill Kennedy because he, in their version, was going to get out of Vietnam, thaw relations with Cuba, and end the Cold War. Well-known left media figures have given this view a lot of attention recently, with the likes of Oliver Stone, Jeff Morley, and Jeffrey Sachs frequently being interviewed by the likes of Chris Hedges, Abby Martin, Majority Report, etc. The JFK dovishness they’re putting forth is preposterous, and there’s ample evidence of Kennedy as a militarist, interventionist, and Cold Warrior. Yet, the media mostly ignores those of us who offer that portrait of JFK. Kennedy’s actual policies have been a major theme in my work and along with Scott Parkin at Green and Red Podcast. Kennedy was no hero and the Left should be focusing on organizing and activism, not hero-worship for a ruling class imperialist like JFK . . .Here’s a transcript of our most recent episode on the topic
Scott Parkin (SP): [00:00:14] Welcome to the silky smooth sounds of the Green and Red podcast. I’m your co-host, Scott Parkin in Berkeley, California today. And as always, I’m joined by.
Bob Buzzanco (BB): [00:00:27] Bob Buzzanco in Houston, Texas.
SP: [00:00:30] Yeah. And so folks, today as we’re recording this, it’s the 60th anniversary of the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. And if you’re a listener of the Green and Red Podcast, you know that this is a that this is a conversation that we’ve been engaged in for a few years now. Bob has actually been engaged in conversations around this for a couple of decades at this point. But we are going to just do a little bit of myth busting of JFK and add our $0.02 on this conversation.
BB: [00:01:04] Yeah. 60 years ago today, November 22nd, in Dallas, Kennedy was killed. And it seems like it’s been about six decades where this . . . I won’t even call it a cottage industry . . . It’s really quite big, has developed to create kind of these myths and conspiracies about it. And then they’ve even gone further than that. Initially, the Kennedy assassination spawned these ideas about who actually killed them. Right? Was it Oswald by himself? Was it somebody else? Grassy knoll. Second shooters, all kinds of stuff, magic bullets, all kinds of stuff like that, which Oliver Stone himself called “parlor games.” The real issue, as Stone pointed out, is what the motives were. And Stone and these people have an explanation for that, too. It’s that Kennedy was a dove. Kennedy had broken with his past, which had been very militarist and intervention, and kind of seeing how the Cold War was destroying humanity, including the US, and so was going to withdraw from Vietnam and thaw relations with Cuba and normalize relations with Cuba, end the Cold War, stopped the arms race, stopped this rush toward this military industrial complex that Eisenhower had warned about. And so it becomes this Kennedy as peacemaker, Kennedy as dove myth, and then the forces of the nefarious deep state killed him. Right? Which sounds a lot like QAnon.
BB: [00:02:22] And it’s actually not that far away from it. These nefarious forces had Kennedy killed because he was going to mess it up for all of them, right? He was going to usher in this New Canaan with peace and money being spent on human needs rather than on the military. And he was going to leave the Vietnamese and the Cubans and all these other third world countries Guiana, Brazil, Iraq, Indonesia to their own devices so that they could achieve self-determination. And this is utterly ridiculous . . . earlier today I put out on various social media, just almost like a bibliography, really, of all the things we’ve done on it, the stuff I’ve written, the shows we’ve done, and one of the key people in that group, Jefferson Morley, has responded. And in the typical way, generally these folks gaslight. And so Morley says, name one person who thought Kennedy was a right wing hawk. So what? That’s irrelevant. He mentions Clare Boothe Luce. Clare Boothe. Luce’s opinion about JFK is utterly inconsequential. Right. Whether somebody thought JFK was a right wing hawk or not doesn’t really contribute to this. And then, of course, they get insulting. They accuse you of being condescending and insulting, which I’ve never done. I’ve actually read, I’ve read much of, if not most, if not all of what Morley has written about this.
BB: [00:03:31] I’ve read a lot by Jimmy DiEugenio . . . and so I’m familiar with all their arguments. I can’t say the same for them because they always bring in these anecdotes . . . They’ve never engaged what I’ve written or said. And in fact, they go even further and say, “you’ve never written anything.” “What do you know about this?” So they’re the ones who are actually being insulting and condescending, whereas I actually take their work seriously and I’ve tried to engage it. Everything I’ve done on this, everything you and I have done on this, has been based on pretty deep research in every relevant archive, right? We’ve read the State Department stuff, we read the National Security Archive stuff, the Cold War International History Project documents, not what somebody said in a tweet or 30 or 40 years ago, not what somebody said to somebody else who died. Not somebody who said, oh, by the way, I saw a bullet on a gurney 60 years later. When in the process of doing all this, because you and I have done a lot of it. Didn’t you learn a lot yourself from the archival work you did?
SP: [00:04:30] Yeah, I think that’s I think that’s the important the thing that these folks, I think they actually think there’s some sort of amateur sleuths. And so they’re trying to piece together some story from a bunch of anecdotes from people who are, like you said, inconsequential. It’s a French journalist or James Galbraith who wasn’t really a player in determining policy around Vietnam or around Cuba. It’s just, it’s hearsay. It’s National Enquirer sort of reporting, which actually this is something the National Enquirer used to report on a lot. And so they don’t dive into the archives. They don’t look at that. There’s a pretty big body of sort of Cold War/post Cold War scholarship that has gone into this. Instead, they’re just trying to they’re acting like reporters and Hollywood screenwriters and not like academics or people who have a serious study of history. The sad thing about all this is that because of Oliver Stone putting a lot of resources behind making a film about 30 years ago that captured and held the public’s attention to the point where it’s swayed public opinion. And then we also have a generation of new media, I guess you could say figures, which totally put the likes of Jefferson Morley and Aaron Good on their shows and continue to promote this, this conspiracy complex, whatever the Oliver Stone conspiracy complex, the “Assassinologists”
BB: [00:05:57] One other big factor this is recently we’ve seen a ton of media attention given to this, especially on the left, Chris Hedges, who I think is great, and Abby Martin and Majority Report, or the Jacobin people and everybody else. And we’ve contacted them saying, hey, there’s another side to this and nobody really wants to hear it. And I think it’s really crucial. And I always start with this now, killing the president is a big fucking deal. You don’t kill a president for some inconsequential or trivial reason. You don’t like a particular statement he made about Vietnam? You don’t like NSAM 263, which they consistently misread anyway? You don’t like Operations Northwood? You don’t like. . . Or you invoke some stirring speech he made talking about the need for peace, and in their narrative that is enough. And that turned the military and the CIA against Kennedy. Not only that, not only turned against him, but want him dead and to actually engage in this huge plot, this conspiracy to assassinate a popular US president, maybe the most popular president, really, who ever took office. Right? Think about that. That’s at some fundamental level. You need motives and a method, and they don’t even engage in those ideas. Somebody disagree with Kennedy? So therefore they wanted him dead? Right. And so what I want to do is just and I’ll go back and forth to that, because it’s really quite frustrating because they don’t engage you other than to say you’re condescending, you’re insulting, you’re an idiot. You don’t know anything, right? I had a long interview with with Jefferson Morley, where I let him talk about two thirds of the time when I tried to let him have his say. And he just he had plenty of say. And I kept saying, where’s your evidence? Where’s your evidence? [He said] “This documents going to come out and this document is going to come out. And as soon as they release the documents.” Right? The same government which conspired to kill the president, have the Warren Commission cover it up and then covered up for six decades subsequently, is now suddenly going to release the documents they need to prove the conspiracy?
