The late JFK Jr. and his wife Carolyn Bessette. Image Source: Esquire.
I have published a new post at Vocal Media about myth-making in politics:
The article concerns the rumours spread by Donald Trump's contact and adviser, Roger Stone, who was convicted of lying to Congress on 15 November 2019 about connections between WikiLeaks' 2016 US Democratic Party email release, Julian Assange and Donald Trump.
Stone's response to the Mueller investigation was considered glib and inappropriate. This was because Stone regards everything in mainstream politics as a puppet show staged by the so-called Deep State. The Deep State narrative allows Stone and other pro-Trump activists to conflate Donald Trump's presidency with that of John F. Kennedy.
Image Source: Amazon.
Image Source: Amazon.
Image Source: Daily Mail.
The Deep State Myth
Image Source: New American Journal.
The Kennedy assassination has become a legend inside a myth of the Deep State. Kennedy, his brother, and Martin Luther King Jr. feature as sacrificial lambs in the Deep State narrative. This is why Jacqueline Kennedy's symbolic depiction of JFK's presidency as an Arthurian 'Camelot' was so poignant. Camelot conjured up one main idea: John F. Kennedy was the last independently-acting American president who actually represented his people. And the American people, in turn, are the only people in the world who ever came close to being truly free. Thus, we have in this epic presentation, the most liberated people on earth, once led by their most free-thinking, promising leader. The story goes that that leader discovered an internal fifth column plotting to enslave his people.
Image Source: AZ Quotes.
When John F. Kennedy tried to destroy that group, they killed him and his brother - and anyone else who got in their way. Since then, the United States has been a vassal state of that fifth column and its interests; all mainstream politicians have - to greater or lesser degrees - been professional slaves of this order. Below are examples of quotations which are widely shared online, to 'prove' this narrative.
Image Source: AZ Quotes.
Image Source: Illuminati Rex.
Image Source: pinterest. The original source was an NYT article from 25 April 1966. You can read it here. Kennedy made this statement in 1961; paleofuture thoroughly, but inconclusively, investigated this quotation.
This is a powerful myth. The Deep State conspiracy theory cannot be proven or disproven, because it supposedly involves top secret machinations of corrupted intelligence agencies. These agencies have run amok and become extremely dangerous. They are - the conspiracy theory states - heirs of the Nazis, who survived after the Second World War by going global.
Again, this is an unproven story, but whispered widely among the grassroots, many of whom have not been socially conditioned in the universities and regard professionally-vetted histories as fiction. The Nazis became an internationally-financed and weaponized corporate conglomerate. The theory maintains that they founded a global establishment and planted power players inside peaceful bodies, oriented toward the development of liberal civil society around the world, such that these bodies became their puppet organs.
The James Bond film, Spectre (2015), depicted the type of Deep State post-Nazi organization that pro-Trump conspiracy theorists fear. Spect[r]e 007 Welcome James (James Bond & Franz Oberhauser) (21 October 2017). Video Source: Youtube. Reproduced non-commercially under Fair Use.
Stone and other pro-Trump activists claim that these post-Nazis planted their own people in positions of power in many nations after the war. The outcome in the developed countries was tyrannical but secret domination, exercised by unruly, black-budgeted intelligence sectors. These agencies were supported by mass media machines, and pliant, well-educated and well-traveled chattering classes. The latter were so socially and professionally conditioned as to be unable to see past the benevolent slogans which dominate a nefarious reality. Nazi-esque agendas in social engineering continued, albeit subtly, behind a smoke-and-mirrors superstructure of humanitarian aid, grants, and research.
WikiLeaks' Vault 7 teaser tweet (7 February 2017). This tweet may have been a tongue-in-cheek jab at American spy agencies. Or it may have used that ironic tabloid context to cloak an acknowledgement that the above figures are actually recruits for those agencies. Image Source: Twitter via Know Your Meme.
