Dissenting Views: Investigations in History, Culture, Cinema, & Conspiracy

By Joseph E. Green

All of us, at some level, know that we are being lied to. Some people internalize it and go on with their daily lives. Some ignore it completely. And still others latch onto fatuous opinion-makers whose daily bread depends on the very system they purport to uncover.
Obviously none of this is satisfactory. What we need is to understand how the world works, how systems of power operate, what motivates its operation, and where it all originated. Much of this book is concerned with what are often called conspiracy theories a label which, it is increasingly understood, is used to try and misdirect all thinking about these very concerns in relation to our own lives. For when one knows how the system truly operates, the only rational response is revolution.
This collection of Joseph Greens published work includes articles on political assassinations (The JFK 1o-Point Program, The Open Assassination of Fred Hampton), historical analysis (Critique of an Apologia for Santa Claus), film (The Beginning is the End of the Beginning: Regarding Watchmen), and philosophy (The Elusive Universe.) From government propaganda to popular culture assuming that distinction even exists anymore every subject is treated in respect to its epistemological implications.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 15, 2010
• ISBN: 9781456832957

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Copyright © 2010 by Joseph E. Green.

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Glossary of Common Terms

Against Solipsism

11/22/1963

The JFK 10-Point Program

The Open Assassination of Fred Hampton

A Brief History of the Patriot Act

Patriot Act Timeline

Hampton Sides Wishes With All His Might: Deconstructing Hellhound On His Trail

The Federalists Vs. The Anti-Federalists: A Study in Contrasting Views of Human Nature

Regarding Neil Postman

Notes on an Agnostic Front

Alger Hiss, Richard Nixon, and the Devolution of Discourse

On the Stupidity of Hegel

Coloring the Blank Slate

An Incurious Man: David Aaronovitch’s Voodoo Histories

A Textbook for Alternative History: American Conspiracies

A Tale of Two Statues

As the Major Media Crumbles

Dulling Occam’s Razor

Mark Lombardi: The Aesthetics of Information

Christian Defenses of Slavery in the Antebellum South

What is the Historical Context for the Kennedy Assassination?

Critique of an apologia for Santa Claus

24 Hour Party People/A Response to Brabazon

The Beginning is the End of the Beginning: Regarding Watchmen

Dissenters Filmed: Two Documentaries from Public Intellectuals

The Elusive Universe: Is modern physics a branch of cultural anthropology?

The Merely Electric: Blade Runner and the Ubermensch

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my family—Gloria and Stanley Green, Shanks, and Clifford. I also thank Bob, Michelle, and Jeff Mezzone, and Amanda Nelson, who provided unquantifiable support over the years and without whom this book would not exist.

I also express my great thanks to three folks in particular who informed this collection: John Judge of the Coalition on Political Assassinations, for serving as a continual inspiration; Jim DiEugenio, who first published several of these pieces in this book at CTKA.net, home of the former Probe Magazine; and Ben Rogers, archivist of Poage Legislative Library at the University of Baylor, who assisted me often in obtaining historical materials for my work.

I would also like to thank Christopher GauthierDickey and Harry S. Long, as we remain brothers and sole members of the Honors Club; and Dwayne Vincik, James and Bethany Dickey, and Ralphie Salinas for tolerating my various personal eccentricities and brazen affection for the films of Werner Herzog. I also thank my webmaster, Randy Kelly, for being so consistently positive, and Kristy Kelly, Jacky Keyes, and Lydia Manriquez for being so welcoming. I’d like to thank all the folks I’ve met over the years at COPA, including Mike Nurko, Robert Falotico, John Geraghty, Randy Benson, Ramann Shukla, Judge Joe Brown, Lisa Pease, William Turner, Cynthia McKinney, Jim Douglass, Shane O’Sullivan, Ralph Cole, T. Carter, and my philosophizing roomie, Carl Hannah Montana Chatski. Thanks to Len Osanic and Black Op Radio for providing an outlet for myself and other historical researchers everywhere.

