American Politics 101: A Different Perspective

American Politics 101: A Different Perspective

P. Schultz

            I am reading another interesting book by Peter Dale Scott that is advancing my understanding of the American political order. I guess it is true that one is never too old to learn, even after years of study. I am reproducing here two paragraphs from Scott’s book, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK. Enjoy.

            “At the end [of this book], I shall propose that most hypotheses of the Kennedy assassination heretofore, whether the designated culprits have been Communists or Minutemen, the CIA or the Mafia, have suffered from a common defect. This is to look for an external conspiracy violating the systemic political order from without.

            “We shall offer an enlarged and deeper perspective of power as a symbiosis of public government, organized crime, and private wealth with deep connections to both government and crime. From this perspective, the forces behind the assassination no longer appear as extraneous, but as deeply systemic; and the violation to the enlarged power system can be seen as coming from the Kennedys, with their policies of détente abroad and an attack on a CIA-sanctioned Hoffa-crime connection at home. From this perspective, the assassination was not a corrupt attack from the outside of an honest system. The assassination was a desperate, extraordinary defense, or adjustment, of a system that was itself corrupt.” [p. 74]

            And this perspective helps me answer one question that has often bothered me: Why did J. Edgar Hoover, who was perceived and who thought of himself as a or even the protector of the American political order, refuse to go after the Mafia or organized crime? There is no contradiction here once it is understood that the Mafia or organized crime, along with private wealth and a complicit government, lay at the heart of the American political order. And those who oppose that order must be “dealt with,” one way or another.