90% of Americans believe at least one conspiracy theory

There’s still something horribly compelling about the assassination of John F Kennedy on 22 November 1963.

It was the first great televised news story: almost half of all Americans were watching the coverage within two hours of the shooting, and half the population were watching, two days later, when the suspected assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was himself murdered by Jack Ruby.

For me, it’s always been one of the most fascinating moments in modern history – not so much because of the assassination itself, as dramatic as that was, but because of what it came to mean.

At the time, many people saw it as a brutal punctuation point, marking the definitive loss of American innocence. And the shooting in Dallas has become a foundational myth of modern American populism, the point at which all conspiracy theories meet.

Conspiracy theories are nothing new: the paranoid style has been part of American life since the dawn of the republic. Indeed, even as Kennedy prepared for his trip to Dallas, cranks were handing out leaflets with a depressingly familiar message.

“Wanted for Treason” read the headline below the president’s photograph. “He is turning the sovereignty of the US over to the communist-controlled United Nations …”

So it’s telling that the most popular conspiracy theories – the CIA, the mafia, the military-industrial complex – focus on enemies within, not without. For the conspiracy die-hards, it would be terribly disappointing if it turned out that Fidel Castro or the Kremlin had organised Kennedy’s murder.

The whole point is to unlock the sinister secrets of American democracy, and expose what one conspiracy theorist calls “the corrupt merger of state and corporate power that is threatening now to impose a new kind of corporate feudalism on our country”.

That conspiracist’s name? Robert F Kennedy, Jr – the nephew of the dead president.

In the absence of a confession or a trial, numerous theories continue to swirl around the internet today.

In his 1,632-page book, Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F Kennedy, published in 2007, Vincent Bugliosi listed 44 organisations, from the Nazis to dissident French paramilitaries, as well as 214 individuals, from Richard Nixon to J Edgar Hoover to Frank Sinatra’s drummer, who have been accused of involvement.…….



https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...racy-theory-assassination-trump-b2629518.html