SP: [00:07:49] They’re also the ones who when we talk about archives and documents and the archives, they’re like, we can’t believe that because the deep state is changed them all or taken them out or or what have you. But then they’re the ones who are like, they’re going to release these documents which prove or right, and it’s want your cake and eat it too.
BB: [00:08:07] Every time there’s been a new dump,. and I give Stone credit for the Kennedy records being released. I think that’s great. Historians . . . We want everything released, right? Every time there’s a new dump. I’ve read it and I’ve been doing this for a long time. So I know a little bit about JFK’s administration. I know a lot, actually, about Vietnam and a pretty good amount about Cuba, too. And I know how to read a document, and I’ve never seen anything in here which changes the story in any fundamental way. And when I talk to people who study Kennedy . . . because when you talk to them [the JFK assassinologists], they have 3 or 4 books they invoke as if I’ve never heard of them. Oh, they’re like, you need to read these but I read them 25 years ago when they came out. It doesn’t change the fundamental nature and their world. . . They’re like, you know, Covid deniers, right? Once their mind is made up, it doesn’t really matter what you say about them, right? It’s there and they believe it. And it has this kind of almost biblical credibility to them. So it’s really quite frustrating, which is why actually rather just do this, than write a long analysis of it, of what they said, because they don’t read it. They talk to you like you don’t know, and then they don’t read or engage anything. I don’t like sitting here and being immodest when they say, what have you ever done or you haven’t written anything? I actually have a whole book about the Vietnam War, which includes a significant stuff on JFK. I’ve written several articles now about Kennedy. I’ve debated DiEugenio, I interviewed Morley. We have a huge amount you and I have done, I don’t know, 3 or 4 shows. We have had Noam on a couple of times to talk about this. We have done as much on this as anybody. And to say that you’ve never done anything about it means they won’t engage it. They won’t engage anything like, because it’s not that hard to undermine it. This is not that difficult a historical episode.
SP: [00:09:46] Yeah. And I just actually even I also just want to I just also want to say for the current political situation is that we’re in a, we’re in a moment where liberals have been waging a war on the left for since the beginning of liberals and left, and the fact that they’re taking this, this liberal cold warrior and trying to turn him into a hero, saying that the person who perpetrated the escalation in Vietnam, who carried out numerous operations on Cuba, trying to overthrow the Cuban government, is somehow some sort of secret dove, actually, I feel like actually undermines, you know, left politics as well. I think if we’re moving towards, I feel like we need a more anti-authoritarian left in this country and that if we’re if we’re making a hero out of Kennedy, then we’re undermining that. Is that, oh, we can have a president who actually can be a dove where the system is not set up like that. It’s not even about Kennedy as a person. It’s about how the system of government and politics and global politics works is that it’s exactly what we’re seeing with Biden in Gaza. There are so many liberals who are astounded that he has doubled down on backing Netanyahu, annihilating Palestinians. And this is just how foreign policy and government and all of that works. And the sort of idolization of Kennedy just is part of why they think that.
BB: [00:11:13] Well, and a great example is actually Jimmy Carter, who has done heroic things since he left the office. Yeah.. . he’s been great. No one in American history, in their like, afterlife, their political afterlife has done anything close to what Carter did. [But] As President, Carter was one of them. He was. We’ve done work on this, right? We’ve written about it. We’ve done a show. This is what happens. You don’t. And yeah, Kennedy everything. And we’re not going to go into this too much. But if you read his about his career prior to becoming president, he had made his bones as a cold warrior. Of the people who study this I’ve talked to, I’ve had mentors and colleagues who’ve written extensively about Kennedy, way more about it than Morley and, Good and all these people combined ever will. And they’ve said Kennedy is right up there with John Foster Dulles and Dean Acheson as the primary cold warriors of the early Cold War, the early postwar era. And so what I want to do is talk about this. What we’re going to do is focus on what the records say. Not on scuttlebutt, not on innuendo. I’m not gaslighting anybody. I would hope that Morley, who I actually take way more seriously, I don’t think Good and DiEugenio are very bright at all . . . Morley actually has done stuff. He’s done some good work, which is why I don’t understand his venom on this and his insults, which are really unbecoming of him. So what we’re going to do is really just talk about what actually happened on this 60th anniversary and hopefully to take a little dent, put a little dent in what they’re doing, because as you point out, this heroism is dangerous. It’s looking for this like Nietzschean Superman. But at heart, I don’t like calling things fascist . . . But it’s reactionary, right? Isn’t it?
SP: [00:12:52] It’s what? And it’s what QAnon does. Let’s just be clear.
BB: [00:12:55] Oh, no. Exactly.
SP: [00:12:56] Trump is their Nietzschean Superman for the QAnon folks.
BB: [00:13:03] So is JFK. Even the first time I ever heard of QAnon some years ago, somebody sent me a video and the first eight minutes seemed to make sense. They’re talking about globalization and international corporations and blah, blah, blah. And then it shifted gears into this crazy, like, conspiracy stuff. And at the end, the two heroic figures to save humanity were Donald J. Trump and John F Kennedy. And of course, they had Kennedy killed because he was going to change everything and they were out to get Trump. The deep state was getting Trump, too. And we know this is preposterous. I’m just curious if they think the deep state was after Trump? . Because if you believe it was after Kennedy, then why not? Actually, if you look at the mechanisms of the state, not the deep state, which is bullshit. What they do is in the open, capitalists don’t need to go into smoke filled rooms and make secret plans. They do it every day. It’s called the stock market. It’s called wages. It’s called employment. It’s called labor conditions. It’s called war. It’s called peace. It’s called public health. They wage war on us every day openly. Right
SP: [00:13:57] They had a summit in San Francisco last week where they all had a big party [APEC]. Right.
BB: [00:14:02] This is not . . . this doesn’t need to be done in some kind of conspiratorial, subversive, cryptic manner. Covert manner. It’s not done that way. Right. And what we’re going to do is, is talk about that. Kennedy was of that class. He came from one of the most famous political families in US history. He had made his bones that way. He had been part of that privilege for a long time. He had been well connected. He was a hard war, hard-core hawk and cold warrior. So what we’re going to do is just tell you about Kennedy. No conspiracies, no grand theories about the deep state or anything like that. And certainly we don’t believe you need heroes, right? We need to organize. We need to go out there. And there are a lot of people doing stuff. I think that’s really inspirational. What we’re being seeing lately. You had a bunch of people out at APEC. We’re seeing huge groups now supporting the people being attacked at Gaza, and that’s what we need. We don’t need heroes. Heroes aren’t going to come in and save us and for them to keep invoking that, and they cite Michael Parenti, who he’s done some good work. But in the course of celebrating Parenti, they attack Chomsky and criticize him, which is really pretty cheap. But they’re going to there and have to say, being called “Chomsky’s useful idiot” is the greatest compliment I’ve ever received too.
SP: [00:15:19] So we’re going to put it on your headstone.
