Saturday, November 24, 2018

Vincent J. Salandria on the Murder of John F. Kennedy: "that historical day when the republic expired"



Here is a link to an important article published yesterday by Professor Graeme MacQueen on the 55th anniversary of the murder of President John F. Kennedy, entitled "JFK 55 years on: Casting Light on 9/11 & Other 21st Century Crimes."

It should be read and considered very carefully, as should everything else that Graeme MacQueen writes.

The article points to the pioneering and decades-long work of Vincent Salandria (born 1926), whose insights regarding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy should be known to everyone -- but who (revealingly) does not even have a Wikipedia entry about his life and work in spite of his tremendous stature and importance as the first citizen to analyze the Warren Report and publish an article exposing its egregious contradictions, in The Legal Intelligencer (the oldest law publication in the nation), and to continue to set an example of courageous willingness to confront the truth of what took place on November 22, 1963 in the months, years, and decades since -- right up to the present day. 

Specifically, Professor MacQueen points to one specific and particularly incisive aspect of Vincent Salandria's analysis of the assassination of President Kennedy: asking how "an innocent government" would be expected to have dealt with the varying types of evidence available following the murder itself, and contrasting that with the way evidence was deliberately destroyed, eyewitness testimony was ignored, and a single explanation was advanced within hours of the event and all other possible hypotheses summarily rejected, dismissed, ridiculed, or otherwise bulldozed in favor of the one officially-sanctioned explanation.

Professor MacQueen calls this line of examination "the Salandria Approach" -- rather than getting bogged down in endless analysis of bullets, trajectories, and grassy knolls, looking instead at the way the official inquiry completely brushes aside any evidence but that which supports its predetermined narrative, and asking if this is the way anyone who really wanted to get to the truth (rather than someone who wanted to cover up the truth) would behave.

Professor MacQueen's article makes the case that the very same pattern can again be seen to have taken place in the response to the mass-murders of September 11, 2001 in which once again evidence was deliberately destroyed, eyewitness testimony was ignored, and a single explanation was advanced within hours of the event and all other hypotheses summarily rejected, dismissed, ridiculed, or otherwise bulldozed in favor of the one officially-sanctioned explanation.

As Graeme MacQueen points out, this approach is paradigm-shifting in cutting through the interminable analyses and getting right to the very heart of the matter: the obvious and undeniable fact that the government response has been the opposite of what one would expect if an honest effort were being made to discover the truth of what actually took place in these world-shaking events, and to find out who was really behind these murders.

The significance of Vincent Salandria's analysis goes far beyond this insight, however. Readers can and should see that for themselves, by visiting the 2017 version of False Mystery: Essays on the JFK Assassination, available online in its entirety (the table of contents is found here, with links to every chapter and essay in the collection).

There, in the foreword to the book, Vincent Salandria plainly states that the supposed "mystery" of the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 is no mystery at all: "the truth was there for all of us to see."  He then places his finger directly on the real issue:
For most of the people the truth was too painful and placed upon us too much responsibility. We did not wish to re-examine, condemn, and confront the violence in the extra-constitutional power structure that finally ascended to hegemony over our citizenry and over much of the world.
Clearly (as Graeme MacQueen makes reference in his article published just yesterday) this is not an issue that belongs to a bygone era, as far away as 1963 may seem to us here at the end of 2018. Our ongoing refusal to take responsibility and to re-examine, condemn, and confront the power structure that ascended following the murder of the president on that day continues to impact everything that has happened in the years since then, and will continue to do so until it is confronted.

In another article by Vincent Salandria published in 1971 -- in 1971! -- and included in that online volume, entitled "The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy: A Model of Explanation," the author refers to November 22, 1963 as "that historical day when the republic expired." 

If you read that article very carefully and all the way to the end, you will see why Vincent Salandria arrived at such a conclusion about the events of that historical day, and why he perceived that the events of that day have led directly to the deterioration of "the standard of living of our workers and the middle class" along with a deterioration in "the quality of their lives" -- and why he believed there was an ongoing campaign of deliberate destabilization and even the introduction of chaos (both words are used in the original article) in order to prevent a healthy and united people who could isolate and eliminate the usurping elements from their political life.

Indeed, he even warned at that early date -- in 1971 -- of the likelihood that those behind the murder would seek to deliberately "promote the polarization of our society," primarily along ethnic lines (in another article, he described it as "a systematic program of polarization").

At the end of the foreword to his book, Vincent Salandria declares that his primary commitment is to his responsibility to bear witness to the truth. In doing so, he has been fulfilling for these past 55 years, the role of a prophet -- for, as the scholar of ancient truths Peter Kingsley has explained
Prophecy is not about the future. Prophets don't talk about the future. What they do is: they talk about the past -- which has been hidden. Things which have happened -- that have been covered over, and no longer clear. That is what the real prophets do: they speak of the past, but the past that has been forgotten.
In the ancient texts such as the Iliad, as Peter Kingsley points out, the prophet explains to the people why they cannot move forward until they address a great wrong that has taken place in the past and that the people have refused to confront.

And this is what Vincent Salandria is doing. In his 1972 article entitled "The Promotion of Domestic Discord," also included in that same online text of False Mystery, he advises that we should not think that we can "drop out" of society in order to escape the need to confront the ramifications of November 1963, because: "There is no place to hide from the power that can gun down a President."

Instead of dropping out, he offers a clear alternative:
No, let us not turn away from the horror of the killing of John F. Kennedy. Let us join together, black and white, rich and poor, Jew, gentile, conservative and radical, to tell the truth about the killing of Kennedy. Through this refusal to live a great lie we will come together to understand and love ourselves and our society better. Let us not delay in this union of truth. If we do not join together in the search for truth, then guns backed by cover-story lies will pick us off one by one and ultimately join us together -- in death.