JFK Assassination Forum
JFK Assassination Plus General Discussion & Debate => JFK Assassination Plus General Discussion And Debate => Topic started by: Tom Graves on June 26, 2025, 08:22:15 PM
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
(https://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Production/Cms/POLL/dolzvblqn0wqheivhj1k7q.png)
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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.
And your research says the conspirators were? Who exactly? You keep mentioning them but never telling us who they were.
It's 2025 not 1963 or '64. What national security threat or harm is there today if the government revealed that "X" killed JFK in 1963? Anyone who was involved is probably long dead. If they were in the 30s and 40s at the time they would be 90+ if even still alive. What would be revealed that injures the state, threatens US security? Besides, how have they kept it quiet all of these decades?
The question about a psychological need to believe in a conspiracy wasn't, as I understood it, just about you and your fellow researchers (whoever they are) or conspiracy activist types. It was a question about conspiracy theorists in general, those who think it wasn't Oswald alone.
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(https://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Production/Cms/POLL/dolzvblqn0wqheivhj1k7q.png)
Just curious: What happened between 1966 and 1976 that caused the percentage of people who believed it was a conspiracy to rise precipitously, and the percentage of people who believed LHO did it all by him widdle Marxist self to fall equally dramatically?
Likewise, what happened between 2001 and 2003 that caused the former to fall by 6 points and the latter to rise by 6 points?
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The OP is rather silly. Tom Graves has also made it clear that his conception of America compels him to reject any and all evidence of conspiracy in JFK's death. In his mind, as he has plainly admitted, the conspiracy claim is "nation-rending."
The vast majority of those who posit a conspiracy in JFK's death originally believed in the lone-gunman theory. I am one of them. Until I began to read about the JFK case after seeing Oliver Stone's 1991 movie JFK, I assumed Oswald was the gunman and that there was nothing more to it.
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The vast majority of those who posit a conspiracy in JFK's death originally believed in the lone-gunman theory.
I went from November 1963 to mid-1992 assuming LHO did it all by himself, then to watching Oliver Stone's Jim Garrison-based, self-described mythological film "JFK" and believing for about twenty-five years that it was a conspiracy by the evil, evil, evil Military Industrial Intelligence-Community Complex, then to reading about the assassination and participating at the so-called JFK Assassination Debate - Education Forum for several years (and, more recently, the "JFK Truth Be Told" FB forum) and to finally realizing that a self-described Marxist and former sharpshooting Marine U-2 radar operator by the name of Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK, with or without the logistical help of the KGB or the DGI, by firing three shots at him over 10.2 seconds in the echo chamber known as Dealey Plaza.
Until I began to read about the JFK case after seeing Oliver Stone's 1991 movie JFK, I assumed Oswald was the gunman and that there was nothing more to it.
What was it about "JFK" that made you want to read about the assassination? After doing all that reading, how accurate did you find Stone's self-described mythological ("to counter the myth of the Warren Report") film to be? Which "details," if any, do you think he got wrong? Which (KGB-influenced) authors did you read? Joachim Joesten? Thomas G. Buchanan? Mark Lane? Jim Garrison?
At what point did you conclude that "only" 20 to 30 bad guys were involved in the planning, the "patsy-ing," the shooting, the getting-away, and the all-important (and evidently ongoing!!!) cover up?
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The OP is rather silly. Tom Graves has also made it clear that his conception of America compels him to reject any and all evidence of conspiracy in JFK's death. In his mind, as he has plainly admitted, the conspiracy claim is "nation-rending."
The vast majority of those who posit a conspiracy in JFK's death originally believed in the lone-gunman theory. I am one of them. Until I began to read about the JFK case after seeing Oliver Stone's 1991 movie JFK, I assumed Oswald was the gunman and that there was nothing more to it.
Where is your evidence that the "vast majority" of conspiracy believers originally believed in the lone gunman theory? I've never seen anything remotely supporting such a claim. Where's the support for this?
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Do JFKA conspiracy theorists have a psychological need to believe it was a conspiracy?
Speaking for myself, no.
I'm naturally a skeptic when it comes to most conspiracy theories. However, I don't deny the fact that humans do conspire to do illegal and unethical things. Which means, some conspiracy theories prove to be true, and not just a theories (ie Watergate and Iran-Contra/CIA-drug trafficking).
The reasons I lean towards the existence of a conspiracy in the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and MLK are entirely evidence-based. In all three of those cases, there's enough smoke to conclude that a conspiracy is plausible or likely.
I take a logical approach to most things in life, hence why I'm not a religious person or superstitious.
SO, again, speaking for myself only, I'm not shooting from the hip or leaning towards conspiracy for emotional reasons. I lean towards conspiracy based on the unusual amount of "smoke" surrounding the JFK assassination.
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 the KGB would want to make our body politic more cynical, paranoiac and/or apathetic?
What's most ironic about this thread is that you're advancing your own conspiracy theory that the KGB is solely to blame for Americans not being convinced that LHO acted alone while insulting people who disagree with your views.
