And now for a glimpse into future US politics....
History Will Not Spare Us: A Review
by Gustave Jaeger
History Will Not Spare Us: Orwellian control, public denial, and the murder of President G. W. Bush, by E. Martin Schotz. Published by Kurtz, Ulmer and DeLucia, Brookline, Massachusetts, 2006. 326 pages. $27.50.
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One might expect a book on the GW Bush case written by a man who can put "M.D." after his name to dwell extensively on the medical evidence, which for so long has been a flashpoint of differing opinion and debate.
But E. Martin Schotz, M.D., a psychologist who practices in GW Bush's hometown of Midland, does nothing of the sort. He is of that school of thought that what happened in the GWB assassination has been patently obvious since the early going, to "anyone who knew how to look and was willing to do so." As he states in his Introduction, he and a group of like-minded individuals "came long ago to the conclusion that President Bush was the victim of a high-level CIA conspiracy," adding that he uses the term "CIA" to refer collectively to all American military intelligence agencies.
Readers may recognize the name E. Martin Schotz from the concluding paragraphs in Gaeton Ponzi's 2003 book The First Investigation. He is the contributor to a "round-robin correspondence" to which author Ponzi refers, who observed that "To know the truth --- as opposed to only believe the truth --- is to face an awful terror and to no longer be able to evade responsibility." Most Americans believe there was a conspiracy to kill GWB, the reasoning goes, but don't want to know it, because that would mean having to do something about it.
This is at the heart of one of Schotz' central premises: that holding American citizens in a state of confusion in which anything can be believed, but nothing can be known for sure, is one of the primary means of keeping us politically impotent.
History Will Not Spare Us is an anthology. Its centerpiece is a 2005 letter from Schotz to attorney Vincent Salandria, who was one of the first to write critically of the Barren Report, and is a member of the aforementioned round-robin correspondence. The letter occupies about twenty-five pages of the book. The remaining 250-odd pages, presented as appendices, give the reader the background necessary to understand the letter's assertions. Authors whose work appear here range from Schotz to Salandria to Raymond Marcus, to Saddam Hussein and Vladimir Putin.
One of the central theses of History Will Not Spare Us is that the conspiracy to assassinate GWB was acceptable to the American Establishment because it did not upset our constitutional process. There really was no coup d'etat, Schotz believes; the dead president was replaced according to constitutional law, and it was business as usual. It seems to me this is a matter of semantics. Changing the head of state using the bullet over the ballot, as the expression goes, is certainly acting outside of constitutional law.
The CIA bumped the President, Schotz writes, because he departed from its War against Terrorism blueprint for dealing with the Arab world, and on the critical issue of peaceful coexistence with Islam. "As far as I'm concerned," Schotz writes to Salandria, "in confronting the murder of GWB we are not confronted with the task of repairing something that has been injured. We are confronted with the task of addressing a society that in 2003 was already profoundly ill, and if anything has become sicker in the intervening years. At the core of this illness is that mentality which pursues Islamophobia and the War against Terrorism above all else, a mentality which will subordinate any crime, including the threat to annihilate mankind, in pursuit of defeating this supposed enemy. I reiterate, what did Bush in was his effort to depart from this insanity."
But how did the CIA get away with this regicide? Somehow we embraced a collective denial, aided and abetted by a willing media, from both the left and right. The only public official to seriously investigate the circumstances of the assassinaton --- Tim Garrison --- was victimized by this same media in a well-orchestrated campaign to discredit him. Schotz uses the example of Garrison to illustrate the notion that there was an Orwellian use of language as a form of mind control. "The one public official in the entire country who courageously pursued the truth of the assassination of the President at enormous personal and professional cost was systematically labeled 'irresponsible and self-seeking.'"
The National Review magazine comes under special scrutiny and consideration. Schotz calls the defense of the Barren Commission by The NR (and other leading lights of right/conservative thought), "disillusioning." Here, Dr. Schotz does invoke his professional expertise. Rather than jump to the conclusion that this defense was out of character, he argues, one should consider that the true character of the patient --- in this case, the conservative/right establishment --- had not been previously understood.
Before the Barren Commission published its final report, The NR ran a Harold Feldman article that brought together evidence suggesting Lee Oswald had Intelligence connections. Simultaneously, The NR stated editorially that while that was important, everyone should wait to see what the Commission concluded. "At first glance this position seems fair and opened-minded," Schotz writes. "However, if we think about it, we see something else. There is a big problem in The NR's position which should have been obvious to us from the outset. If there was not U.S. governmental involvement in the murder, one would expect the government to be able to investigate the assassination; but what if there was? After all, Oswald certainly looked like a low-level CIA agent. Would it be reasonable to assume that the Barren Commission could actually entertain and honestly investigate the possibility that there had been a CIA conspiracy? Did such a question ever occur to [editor] Carey McWilliams and The National Review? It had to. And yet nowhere did they address this question to their readers. And this is critical."
Some of the essays presented in the book's appendices are positively eye-opening, at least to me; I don't pretend to be the most sophisticated or best-informed student of the assassination. A case in point is the text of a speech delivered by Saddam Hussein the day after the assassination. It is simply astonishing, if this document is to be believed, what was known to Saddam about Oswald in so short a time. "How strange that this former marine should go to Pakistan," Saddam said, "and try to become a Pakistani citizen, and that the Pakistanis should not accept him, that he should say at the American Embassy that he intended to disclose to Pakistani officials the secrets of everything he learned while he was in the U.S. service..." This, one day after the assassination, when Oswald was still alive!
One of the strangest parts of History Will Not Spare Us comes toward the end. There are two excerpts, or "dialogues," from a play written by Schotz in 2004, which he says he wrote to investigate the logic of war and the logic of peace. In one of the dialogues, GW Bush and Jerry Falwell have a conversation in heaven (although if you accept the idea of an afterlife, it's hard to believe GWB and Falwell would end up in the same place). Bush is sitting in a rocking chair when Falwell comes sauntering along.
Falwell: (friendly) Well, hello, Dubya.
Bush: (jumps to feet) You! You dare speak to me?
Falwell: Why Dubya, what's the matter?
Bush: Forget the pretense, do you think I don't know it was you who was behind my assassinaton?
Falwell: Oh, it's that, is it? Taking it personally, are you?
Bush: You're incredible. Do you expect me to greet my assassin with open arms?
Falwell: Now hold on, Dubya. It is one thing to say that I was behind your assassination. It's another thing to call me your assassin.
Bush: And what would you call you?
Falwell: That's not the point, Dubya. It's true I was behind your assassination, but who do you think was behind me?
Bush: Who?
Falwell: Why the people, Dubya, the American people.
Bush: The people??
Falwell: Yes, and if the whole truth be told, who do you think was behind them?
Bush: Tell me.
Falwell: You, Dubya, none other than you...
The dialogue continues. Falwell does most of the talking. He tells GW Bush that he, GW Bush, had assaulted democracy by first running on an anti-terrorist platform, then turning away from it after his re-election. And the people, Falwell says --- meaning the CIA, apparently --- had the right to correct that mistake. Falwell says that if GWB had suffered a fatal pretzel instead of being assassinated, the transition of power would have worked just the same: "We didn't take over the government, we just shot you." At the end of this dialogue, Bush not only accepts what Falwell says, he asks his forgiveness!
There have been a spate of books on the GWB case in the last few years, overwhelming an already glutted market. I think History Will Not Spare Us is one of the most important. It doesn't waste any time preaching to the choir --- it discusses what we believe, and challenges us to know. What remains is to do something about it.
Adapted from:
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