BB: [00:15:21] Oh hell yeah. But let’s just talk a little bit. Let’s talk a little bit about what Kennedy actually did beyond the Looking Glass and beyond all the the prisms and beyond all the contrivances and all the gaslighting. Let’s look at what he actually did. Like some of the stuff we’ve gone over, and I’ve put out a list of various shows we’ve done, and we’ll include that too. But I know the first time we did this was like three years ago, I think. Right.
SP: [00:15:47] It was after the election, after the election of the second Catholic president in US history, Joe Biden.
BB: [00:15:52] That’s right. Joe Biden, Catholic president, sure do like to to kill a lot of people, don’t they? Yeah. To destroy third world countries, don’t they? And one of the things I think that’s important is to start with Kennedy’s political career, right? How he came to politics. And I remember at the time you talked about this, he initially gets a start with Joe McCarthy, and his record on civil rights is that of a traditional Democrat. Wasn’t it the because this is another part. They don’t stress this, but they often talk about how Kennedy was this great civil rights president and did more for black Americans than anybody ever did.
SP: [00:16:25] Yeah, like on the domestic front. Kennedy. First of all, the Kennedys were friends with McCarthy. Like Joseph Kennedy, the father befriended McCarthy and found it found him to be another likable fellow Irish Catholic. And there was there was like a big connection between his sons, John F Kennedy and Robert F Kennedy and McCarthy. And also, it should be noted, Joe McCarthy is the perpetrator of McCarthyism. He was the Republican senator from Wisconsin who would often appear in front of the press and say he has a list of 50 communists in the State Department or what have you. Kennedy, for his part, had actually aligned himself with militant anti-communists when he was in the House of Representatives before he was even elected to the presidency and to the to the Senate in 1952. And he they actually targeted the Truman State Department because they didn’t like the loss of China, because they were hard core anti-communist. Kennedy actually, on the House floor in January 1949, said the responsibility for the failure of our foreign policy in the Far East rests squarely with the white House and the Department of State. There’s there was a lot of personal bonds between the Kennedys and McCarthy, including McCarthy dating two of the Kennedy sisters, Eunice and Pat. He actually went to the wedding of Eunice and Sergeant Shriver, and presented Eunice with a silver cigarette case inscribed to Eunice and Bob from the one who lost. And so there’s a little romantic intrigue there as well.
SP: [00:17:55] Bobby Kennedy actually worked for Joseph McCarthy and actually had a clash with Roy Cohn, which actually led to RFK actually eventually leaving the Who committee. But they when the Senate voted. So Kennedy gets elected to the Kennedy gets elected to the Senate. During his election, McCarthy basically supported JFK in taking out Henry Cabot Lodge, who was actually a Republican senator. And then it’s also worth noting that when the Senate voted to censure McCarthy, Kennedy was he had surgery and he was notably absent from the from that vote. It was actually a it was a pretty dirty relationship going on there. There’s a pretty choice quote. It’s fairly long from Eleanor Roosevelt about Kennedy and McCarthy. She wrote in an article called On My Own, which had presented in the Saturday, which was printed in the Saturday Evening Post:
“During the lively contest for the vice-presidential nomination between Sen. Estes Kefauver and Sen. John Kennedy, a friend of Senator Kennedy came to me with a request for support. I replied I did not feel I could do so because Senator Kennedy had avoided taking a position during the controversy over Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s methods of investigation. Senator Kennedy was in the hospital when the Senate condemned Senator McCarthy and, of course, could not record his position. But later, when he returned to the Senate, reporters asked him how he would have voted and he failed to express an opinion on McCarthyism. “Oh, that was a long time ago,” the senator’s friend told me. “He was unable to vote and it is all a thing of the past. It should not have anything to do with the present situation.” I replied that I thought it did. “I think McCarthyism is a question on which public officials must stand up and be counted,” I added. “I still have not heard Senator Kennedy express his convictions. And I can’t be sure of the political future of anyone who does not willingly state where he stands on that issue.” Later, Senator Kennedy came to see me. I told him exactly the same thing. He replied in about the words he had previously used in talking to reporters, saying that the McCarthy condemnation was “so long ago” that it did not enter the current situation. But he did not say where he stood on the issue and I did not support him.”
I think it’s what’s important here is that they had this sort of back channel relationship where the Kennedy and McCarthy, the Kennedys and McCarthy privately supported each other, including having social connections. And while Kennedy didn’t overtly take a stand on McCarthy, he also overtly did not condemn him or anything along those lines. I think that’s I think that’s really important to note that the Kennedys were fine with someone who would, like, get people blacklisted and go after them.
BB: [00:20:46] It also, I think, is important to understand what the nature of liberalism was after World War two. Cold War liberalism involved domestic reform. So Cold War liberals clearly did support things like civil rights. And they’ll be important in the civil rights movement moving forward. But liberals hated the Soviet Union and communism, so they were all in on military budgets. They were all in on interventions. They were corporate liberals. They thought communism was an evil, just like everybody else did. These are the people who had destroyed Henry Wallace, put pressure on FDR in 1944 to remove him from the ticket. Monkeywrenched his candidacy in 1948. Red baited them. They red baited Truman, who had instituted loyalty oaths. And the government, they red baited people like Paul Robeson and other activists. In the early days of the Civil War movement. They were calling Martin Luther King a communist. And keep in mind, the Democratic Party was really strong in the South. There were there were no Republican senators in any southern states in the 50s. Kennedy came out of that. The idea to portray him, not even ten years later, as this different person who cared for civil rights and hated war and hated the military and hated intervention, is just utterly ahistorical. There’s nothing for that. He was the opposite. He came in that culture, in that system, in that structure. And so as a result of that, you get his very close connections to McCarthy, to McCarthyism, to destroying people right there, blaming the State Department and the who lost China debate in the 1960 debate against Nixon, Kennedy attacked Nixon for not overthrowing Castro in Cuba. And look at Kennedy’s address. We will pay any price, bear any burden, fight any foe. We will do this and more is what he says. We’ll do this. And why don’t you do more than that? You fight any foe, bear any burden, right? He came into office out of that culture. He was a McCarthyite. His positions on civil rights were slow and meandering yet.
SP: [00:22:48] I’ll keep going. Then I’m going to say something.
BB: [00:22:50] Oh, okay. No, it’s position on civil rights were slow and meandering. He put pressure on King and others in the civil rights movement to slow down. It’s not time yet. You need to wait. He initially tried to get them to cancel the Freedom Rides, and reluctantly agreed to put federal marshals on the buses as they were getting firebombed and people were getting beaten up and literally killed in some instances. He moved slowly.
SP: [00:23:15] The one thing that he where he gained some cred with the civil rights movement is when King was in jail and one of the southern cities, and when he was running for president, it was in Atlanta, actually. And Coretta Scott King had actually called Kennedy, basically concerned about her husband’s safety and. He was encouraged to call Mrs. King Kennedy and. Basically Robert F Kennedy the next day made a well-placed phone call to secure King’s release. The important thing to note here, though, is what the Kennedy people did is they turned this into a pamphlet about how they had been this champions of civil rights, and had actually supported King getting out of jail in October 1960, and then distributed to black churches all over the country the weekend before election, November 1960. And so it’s a really cynical act. And we’re we’re talking about he’s this liberal civil rights supporter is it’s all completely Machiavellian political moves to sow the black vote. Turns out for him in an unprecedented sort of way.
