Thursday, April 17, 2014

SFL Board Member: Lee Harvey Oswald Acted Alone in Killing JFK

Ankur Chawla, 2010-2011 Executive Board Member at the Students for Liberty, didn't a exactly say Oswald acted alone, he just doesn't want you to talk about theories that suggest a conspiracy occurred, any conspiracy. In an essay at the SFL web site, he writes:
The truth is that conspiracy theorists, however unfortunately, are dealing a crippling blow to the movement for liberty. As long as they are associated with libertarians, the movement will be held back. 
I really have to wonder what the hell is going on at some of these "libertarian" organizations. First, we have the promotion of feminist agendas (SEE:  Was Ludwig Von Mises a Feminist?) and now we have the call for the elimination of conspiracy theory discussions amongst libertarians.

Murray Rothbard explained the linkage between conspiracy theories and the advancement of the libertarian movement:
Anytime that a hard-nosed analysis is put forth of who our rulers are, of how their political and economic interests interlock, it is invariably denounced by Establishment liberals and conservatives (and even by many libertarians) as a "conspiracy theory of history," "paranoid," "economic determinist," and even "Marxist." These smear labels are applied across the board, even though such realistic analyses can be, and have been, made from any and all parts of the economic spectrum, from the John Birch Society to the Communist Party. The most common label is "conspiracy theorist," almost always leveled as a hostile epithet rather than adopted by the "conspiracy theorist" himself.
It is no wonder that usually these realistic analyses are spelled out by various "extremists" who are outside the Establishment consensus. For it is vital to the continued rule of the State apparatus that it have legitimacy and even sanctity in the eyes of the public, and it is vital to that sanctity that our politicians and bureaucrats be deemed to be disembodied spirits solely devoted to the "public good." Once let the cat out of the bag that these spirits are all too often grounded in the solid earth of advancing a set of economic interests through use of the State, and the basic mystique of government begins to collapse.
To be sure, Rothbard made clear that conspiracy theory must be based on fact but, when it is, it should be advanced as showing  the true motives of those in power:

