(06-03-2018, 04:29 AM)TheNomad Wrote: (to me)
Quote:You said: We will never know what was going on in the murky mind of Lee Harvey Oswald, a man who could never form a wholesome bond with anything. He could not fit in in the USA, and he could not fit in in the USSR. If you want to claim that he was a KGB operative -- he was too untrustworthy for a high-risk, low-reward assassination. To claim that he was part of some right-wing plot to take down someone that Dallas-area participants in the right-wing lunatic fringe hated -- such was too risky for themselves for any involvement. As someone with no obvious moral certainties, he could go from one extreme to the other in his political views.
It is amazing you know so much about the man. Did you ever meet him? From where did you receive your intimate knowledge of him? All the adjectives you used are also used for cult leaders, psychotics and the insane.
I have seen several documentaries about the JFK assassination. Much of the detail on Lee Harvey Oswald is already in the public domain, including his military record and his general movements. He did buy a rifle that he left behind at the Texas School Book Depository in his haste to leave. But let us remember that someone like Lee Harvey Oswald (if you lump him with "cult leaders, psychotics, and the insane") is more likely to be explained through his actions than through confessions about his inner self; besides, someone like him likely has little of an 'inner self' and would be either dishonest or simply wrong if he tried to examine his life. Someone who does what he has done will draw much attention. What is said about him is often confusing because it reflects a befuddled man who seems like just the sort to be so foolish as to believe that he could assassinate the President of the United States and get away with it.
Quote:Do you believe at all in the idea of propaganda? Yes? No? Possibly? "Official Narratives" are exactly that. I suggested to another friend here to seek a book called Me & Lee by Judith Vary Baker. She actually knew him; intimately. And if you do not know her story, you know very little about JFK except what has been prepared for you to know in advance.
Intimate partners of those who do outrageous, incomprehensible deeds generally do not hear everything. Timothy McVeigh actually had a wife who may have no clue about why her late husband detonated a bomb in the Murrah Federal Building. Sane, decent people can spill more of their souls than can crazy, violent people who must act normal just to avoid trouble. Oswald's Russian-born wife, who could have known more about him than any person other than his mother has exposed little -- probably because Lee Harvey Oswald did not tell her what he was up to. Let us remember that the FBI is really good at getting people who have guilty (and not-so-guilty) knowledge to expose themselves and get them implicated or exonerate themselves and implicate someone else.
Marina Oswald has remained in the United States without enduring any penal term -- and if the FBI could connect her even to giving Lee Harvey Oswald any hints on any aspect of the crime, it would, and the courts would have given her a prison term. Meanwhile the INS would have gotten and followed directions to strip her of her US citizenship and deport her.
To be sure, I have never read Me & Lee by Judith Vary Baker. I have never even heard of it. Lee Harvey Oswald was a confused, angry loner and loser unable to connect to much or formulate any well-refined or stable beliefs.
Do I believe in propaganda? Certainly -- as by FoX "News", which I have lambasted as "the Propaganda Channel", "FoX Newspeak Channel", and GOP Pravda". Do I believe propaganda? I hope not, but even I can recognize propaganda in such well-received feature films as Gone with the Wind (basically the slaves were child-like in their judgment and needed the stern management of owners and overseers to keep them from straying) and Casablanca (anyone who does not think himself fortunate to be in America is a fool; if you think you have problems, just think of what is going on in the Hell that is the Third Reich and its conquered or satellite countries).
This said, propaganda has its effectiveness, especially where alternatives are unavailable. But alternative views can be far more crazy than some ostensibly-plausible explanation. Some sources (like tabloid media) are inherently suspect. This said, we are near the opposite of the reality that one finds in North Korea, in which there is but one acceptable source of information. North Korean propaganda is ludicrous for its hackish content and techniques. Propaganda from the People's Republic of China is far more subtle, probably because China is far more open to outside news about anything outside China. Yes, I see much of the news that the Trump regime (and face it, this Presidency is close to being a despotism or dictatorship) as propaganda -- incompetent propaganda whose disseminators fail to assess its impact upon the people that it derides.
The most effective propaganda comes from political and cultural leadership that understands the intended target very well and can adapt quickly. Goebbels? No. Falsehoods eventually caught up with him, as shown in the short You Nazty Spy and the cinematic masterpiece The Great Dictator. Think of the cinema bosses in America in the 1930s and early 1940s who had self-evident reason to expose how horrible the Nazis were... and the Churchill government. The really good propagandists are as adept at convincing outsiders as the inept ones (like the North Korean News or 'Comical Ali') are capable of proving their slavish loyalty to bosses who can have them killed. Of course, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who is about as effective in convincing Americans not part of the Trump cult as 'Comical Ali' was capable of convincing Americans of any political stripe, does not fear being murdered.
I am not going to guess what will be exposed when the findings of the Warren Commission are fully leaked. I'm guessing that much has been covered as a defense against defamation lawsuits or to protect sources or exonerated suspects. Maybe that explains why we have theories ranging from right-wing plotters in the Dallas-Fort Worth area to the CIA to the KGB and Fidel Castro. Consider the possible consequences of a linking of the Kennedy assassination to the KGB (over the Cuban Missile Crisis) -- World War III, anybody?
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.