When I was in high school I became a JFK Assassination Conspiracy buff. Part of it had to do with the JFK movie that came out in the early 1990s of course, in which Oliver Stone directed an all start cast in a truly skilled way. I bought every book I could find (and thanks to that movie, there were many more than I could afford) and what I couldn't buy, I checked out from my local library. For one of my senior English classes (with the late Mr. Kip Prenkert) I even wrote a paper on it. I didn't know which conspiracy theory to believe (and there are plenty -- some more outlandish than others) just that the official version didn't seem to hold up.
Like many youthful passions, this one cooled over the years. Oh, I still enjoyed the topic from a certain standpoint of course. When the opportunity arose to purchase a first edition of the Warren Commission Report a few years ago at a rare bookshop, I took it. But the adore of my younger self was long gone. Part of it had to do with finding other things to study, reflect, and be upset about! Part of it had to do with a book that my grandparents got me for Christmas (one of the few fiction books I've read as an adult) The Fourth K, by Mario Puzo...which surprisingly, to me, perhaps because I didn't see it coming until the very end, got me to believe that a random assassin could kill a president after all. Other than bringing it up when I lectured on the Kennedy years, and even then only in passing (and mostly as a means to talk about why we like/need conspiracy theories), I'd mostly left it behind me. Indeed, a few years ago when I had the chance to interview then Senator Arlen Specter (who had come up with the "magic bullet theory"), it never crossed my mind to ask him about his work on the Warren Commission!
But how could I, or anyone, really escape it this week? In the midst of the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address, as well as thinking about the 50th anniversary of C.S. Lewis's death (a Christian apologist whose writings have probably had a bigger impact on me personally than either Lincoln or Kennedy's writings), we were confronted with the fact that Lewis died the same day as Kennedy was murdered. Even then, I wasn't planning on writing anything about it on this blog (we've got to much going on), until that is, I read this.
Now, yes, it was written by a conservative journalist. And yes, he does have a "spin" to put on all of this on when it comes to conservatives and liberals politically (which you may or may not agree with). But that isn't the reason for this post. Rather, I think it gets at something very real. If we can all agree that there wasn't a conspiracy (because if there was, it is maybe the best kept secret, ever) involved and that Lee Harvey Oswald is the lone gunman (watch this if you can for the ballistics/science angle of the shooting and what that gun could do), then we need to remind ourselves who Lee Harvey Oswald was.
The answer to that is that he was a communist. That doesn't mean much to younger readers (or very younger eventual readers, like my children). Communism for all intents and purposes isn't part of their/your reality. Oh sure, there are still, officially, some communist nations -- China, North Korea, Cuba and the like -- but in reality the communism they have is a an ideological veneer for oligarchical and often time totalitarian governmental structures. Not that the old Soviet Union (and associated Eastern bloc) was much better of course (to date, no nation has lived up to all of Karl Marx's requirements), but what is left of communism isn't much, at least not when compared to when the Cold War was at its height. And that apex is right about the same time when John F. Kennedy was killed. The fact that Oswald was a communist, had lived in the Soviet Union after serving in the U.S. Marines (he'd defected and then defected back when he realized that the old USSR wasn't quite the worker's paradise he'd expected), had supported "fair" treatment of Cuba (at a time when the United States, and President Kennedy in particular were fixated on getting rid of Fidel Castro), and had attempted to kill a right wing former Army general (and leader in the Texas John Birth Society), are all known.
At the time, highlighting them may very well have provoked World War III. Remembering them now serves a different purpose though. Communism is a seductive doctrine. It melds disciplines like history and political science and economics together. It seems to be very rational and "fair", on paper. But the paper version neglects the element of the real world most important, and the one that it is missing is taking into consideration (what most Christians would assert to be, fallen) human nature. Every government that has proclaimed itself to be a communist one to date (every one) has ended up spending at least some of it its time as a totalitarian dictatorship. Once given massive amounts of power (often with scores to settle) people find it much easier to use that power to stay in power rather than to do the right thing. And of course, this shouldn't be a surprise either. Some people recognized it early on (read George Orwell's Animal Farm for starters), but when we forget the past (or just don't consider it, as perhaps has been the case with Oswald and the Kennedy assassination), we do a disservice to those who come after us. Because even if the Cold War is over, the seductive reasoning that once (esp. in the 1930s) made communism so popular with many intellectuals (including in the US), is still there, claiming that the previous attempts just didn't get it right, but don't worry, this time it will work.
But remembering Oswald's communism is important for another reason. Communism is officially atheistic. The reason is simple of course. Communist doctrine expects that the state (or more to the point, the government) should be the highest authority in a person's life. It is a doctrine about control (whether the economy, the people, the flow of information), and it cannot survive if there is a place that reminds people of other obligations. Communists were among the first (but by no means only ones) to argue that the state should take care of its citizens. Whatever the merits (and there are many) of a social welfare state, one of the things its introduction did in the first half of the twentieth century, it disrupted older forms of charity. The moment Person A is taxed to help Person B, rather than Person A either directly helping or giving money to an organization, such as a church, to help Person B, the action stops being charitable (which requires a personal connection) and becomes something else entirely. Communists (and other totalitarians, the Nazis are the best example) couldn't have churches doing such things (reminding citizens that they had an obligation to aid the poor for example), because if they did, then the Church (or organized religion) might also remind people that they had other obligations as well that surpassed or super ceded the state's demands on the individual. That God might be more important than the government, or that God's word might run counter to what the state said should be done, could not be allowed.
Historians often remind our students that "those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it" (the words of George Santayana). And even though events in different times are never exactly alike, we should all hope that we, in the United States, live through the assassination of a president. Likewise, we should also that we don't live through a resurgence of communism (or other totalitarian movements) which were such the hallmark of the twentieth century (and were perhaps the greatest killers in World History). The best way to do that is to remember the words once uttered (though he was hardly alone) of one of Lincoln's contemporaries (and like JFK, a Bostonian), the abolitionist Wendell Phillips, who said "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."
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