BB: [00:24:22] And it was very important in winning that election as president. He doesn’t want to piss off the southern states. He keeps . . . he appoints southern segregationist judges. He’s constantly telling King to slow down. Finally, reluctantly, was dragged into proposing the civil rights law. And. In 1963, amid the filibuster, King and others decided to put even more pressure on him with the March on Washington, and he was killed shortly after that. There’s not much of a record there, and to call him somehow a heroic champion is preposterous. And of course, the irony is that Lyndon Johnson from Texas, who had clearly didn’t have a sterling civil rights record, actually ended up doing a lot of the things that Kennedy never did. Right. You want to create this image this young man shot down? Handsome guy, handsome family and all this kind of stuff. But if you look behind it, the Kennedys, you know, Machiavellian is the perfect word. Kennedy’s. Everything they do is calculated, and it’s the same.
SP: [00:25:18] It’s the same thing with the McCarthyism. It’s liberals did not they did not want to be painted with this sort of like, communist socialist thing that was coming out of the New Deal years. And so they really doubled down on going after Truman, State Department around China or supporting loyalty oaths or everything that you had mentioned. And that was that was also so that they would not be painted as weak. It’s interesting that morally, what I was going to actually say before is morally, in one of his tweets that he put out today is about how Nixon viewed Kennedy as a weakling. But it was Kennedy who actually was Nick. I can’t say that Nixon’s not a hawk, but it seems like Kennedy seemed even more hawkish and in many ways in that debate in 1960 and undermined Nixon’s credibility, talking about Cuba and many other things. Kennedy really outfoxed Nixon in many ways, and I find it interesting that he says he refers to Nixon and Kennedy as a weakling.
BB: [00:26:15] But this is what they do. And this is what I mean. It’s ghastly. Right? It’s all based on these kind of rumors like these. These cocktail party talks, parlor talk. Right? Nixon said this, and Clare Boothe Luce said this in the military about this, and they thought this. And look at the fucking records. I can’t even be more explicit than that. Killing a president is a big deal. You don’t do it casually because someone in the so-called deep state has a snit, right? And there’s no evidence for it. And that’s the thing you got to keep coming back to. You can gaslight us. You can insult me. I don’t care about you guys insulting, especially Aaron Good. Who’s really an embarrassment. Hey, but there’s just a record out there that they won’t even engage. So if any of you have the tenacity to listen to this, engage the record. If not, frankly, you don’t want to hear it anymore because there’s a big record out there that you simply never, ever have engaged. And we’ll talk more about that. Right? The stuff of McCarthyism that’s real. That happened, his foot dragging. And that’s a really nice euphemistic word, because it was much worse than that on civil rights is documented. It’s evident it happened right now.
BB: [00:27:17] Obviously, the crux of the conspiracy argument has to do with foreign policy, especially Vietnam, but other parts of the world, too. And we’ve done a ton of stuff on this. I’ve written a ton of stuff on this, too. Once again, I would suggest that these folks have issues with it to begin by reading or listening to what we’ve done. We’ve done a ton of things. I have, I think, 2 or 3 chapters in Masters of War, specifically about the Kennedy years. We’ve written and talked about that at great length. Kennedy came to office, you know, as a cold warrior . . . pay any price, bear any burden. Vietnam was a crucial place. Vietnam and Cuba were two important places. Cuba more, actually, when Kennedy took over. Also, I think it’s important, and Noam always points this out. Kennedy took office not even a month after Dwight Eisenhower had said that the military industrial complex is threatening American democracy. Right. And Kennedy never said anything like that. Kennedy never said anything like Eisenhower’s Cross of Iron speech, that every bomb we build, every airplane we make, is, is a bed taken away from a hospital. It’s a school that’s not being built. Kennedy. Never say anything like that. Right? Eisenhower.
SP: [00:28:24] I want to note a lot of those weapons manufacturers, because I’ve been following this very closely with the both the war in Ukraine and the current debacle going on in Gaza is that a lot of those companies are based in New England and Massachusetts. It’s important to to note that there’s a deep history of weapons manufacturing companies based in Massachusetts and Kennedy from Massachusetts.
BB: [00:28:47] And the Democratic Party was closely connected, that there’s a really good book by Frank Kofsky, The War Scare of 1948, Harry Truman and the War scare of 1948, where Democratic senators, the likes of Stuart Symington and Scoop Jackson was the. These are the forerunners of Tailgunner Joe Biden, right. Were really crucial and boosting the defense budget, building new aircraft, new military. Aircraft, built naval ships. This was. The Democrats were building up the American arsenal. Eisenhower actually wanted to cut defense spending and just build a bunch of airplanes that could that could carry long range missiles. Right. So it can be in all of these ways. Clearly was part of that intellectual, liberal, intellectual and political liberal heritage in Vietnam clearly is a demonstration of that in Cuba. He came into office right, barely a couple months in, sanctioned the Bay of Pigs attack to overthrow Castro, which was an utter disaster in the aftermath of that became even more important because he had looked foolish with regard to Vietnam. There’s so much, but I just want to hit 2 or 3 main points. One Kennedy immediately ratcheted up the American role there, sent in armor, sent in, herbicides, sent in helicopters, started using napalm and Agent Orange and things like that. When Kennedy assumed office in January of 1961, there were 8000, I’m sorry, 800 American advisors in Vietnam. By the time he left, there were 16,000. So there’s a consistent escalation there.
BB: [00:30:25] Right, two, which I think is really important is the thrust of much of the work I’ve done, the US military, the people who allegedly had him killed because he wasn’t gung ho enough about Vietnam and Cuba and everywhere else, didn’t want to go to Vietnam. If any group in the government was opposed to Vietnam, it had a realistic view of it, it was actually the military, and I’ve written about that in great detail. And I’m not going to go into all of it right now. But if you look at anything we’ve done, there are short articles to the military. Officers thought Vietnam wasn’t crucial to American security. They thought that the other side there had a huge advantage in terms of morale and political influence to Vietnam, the NLF, VC and others. They didn’t believe that the ally that the US had created in the South was really worth defending or able to exist on its own. They consistently said that the war was going to escalate. They consistently said the war was getting worse, and they consistently were very candid in expressing how difficult it was. And you even had people who really were hawkish, like Westmoreland and Maxwell Taylor, who would say, we really can’t get involved there. We we should never. And especially one of the things that they’ll often put up is that Kennedy didn’t want to send troops into Vietnam. Nobody wanted to send troops into Vietnam, no one ever, in the early 60s envisioned that you would have a point at which 542,000 American troops would be in Vietnam, that that doesn’t prove anything.
BB: [00:31:53] Kennedy never thought that. No, of course not. Nobody did. Nobody. Thought you would need them. Right. So it’s just they don’t know how to use historical evidence or even do historical research. So the military, the group which allegedly, you know, hated Kennedy and wanted him dead, actually had no real interest in Vietnam. And I would say the consensus within the military was that it was a bad idea. And like I said, read two or whatever, 2 or 3 chapters, and we’ve written about it as well. The third thing, which I think is really crucial, which they dodge all the time, is the coup. And on early November 1st, 1963, the US finally authorized and approved and helped execute a coup to overthrow Ngo Dinh Diem. And Nhu his brother, the Ngo family. And they were killed which wasn’t in the American that wasn’t in the American planning, but they were killed as well. If you look at the records from like mid 1963 on, Kennedy and the, the white House are very upset at GM. Why is that? Because he’s ruining the war effort. He’s not popular. He’s harassing and repressing his own people. He’s attacking the Buddhists. There was a prison camp in 1959 where over a thousand prisoners were poisoned to death by Diem.
