Daniel Sheehan on the Cabal that Rules the World
I’ve been teaching a course in 20th century history for
the last few years, and it has always been a challenge to find ways to help
21st century people understand what it was like to live in the pre-1991 world.
I was born in 1959 during a brief moratorium in atmospheric nuclear bomb
testing, but the fallout was at its peak just before and just after this time,
before the definitive end of atmospheric tests by the US, USSR and the UK. The
news was out that Strontium-90 and the Iodine-131 were in the milk throughout
the world. Europe was divided between the Warsaw Pact countries and NATO
countries, and there was almost no free travel of citizens between the two
sides of the iron curtain. In 1972, it was a really big deal when Canadian
professional and Soviet “amateur” hockey teams held a Summit Series to see
which country could put together the best team in the world. People born after
the 1980s find it difficult to understand why the world was ever so divided and
terrified of nuclear war. My students had never learned much contemporary
history at all, and they found this old world to be a strange place.
I approached this broad subject by talking about
specific periods, leaders, events, wars, and regions, and explained the role of
religion, ideology and economic interests. It took a while to see which of
these most interested the students, and which were most effective at revealing what
the conflict was all about. It turned out that the early 1960s captured the
students’ interest and also had the most explanatory value. In particular, one
could start with November 22, 1963 and work backward and forward from there to
gain an understanding of the entire century, of the problem elaborated famously
in 1848 by Marx and Engels when they wrote, “A specter is haunting Europe…” The
specter haunts the world enough still that the current US president felt
compelled to warn about it in his 2018 address to the United Nations Assembly.
After I came to understand the early 1960s as the
touchstone of the cold war era, I found that Daniel
Sheehan, a man who has done much research into the JFK assassination (in
addition to his famous legal career), had reached the same conclusion. In a two-and-a-half-hour lecture he gave in
2016, he stressed that the assassination should not be seen as just an
irrelevant obsession of conspiracy nuts but should be taken seriously as the crucial
event that reveals the roots of the problems faced by the United States and the
world today.
In his lecture he goes over all the details of the assassination
that prove the Warren Commission findings were a coverup, and he explains the
web of criminal gangs, government agencies, and financial interests that
carried out the crime. Then he explains why the assassination is still the
essential lesson for understanding how the world got to its present state.
Readers can go to the lecture to listen to the details about how the
assassination was carried out, but key excerpts from his explanation of its
significance follow below.
Although Daniel Sheehan identifies the cabal that holds
up the power of US hegemony, there is controversy about whether JKF really had
to be killed to protect their interests. JFK could have been brought down by
exposure of his personal scandals and various other means that the CIA has for
character assassination.
Also, it’s likely that JFK would have backed off his
plan for a cold war thaw in order to get re-elected. Many people have faith that
JFK sincerely wanted to end the cold war and could have ended the cold war, but
this policy was an opposition to anti-communism, which, logically, had to be
pro-communist. Kennedy’s devotees never admit to such an endorsement or such a
rejection of capitalism. They want to have it both ways. They want to reject
anti-communism but not admit that capitalism is by definition anti-communist. Ending
the cold war would have meant admitting the Soviet Union’s right to exist and
develop its economic system undisturbed, and this would have also entailed
admitting that the United States also had to move toward socialism in order to
become a just society.
I find it likely that JFK was killed for motives that were
more personal than business-related. He had plenty of enemies: the anti-Castro
mercenaries, organized crime leaders, Lyndon Johnson, Allen Dulles (head of the
CIA whom JFK had fired), and J. Edgar Hoover (head of the FBI). Dulles still
had power in retirement, and by this time he was so accustomed to having people
killed that killing a US president would not have caused any disturbance of his
moral compass, if he had one. All of these people had the personal animus to
want to have JFK killed, but he didn’t need to be killed in order to achieve a
change in leadership or government policy that would protect his enemies’
financial interests. The agencies of the permanent state have many ways to make
sure a president fails or is coerced to pursue their objectives. But perhaps the
goal was to intimidate all politicians in the future with one traumatizing
demonstration of violence.
Sheehan asserts that Dulles “was in the catbird seat,”
coordinating approval for the assassination between those who executed it and
the financial power holders who wanted JFK replaced. Dulles could have told the
latter with great ambiguity that there was a plan to “take care of the Kennedy
problem” and they would have asked no questions about what that meant. Surely,
they would say, it meant he would be eliminated as a viable candidate for
re-election in 1964, not killed. Afterwards, none of them would have had a
motive to disturb the coverup.