There were many people who assisted with this book through kibitzing, chatting, emotional support, and/or serving as role models: Jedediah Laub-Klein, A. J. Weberman, Lachy Hulme, Jayne Stahl, John Kelin, Mark Crispin Miller, Robert Groden, David Abraham, Jeff Worcester at JFKMI, Richard Bartholomew, Lyndon Barsten, Michael Parenti, Naomi Klein, Peter Dale Scott, Jeremy Scahill, Dawn Meredith, Jeffrey Cass, Nafeez Ahmed, Nathaniel Heidenheimer, Ed (Treefrog) Sherry, and Tara Brabazon. And then there are some folks who provided kibitzing, chatting, emotional support, and served as role models while also playing poker: Jim Buckelew, Chad Toepperwein, Grant Ellis, and Robert Danels.

Thanks also to Bill Hampton, whose communication meant a great deal to me. Long live Fred!

Much love to all.

Glossary of Common Terms

Political discussions can sometimes become a Babel Tower cacophony, as people talk over each other without ever arriving at common ground. I want to avoid confusion in this book and explain precisely what I mean when certain terms are used, so please refer to the following glossary when necessary.

If a term defined in this glossary appears in another definition, it is italicized.

American Values: The belief in the inherent goodness of American intentions and the rightness of our collective cause, without any reference to what is sometimes called ‘the external world.’

Anti-American: This is a broad term that implies resistance to American Values. This can include such activity as thinking, reading books or magazines outside the range provided by your local airport, speaking to other people about topics that are not established by television, and other forms of revolutionary terrorism. This should not be confused with one who is Anti-Swede; as the name implies, this would be simply be a person with an aversion to Ingmar Bergman films.

Bad American: A corrective supplied by Bill O’Reilly, when he announced that he would no longer label people who resisted the Iraq War as un-American. These degenerate infidels would, he said, now be referred by him as Bad Americans. Bad Americans are stupid and going to Hell, but should not be immediately imprisoned unless there are additional crimes such as suspected thinking.

Conspiracy Nut: Any individual who asserts that persons of great power and influence may, like all other humans, take actions in pursuit of their perceived interests.

Conspiracy Theory: Any notion suggesting that human beings in positions of power will, all other things being equal, attempt to act in their perceived best interests if they think they can get away with it. By definition, can never be supported by evidence.

Evidence: Information supporting core beliefs and American values.

Evil: Any person or group who behaves in their own interests to the detriment or potential detriment of the United States, Great Britain, or Israel. See terrorist.

FBI Investigation (on Television): A massively coordinated effort that includes the collection of all available forensic evidence, the following of leads, the interviewing of relevant parties, and the arrest and eventual confession of the perpetrator, in under one hour including advertisements.

FBI Investigation (Real Life): A massively coordinated effort that includes the destruction of inconvenient discoveries,[1] the failure to interview relevant suspects,[2] the identification of an alleged perpetrator despite a total lack of evidence,[3] and the failure to arrest even the alleged perpetrator due to lack of interest.[4]

Fair and Balanced: The scientific discovery made by noted social scientist Rupert Murdoch that there are two sides to every issue, one acceptable to sinful deviants and one acceptable to normal people. You decide which is best.

Fair Trade: A Marxist-Leninist idea concocted by hippies and other wild-eyed leftists that asserts that global welfare, not corporate interests, should dictate policy.

Free Trade: A global market system that respects the rights of NATO countries and their allies to vigorously pursue the rape and dismantling of less fortunate countries.

Freedom: Your right to obey the Blackwater mercenary holding the automatic rifle.

Freedom Fighters: A group of revolutionaries who have aligned their goals with the desires of the United States, Great Britain, or Israel; for example, the expansion of increased territory from which to buy and sell narcotics. Sometimes freedom fighters, once they have attained power, will begin to demand a larger percentage of the profits or—if they become truly evil—start using their profits to rebuild the infrastructure of the country they live in. Such activity automatically turns them into terrorists.

Globalism: The interconnected world that will magically raise the living standards of ordinary human beings, if only we wish with all our might. By no account should it ever be confused with a concept that will result in near-universal misery but enormous profits for a tiny elite and its paid cheerleaders in the mainstream press.

Historical analysis: The recognition, based in fact, that historical events are so complex and motives so arcane that no one can ever ascribe any given activity to the will of any person or group of people. Unless, of course, it happened in Stalinist Russia or something.

