Another
Lone Nut?
by
Murray
N. Rothbard
Mises.org
This
first appeared in The
Libertarian Forum, Vol VI, NO.6-7, June-July,1972
John F. Kennedy;
Malcolm X; Martin Luther King; Robert F. Kennedy; and now George
Corley Wallace: the litany of political assassinations and attempts
in the last decade rolls on. (And we might add: General Edwin Walker,
and George Lincoln Rockwell. In each of these atrocities, we are
fed with a line of cant from the liberals and from the Establishment
media. In the first place, every one of these assassinations is
supposed to have been performed, must have been performed,
by "one lone nut" – to which we can add the one lone nut
who murdered Lee Harvey Oswald in the prison basement. One loner,
a twisted psycho, whose motives are therefore of course puzzling
and obscure, and who never, never acted in concert with anyone.
(The only exception is the murder of Malcolm, where the evident
conspiracy was foisted upon a few lowly members of the Black Muslims.)
Even in the case of James Earl Ray, who was mysteriously showered
with money, false passports, and double identities, and who vainly
tried to claim that he was part of a conspiracy before he was shouted
down by the judge and his own lawyer – even there the lone nut theory
is stubbornly upheld.
It is not enough
that our intelligence is systematically insulted with me lone nut
theory; we also have to be bombarded with the inevitable liberal
hobby horses: a plea for gun control, Jeremiads about our "sick
society" and our "climate of violence", and, a new
gimmick, blaming the war in Vietnam for this climate and therefore
for the assault on George Wallace. Without going into the myriad
details of Assassination Revisionism, doesn't anyone see
a pattern in our litany of murdered and wounded, a pattern that
should leap out at anyone willing to believe his eyes? For all of
the victims have had one thing in common: all were, to a greater
or lesser extent, important anti-Establishment figures, and, what
is more were men with the charismatic capacity to mobilize large
sections of the populace against our rulers. All therefore constituted
"populist" threats against the ruling elite, especially
if we focus on the mainstream "right- center" wing of
the ruling classes. Even as Establishmenty a figure as John F, Kennedy,
the first of the victims, had the capacity to mobilize large segments
of the public against the center-right Establishment.
And
so they were disposed of? We can't prove it, but the chances
of this pattern being a mere coincidence are surely negligible.
If the only problem is a "sick society", a "climate
of violence", and the absence of gun laws, how come that not
a single right-centrist, not a single Nixon, Johnson, or Humphrey,
has been popped at?
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