image: Wikimedia commons (link).
As we arrive at yet another November 22, it is most appropriate to pause and consider the magnitude of the significance of the criminal and treasonous murder of the elected president of the nation in 1963 in broad daylight in Dallas, Texas.
Above is a photograph showing President John F. Kennedy "pardoning" a turkey on November 19, 1963.
The tradition of pardoning a turkey -- sparing its life from becoming a Thanksgiving meal -- may seem quaint and light-hearted, and of course it is both of those things to some degree.
But the tradition actually has extremely ancient roots and goes all the way back to the civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia, when the ruler could declare amnesty for debts which were owed. Economist Michael P. Hudson explores the significance of this declaration of forgiveness in his most-recent book, entitled . . . and forgive them their debts: Lending, Foreclosure, and Redemption from Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year (2018).
Another manifestation of this concept was already a well-established tradition at the US Military Academy at West Point for many decades by the time I attended: it was understood any visiting head of state could proclaim "amnesty," and that if he or she did so, then all of the hours of "area tours" owed for infractions against the regulations of the Academy would be instantly cancelled on the spot.
I will never forget the visit by President Reagan in 1987, when I was a plebe at the Academy, during which the president had lunch with the cadets, sitting at a table high in the "poop deck," a kind of open patio situated within a tower-like edifice in the center of the mess hall, where he was served by two of my good friends who were also plebes and who were required to perform all the "table duties" such as pouring out the beverages and passing them up to everyone else on the table, or cutting the dessert into the correct number of servings, and so on.
During every meal, the brigade adjutant would rise from this table and walk to a spot overlooking the entire corps of cadets and announce "attention to orders" from the edge of the poop deck over a loudspeaker, and from there read out all the various administrative updates to schedules and other minutiae.
During that meal, at the time when we would normally hear these mundane announcements, President Reagan himself went up to the microphone and said: "I have an announcement that I've been asked to make, and I wrote it down on this piece of paper . . ."
He then paused for a moment for dramatic effect, before uttering just a single word: "Amnesty!"
As he said it, the president threw his hands upwards and forwards in a kind of victory gesture, and the entire corps of cadets erupted in complete and utter bedlam, standing on chairs, banging on empty metal water pitchers with utensils, and generally making wild shouts of approval and applause for several minutes.
As Professor Hudson explains in the above-cited book, the ability to forgive debts was anciently understood to be vested in those who are tasked with protecting the gifts given to the people of that nation by nature and the gods (or those gifts given by the divine realm, if you prefer -- by heaven). The natural resources of a nation were universally understood to be gifts of heaven: the land, the crop-growing soil, the life-giving sunshine, the rain, the rivers, the woods, the ports, the gifts of the sea, the mineral resources under the earth, and so on.
The role of the king in ancient times was to protect those resources from being "cornered" by oligarchs.
And that is why the sovereign could forgive debts: in order to protect the nation from devolving into oligarchy. In an oligarchy, the natural resources are cornered by powerful individuals and families and "fenced off" such that they benefit only the elites and not the entire nation.
That ancient tension was recognized in the ability of the sovereign to forgive debts, spelled out explicitly in ancient Mesopotamian texts. As Professor Hudson explains, that function acts as a check against oligarchy, because otherwise whenever there was some kind of calamity that caused (for example) a loss of the crops (such as a war, or a flood, or a plague or pandemic), then debtors would be unable to pay their creditors, and they would lose their land to the creditors, who would build their own fiefdoms of land and wealth taken from others, and impose oligarchy.
In a modern democracy or democratic republic, the power of the people, expressed through their elected officials in the legislature and the executive branch, is supposed to play this same role of preventing oligarchy, and of ensuring that the gifts bestowed upon the nation benefit all the people of that nation and not just a tiny elite. The murder of President Kennedy represents -- as the late great Vince Salandria perceived almost immediately in 1963 and declared with absolute clarity in this important video interview from 1994 -- not just the killing of a president, but effectively the killing of the presidency (that quotation is found at approximately the 0:33-minute mark in the interview).
If the elected president can be murdered with complete impunity by coordinated plotters, and if the law enforcement agencies and the entire news media can be made to cover up the facts surrounding that murder from that day to this one, then it should be quite clear that the elected government which is supposed to serve as a mechanism to express the will of the people and stand as an obstacle to oligarchy has been hijacked and is now being controlled by usurpers.
And that killing was not an isolated killing, but takes its place alongside the killing of other leaders who stood against the seizure of the resources given to the people of their nation and who stood against impoverishment and oppression of the people, both around the world (such as the killing of Patrice Lumumba in the Democratic Republic of Congo and of many other leaders in subsequent decades) and also domestically (such as the killing of Malcolm X, the killing of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the killing of Robert F. Kennedy).
This November 22, I would highly encourage listening to that interview with Vince Salandria again, in its entirety.
I would also recommend reading this reflection upon the trauma-inducing nature of the JFK assassination, as well as of subsequent trauma-inducing crimes including the September 11 operation, written by author and teacher Edward Curtin and published in Global Research.
And I would recommend taking time to contemplate the impact that killing fifty-seven years ago has had on the world that we live in today, and the likelihood that we cannot effectively move forward until we face the reality of what took place that day and address it.