Comparing JFK assasination to 9/11, and have our own security concerns turned us into a police state we’ve always fought against?

I’m not sure what has been the most momentous thing to happen in current events in my lifetime, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy or the 9/11 attack on the U.S.

With the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination coming up (Nov. 22) I was thinking of those two events. In my life, perhaps, the JFK assassination has had more significance. I was a freshman in high school. I paid attention to current events and read a weekly news magazine and watched Huntley-Brinkley and Walter Cronkite newscasts on TV. I knew that not everyone loved JFK even if the hype in popular culture seemed to indicate otherwise. Still, he and his family were something different and exciting for much of the public. The president was relatively young (in his 40s), when compared to the previous presidents, and I guess JFK and wife Jackie and children Caroline and John John were the first mediagenic first family. And JFK had that strange but fun-to-listen-to Boston/Irish accent where he pronounced Cuba as “cuber”, and in his press conferences, of which he held many, he would flash that magic, magnetic smile, often along with some expression of wry humor often via innuendo, which to any guy seemed cool and probably to any girl or woman, well, whatever…

But when it came to things like the Cuban Missile Crisis when the nation was actually concerned that it might end up in nuclear war at any second with the standoff between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, he presented himself as a steady reassuring hand as he soberly addressed the public. He just seemed to say the right thing.

They say he was not a top student at Harvard (I don’t know, maybe he kept up the “gentleman’s c”) but he was eloquent in speech and always seemed to make the well-reasoned and convincing case.

He was staunchly pro-civil rights but had to deal with the political realities of the times. It would take the older and much more seasoned congressional wheeler-dealer Lyndon Johnson, JFK’s vice president, to push the civil rights legislation through after he assumed the presidency, upon the assassination of JFK.

The assassination of JFK blew our whole world apart. While he had his detractors much of the nation seemed enthralled with him and his family. They were like royalty almost. And maybe that is what someone or ones were afraid of.

I’m not a conspiracy buff by any means. But I have to wonder if his assassination was not a CIA job. That theory has been posited before of course. I have a book by some woman who claims to have been a lover of Fidel Castro (I mean one of his lovers) and who claims that she was with the CIA and that they were mad about JFK’s abandoning the Anti-Castro forces in the ill-fated Bay of Pigs operation. I think her book is rather obscure and she may have well been just trying to make some money. You think? But still…

We know that Lee Harvey Oswald was the assassin. We also know that he did not just pop up out of nowhere. The CIA and the FBI already knew about him and yet why did they not make sure where he was that fateful day in Dallas? Well, back then maybe we did not have that much capability in tracking people? (We had a hard time finding Osama Bin Laden is nearly plain sight.)

And what made me think of all of this is the recent and ongoing revelations as to how much our own government via the National Security Agency and other intelligence branches is spying on its own citizens — eavesdropping on phone calls, emails, and other world-wide web data. It is also spying on friendly foreign leaders and in the process the president himself (which he claims not to have known about — and that is bad either way). I mean what possible reason or justification is there to spy on our allies? And is not an agency dangerous if it is spying on the president? J. Edgar Hoover, the late director of the FBI, was infamous for blackmailing high officials with the dossiers he held on them.

And then to 9/11. In the first direct attack on U.S. soil since the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, a group of terrorists pulled off the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York, hijacked four airliners, and ran one into the Pentagon. And the baffling thing is that our intelligence agencies had the names of these guys and I guess their descriptions on their watch list and yet they were allowed to board airliners. Okay probably too paranoid conspiracy-centric here, but did someone want this to happen? We know that forces behind the rather dim-witted former president George W. Bush were pushing for war in the Middle East and even published a paper that opined we needed a new Pearl Harbor to wake the electorate up — and along comes 9/11 with the numbers of dead very close, close to 3,000 in each.

The death of JFK put LBJ in office. I have no doubt that he had good intentions, but he was perplexed over what to do about the ongoing situation in Vietnam, threatened by an ongoing insurgency that would result in a communist takeover of South Vietnam. And it was simply understood at the time that we had to stop communism anywhere we could. While JFK was trying to keep from sending actual American combat troops there, while supporting the anti-communist side nonetheless — we only had military advisers in the theatre — LBJ eventually sent as many as a half million U.S. troops there, even though he knew from almost the start that the situation was hopeless. But ever since China was lost to the communists in 1949 during a Democratic administration, Democrats had to be on guard not to lose anything else. The fear of being weak in the face of the communist threat forced President Harry Truman to send troops to save South Korea (a highly unpopular move at the time).

