Do JFKA CTs have a psychological need to believe it was a conspiracy?

[Tom Graves]

Do JFKA conspiracy theorists have a psychological need to believe it was a conspiracy?

If so, is it the result of sixty-six years (it started in 1959) of KGB* disinformation, "active measures," and mole-based strategic deception counterintelligence operations (what Nosenko-protecting John L. Hart derisively called Angleton and Golitsyn's "Monster Plot") waged against us and our NATO allies?

JFKA-specific disinformation wittingly spread by the likes of Joachim Joesten, Robert G. Buchanan, and Mark "KGB" Lane, and (probably) unwittingly spread by Paese Sera-influenced Jim Garrison, Oliver Stone, and James DiEugenio, et al. ad nauseam?

*Today's SVR and FSB

Regarding Nosenko, the funny thing is that he was a false defector-in-place in Geneva in June 1962 (sent there to prevent "moles" from being uncovered in the CIA) and a rogue physical defector to the U.S. in February 1964 whose bona fides the KGB had no choice but to continue to support (through the likes of Bruce Leonard Solie, Leonard V. McCoy, FEDORA, SHAMROCK, AND KITTY HAWK) because he was telling the CIA and a very grateful FBI what it desperately wanted them to hear -- that the KGB had absolutely nothing to do with former sharpshooting Marine U-2 radar operator Lee Harvey Oswald during the two-and-one-half years he lived half-a-mile from a KGB school in Minsk.

[Dr Alan Howard Davis]

The answer is an emphatic NO as far as JFK's assassination is concerned! There was so obviously a cover-up after the assassination that the logical inference is there was a conspiracy. The conjecture since then has been about who the conspirators were. The problem is the conflation of those theories with other ridiculous claims such as a flat earth or bogus moon landings where the evidence speaks for itself.

[Steve M. Galbraith]

The answer is an emphatic NO as far as JFK's assassination is concerned! There was so obviously a cover-up after the assassination that the logical inference is there was a conspiracy. The conjecture since then has been about who the conspirators were. The problem is the conflation of those theories with other ridiculous claims such as a flat earth or bogus moon landings where the evidence speaks for itself.

I've heard many people, not necessarily the theorist types who actively promote the idea but ordinary Americans, say they simply can't believe that a nobody like Oswald could change history so much, could kill the most powerful man in the world. There just has to be something more. It's an emotional, psychological need to believe in something larger, that great events have to have a great cause or force behind it and Oswald simply can't be that force.

So, yeah, I think there is/was an emotional or psychological desire or need behind the belief in a conspiracy. I think some of that is behind the conspiracist theorists too but they are motivated by more than this emotion. It may have started with that but it's more. There's probably also a psychological need for lone assassin believers to think that "the government" didn't kill JFK either, that there wasn't a CIA/FBI conspiracy. That is that one's own government couldn't do such an act. Mom and apple pie and all that. 

As to the coverup: If you know there was a coverup then you must know who they covered up for, right? There must have been a reason for this coverup other than because of incompetence or they didn't want to reveal classified information, e.g., the CIA and the wiretaps, et cetera, or they didn't want the covert war on Cuba revealed. That's a innocuous type of coverup, one that did take place, but not a sinister one. I assume you mean covered up for the murderers, the real perpetrators of the crime? Covering up for incompetence or for national security reasons is different than covering up for those who did the act itself.

But you admit that it's just conjecture as to who were the conspirators? The same ones that the cover up was for?

So how many coverups over how many years have we had? The Warren Commission was ordered to cover up (again for who?) and then all of the people remained silent? There are some staffers who worked for the Commission who are still alive. Why are they remaining silent?

What about the HSCA? Coverup? The Rockefeller Commission? Coverup? The Church Committee? Coverup? How about all of the news organizations and reporters who investigated this? Did they cover it up? Seymore Hersh says he looked into it and found nothing. Tim Weiner, ABC News, the NY Times. It's a lot of people covering this up for a lot of years. People who had no reason, no benefit, to do so. In fact, they had much to gain by revealing it. So, again, who were they protecting?

[Steve M. Galbraith]

The historian William Manchester put it this way:

"If you put the murdered President of the United States on one side of a scale and that wretched waif Oswald on the other side, it doesn't balance. You want to add something weightier to Oswald. It would invest the President's death with meaning, endowing him with martyrdom. He would have died for something.

A conspiracy would, of course, do the job nicely. Unfortunately, there is no evidence whatever that there was one."

I think Manchester is talking specifically about ordinary Americans and not the conspiracy theorists who actively promote their beliefs; but I think it applies generally to them too.

It has nothing to do with the KGB or Putin or Oliver Stone or anyone else. It's an emotional need for some to believe his death had greater meaning, that there was a larger purpose or force behind it. That is, he was killed for some reason. It couldn't just be some nobody, some crackpot, some wifebeater, "some silly little communist" (as Jackie Kennedy said), with a rifle. That makes no sense.