BB: [00:33:10] He sent troops into Buddhist temples. He sent troops to take down Buddhist flags. And of course, you had the famous immolations, right? So they knew that. I’ve had to go in addition to that, something else that these folks on the Kennedy side never even acknowledged is that at that particular moment. And George Mctc, who’s as good as anybody ever been on the first person to come up with this, and we know it now. Even better, in the early in 1963, nobody knew was having covert talks with people in the Politburo led by Le Duan. In the north. They were talking about some kind of negotiated agreement, any kind of negotiated neutral settlement where essentially the north and south, northern and Southerners would say, okay, we’re going to have a provisional government. And then in the course of time, we’ll unify the government. Well, everyone knew, as they did in 1954, when Kennedy and others supported Diem to monkey Wrench the agreement to have elections at Geneva. But everyone knew again that could never be elected to run a unified Vietnam, that in fact, the only people with the credibility to do that came out of the old Viet Minh or some of the front groups, people like Ho or Truong Chinh or Pham Van Dong or Le Duan. So basically in 1963, Kennedy understands that their options are to double down, to get into Vietnam even deeper, or to see a negotiated settlement which would leave the US with egg on its face and would leave power, or somebody from the Viet Minh in charge, those are their options.
BB: [00:34:47] They don’t have anything else. They either go in deeper or they get rid, or they lose, or they get rid of Diem and getting rid of is going in deeper. What did they think they were going to overthrow? And then everything would be fine. The war would be over. How? There were 12 governments in the ensuing 18 months in Vietnam, and a lot of those governments were overthrown by the US because the new Vietnamese leaders continued to speak to the Politburo in Hanoi about a negotiated settlement. Kennedy was far more afraid of peace breaking out in Vietnam than anything else that is to me. It’s like really all the evidence you need, right? If you’re going to get out of a war, if you’re in some kind of conflict, are you going to utterly just destroy the government you’re allegedly aligned with, or are you going to just monkey wrench that? I don’t think it’s start over again. It makes no sense. It’s preposterous. And there’s nothing in the record. They keep quoting NSAM 263. Oh, and NSAM 263 was declassified in the early 80s. It’s not something they say like, oh, what is it then? Lord of the rings or something like the precious thing or that’s what they treat it like, right? Some kind of ring.
SP: [00:35:58] The ring. It’s the ring, it’s the ring.
BB: [00:36:01] NSAM 263 is a boilerplate document. It had been around in various forms for quite some time prior to that. It suggested that if things continue to go well, and in 1962, actually things had improved because the United States had sent so much firepower in there that they were using that with some success. The Vietcong and other groups rallied By early 1963, especially at Ap Bac, they had reversed that. But essentially NSAM 263 said, if the war is going well, we might be able to pull out some troops. Maybe we can withdraw some troops by the end of 1963. And then maybe if things go well, by 1965, the war will be over. That’s what policymakers do. They put together a documents. I’ve seen countless documents like that. These are the projections. That’s why you have things called the National Security Council, Policy and Planning Staff. That’s what these groups do. They study these things, and then they put out papers and they put out projections, about the military directorate’s military. And they all do that. If you go through archives, you’re going to come up with dozens of documents of this nature, and they’re going to suggest various alternatives.
BB: [00:37:08] There’s nothing wrong with saying, look, things go well, we can start pulling troops out on it. But the situation’s taken care of by 1965. We’re all fine. So what? The fact is, it wasn’t. And if it had been, if it had been that sweet and peachy keen, they wouldn’t have had a coup. They wouldn’t have been so upset that Nhu and Le Duan’s people were talking, they wouldn’t have continued to plan for a coup and overthrow them. They wouldn’t have. It’s just there’s nothing there. The evidence all points in an incontrovertible way to Kennedy ramping up the American commitment in Vietnam. That’s the only point that matters. It’s not who said what to who. Clare Boothe Luce, Richard Nixon, he’s weak. I talked to this guy. Somebody in France said this. It doesn’t freaking. matter. What matters is that every single bit of evidence in the historical record indicates Kennedy ramping up Vietnam. That’s it, that’s it. Yeah. Yeah. Like, how fucking hard is that? Excuse my language. How fucking hard is that to figure out?
SP: [00:38:07] Yeah. I just want to point out there’s this really great quote from Chomsky, which I jotted down when we did one of these episodes, which is the Kennedy assassination cult is probably the most striking case, talking about conspiracies, etcetera. “The Kennedy–assassination cult is probably the most striking case. I mean, you have all these people doing super–scholarly research, and trying to find out just who talked to whom, and what the exact contours were of this supposed high–level conspiracy — it’s all complete nonsense. As soon as you look into the various theories, they always collapse, there’s just nothing there. But in many cases, the left has just fallen apart on the basis of these sheer cults.” I think it’s really important to point out, is that they spend a lot more time talking about that one hearsay, and not documented conversations from people who are like, maybe not Nixon, but like others who are like, largely irrelevant. But then I’ve never actually seen any of the conspiracy. The assassin analogy is conspiracy. People actually dive into the November 1963 coup against Diem, right? They never talk about what.
BB: [00:39:13] Is Chomsky, Noam Chomsky? No, no, that’s my point.
SP: [00:39:16] Well, the Gaslight, by the way, they gaslight Chomsky all the time too. So yeah.
BB: [00:39:19] Yeah. Chomsky wrote a book called . . . Rethinking Camelot, which is 200 and some pages of documentary evidence, much like this stuff we’ve done. Right. We’re not sitting here talking about some tweet. We’re talking about what the record actually shows, which is how you do history. Right? What they were saying at the time, not what somebody said 30 years ago, how you do scholarship. Right after Kennedy took office, he was asked a question about Vietnam, and he said, “if we postpone action in Vietnam to engage in talks with the communists, we can surely count on a major crisis of nerve in Vietnam and throughout Southeast Asia. The image of US unwillingness to confront communism induced by the last performance [this is also after the Bay of Pigs] will be definitely confirmed. There will be panic and disarray.” And this is like when Biden said, is there any possibility of talks and Palestine? No. No possibility. That’s what Kennedy saying. We won’t even engage in talks, right? Because it would make us look weak. Credibility is huge. I would suggest reading the work of Gabriel Kolko on Vietnam. So what Biden is.
SP: [00:40:19] Saying about Ukraine, too? Yeah, that’s.
BB: [00:40:20] Right. And I would suggest, I think Kolko’s done the best stuff on Vietnam, and Kolko talks a lot about credibility and how important that is to be seen as strong. Right? The idea that he’s this soft, teddy bear kind of guy who wants to bring peace to the world and all these wars is preposterous. Again, no evidence for it. Right? And so you have that. There’s so much to do with Kennedy and Vietnam and like I said, but the three key points, I think, are consistent escalation, both in terms of commitment of manpower, commitment of weapons, use of dioxins and Agent Orange and things like that, two would be the military’s consistent reluctance and often opposition to fighting in Vietnam, which totally undermines any idea that there was a motive there to get rid of them. Right. And the CIA is not involved in this to any great extent either. Right. And third, of course, is the coup, which I think is really by itself takes care of the whole issue. The coup by itself, really, I think, destroys any particular argument that Kennedy was somehow going soft on Vietnam. We’re going to get out of Vietnam. That’s just it’s ridiculous. Yes. You don’t have a coup three weeks before your own death, right? Or three weeks before you’re going to start this withdrawal from Vietnam. It’s utterly insane. Right. And something just, you know, because Morley and these people keep saying, name one right wing person, that’s the people of Vietnam. If they think Kennedy was weak, ask the people of Cuba if they think Kennedy was weak, ask the people in Brazil and Guyana and Iraq if they thought Kennedy was weak.