Regardless of what one thinks about these controversial
questions about the motives for the assassination and the full roster of who was
in on it, Daniel Sheehan’s lecture provides valuable insights into the roots of
the contemporary political dysfunction and many of the misguided and wasted efforts
to overhaul the economic and political system that rules the world—the calories
burned in trillions of American brain cells on the recent Russian “red” scare
being a prime example.
__________
Daniel Sheehan, Trajectory of Justice, Rulers of the
Realm,
14th and 15th lectures, May 17th and 19th, 2016, University of California Santa
Cruz
00:00:02:
I want to discuss the [JFK] assassination.. because I
want you to be able to discuss this with your family and with your friends and
neighbors throughout the rest of the year, and the rest of your lives really,
to be able to talk about it in a very informed way. The fact that President
Kennedy was assassinated in 1963 is a very terrible event and it was very sad
for virtually everybody in the country, and as important as it was for the
strategic impacts that it had at that time... [nonetheless] these are not
really the most terrible aspects of the assassination... Once you understand
who did it and who was involved in covering it up, then it will be very clear
that the most horrible aspect of it is that it can happen again because the
people who did it were not brought to justice. The people who were involved in
covering it up were never revealed or brought to justice, and for that reason
the effectiveness of the assassination still remains with politicians today who
realize what can happen to them if they cross these particular people. So
unless and until we, that is your generation and my generation, the millennials
and the baby boomers, join together to effectively reveal what really happened
surrounding this assassination, and take the steps necessary to deconstruct the
structural sources that generated this particular assassination, it not only can but it almost certainly will happen again.
00:03:15:
So we want to address this issue directly here... what
the class is all about is elucidating
the elite core of men—virtually all of
them are men—who basically, from behind the scenes, manipulate United States
domestic and foreign policy... We’ll see that this has been happening virtually
ever since the beginning of the country, but there was this especially tragic
period... this whole period from the end of the American Civil War all the way
up to World War One and World War Two, and its aftermath, that led to the assassination
of President Kennedy.
00:57:59
00:57:59
I want to discuss the aftermath of the assassination
that points more and more toward the general explanation of the assassination
that you get in the three books that I just referenced [by Douglass, Scott and
Talbot—see the list of sources]... and we’re going to be discussing things next
week which have to do with the Watergate burglary, the return of the
impeachment resolution by the House Judiciary Committee against Richard Nixon
flowing out of the Watergate burglary, what the connection between the
Watergate burglary and the Kennedy assassination was, the installation of the
Church Committee, the House Select Committee or the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence Abuse chaired by Senator Frank Church, and then followed by the
House Select Committee on Assassinations, and the Iran-Contra Select Committee—all
of which had these major select committees appointed in Congress because of
this sequence of scandals that besieged the United States during that period of
time, which all arose out of this issue that we’re talking about in this
course: that there was this very aggressive effort on the part of the national
security state bureaucracy, and this cabal that I’ve been talking about, to
suppress any type of full-scale revelation about what was going on behind the
scenes in all of those scandals because they are all basically the same thing.
00:59:45:
... what I want to do is return to the historical
origins of this cabal to try to make clear
that it wasn’t just this narrow
period of time that we’ve been talking about— from just before World War One
down to the end of World War Two to the assassination of President Kennedy—during
which this cabal has been functioning. I don’t want you to leave this course
being depressed about the fact that there’s a cabal that has been in charge of
the United States during your lifetime, that has been going on the whole time.
I’m not sure whether that’s more depressing or less depressing, but I want you then
to be able to address what I think we can do about it.
So what I want to do today is point out a dozen or so
key facts that make it clear that the Warren Commission findings about the
Kennedy assassination are totally unreliable and then, secondly, I want to
point out a half-dozen key facts that I believe point directly toward the
larger explanation of the assassination that we’re talking about in this class.
Then I want to discuss this entire issue of the Kennedy assassination in the
context of the general themes that we’re addressing in the course—that being
that there is this element behind the scenes in the United States that
basically dictates the foreign policy and the domestic policy of the United
States.
