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Regular readers will also recall that another issue we have considered in this series is when the coup took place, if it did in fact take place.
In today's post I will mention three candidates for "when" the alleged coup or coups took place, as well as an argument that this specific coup business is akin, in some ways, to the dynamics of decline of empire.
That is, this is a "coup" or "coup d' état" that took place in increments a la "a decline" after "a decline", rather than all at once as in "the decline" (A Decline Of The American Republic).
That said, the first candidate for consideration is that it happened during World War Two (Wee The People - 2, quoting Eisenhower), the second is that it happened with the JFK assassination:
On November 22nd, 1963, my uncle, president John F. Kennedy, went to Dallas intending to condemn as "nonsense" the right-wing notion that "peace is a sign of weakness." He meant to argue that the best way to demonstrate American strength was not by using destructive weapons and threats but by being a nation that "practices what it preaches about equal rights and social justice," striving toward peace instead of "aggressive ambitions." Despite the Cold War rhetoric of his campaign, JFK's greatest ambition as president was to break the militaristic ideology that has dominated our country since World War II. He told his close friend Ben Bradlee that he wanted the epitaph "He kept the peace," and said to another friend, William Walton, "I am almost a 'peace at any price' president." Hugh Sidey, a journalist and friend, wrote that the governing aspect of JFK's leadership was "a total revulsion" of war.(JFK's Vision of Peace, emphasis added; cf. Who Really Killed JFK). Soon after the Kennedy assassination the Vietnam War began writ large, and then continued until it had lasted longer than WW II.
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In a secret meeting with Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, my father [RFK] told him, "If the situation continues much longer, the president [JFK] is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power."
The third candidate, for when the coups could have taken place, is that it happened at or near 9/11:
"What happened in 9/11 is we didn't have a strategy. We didn't have bipartisan agreement. We didn't have American understanding of it. And we had instead a policy coup in this country, a coup, a policy coup.(A Tale of Coup Cities - 3, quoting Gen. Wesley Clark). These coup thingys are generally done in secret, so it is difficult to be as precise as one would want to be.
Some hard nosed people took over American policy and they never bothered to inform the rest of us."
One thing is for sure, the things of peace take a long time when the dynamics of military empire are involved, and if we take history as our mentor, military empires do not end peacefully (cf. End To Monroe Doctrine and America's Genocidal Logic at Work Again).
The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.
"At no point have more than 36% of Americans believed Kennedy was assassinated by a lone gunman." Guardian (Link)
ReplyDeleteWhich means that, at a minimum, 64% of Americans believe that there was a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy.
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