RELEASE: CIA Vault 7 Year Zero decryption passphrase:— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) March 7, 2017
SplinterItIntoAThousandPiecesAndScatterItIntoTheWinds
This was all going fairly well, until the Internet - itself an intelligence project - was launched and inadvertently birthed a million grassroots rebellions. In 2017, WikiLeaks, a central institution in the rebellious online cause, began to publish the CIA's actual paper trail. They used Kennedy's anti-CIA quotation as a passphrase to read their CIA drop on the Internet. You can look at the Vault 7 drop, which started on 7 March 2017, here. My related post is here.
With Vault 7, Julian Assange took aim at the CIA and aligned himself with the Kennedy myth and the associated idea that a dangerous fifth column had to be destroyed. What made WikiLeaks' drops so dangerous was their claim that these online leaks proved and documented real CIA actions. The inquiry was not contained within the bounds of a controllable US government inquiry, or of the controlled mainstream media. It was held out in the public square, debated by the members of the mob, speaking from their individual bedrooms.
For once, the conspiracy theorist crazies had historical, documented proof of the black budget ops they feared. Could the documents be faked? Could Assange himself be part of a CIA limited hang-out operation? Yes. And thus the investigations, launched by the alt-media into the Deep State myth, went deeper and got weirder.
This atmosphere allowed pro-Trump activists to present Donald Trump as another anti-Deep State president, just like JFK. Conspiracy theorists have even depicted Richard Nixon as a victim of the Deep State. In 2013, Roger Stone wrote a book asserting that Lyndon B. Johnson was involved in JFK's killing and he has accused the Clintons of being involved in JFK Jr.'s death. For Stone and others like him, this story extended into the Deep State's extra-political zone. Political wranglings were a distraction, and any talk about left-versus-right was ultimately irrelevant. Everything has been blamed on the Deep State. It was the Deep State that destroyed America's Camelot.
Arthurian Legend, Applied
Image Source: Amazon.
But America-as-Camelot was also a fiction from the beginning. At The Daily Beast, James Piereson reported on 12 November 2013 that Kennedy's presidency was artificially associated with King Arthur's court by Jacqueline Kennedy:
"On the weekend following the assassination and state funeral, Mrs. Kennedy invited the journalist Theodore White to the Kennedy compound in Hyannis for an exclusive interview to serve as the basis for an essay in a forthcoming issue of Life magazine dedicated to President Kennedy. ...
Mrs. Kennedy pressed upon White the Camelot image that would prove so influential in shaping the public memory of JFK and his administration. President Kennedy, she told the journalist, was especially fond of the music from the popular Broadway musical, Camelot, the lyrics of which were the work of Alan Jay Lerner, JFK’s classmate at Harvard. The musical, which featured Richard Burton as Arthur, Julie Andrews as Guinevere, and Robert Goulet as Lancelot, had a successful run on Broadway from 1960 to 1963. According to Mrs. Kennedy, the couple enjoyed listening to a recording of the title song before going to bed at night. JFK was especially fond of the concluding couplet: 'Don’t ever let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was Camelot.' ... 'There will be great presidents again,' she told White, 'but there will never be another Camelot.' ...... Camelot, the Broadway musical (later a Hollywood movie), was adapted from T. H. White’s (no relation to the journalist) Arthurian novel, The Once and Future King, published in 1958. ...By turning President Kennedy into a liberal idealist (which he was not) and a near legendary figure, Mrs. Kennedy inadvertently contributed to the unwinding of the tradition of American liberalism that her husband represented in life. The images she advanced had a double effect: first, to establish Kennedy as a transcendent political figure far superior to any contemporary rival; and, second, to highlight what the nation had lost when he was killed. The two elements were mirror images of one another. The Camelot myth magnified the sense of loss felt as a consequence of Kennedy’s death and the dashing of liberal hopes and possibilities. If one accepted the image (and many did, despite their better judgment), then the best of times were now in the past and could not be recovered. Life would go on but the future could never match the magical chapter that had been brought to an unnatural end. As Mrs. Kennedy said, 'there will never be another Camelot.'
