The Charlotte News

Thursday, January 8, 1942

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page tells first of the projected increase in production of armament by the end of 1943, ten times the tanks of 1941, over ten times the anti-aircraft guns, ten times the tonnage in ships, and over six times the airplanes. They would be needed, both in Europe and in the Pacific.

The rest of the front page provides continued good news on the Libyan front where the British sustained the backward march of the Nazis and Italians, more good news on the Russian front as the Russian army maintained its assault on German positions; but, bad news remained the staple fare from the Far East. Now, Kuala Lumpur, capital of Malaya, was threatened by the Japanese, as the British had pulled back its defensive lines in an effort to protect it; Singapore continued to be threatened; the Philippines defenses braced for a new assault on Corregidor and Bataan. And, as reported the previous day, the Japanese were landing troops in Borneo.

Also reported was the fact that before the Japanese had turned to suicide attacks on ships late in the war, the Italians at this point in 1942 had adopted the practice, guiding torpedoes as pilots into ships. The Italians, however, did not even have a religious cult to breed in them promise of Nirvana. Just what therefore they got out of it, or thought they did, is not clear. The probable answer is that they climbed aboard these craft with only two options, death by such heroics or death as a coward at the point of a pistol.

The editorial page reports of a Chinese rout of a Japanese army, 100,000 strong, at Changsha, the Japanese becoming mired in the mud on which the Chinese had months earlier, before the rains came, mounted their gun implacements. The editorial counsels more aid to China. The problem in that regard was, however, getting the aid to China, soon to become even more problematic with the taking of the Burma Road by the Japanese. Already, the Shanghai sea route was effectively closed.

Besides war news, the editorial column indicates that Charlotte had attenuated its murder rate, with the reduction by nearly half, from 46 murders in 1940 to 25 in 1941, leaving Atlanta as the likely murder capital for 1941. The News attributed the drop to better police enforcement.

The Baltimore Sun tells of the help to the war effort provided by the Norwegian merchant fleet, most of which refused orders to surrender to the Nazis in April, 1940 at the fall of Norway and instead interned to Allied ports. The ships, especially oil tankers, had proved instrumental in the interim to convoying of American aid to Great Britain.

And, just for spite, to show that all humor was not lost, despite perceptions, however remote, that even a city so far inland as Charlotte could become the subject of an air raid, Tom Fesperman offers some lightsome fare, in stark contrast to the dismal front page war news, regarding the ____ and __ which had fallen, causing everyone to fall on their _____, perhaps picking up the hint from the January 3 editorial page piece from the New York World-Telegram informing of the gent who had launched his Anti-Profanity Week against any sort of _____.

Our own sentiment is that "war" is the most profane sentiment imaginable, pictures of war, the worst obscenity. Yet if the worst aspects of war are not depicted, it can lead to the idea that war somehow produces sanitized death, heroic death, clean death: war as an abstraction, leading on to more war.

We extend the sentiment further to suggest that the Zapruder film not only depicts one of the most obscene acts in the history of the United States, arguably the most obscene ever committed in the country's history, but also is undoubtedly the vilest, most obscene piece of film footage shown publicly in the history of the world. Yet again, without it, as sadly ironic as it is, we would be misled to this day into thinking that all was correct in the original assessment of the case, that a single assassin acted that sickening day.

We are not among those, incidentally, as indicated before, who find fault per se with the Warren Commission or its report--and we have read the bulk of it. Instead, we believe that, for good reason, to avoid the potential of nuclear war in retaliation at a time when a large extreme right segment of the country, and a large enough number of people in the center, were chafing at the bit to destroy Soviet Communism, and by nuclear war if necessary, the preconception was that any definite connection established between Oswald, given his connections and past history, and a conspiracy would have inevitably led to such immediate speculation, potentially with disastrous results, potentially with great pressure from within the military to do precisely what many in the military high command had desired in October, 1962, an invasion of Cuba, leading to a counter-strike by the Soviets in West Berlin, and nuclear exchange as a result. And, as President Johnson, having been witness to such pressure just a year earlier, was well aware of such potential, his fears of that end sufficiently justified the pressure he placed on the Warren Commission from its inception to deliver up a verdict on Oswald promptly, without too much dallying around the issue of conspiracy. That is not the result of speculation, but rather is to be gleaned from listening to the tapes of President Johnson in the days following the assassination, in the process of forming the commission. That does not, in our estimate, suggest any "vast conspiracy in the government" to hide truth. Indeed, President Johnson, not long before his death, indicated his belief that there had been a conspiracy.

We bring this subject up because we are in the process of reading Vincent Bugliosi's 2007 book on the subject; we refrain from elaborate comment, as we have just started it. But we do feel compelled to make the observation that Mr. Bugliosi expends an inordinate amount of print first castigating everyone setting forth a conspiracy theory as liars and obscurantists, bent on obfuscating the truth. While we would agree that some of the theories enunciated through the years are preposterous, some are not. Mr. Bugliosi, however, with little discrimination, groups them all under the rubric of absurd lies. But we shall wait and see how Mr. Bugliosi treats of the infamous and horrible frames 313-315 of the Zapruder film before offering our two cents on it. We have read the counter-explanations. But we have yet ever to see any positive proof to contradict the obvious observation to be gleaned from those frames: that the President reacted to a frontal shot to his head. In other words, we have yet to see any proof that the laws of physics ceased to apply in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

As we have indicated previously, and we continue to offer, it is entirely possible that for 45 years we have looked through some of the lenses of some of the co-conspirators themselves when we look at these obscene images. Once one accepts that as a possibility, the things not explained by the other evidence begin to form a cohesive picture of what happened and why it was so difficult to figure out for so long. That which is hidden in plain view always is, as we tend to look for that which is hidden, as in murder mysteries, to explain the most heinous of criminal conduct, assuming the culprits will always seek the covert. Sometimes it is so; conspiracies, however, rarely can get by with being hidden.

As we have also suggested six and three years ago, the Zapruder film, for being produced by an amateur photographer who claimed to have taken very few moving pictures, has to be one of the smoothest moments of film amid live, unexpected gunfire ever made, even counting that of professional journalists accustomed to photographing images of war. But with the promise of a large purse at the other end, especially if one is sympathetic with the John Birch Society of the time or its equivalent among "Citizens' Committees", and moreover if one truly believed the future of mankind, the Apocalypse, was at stake, such a person could practice enough amid gunfire and likely produce a relatively smooth-running film--while most people would have felt compelled to take their face from the viewfinder and check themselves to insure that what they were seeing was really happening, and then hit the turf. Turn the lens around and first look at that perspective through which you are looking--not bad advice generally, but less apt to be followed or even considered in the era of 1963 when the population generally, including the most sophisticated people in society, were accustomed to being guided by media images of reality while suspending the good sense which one normally might otherwise bring to any subject without such an image for ready guidance.

Inevitably, we have to wonder whether, if in those frames the President's body had instead pitched forward rather than backward, the same people who attempt to turn the fact into reverse physics would be instead attempting to use it as proof positive of a final shot from the rear. We think so. Moreover, as we also indicated from close analysis of the film in 2003, the slight blurring of the film in certain frames, indicative of natural autonomic human reaction to loud, sudden sounds, is completely inconsistent with there having been only one shooter; and the speed of sound is completely inconsistent with the final shot having come from the Depository window. As we say, we shall await our reading of Mr. Bugliosi's analysis of these factors before further comment.

We don't like doing that analysis, as it is very saddening, far more saddening than dealing with this time of war, as we lived through the assassination and recall those days all too well. The war is not an abstraction, but it is not an event through which we lived. But we have come to believe in the last decade and a half that the motive for the assassination in the minds of those who planned and executed it was developed out of events from this time period between Munich and Pearl Harbor, linking Munich inevitably in their minds, and thus the source of this war, a complete absurdity, to Joseph P. Kennedy, providing them thus an easy rationale. That they also sought then to fault 24 year-old John Kennedy for his being at ONI when Pearl Harbor occurred, an even more absurd notion, and by it provide further rationale, presents itself nevertheless as likely. That there were other rationales closer to the events, namely civil rights and anti-Communist fervor, consistent with the Nazi philosophy which these people carried over in time, is equally plain. We do not seek rational rationale for such an act: to murder a President at any time, but especially to murder a President in broad daylight in front of a hundred witnesses, one would have to be completely nuts and divorced from reality.

We do not suggest that persons, such as Mr. Bugliosi, who are convinced of a single-shooter theory, are liars or obscurantists, but we do suggest that they refuse to look at all of the evidence in a fast sequence as it occurred in a few seconds, and then come to understand that a single shooter is simply not possible, not just improbable, but, unless the laws of physics ceased to apply for those 6 to 8 seconds, impossible. We shall return to this topic later.

If you should wonder why we digress to it now, go back and carefully examine the editorial page of January 2, and realize that as we have gone through these editorials as printed from 1937 to this time, that particular set of coincidences, extending into the Wolfe quote, (one reason, in addition to the inherent beauty and terrible accuracy of that passage, we have gone to some absurd lengths to highlight it), is only one of numerous such collisions of circumstances which occur on particular dates and in particular sets of sequence on some of these pages, eerily fitting in each such set the events of November 22, 1963. Do we read too much into these sets of circumstances? We think not. If it happened only once or twice, we would think less of them. But it has occurred thusly numerous times, on many of which we have refrained from comment, though not overlooked. Many occur, though not on the January 2 page, in relation to a mention in The News on the same page of Joseph Kennedy, most surrounding key events, most surrounding Cash editorials. Is it all some mystical coincidence? Such coincidences after all seem sometimes to occur in ways which could not possibly imply subsequent conduct perversely stimulated from them, consciously or unconsciously, as we have sometimes explored herein. These particular pages to which we refer, however, we think, have quite worldly explanations, whether from conscious consideration of them later in the period 1962-63 by some xenophobic racist determined to destroy contemporaneous administration efforts toward nuclear disarmament and justice for all, motivated then to examine these editorials because of the news that Joseph Morrison intended a biography on W. J. Cash, first planned in 1962, or whether from unconscious retention of them from the time of their original printing, or some combination of the two time frames, being not clear. The microfilmed versions of these pages have been around since before the 1960's, as Professor Morrison himself used the microfilm for his research between 1962 and 1967.

By no means do we suggest, incidentally, that Professor Morrison himself became, wittingly or unwittingly, a conduit to conspiracy. He was a liberal who greatly admired President Kennedy, and thus any such notion would be preposterous. Indeed, we once had the pleasure of meeting him and he was a scholarly gentleman, not a conspirator or loose cannon apt inadvertently to encourage loose cannons, however much we disagree with his conclusions on the death of Cash, even positing in his preface of the 1967 biography a comparison of the believers in the murder of Cash by Nazis theory with the doubters of the Warren Report, those who he obviously found in 1967 at very least to be unduly gullible.

But, at the time, so did we, on both accounts, as to the Cash murder theories and the conspiracy theorists on the assassination. At the time, however, as with most of the rest of the country, and until 1973, we had never seen any version of that infamous, obscene film in motion, having seen only the gruesome stills in Life in the days following the event. Since we saw the moving film for the first time at Wait Chapel on the campus of Wake Forest University, however, our opinion has been vastly altered on the subject. Since we began the research into the death of Cash in August, 1991, we have become quite disabused of the notion that he was not murdered and that his having been murdered by Nazis was somehow baseless, as Professor Morrison essentially concluded. We now think it rather baseless for anyone to assume that he was a suicide, once the evidence on each side of that issue is examined carefully, as Professor Morrison did not do.

We started that research without the slightest clue that it might also suggest irrational rationales for the Kennedy assassination. After all, the events were over 22 years apart. We now have more than slight clues arising from the research supporting that seemingly preposterous notion as well. Call us nuts, as we have said before; that is the reader's prerogative. But, do not dare call us liars. The evidence is presented accurately; it is the evidence from which we draw our conclusions, not predetermined prejudices or any motivation of financial reward or notoriety--as should be obvious to the regular reader. You are not charged to read the herein; you will have to pay the admission fee, unless you obtain it from the library, to read Mr. Bugliosi's book, for instance. But we refrain from further comment on that particular work--for now.