Jon, you guys who suspect some sort of small "c" conspiracy involving perhaps a rogue element in the CIA should be furious at Stone's recklessness. He makes your side look foolish with all this nonsense. Instead of giving him a standing ovation you should be jeering him. The entire JFK conspiracy cause went haywire after Garrison's poison. And you've never recovered.
The vast majority of the public disagrees, according to polling on opinions of the JFK assassination. Anywhere from 60-80% of Americans believe Oswald didn't act alone. I'm aware that there's a range of opinions among CT-believers about "Who" killed JFK (not everyone agrees with Stone's thesis). But the "who did it" doesn't really matter as long as the truth seems ambiguous to most people.
Now it's fair to say that Stone, and most JFK researchers on the CT side, has lost the respect of corporate media in the US but as I said earlier, the corporate or mainstream media isn't as relevant today as it once was.
In Stone's case, it's not just his opinions on the Kennedy assassination but also his coziness with autocrats like Vladimir Putin which has caused many Liberals in Hollywood to turn against him (especially since the 2016 election). Some of the mixed reviews on the new movie bring up Stone's films about Putin and Castro as if those things are even relevant to the new film.
So the fact that JFK Revisited is being ignored by most of the mainstream media (except for USA Today) doesn't surprise me at all.
One concern that I had about JFK revisited was that it would be mostly based on Jim DiEugenio's book, "Destiny Betrayed". I was pleased to see that there was only a brief mention of Garrison's investigation in the new movie.
As to the Cold War: I think it's absolutely false to argue that the US caused the Cold War to last longer than it did. Did our policies unnecessarily contribute to it? Of course, our hands weren't clean. And absolutely false to say "both sides" caused it to start. The US dramatically dismantled the military after the war; if the MIC was so powerful how did they let that happen? It was only Stalin's betrayals at Yalta, the Red Army's occupation of Eastern Europe, the attempted subversion of the West, that caused the conflict. Why did the countries in Western Europe go along with this? It wasn't just the US that felt threatened by Moscow. We had troops there with the approval of those governments; the USSR had troops in Eastern Europe after installing puppet governments.
We'll have to agree to disagree on most of those points. I also think you're downplaying or underestimating the power of Threat Inflation in US foreign policy since the end of World War II.
It's the biggest flaw we have and contributed to the massive failures in US foreign policy since the Bush II years. heck, it contributed to most of the mistakes the US made abroad since the Vietnam war.
Afterall, the MIC is a huge bureaucracy and bureaucracies have to find ways to justify their existence.
You're reading what the US did - the Dulles et cetera - and ignoring what the Soviets and Chinese were doing that precipitated those actions. This is like Howard Zinn's history where he cites what the US did and never includes the policies of Moscow and others. I certainly don't want to re-fight the origins and causes of the Cold War here <g>.
Well I asked if you read any books on the Dulles brothers because that's the key to understanding the behavior of post-WWII US national security policy.
Even if you don't agree with Stone that the MIC killed JFK, those institutions did do a lot of bad things at home and abroad in the name of ideology and protecting the interests of American elites. So I think Stone is right to distrust those institutions but wrong to assume that they played a role in JFK's murder. Short of the JFK assassination (which remains unsolved imo), there's plenty to criticize regarding how MIC related institutions behave at home and abroad.
But JFK Revisited is still a great doc even if there's some things in it that I disagree with.
One final note: the idea that JFK was opposed to these policies, was some sort of critic of US opposition to the Soviets is frankly groundless. I don't think there's a whiff of evidence that as Stone and Garrison argue he was going to "end" the conflict. Or pull out of Vietnam. Or make nice with Castro. That's all part of this mythical JFK as Camelot. JFK was a hard-headed realist who, yes, wanted to avoid conflict with the Soviets, but who recognized the existential danger they posed to us.
That's a debate for another day. Regardless of why they were killed, I believe both Kennedy brothers were evolving by the early-60s and JFK showed sympathy towards anti-colonial movements in Africa and Asia from the start of his Presidency beginning with his outrage about the murder of Patrice Lumumba.