A 2014 book, End of Days, also confirmed that Jacqueline Kennedy cleverly associated the Camelot image with her husband's death and legacy. She made this association at precisely the point when the grieving American public searched for meaning around the murder of their young, handsome leader. The public never forgot the symbol which Jackie presented to them at this critical moment.The Camelot myth posed a challenge to the liberal idea of history as a progressive enterprise, always moving forward despite setbacks here and there toward the elusive goal of perfecting the American experiment in self-government. Mrs. Kennedy’s image fostered nostalgia for the past in the belief that the Kennedy administration represented a peak of achievement that could not be duplicated."
To build on Piereson's above-quoted analysis from The Daily Beast, the battle with the Deep State not only allowed Trump to insert himself into the Camelot-Kennedy legend. It also involved American conservatives stealing the liberal ideal of progress by following the Arthurian tale to its logical conclusion. Piereson argued that with Jackie's statement, "there will never be another Camelot," she had closed the door on any higher progress in America for US liberals. But he neglected to consider that the liberal idea of progress - complete with its Arthurian packaging - would be appropriated by conservatives. How could this be? It happened because progress was not just about finding equality while sitting at the Round Table; about freeing the US from the demons of inequality and racism; about civil rights and identity politics.
American progress is also about sitting at the Round Table in the first place. It involves the freedom to think, the freedom to act, and the freedom to debate how to build a better life. It is about battling the Deep State so that they cannot control our tools to accomplish these endeavours. Those tools come in the form of the emerging technosphere, which is on the brink of making us all cyberslaves. Trump's activists seeded this idea of technologically-driven progress into the most cutting edge online theatre of all: the Dark Web.
I am not saying that Trump himself - with his ham-fisted speeches, narcissistic misdirections, possible collusion with foreign powers, pussy-grabbing and all the rest of it - single-handedly dreamed this up, because that is obviously impossible. But Trump-in-Camelot is definitely the pro-Trump narrative which now exists online, beyond sense and censorship. It was a successfully-executed, strange, and unexpected exercise.
When King Arthur's court collapses in in-fighting, betrayals, and the break-up of the Round Table, the Camelot legend promises that the dead king will return from the grave to lead his people in their hour of greatest need. This is a common political trope in medieval epics. In 1963, Jackie Kennedy said Camelot was gone and could never return. But the entire point to T. H. White's Once and Future King is just that: 'once and future.' This means that the story of political change in America's Camelot isn't over, and if the liberal Round Table was broken, and the Kennedys were eliminated as liberal political leaders, the banner would be taken up elsewhere.
It was rather artful of the pro-Trump camp to go back to Jackie Kennedy's original source and follow White's novel to the letter. The novel ends with the words: "THE BEGINNING." Trump's hatchet men just keep reading the same book, and seeded the next act of the King Arthur legend into chatter on the Dark Web.
You can't have Camelot without someone coming back from the dead. It would have been ludicrous to cast a portly Donald Trump as King Arthur, even in meme form. Trump's trolls had a whole cast of dead historical figures from which they could choose as they sought to stage a meta-historical and meta-fictional resurrection of King Arthur on the Internet. But of JFK, RFK, Martin Luther King Jr., and JFK Jr., only the last man actually knew Donald Trump in real life, and the two were photographed together. That was enough!
And so, in the autumn of 2017, they brought back JFK Jr. from the dead, and made him the Dark Web avenger and shadowy whistle-blower, QAnon. QAnon became the source of pro-Trump intelligence on the Internet. The fact that this was total nonsense did not matter, because, in the emotional world of grassroots politics, it is the story that stirs the hearts of the people that matters.
What mattered was that JFK Jr. had come back from the dead to save his people. The stories about JFK Jr. faking his own death so he could come back to endorse Trump (as opposed to endorsing one of his Kennedy cousins?) gave Donald Trump the kind of emotional legitimacy that money just can't buy.
When asked about it, Trump could blink into the lights and plausibly deny the whole insane story, even as his hatchet men started to go to prison for lying about their fantastical forays into the realms of electronic media. These are the symbolic and fictional tropes which inform seemingly rational and legal battles in Millennial politics. The technique is not new. The way the symbol has passed into the public consciousness this time, by way of Dark Web and alt-media debate, is new.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment