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Saturday, March 26, 2005

Reading list: Les Nouvelles preuves sur l'assassinat de J. F. Kennedy

Lebeau, Caroline. Les nouvelles preuves sur l'assassinat de J. F. Kennedy. Monaco: Éditions du Rocher, 2003. ISBN 2-268-04915-9.
If you don't live in Europe, you may not be fully aware just how deranged the Looney Left can be in their hatred of Western civilisation, individual liberty, and the United States in particular. This book, from the same publisher who included a weasel-word disclaimer in each copy of Oriana Fallaci's La Force de la Raison, bears, on its cover, in 42 point white type on a red background, the subtitle «Le clan Bush est-il coupable?»--"Is the Bush clan guilty?" This book was prominently displayed in French language bookstores in 2004. The rambling narrative and tangled illogic finally pile up to give an impression reminiscent of the JFK assassination headline in The Onion's Our Dumb Century: "Kennedy Slain by CIA, Mafia, Castro, Teamsters, Freemasons". Lebeau declines to implicate the Masons, but fleshes out the list, adding multinational corporations, defence contractors, the Pentagon, Khrushchev, anti-Casto Cuban exiles, a cabal within the Italian army (I'm not making this up--see pp. 167-168), H.L. Hunt, Richard Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover, the mayor of Dallas . . . and the Bush family, inter alia. George W. Bush, who was 17 years old at the time, is not accused of being a part of the «énorme complot», but his father is, based essentially on the deduction: "Kennedy was killed in Dallas. Dallas is in Texas. George H. W. Bush lived in Texas at the time--guilty, guilty, guilty!"

"Independent investigative journalist" Lebeau is so meticulous in her "investigations" that she confuses JFK's older brother's first and middle names, misspells Nixon's middle name, calls the Warren Report the product of a Republican administration, confuses electoral votes with Senate seats, consistently misspells "grassy knoll", thinks a "dum-dum" bullet is explosive, that Gerald Ford was an ex-FBI agent, and confuses H. L. Hunt and E. Howard Hunt on the authority of "journalist" Mumia Abu-Jamal, not noting that he is a convicted cop killer. Her studies in economics permit her to calculate (p. 175) that out of a total cost of 80 billion dollars, the Vietnam war yielded total profits to the military-industrial complex and bankers of 220 trillion dollars, which is about two centuries worth of the U.S. gross national product as of 1970. Some of the illustrations in the book appear to have been photographed off a television screen, and many of the original documents reproduced are partially or entirely illegible.

Posted at March 26, 2005 22:28