BB: [00:41:50] But what did he say? Ask a right wing Cuban . . . who gives a fuck about right wing Cubans, right? They were nuts. And Kennedy knew they were nuts. . . . Basically, Kennedy is trying to help them and they’re not really understanding what he’s doing. If you look at Cuba, much like Vietnam, the record is just really crystal clear. There he tries to overthrow Castro within a couple of months of becoming president, then immediately authorizes Operation Mongoose to conduct all kinds of subversion against the Cuban government of Castro. They institute all kinds of international sanctions, including the most brutal embargo the world has seen, although 17 years, I would assume people who’ve been in Gaza the last 17 years could make a case for that as well. But they institute this brutal embargo they engaged in, obviously, in covert operations. That’s why the U-2 was shot down. They were ratcheting up internal security throughout the region. And whenever they talked about Latin America. Whatever country it was in Latin America. Castro was their point man. Right. We have to do this because of Castro. We have to do that because we need the Alliance of Progress, because of Castro. We need the School of Americas, because of Castro. We need internal security programs because of Castro. Right. So the idea that somehow like that and they’ll acknowledge that this was. But then in their version of things, the Cuban Missile Crisis was his road to Damascus.
BB: [00:43:15] That was his epiphany. The world came close to getting blown up. And so he decided at that point he’d been wrong and he’d have to change course. Right. Now, you and I did a really great show on the Cuban Missile Crisis, right? And we looked at all the more recent documents. We were doing stuff the day of the show. We were still getting new documents from National Security Archive, putting them. Yeah. And I remember emailing back and forth that whole week with Chomsky. Have you seen this? Have you seen this? He’s sending me stuff and so on. So that reflected everything that was new that day. And what did we see in the Cuban Missile Crisis? He was reckless. He was provocative. Right. He never took measures to defuse the situation. That was actually Khrushchev who did that. Right. So at every point along the way, Kennedy, despite the rhetoric, wanted to take a hard line. Now, there were others who were more hawkish than him. That’s true. That’s what policymaking is. You had a bunch of people in a room, and not everybody agrees, and some people may disagree virulently. But the fact of the matter is, Kennedy didn’t take any kind of soft line, and it was really important for Kennedy to be seen as the victor in this, to the extent where he actually threw Adlai Stevenson under the bus afterward. Stevenson was the UN ambassador, and he put the story out that Stevenson is the one who wanted to negotiate, and he wouldn’t let the media report on the trade for the Jupiter missiles in Turkey.
BB: [00:44:38] And I think what’s and again, this kind of seals the deal. During the missile crisis, the US continued subversive operations. And after it was over, they ramped them up again. And in fact, it wasn’t in November of I can’t remember the precise date right now. November of 1963, the US authorized these Miami terrorists to blow up a Cuban factory, and they killed 400 people right now. What’s that? You’re trying to bring freaking peace to the world, right? And they thought Castro was so upset [at JFK’s death]. Castro had a meeting and met in September of 1963. This is before Kennedy was killed. He had a meeting with a reporter from, I think, UPI. It was like an event at the Brazilian embassy in Havana or something like that. And Fidel went off on a rant about Kennedy. He’s trying to get rid of us. I can’t stand the guy. Like the Cubans didn’t see Kennedy as going soft and in fact, a very ham handed story. But also, I think, reflective of what Kennedy was really like on November 22nd, 1963, 60 years ago today, there was a Cuban operative in Paris. His codename was Am/Lash, who was being given a poison pen or something like that to use to to kill Castro. And how many? The church Committee showed that the kind of constant subversion and attempts at assassination and everything else. Yeah.
SP: [00:45:54] And I just I want to say is that in JFK revisited, which is the documentary, the faux documentary that that Oliver Stone put out last year is that there’s a segment on the where Kennedy was being progressive on foreign policy with different in different parts of the world, and one was Cuba, and it was taught and they actually talk about how Kennedy was trying to thaw the freeze with Castro. And there’s a quote that Castro says on the assassination day, this is a very bad thing. Castro probably thinks it’s a very bad thing, because it means the US is going to blame them and come after them would be my interpretation of that. Not because Kennedy was some dove that was about to open up US Cuban relations for the better. So just it’s just.
BB: [00:46:36] And Oswald was connected with reason to Cuba, right? He’s he’s the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. So yeah. Why would Castro think, oh, this is great. Of course he understands. There’s going to be a lot of attention thrown on Cuba. He’s afraid they’re going to blame him for it, which is at least the conspiracy people don’t do that. But yeah, there’s no again, nothing in the record to indicate that Kennedy was anything other than aggressive and continuing to escalate that aggression in Cuba all the way to the very end. And and was it the last speech he ever gave, I think, on the topic, was in Miami, just a less than a week, I believe, before he was in Dallas, where he talks to the Miami, the community in Miami, the terrorist community in Miami, and he’s all in with them. He gave awards to to veterans of some of these brigades and things like that. The United States continued to train them in the Everglades, violating all kinds of international laws and everything else. But again, the record shows it and engage the record! Morley, Good, DiEugenio, Oliver . . . engage the record! Go to all those documents, read what people have written. Read what Tom Patterson has written. You don’t have to listen to me. Read Tom Patterson, read Chomsky, read Steve Rabe. There’s so many people out there who’ve done good work on this. Go to the Foreign Relations series, which is all online, the National Security Archives, it’s online. This stuff is there.
BB: [00:47:57] Right. So Kennedy, as in Vietnam, is ramping up hostilities, escalating American aggression and American involvement there. There’s no reason that anyone would have within the so-called deep state, within the foreign policy making apparatus to want him dead. Killing a president is a kind of a big deal, right? You can have issues with them. They keep talking about operations. Northwood, which Kennedy killed in 1962, and Northwood was another proposal to subvert and overthrow the Castro regime there that was constant. Sometimes you agree on a particular program, right? If you agree on a program within bureaucratic politics, that means you lost that one. And maybe you find a way to try to get in through the back door. But you really you assassinate a president because he chose one particular policy proposal over another? And he didn’t say, oh, no, I’m going to reject Northwoods, and we’re going to stop all hostilities toward Cuba. We’re going to stop all suffering. That never happened. That never happened. It’s again, it’s like NSAM 263 or or Clare Boothe Luce said this or Northwood said this. He cherry picked something and you extrapolate. This is like QAnon. It really has no more intellectual validity than the pizza parlors and QAnon or some of the crazy shit RFK Jr is saying and stuff like that in Cuba and in Vietnam, which I think are. The two big issues, but it doesn’t stop there either. If you look at his issues toward Latin America, and we did talk to Noam at some length about that.