And the lives of so may young Americans (and the their loved ones) were forever changed by LBJ’s actions. I probably would not have gone into the Army if it were not for the Vietnam. In some kind of twisted logic I joined the Army, figuring I would be drafted soon enough anyway. The draft lottery had not been put into place at that time. But I was sent to Germany. But one of my brothers was grabbed by Uncle Sam and put into the Army and sent to Vietnam. Fortunately he did his tour and came home safe and sound. But such was not the case for nearly 60,000 American troops who died and thousands more who were gravely wounded. And besides that: all the lives torn apart. Wives who lost husbands and parents who lost children and so on.

(Even though I joined the Army I was not much of a soldier, but I am glad I served if for no other reason than I can say I served. I am proud that all the boys in my family served. My oldest brother served 20 years in the U.S. Navy.)

So, anyway, the 9/11 disaster was used as a pretext to get our nation into war in both Afghanistan and Iraq. We all know what that has wrought, nearly 7,000 dead Americans over a decade (thousands more wounded) with no discernible good to have come of it and trillions of dollars drained from our treasury. But of course we can’t afford to guarantee health care to our own citizens, the troubled Obamacare program notwithstanding, and have to cut back on aid to the poor, and we fail to invest in our infrastructure.

So, it is hard to choose as to which event was more momentous, the JFK assassination, or 9/11. There is no correct answer. It depends upon your age, really, and your own personal situation (you may have lost someone in the current wars).

And then again, with the result that intelligence agencies have been so emboldened to turn on the public they are supposed to protect, maybe 9/11 is the more momentous.

We are all so accustomed to giving out our Social Security number and our email address and we are so wired-in now with commercial interests knowing our personal tastes and information and every move, that we almost do not notice that we have become something close to a police state worthy of the old Soviet Union or East Germany or Hitler’s Germany. So far, no discernible ill effects, but overnight that all could change, the apparatus for the evil of control over all humans by a minority is already in place.

There is talk (or maybe it has already happened) of domestic use of drone aircraft by local law enforcement. We may not fear it as much when used elsewhere, but here?

We really need to pause and think about all of this.

NATO and the changing alliances or Russia part of NATO???

NATO, or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was formed the year I was born, 1949. I was once a part of it — a very small part — serving in Germany as a soldier, part of the U.S.’s NATO contingent (well, actually as far as I was concerned I was just an American GI and that is it).

I thought I understood it, it was an alliance formed by the U.S. and its European allies to fight the advance of our old ally but Cold War foe, The Soviet Union.

Now we have invited Russia, a main part of the former Soviet Union, to all but join the alliance. Many former Eastern European Soviet Block nations and new nations, all of which were part of the old Soviet Block, are members of NATO.

Get this — we want Russia to join with us in a missile defense shield against possible attacks from the Middle East, most notably Iran, and from North Korea, the same North Korea that the Soviet Union and the Communist Chinese helped attack our ally South Korea.

We rebuilt our former enemies in World War II, Japan and Germany, only to watch them rival us economically on the world stage, while in the case of Germany (or formerly West Germany) , especially, protecting them militarily, saving them one heck of a big defense bill over the years (the same goes for the rest of Europe and other nations).

Meanwhile, we (the U.S.) have become wholly dependent upon our former ally in World War II — China — the one we saved from Japan, for our whole economy — they supply much of our manufactured and consumer goods and we use them (China) as a credit card in order to print money for which we really have nothing to back up with.

It’s hard in this world to know who are your friends and who are your adversaries — they seem to be both at different times or all at once.

With the BP oil mess and Katrina and 9/11 as a guide, one wonders just how much security our government provides…

If you stop and really think how unprepared our government and industry (at least BP) was for the Gulf of Mexico oil blowout, you almost have to think about how unprepared we are for most any dire contingency, such as a nuclear strike or a dirty bomb.

The weather or a natural disaster offers a special challenge, because there is nothing you can do to prevent it. But a prepared and willing government can come to the aid of its own people or it can act woefully incompetent, as in the case of Katrina.

The right hand can not know what the left hand is doing or rival government agencies — the CIA and FBI — can allow a situation that results in disaster, such as ignoring terrorists on a watch list, thus allowing them to board and hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings, ala 9/11.

Watchdog agencies can be starved for funds and/or filled with incompetent bureaucrats who take bribes for looking the other way and not making waves, the exact thing they are supposed to do (make waves), resulting in tainted food and oil well blow outs a mile-deep in the ocean, with proper procedures and safeguards ignored, and dangerous and fraudulent financial transactions that endanger our whole economic system.

We all thought for so long that there could never really be another event like the Great Depression because we had safeguards. We shed some of those safeguards in the name of unhindered capitalism and greed some time ago, and the remaining safeguards were useless because regulators looked the other way and watched porn while drawing government paychecks and because in the end nothing really trumps greed.

A lack of confidence that our government is there for us in matters of security is enough to bring the whole system down.