Historian: A paid professional, adept at tracing shadows on the cave wall.

Insurgency: What happens when a people conquered by NATO forces fail to submit to freedom. The British sometimes refer to this behavior as being a poor sport.

9/11: The murder of 3,000 people on American soil by Osama bin Laden and his dark minions, the imperative for wars with Afghanistan and the Middle East, the reason we must elect Rudy Giuliani to the Presidency, and the event that proves the pressing need for a tax break for the wealthiest one-tenth of one percent of all Americans.

‘Possibly linked to Al-Qaeda’: This phrase refers to people who are Arabic, Indian, African-American or otherwise scary and disliked by The American Public and are found to have possibly contributed some money to a charity that may have been connected to a mosque that could theoretically have had a known terrorist’s cousin in the same county. This also refers to people such as Saddam Hussein, who has no known connection to Al-Qaeda but is also not well liked by The American Public. This emphatically does not refer to those who definitely have a link to Al-Qaeda, such as Zbigniew Brzezinski.[5]

Propaganda: Information at odds with core beliefs or American values.

Supporting the Troops: This consists of praising the heroism and sacrifice of soldiers as they fight and die in operations benefiting military contractors, munitions manufacturers, and a handful of investment bankers and their stockholders. Suggesting that the best way to support the troops would be to bring them home is, of course, seditious and a clear example of thinking.

Targeted Assassination: The only sensible response to terrorist actions that doesn’t involve saturation bombing.

Terrorism: Any activity that thwarts or attempts to thwart U.S., British, or Israeli interests. Note: can also refer to a conquered people’s refusal to take any action other than throwing themselves under the treads of advancing NATO tanks.

Terrorist: Any person who is no longer perceived as useful to the U.S. Department of Defense and is therefore now off the payroll; i.e., Rafael Trujillo, Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, etc.

Thinking: The use of one’s cognition to make judgments that could, at least in principle, conflict with those handed down by the proper authorities. Such behavior invites ridicule, ostracism, and potential imprisonment.

Against Solipsism

Unless something is certain, nothing else is even probable.

—C. I. Lewis, 1952

Is there an external world? This may seem an obvious question, but it remains a fundamental and arguably unanswerable one. When Rene Descartes attempted to find the absolute foundational premises from which one could build a science, he hit upon the cogito ergo sum—‘I think, therefore I am.’ However, as has been pointed out, even this makes too large an intuitive leap. The ‘I’ is presupposed. What Descartes should have said is ‘I think, therefore there are thoughts.’ The thoughts are indubitable; the container, an assumption.

In his attempt to construct a foundational monument to science, Descartes did so to counteract the idea of solipsism. Solipsism is the idea that we cannot get outside of ourselves to prove the existence of an external world apart from our own thoughts. Because our senses limit our perception to external observation—that is, we cannot inhabit another person’s body—we are therefore limited in what conclusions we can draw from the plurality, the world. The philosopher Immanuel Kant stated that we cannot know noumena, but only phenomena; or, to use his language, we cannot know things-in-themselves. This idea was later built upon by B.F. Skinner as the theory of Behaviorism, which studied all entities solely in terms of their observable quantifiable effects.

How do I prove, for example, that Jane feels pain? I pinch her and she cries ‘Ouch!’ This is what I do when someone pinches me. That is, we make an argument from analogy. Of course, not everyone responds the same way; a masochist may demand to be pinched harder. However, this is an anomalous circumstance. In virtually all cases, people respond the same way to basic stimuli, especially at the most primitive or instinctual levels. (In other words, no matter where you go in the world, people react to being scared by jumping or making sudden movements away from the stimuli. In fact, animals can be seen to react this way as well.)

Bertrand Russell describes the issue like so:

There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that remembered a wholly unreal past. There is no logically necessary connection between events at different times; therefore nothing that is happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the hypothesis that the world began five minutes ago.[6]

I actually think Russell’s supposition here is false and that in fact it is, if not a logical impossibility, demonstrably highly improbable.

What is the probability that massive complexity in the universe is the construct of billions of interactions, some of which are the product of minds and some of which are not, versus the probability that everything I experience is the product of one mind, my own?