BB: [00:49:25] Kennedy initiated this era of subversion of internal security. He sent tons of money to the militaries and right wing groups in these particular countries, places like Cuba, Guiana, and outside of Latin America. If you read the Latin American policy papers there. They all say the same thing. Because of Castro, we have to stop the spread of communism throughout the region, right. And Kennedy. Kennedy is quite candid about that. He even says the famous Trujillo equation. We don’t want people like Trujillo who’ve been overthrown in Dominican. Right? But if the alternative is, what we’d like to do is have democratic governments instead of Trujillo. But the alternative may be Castro type governments, and that we can’t tolerate. Potentially the worst thing you could have would be a Castro type government, and therefore you do whatever you need to do to prevent that from happening. The idea that JFK somehow would have been comfortable with a communist government, whether it be in Hanoi or Havana or anywhere, is utterly nuts. It’s just insane. It’s preposterous. He in Latin America, he ramped up aggression there again. It’s one of the articles I’ve written in and with regard to the Cold War and military spending. He did the same thing, right? You all of these ways. In all these measures, guess is condescending and insulting to point out evidence and facts and reality to people. But if you look at all.
SP: [00:50:53] It’s trolling, it’s what it.
BB: [00:50:54] Is. It’s trolling. Yeah, we’re trolling people with facts. Next thing we’re going to blind them with science. It’s really quite remarkable that this guy would have this kind of historic reputation, and it would be like it would be praised and, and put forth by the left, by, by these people like Chris Hedges, who I admire, and Abby Martin, Majority Report, Jacobin. It’s all over the place, right. New York Times What was it a couple of months ago, when the guy who claims he found a bullet on the gurney suddenly, 60 years later, remembers it right in the New York Times, right. Every everywhere these people go, they’re able to attract media attention and get a lot of juice for it. And they’ve convinced a lot of people who really should know better, you know, about this, and they’re looking for it. And that’s the thing that’s really looking for heroes. You know.
SP: [00:51:43] Just it’s lazy reporting and looking for clickbait basically. Yeah.
BB: [00:51:47] And, and but for them to turn around and attack people who point out their flaws and there are many. It’s really funny, right? It’s very typical. Right? It’s the Trump QAnon type of argument. You don’t engage what people say, you just flip it. It’s what aboutism? It’s what about you? Or look where that showed up or what have you ever done? Or you’re insulting me, man, these guys are really freaking soft and sensitive. If they’re like, insulted and and if they feel like I’ve been condescending, I could be condescending. I’ll condescend you if you want it, but it’s just preposterous. Simply by trying to have this debate over what the record says. Right? It’s funny, when I debated DiEugenio like almost everybody who listened to it said, wow, man, you were really, like, cool and calm and all you did was talk about . . . Yeah, of course that’s what historians do, because it’s like, well, they just kept talking about anecdotes and anybody could do this. I have no special intellectual skills that enable me to think of things like, anybody could see this stuff. And there are, like I said, most people who I think have studied Kennedy have come to the same conclusions. There’s not a whole lot of people praising him and his work, and those who do think are just caught up in that myth of Camelot. They probably grew up in that era, and it was, if you look back, I mean.
SP: [00:53:01] And then and then 28 years later, after, when the myth of Camelot has started to fade, it’s still in the early 90s, it was still my grandparents generation was still here, and my parents generation who’s still here now. But but then Oliver Stone does a little bit of a reset on it, because he releases a film and makes this into a political issue. He makes a Hollywood movie about something where he inserts a lot of fiction into it, and then promotes it as fact, and then goes and goes on tour for the next couple of decades. And then he did another reset last year as well, like 30 years later after after JFK’s release. And I think Oliver Stone’s actually a talented filmmaker. I enjoy Platoon and Born on the 4th of July and films like that. But I also think that with JFK and actually the another movie he made after that, which was about Nixon, is that he’s used this to keep this alive, and it gives fuel to the fire for the DiEugenios and Aaron Goods of the world. I think Morley’s a little bit of a different animal, but definitely it just gives those people credence where it’s baffling how much cred they and how they’re building something of a career out of it.
BB: [00:54:13] Yeah, the boring part of this is it’s this is really about how people use evidence and how you do historical research. And I don’t want to turn this into a graduate student seminar. But the reality is they’re not doing that. They’re entertainers. They’re not held to the same standards. Yeah. That’s true. And and, you know, Stone was born in the 50s. So he was young, you know, when Kennedy, you know, came to political life. He’s a Vietnam vet. You know, I mean, I know a lot of people from that generation who still speak with great reverence about JFK and the Kennedy myth and look at how popular.
SP: [00:54:49] Soprano, junior soprano man.
BB: [00:54:51] Soprano. Right, Tony. He was with JFK mistress. He met JFK mistress. Look at how popular RFK junior was, at least at the outset, right. Because it evoked that. And so people of that generation, you want to believe the best about Kennedy, right? And if you look at the way the media report about him at the time, it was like the guy was like virtuous and almost messianic, right? And so they don’t want to let go of that. You know, people like Stone. But the reality is you have to do historical research, get into documents, you find all the available evidence. You figure out what people were saying at the time, what the various competing interests were, what some people said to support a particular position, what some people said to oppose a particular position, what the president decided to do. John F Kennedy decided to ramp up the American commitment in Vietnam. John F Kennedy decided to overthrow the government of Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam. John F Kennedy decided against the the advice of of most of his military, to continue to pursue a military solution in Vietnam with more American resources, John F Kennedy decided to authorize mongoose against Cuba. John F Kennedy decided to confront the Russian subs during the missile crisis. John Kennedy decided to continue subversive operations. After that, John F Kennedy decided to ramp up military spending. He decided to overthrow governments in places like Iraq and Brazil and Guyana. He decided all that, and there’s a huge documentary record of it.
BB: [00:56:23] We have these things called footnotes, which would suggest they check out, rather than I interviewed the CIA guy who said that 30 years ago he found a bullet on a gurney. I know I’m conflating everything, but you get my point, right? Look at what was happening. And there’s just a ton and great. If you want to interview people, that’s fine. But that doesn’t supersede what actually happened. What I say happened 30 years ago is not a more credible version than what actually happened at the time that I recorded or reported, or that somebody viewed or that there’s a paper record for. Right, that’s more credible, that’s more credible, and they don’t do that because they know it would undermine it. Right? They want you to believe they want all of us to believe that people in the CIA and the military had issues with Kennedy over these specific policy disputes. And because of that, they conspired. And this has to be a pretty big conspiracy, right? They conspire to kill a US president. And then nobody spilled the beans about it. Nobody talked about it. Right. It’s it’s just if somebody handed that script to script, you could do this Hollywood. So you can do whatever you want. That’s fair. That’s cool. I don’t expect movies to be historically accurate. They’re movies. Right? But if somebody handed that story to a press to write like a nonfiction book, it would be thrown out. It’d be laughed at. Right? Since there’s no feasible evidence for any of it.