Far from being a paranoid or a determinist,the conspiracy analyst is a praxeologist; that is, he believes that people act purposively, that they make conscious choices to employ means in order to arrive at goals. Hence, if a steel tariff is passed, he assumes that the steel industry lobbied for it; if a public works project is created, he hypothesizes that it was promoted by an alliance of construction firms and unions who enjoyed public works contracts, and bureaucrats who expanded their jobs and incomes. It is the opponents of "conspiracy" analysis who profess to believe that all events — at least in government —are random and unplanned, and that therefore people do not engage in purposive choice and planning.
There are, of course, good conspiracy analysts and bad conspiracy analysts, just as there are good and bad historians or practitioners of any discipline. The bad conspiracy analyst tends to make two kinds of mistakes, which indeed leave him open to the Establishment charge of "paranoia." First, he  stops with the cui bono; if measure A benefits X and Y, he simply concludes that therefore X and Y were responsible. He fails to realize that this is just a hypothesis, and must be verified by finding out whether or not X and Y really did so. (Perhaps the wackiest example of this was the British journalist Douglas Reed who, seeing that the result of Hitler's policies was the destruction of Germany, concluded, without further evidence, that therefore Hitler was a conscious agent of external forces who deliberately set out to ruin Germany.) Secondly, the bad conspiracy analyst seems to have a compulsion to wrap up all the conspiracies, all the bad guy power blocs, into one giant conspiracy. Instead of seeing that there are several power blocs trying to gain control of government, sometimes in conflict and sometimes in alliance, he has to assume — again without evidence — that a small group of men controls them all, and only seems to send them into conflict...
 Do we say that David Rockefeller's prodigious efforts on behalf of certain statist public policies are merely a reflection of unfocused altruism? Or is there pursuit of economic interest involved? Was Jimmy Carter named a member of the Trilateral Commission as soon as it was founded because Rockefeller and the others wanted to hear the wisdom of an obscure Georgia governor? Or was he plucked out of obscurity and made President by their support? Was J. Paul Austin, head of Coca-Cola, an early supporter of Jimmy Carter merely out of concern for the common good? Were all the Trilateralists and Rockefeller Foundation and Coca-Cola people chosen by Carter simply because he felt that they were the ablest possible people for the job? If so, it's a coincidence that boggles the mind. Or are there more sinister political-economic interests involved? I submit that the naïfs who stubbornly refuse to examine the interplay of political and economic interest in government are tossing away an essential tool for analyzing the world in which we live.
BTW: Here's Rothbard on the JFK assassination:
The evidence is now overwhelming that the orthodox Warren legend, that Oswald did it and did it alone, is pure fabrication. It now seems clear that Kennedy died in a classic military triangulation hit, that, as Parkland Memorial autopsy pathologist Dr. Charles Crenshaw has very recently affirmed, the fatal shots were fired from in front, from the grassy knoll, and that the conspirators were, at the very least, the right-wing of the CIA, joined by its long-time associates and employees, the Mafia. It is less well established that President Johnson himself was in on the original hit, though he obviously conducted the coordinated cover-up, but certainly his involvement is highly plausible.
The last-ditch defenders of the Warren view cannot refute the details, so they always fall back on generalized vaporings, such as: “How could all the government be in on it?” But since Watergate, we have all become familiar with the basic fact: only a few key people need be in on the original crime, while lots of high and low government officials can be in on the subsequent cover-up, which can always be justified as “patriotic,” on “national security” grounds, or simply because the president ordered it. The fact that the highest levels of the U.S. government are all-too capable of lying to the public, should have been clear since Watergate and Iran-Contra. The final fallback argument, getting less plausible all the time is: if the Warren case isn’t true, why hasn’t the truth come out by this time? The fact is, however, that the truth has largely come out, in the assassination industry, from books – some of them best-sellers – by Mark Lane, David Lifton, Peter Dale ScottJim Marrs, and many others, but the Respectable Media pay no attention.With that sort of mindset, that stubborn refusal to face reality, no truth can ever come out. And yet, despite this blackout, because books, local TV and radio, magazine articles, supermarket tabloids, etc. can’t be suppressed – but only ignored – by the Respectable Media, we have the remarkable result that the great majority of the public, in all the polls, strongly disbelieve the Warren legend. Hence, the frantic attempts of the Establishment to suppress as gripping and convincing a film as Stone’s JFK.
Yet, Chawal writes:
 There is a fundamental disconnect between the rationale behind most conspiracy theories and the philosophy of liberty. If central to our world-view is that government is by nature inefficient, then how could the bureaucrats and politicians possibly mastermind complex plots to control global politics and economics?
What is occurring here is that Chawal is placing a blanket over all activity of government actors and saying that they can never accomplish anything. This is a terrible distortion of Austrian economic theory and libertarian theory---and a denial of reality. Government is terrible as far as being a central planner when considered in relation to free market prices and economic activity, but if a small group of government actors wants to get together to stage a coup or plot legislation to benefit cronies, they certainly can be effective. Chawal's distorted theory is in denial about that fact that coups do occur, that big pharma, the big banks, two name just two groups, do have varying degrees of influence over government and devise government driven schemes that benefit them at the expensive of the people.

Chawal's piece is really urging the whitewash of all activity that points to these evil operators in and around government. They do exist  and it takes a major distortion of correct economic and libertarian theory to suggest there is a "fundamental disconnect" between such theory and an examination of facts with regard to specific events to determine whether a conspiracy may have occurred. 

6 comments:

  1. It's on !
    A full scale infiltration of the Freedom Movement.
    Co-opting the Tea Party movement.
    All these poseur Libertarian groups.

    Rand selling his soul to satan to be elected POTUS.

    I guess in Ankur's world The Dreyfus Affair is just a novel.

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  2. "I really have to wonder what the hell is going on at some of these "libertarian" organizations"
    .
    I don't.
    IRS,NSA,ICE,etc..... threats and/or possibly government drugs.
    .
    Otherwise, There is just NO explaining MR.Chawla's following quote.

    "We do not think the government is intentionally malevolent, just very misguided and unintentionally harmful."
    .
    (I would like to see him tell that to Alex Jones)
    .
    lol

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  3. Pay no attention to to the power elite, says a Koch-funded, astro-turf "student" organization. This same org is promoting hostility to Russia, on behalf of the Kochs, to increase the relative value of their vast energy resources, and to have a hand in Ukraine's. It is also part of the decades-long attempt by the Rothbard-hating Kochs to turn libertarianism into a tame Republican philosophy that buttresses their part of the oligarchy.

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  4. Call me a conspiracy nut but you can make a case that there is an ongoing conspiracy to silence and bury genuine voices of freedom and liberty and thereby move the perceived 'deviancy' needle closer towards one world governance.

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  5. They have to weed out the principled libertarians so they know who to demonize.

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  6. Like that Rand Paul comment above.
    Despite the many good points he advocates, he's voted yes so many times, when we know how Dr. No would've voted...

    this train left long ago, and it's not coming back.
    I feel sorry for Ron every time one of these events happen, must be sad, despite the happy face

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