[Mitch Todd]

Do JFKA conspiracy theorists have a psychological need to believe it was a conspiracy?

If so, is it the result of sixty-six years (it started in 1959) of KGB* disinformation, "active measures," and mole-based strategic deception counterintelligence operations (what Nosenko-protecting John L. Hart derisively called Angleton and Golitsyn's "Monster Plot") waged against us and our NATO allies?

JFKA-specific disinformation wittingly spread by the likes of Joachim Joesten, Robert G. Buchanan, and Mark "KGB" Lane, and (probably) unwittingly spread by Paese Sera-influenced Jim Garrison, Oliver Stone, and James DiEugenio, et al. ad nauseam?

*Today's SVR and FSB

Regarding Nosenko, the funny thing is that he was a false defector-in-place in Geneva in June 1962 (sent there to prevent "moles" from being uncovered in the CIA) and a rogue physical defector to the U.S. in February 1964 whose bona fides the KGB had no choice but to continue to support (through the likes of Bruce Leonard Solie, Leonard V. McCoy, FEDORA, SHAMROCK, AND KITTY HAWK) because he was telling the CIA and a very grateful FBI what it desperately wanted them to hear -- that the KGB had absolutely nothing to do with former sharpshooting Marine U-2 radar operator Lee Harvey Oswald during the two-and-one-half years he lived half-a-mile from a KGB school in Minsk.

Some do. For different reasons.

There are some fairly narcissistic sorts who think that if they disprove the "official story," it will validate their self-importance.

Others already have a boogey man haunting their minds, like the CIA or the Military-Industrial Complex, or the illuminati, or the KGB or a vaguely-defined "far right" or LBJ or the "deep state." Boogey men who are the cause of All the Bad Things in the World, so therefore must have orchestrated the assassination.

I think that there really are people who come to this honestly. For instance, it's no wonder that Oswald's murder in the DPD basement garage....on TV no less... launched a thousand suspicions. But these people rarely come out to  debate this stuff publicly on the inter-toobs. 

[Dr Alan Howard Davis]

My research shows that the cover-up was both for hiding actions of government agencies AND revealing the identity of the conspirators would damage national security -as has always been mooted. This does NOT mean that the CIA or FBI -or even the Dallas Police Department had anything to do with the assassination

The only thing that drives myself and fellow researchers is discovering the truth of what happened, and has nothing to do with 'psychological need' as some sort of satisfying cognitive function.

[Tom Graves]

It has nothing to do with the KGB or Putin or Oliver Stone or anyone else.

You don't think the anti-CIA / anti-Clay Shaw KGB article that was published in the Communist-owned Italian newspaper Paese Sera three days after Garrison arrested Shaw on the suspicion that he had orchestrated a homosexual thrill-kill assassination of JFK influenced Garrison to change his theory to "Clay Shaw organized the Assassination of JFK for the CIA"?

You don't think Vietnam War-traumatized Oliver Stone based his self-described mythological ("to counter the myth of the Warren Report") film "JFK" on Garrison's 1988 book, On the Trail of the Assassins, and that said film had a negative effect on our body politic -- making it more cynical, paranoiac, and/or apathetic?

You don't think the KGB would want to make our body politic more cynical, paranoiac and/or apathetic?

LOL!

Did Manchester and Jackie think it would make more sense if J. Paul Getty had killed JFK?

[Steve M. Galbraith]

You don't think the anti-CIA / anti-Clay Shaw KGB article that was published in the Communist-owned Italian newspaper Paese Sera three days after Garrison arrested Shaw on the suspicion that he had orchestrated a homosexual thrill-kill assassination of JFK influenced Garrison to change his theory to "Clay Shaw organized the Assassination of JFK for the CIA"?

You don't think Vietnam War-traumatized Oliver Stone based his self-described mythological ("to counter the myth of the Warren Report") film "JFK" on Garrison's 1988 book, On the Trail of the Assassins, and that said film had a negative effect on our body politic -- making it more cynical, paranoiac, and/or apathetic?

You don't think the KGB would want to make our body politic more cynical, paranoiac and/or apathetic?

LOL!

Did Manchester and Jackie think it would make more sense if J. Paul Getty had killed JFK?

I don't think most Americans who believe in a conspiracy know anything about any of that at all or were influenced by it other than marginally. Certainly Stone's movie influenced opinion. Apparently Garrison's investigation did too. But it was already there; they didn't create it out of nothing. Again, right *after* the assassination - well before Garrison and that Shaw nonsense and Stone's propaganda - most Americans, over 50%, said they believed there was a conspiracy.

This was in 1963 and '64; all before the KGB started blaming the CIA or Jim Garrison or Oliver Stone were promoting their nonsense. From the early days and weeks after the assassination many believed that it was more than one person who assassinated JFK.