BB: [00:57:52] Oh, the Devil’s Chessboard and Oliver Stone and all this shit. They just throw all this at you and don’t give you a chance to respond. They. For you or shut you out, and then they accuse you of not saying anything. And all I’m simply saying is look at the evidence. You have to listen to anything I say. Look at all the evidence. Read what we’ve written. I say read it because I wrote. I’m saying read because there’s a bunch of footnotes in it. Okay. It’s really maddening. And this heroism, I think that’s the worst part of it really wouldn’t be that big a deal, except so many people on the left are really thumping their chest and they’re all in over this. And it’s just Joe Biden is the legitimate heir of JFK. He’s this is what Kennedy would do. So I said, if you’re looking at Scoop Jackson’s presidency, it’s Kennedy presidency. It’s no different. I think those guys probably did have better domestic programs than Biden. But this is the reality. This is what Democrats do. This is what the Democratic Party does to suggest that somehow we’re not even talking about JFK as an outlier. We are talking about him as the utter apostate of it. All right. He’s the prodigal son who just went off, totally left the reservation and did everything different. And that’s utterly ridiculous. There’s just no evidence of it. I don’t know what to say. And I don’t get why this need for heroes is.
SP: [00:59:09] Yeah, there’s a lot of there’s a lot of emptiness out there, I guess, that they’re trying to fill with something that they really that they’re being spoon fed this and they’re trying to fill some void they’re looking for.
BB: [00:59:21] They search for it . . . Bernie Sanders and Cornel West, and they’re looking like we need the next hero, right? Yeah. Like, dude, organize. Can you tell me who the head of Jewish Voice for Peace is? I can’t, I have no idea. I don’t know who. I don’t know who, who’s created the group, I don’t know. They’re freaking amazing. These people are amazing, right? There’s not a single person in there who’s a hero. They’re doing what they need to do. Students for Justice in Palestine. The folks you worked with last week. You don’t need some media darling. We talk so much about Martin Luther King with good reason, right by himself. King doesn’t create civil rights movement. There’s a huge number of SNCC and there’s Ella Baker, and there’s the people in North Carolina. There’s just all over. Freedom Summer. People like John Lewis and Staughton Lynd. Right? And you don’t need some Superman, some Ubermensch to come in and save the day. And Kennedy certainly was not that. It’s just nuts. Look at the people. Like after he died, the same people were there, right? The same people were there for LBJ telling them what to do in Vietnam, telling them what they’re doing back, largely.
SP: [01:00:28] Ignored by the people who claim that they know all the facts.
BB: [01:00:31] Yeah, they know the facts . . . that that you can find five facts that fit your puzzle. That’s all you need. And what we’re doing is presenting, and it’s not. What I say. We. I’m not saying like what Scott and I say that’s just we’re we’re channeling what we know and what we’ve presented. So when I say what we say, what I mean is the stuff we found is overwhelming. It doesn’t matter who says it or who writes it. Just go in and look at the documents. Look at the notes, go in and read the documents. Right. And there’s just nothing there. And if you want to get fame and fortune for it, “A Salut,” God bless you. You guys are big shots and you’re in the media and all that. That’s great. I don’t really care what bothers me. What I think is really dangerous, though, is that so many people are attaching themselves to that and it’s really skewing and murkying up the sense of politics that the left, I think, really should be engaged in. They’re looking for. They’re looking for their own version of Trump. They actually are.
SP: [01:01:26] It’s interesting how many people spend their time and resources, that the resources is what really gets me on pursuing this JFK conspiracy assassination cult in trying to get Biden to release the documents or to get themselves in the mainstream media. And they definitely are claiming to be part of some element of progressive politic right now. The Israelis, backed and funded by the US, are annihilating the people of Gaza. I looked at Aaron Good’s Twitter the other day, and he’s definitely retweeting stuff opposing the attack on Gaza. But why aren’t you spending your time and resources in undermining what liberals are doing in Israel and Palestine right now? Just like what Kennedy was doing in Vietnam and wanted to do in Cuba. That’s the thing about it is that this is all a pattern. This is . . . there’s nothing new. Nothing is happening different there than it’s happened in the last 100 years of US foreign policy. And Kennedy was a liberal. He was a Cold War liberal. He was anti-communist. He went after he was tacitly in partnership with Joe McCarthy. And they went after progressives and socialists and whoever else, communists and internationally, they waged war on the global South. And that’s exactly what Biden’s doing now. And also the whole McCarthyism thing is they’re going after the left again right now. And the parallels are striking. Like, you’re right, Joe Biden is the sort of is the heir apparent to what also was Obama and Clinton, just to be fair. But there’s there’s nothing different going on here in 2023 than what’s going on in 1954 or whatever.
BB: [01:03:14] Or 1963 or. Yeah.
SP: [01:03:16] Yeah, yeah.
BB: [01:03:16] It’s just maddening. And it’s just obviously to see the left media’s plans. . . It. It’s frustrating when they latch on to these kinds of things and they’re participating in it. It’s unfortunate, you know? We really need to give priority to people who are out there doing stuff, who are in the streets, who are fighting against intervention and the military industrial complex.
SP: [01:03:35] And that’s my point, is that if if the conspiracists are against the attack on Gaza or they’re against the war in Ukraine or what have you, then why do they spend so much time and resources talking about something that happened 50 or 60 years ago, 60 years ago?
BB: [01:03:50] The undercurrent of all this is that there are particular people out there who are really good and want to do the right thing and make everything better. . . and that they’re being stopped. So who are these good people? It’s this. It really is. It’s a fable, right? We need a conspiracy to to explain away why these good people didn’t change everything. What good people in Vietnam? The people trying to change things tended to be in uniform. They were like generals and chiefs of staff and people like that who were saying, that’s a bad idea, right? Like, so just it confounds one because there’s just no basic evidentiary foundation to this stuff. There’s just no evidence. . . .
BB: [01:05:24] We could talk about this. We could go on and on and on because we have so much on this. I’ll leave you with this. The folks who’ve made it this far, we’ve put out all kinds of lists of the stuff we’ve done, articles, podcasts and so on. If you can’t find that, Google it. I wrote a book called Masters of War, which, like I said, has 2 or 3 chapters about Kennedy and Vietnam. I would just suggest that if you want to have an open mind about this, to go look at that stuff, look at the arguments made, look at the historical evidence presented, look at the sources, look at the notes, and you can pursue those further if you want to. Right. We’re not going to sit here and be gaslit and insulted into changing our point of view. I don’t respect what they write. I don’t think it’s based in any kind of history or historical evidence. I think they’re doing it because it certainly helps them on a personal level. But if that’s their motive or not, it clearly has. So I would just suggest, if you’re interested in this, to go out and figure it out for yourself, because the stuff is out there. If you don’t want to listen to Scott and me, that’s cool, but just go out and find the footnotes, the sources, the evidence, the historical vignettes. We don’t rely on tweets and anecdotes and year later interviews or anything like that. It’s important. We don’t need heroes. And the JFK thing is just one. You don’t go around and assassinate a president just for the hell of it. And that’s what these folks are saying. And we’ll pick this up again. We had planned on doing a lot on this, and then to some degree, I decided not to, just because we have, you know, we don’t get anywhere. The media doesn’t want to hear this side of things. And then, of course, in the last six weeks, all of us have just been obsessed with the horrors unfolding in Gaza. Thanks for this, and check it out on your own. It’s important, it’s important. So please check it out.
SP: [01:07:12] Yeah, and if you like what you’re hearing, please share it on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. And if you’re watching this on YouTube, hit subscribe. If you’re listening on your audio platforms, please give us a rate and review. And then also if you like what you hear and check us out at our website, green and Red podcast.org and hit that support button or go to patreon.com/greenandredpodcast and become a patron and we will talk to you all again really soon.