I don't doubt that the Soviets/Russians at various times amplified misinformation or conspiratorial stuff in the JFK assassination. Where I think you sound kooky is how you make the Russians seem super effective and omnipotent when the reality suggests otherwise. The Russians couldn't even manipulate politics in the former Soviet countries that are in their own backyard successfully yet we're supposed to believe the Russians are good at manipulating politics in a vast country which is culturally very different from their own?
Question, do you still believe the Russians rigged the 2016 election for Donald Trump? If yes, are you aware that you believe a 'conspiracy theory'? Do you have a psychological need to believe Putin rigged American elections in Trump's favor?
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I don't doubt that the Soviets/Russians at various times amplified misinformation or conspiratorial stuff in the JFK assassination. Where I think you sound kooky is how you make the Russians seem super effective and omnipotent when the reality suggests otherwise. The Russians couldn't even manipulate politics in the former Soviet countries that are in their own backyard successfully yet we're supposed to believe the Russians are good at manipulating politics in a vast country which is culturally very different from their own?
KGB true defector Major Anatoliy Golitsyn said that the Kremlin planned in 1959 for the Soviet Union to eventually collapse so that the West would drop its guard.
Question, do you still believe the Russians rigged the 2016 election for Donald Trump?
If by "rigged" you mean that "former" KGB officer Vladimir Putin used disinformation and "active measures" ops to install The Traitorous Orange Bird (rhymes with Xxxx), as our "president" on 20 January 2017, of course I STILL do.
Don't you?
If yes, are you aware that you believe a 'conspiracy theory'? Do you have a psychological need to believe Putin rigged American elections in Trump's favor?
Compared to Michael Griffith's "20 to 30 bad guys" who were somehow involved in the planning, the "patsy-ing," the shooting, the getting-away, and the all-important (and ongoing!!!) coverup of the JFKA, the KGB*'s and the GRU's efforts to put The Traitorous Orange Bird (rhymes with Xxxx) in the White House are well documented.
How many bad guys do YOU figure were involved in the planning, the "patsy-ing," the shooting, the getting-away, and the all-important cover up?
Just a few, or oodles and gobs?
*Today's SVR and FSB
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KGB true defector Major Anatoliy Golitsyn said that the Kremlin planned in 1959 for the Soviet Union to eventually collapse so that the West would drop its guard.
:D :D :D :D :D
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And your research says the conspirators were? Who exactly? You keep mentioning them but never telling us who they were.
It's 2025 not 1963 or '64. What national security threat or harm is there today if the government revealed that "X" killed JFK in 1963? Anyone who was involved is probably long dead. If they were in the 30s and 40s at the time they would be 90+ if even still alive. What would be revealed that injures the state, threatens US security? Besides, how have they kept it quiet all of these decades?
The question about a psychological need to believe in a conspiracy wasn't, as I understood it, just about you and your fellow researchers (whoever they are) or conspiracy activist types. It was a question about conspiracy theorists in general, those who think it wasn't Oswald alone.
I will reveal the conspirators- in time. What I am first doing is showing that the idea that the CIA/ FBI/ anti-Castro/Johnson theories do not hold up to close scrutiny, but have become the accepted narrative, set in stone, when they don't deserve to be. As a scientist, I would deem any study/ experiment conducted thousands of time without a fully plausible result, that doesn't account for all of the variables, is a failure. Time to revisit, re-examine, find another avenue of research that produces more plausible results.
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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.
Well said. There's nothing psychological about this case. It's just very obvious that the official report is a whitewash. The shooting sequence alone shows that there's no way that a shooter on the 6th floor of a building could have done the shooting with an old out-of-whack gun. The Zapruder film clearly shows this. The shooting starts immediately after you see him from the sign - the shots are almost at the same time, but not quite. The throat shot happens first and then the back shot right after it, which is why he's nudged forward. Connally is not even hit until a few seconds in between.
The head shot sequence then starts after a slight pause. Then the flurry of shells [not my words but from someone who was actually there, the SS guy driving]. There were reports that there was smoke in the air further down near the train tracks [per Pat Speer's website].
The autopsy photos also prove that nothing lines up the way they wrote it up. The back shot alone has no exit point.
Then we have the supposed assassin murdered in plain view of the entire world, with hoards of policemen standing around watching.
I really don't care who did it but will say this - Russia didn't do it, nor Cuba. My hunch is it was obviously some kind of inside job. Was it the Georgetown clique? We don't know. CIA? Same answer. I lean this way because the so-called assassin looks too connected. It wasn't just some nobody like Tim McVeigh. The guy "defected" to the hottest enemy during America's Cold War, then changes his mind and comes back with a hot Russian wife to boot. No questions asked.
He's seen handing out leftist papers on TV and then appears on a "debate" about it on TV and radio, almost as if he's reading a script. All of this a mere 3 months before the murder.
And as you mention above, there are too many kooks and crazies out there muddling everything up. His body was thrown down into the cargo hold; the SS was involved; and on and on and on. And it's not just this case. Go to any crime forum and you can see kooks there as well.