I go to the library. In the library are thousands of books on every conceivable subject. I open a book about the history of whaling and immediately see all manner of esoteric information. I open a book about theoretical physics and see information, some of which I may not even understand at first. I go to the languages section and see books in Chinese, Russian, French, and a dizzying number of more obscure languages, depending on how large the library is and what it holds.

I leave the library and decide to take a walk on the sidewalks of Manhattan, stopping at Madison Square Garden and walking about Times Square and finally getting on a subway to go to the Bronx for a Yankees game. All around me are voices in innumerable dialects spoken by people of highly variable ethnic backgrounds, all of whom have specific movements, pitch, frequency, and appear to be of various sizes and smells. They are also consistent; if I turn my head around to follow the cute Asian girl who was walked past me, she remains there; she doesn’t suddenly disappear or replaced by some other person or thing. The world remains, at all times, internally consistent. Those times the world is not is when we know something is wrong, like we’re drunk or sick.

If solipsism is true, my mind is continually generating this information and providing it to my senses in a continuous stream of data. Either I have all of this information locked in my own head at all times, or my brain is in a perpetual state of laying tracks ahead of the train as I continue my existence.

Another way of saying this is to state that every institutional fact in the known world is now a product of one thing, my brain. I am, in effect, Berkeley’s God, inventing the universe by way of thinking about it.

Now part of that world that my brain is continuously generating is that the world behaves in lawlike fashion. That is to say, interacting with the ‘environment’ produces a consistency of perceptual effects. I remain on the Earth due to the effects of gravity. I drive my car to the store and the store does not suddenly become a circus. (Douglas Adams described a situation in which this would be the case, in The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in his chapter about the Infinite Improbability Drive. A pair of missiles may well become a whale or a geranium in its presence.) I perceive relationships (not cause, as such, invoking Hume, but relationships that imply cause) such as when a billiard ball is struck, it moves in a particular direction. All of this information is either coming from my real perception of the real external world, or it is coming from my brain.

So what is more probable?

Is it more probable that this relatively consistent (except in certain complicated situations) world with laws, relationships, and other human beings, complete with histories and languages, is the product of millions of different tiny causes, or a single simple cause, my own mind?

Barring significant evidence the other way (and indeed, it’s hard to see what could constitute evidence if I accept the solipsist’s argument) then it is infinitely more probable that the astonishing complexity I perceive in the universe is the product of more than one cause. Quite simply, the concept that my brain is the unmoved mover has such an infinitesimal chance of being correct that it is not worth discussing.

The same thing is true in Russell’s example. Is it more probable that the world came about as a gradualist process of a long chain of (not necessarily all related) causes, or that it manifested five minutes ago? Because if it did manifest five minutes ago, we have to suppose that it did so from the interaction of this same complex chain. (If we don’t, and we suppose that it evinced from a single mind—either my own or someone else’s—then we’re back to the problem of probability, and how unlikely it is that can be true.) We know from everything we’ve learned about the external world (via empiricist means, that is, sense impression) that it is singularly improbable such an event could occur in the universe we study. We can therefore dispose of the idea as not worth pursuing, again barring some new striking evidence to the contrary.

11/22/1963

This was the first thing I ever wrote about the Kennedy assassination for publication. I lived in Austin at the time, and when the Austin American-Statesman, the paper of record, ran a pair of frankly incompetent articles about the JFK assassination, I was compelled to write a response.

In the Sunday, November 16, 2003 issue of the Austin American-Statesman, there is a special section (consisting of two full pages) addressing the John F. Kennedy assassination. It is no better and no worse than most such retrospectives (and another is planned on network television, to coincide with the 40th anniversary), but it provides a good example of the kind of coverage the assassination typically receives.

On the first page of the section, the Statesman places a graphic showing JFK’s head surrounded by other pictures representing various assassination theories. Among the theories mentioned are: (1) UFO cover-up; (2) Joe DiMaggio arranged it; (3) LBJ did it; (4) Kennedy ordered it himself; and (5) Oswald was aiming at Connally, or Jackie, and missed. As so often happens, the editor decides to focus on several absurd theories rather than fairly examine the facts of the case. This has the effect of marginalizing those who maintain that the case is far from being closed.