02:03:20:
Joe Trento [author of Prelude to Terror] said that when he talked to James Jesus
Angleton, he told him that that Allen Dulles in 1953 had hired Angleton to be
the head of counterintelligence for the Central Intelligence Agency on the
explicit condition that Angleton agree never to flutter (that means give a
lie-detector test) to either Dulles, himself or any of the sixty men that
worked with him to help fund Germany at the end of World War One up into World
War Two, and that was the specific demand that was made by Dulles to Angleton.
This is the group of people that Dulles worked with. It isn’t that he answered
to these people but that these were the people that were deep into the centers
of power—financial, banking, investment banking, running the major
corporations, the steel corporations, the petroleum industry. These sixty men
were the people that Franklin Roosevelt was talking about ... when he said that
if this process of corporate consolidation continues, by the time we reach the
end of this century, the entire country will be run by less than 50 men who own
and run the major corporations. That’s what he said back in 1942. These are the
people. It is not that Dulles answered to them but that he worked in
conjunction with them in making these major policy decisions.
02:05:19:
So there was no reason why Dulles would have had to go
out on a limb by himself, to jeopardize himself
[by having JFK assassinated] by not having the support of these people.
It was true that Kennedy had not only abandoned any effort to overthrow the
Cuban revolutionary government but he had in fact agreed to open a back channel
of communications to normalize relations with Fidel Castro. He had in fact
reached out to Nikita Khrushchev, and by reason of this exchange of letters
through Norman Cousins, these 18 separate private letters, that they were
planning to disassemble the nuclear warheads of the United States arsenal and
those of the Soviet Union... These sixty
men and Dulles and their compadres, and their grandparents, had spent a hundred
years [1860-1960] building the United States into the major hegemonic force on
the planet, and it was by dint of their control of a massively superior amount
of nuclear weapons that they had the power not just over the Soviet Union but
China, whom they could not possibly confront in a traditional military engagement
because the Chinese could put in the field a million men against them.
02:07:14:
Allen Dulles would very much have wanted to get the
green light for what he wanted to do [assassinate JFK], and he was in the
catbird seat of being able to tell these men that the deepest, darkest secret
was that they had found out that Kennedy was engaged in the exchange of these
letters with Khrushchev and was actually planning to disassemble the nuclear
arsenal of the United States, and this was viewed as high treason by these
people.
02:14:16:
The key thing to understand is that I’m telling you
this only so that you’ll know how bad things are, not so that knowing this will
paralyze you but so that you will be able to know what it is that you have to
do.
02:18:43:
So what I’m suggesting to you is that if you don’t
understand this information, you may still be living in the illusion that all
you have to do is write a letter to your congressperson, or that you might even
be able to replace your congressperson, and that things would get solved, but
that’s clearly not true because they are not in charge. This cabal is in
charge, and so the key is having to figure out how to dig in and find out who
these people are, what their levers of power are, and how we can dislodge them.
So that’s the conversation that we have to have.
02:19:31:
I don’t want you leaving this course thinking that you’ve
just been told a lot of really bad news because this is in fact the good news.
The fact that you now know what’s really going on is better news than you might
have expected to get at college, and so at least with regard to this aspect of
reality, which I think is a pretty critical central aspect of reality, you now
know what we’re up against.
Daniel Sheehan, Trajectory of Justice, Rulers of the
Realm,
14th and 15th lectures, May 17th and 19th, 2016, University of California Santa
Cruz
__________
Sources
mentioned and other sources
Daniel Sheehan, The
People’s Advocate: The Life and Legal History of America’s Most Fearless Public
Interest Lawyer (Counterpoint, 2013). See the
publisher’s web page for this book for information about Daniel Sheehan’s legal
career.
David Talbot, The
Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret
Government (William Collins, 2015).
Edwin Black, “The Plot to Kill JFK
in Chicago,” Chicago Independent,
November 1975.
James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (Orbis Books, 2010).
Jim Garrison, On
the Trail of the Assassins (Skyhorse Publishing, 2008, 1988).
Joseph J. Trento,
Prelude to Terror: Edwin P. Wilson and the Legacy of America’s Private
Intelligence Network (Basic Books, 2006).
Michael Parenti, The JFK
Assassination and the Gangster Nature of the State (video).
Noam Chomsky, Rethinking
Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam War, and U.S. Political Culture (South End Press,
1993).
Peter Dale Scott, Deep
Politics and the Death of JFK (University of California Press, 1996).
Roger Stone and Mike Colapietro, The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ (Skyhorse
Publishing, 2013).
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