Monday, January 25, 2010

Oliver Stone says US is still in denial over JFK assassination

by DALE K. MYERS

The headline out of Bangkok, Thailand, this morning reads: “US filmmaker Oliver Stone says US is still in denial over JFK assassination.” Who’s in denial?

Stone, who was in Bangkok to talk films and peace at a venue sponsored by the Vienna-based International Peace Foundation, told a captive group of 300 high school students that the United States remains in denial over the possibility that someone other than Lee Harvey Oswald could have assassinated John F. Kennedy, calling it a “national fairy tale.”

The Canadian Press reported that Stone said exploring alternative theories over the JFK assassination remains too sensitive for those in the media or academia who “would be endangering their careers and their position.”

“To this day, many key Americans in power are in total denial about this story,” Stone said. “They don’t even want to know about the possibility that he was killed by someone other than Lee Harvey Oswald. It is a national fairy tale.”

Speaking of his 1991 film JFK, Stone said he thought it was “a good thing” to revisit the JFK assassination but was surprised when historians and film reviewers jumped on him for fudging facts, inventing characters and elevating speculation to truth in an effort to back up his own belief that Kennedy was killed by a CIA-led cabal masterminded by the “evil genius” Clay Shaw, a New Orleans businessman.

“It’s an amazing story and I did it,” Stone said. “I thought I would be respected for it, and I was lambasted in the establishment press. I was called a myth-maker, a propagandist. I didn’t see it coming. I thought the Kennedy murder was safe.”

Is he kidding? Apparently the only audiences Stone can sell this load of shingles to have to be filled with foreign-born teenagers too young to remember the controversy surrounding his film let alone the Kennedy murder itself.

No doubt, Stone failed to mention Clay Shaw’s swift acquittal or the fact that he himself called his film a “counter-myth” to the Warren Commission’s report. So much for facts.

Anyone with a half-nut knows that Stone’s JFK, while fabulous and provocative filmmaking, doesn’t have anything to do with reality when it comes to the JFK assassination. For Stone to pretend that it does shows just how bankrupt the conspiracy crowd is when it comes to dethroning the case against Lee Harvey Oswald. That doesn’t stop them from trying though, does it?

For forty-six years we’ve been hearing about the big conspiracy that killed Kennedy and still we’ve seen not one shred of believable evidence that anyone other than Oswald was behind the deed.

And despite Stone’s claim that those in the media and academia are too afraid to risk their careers or positions of power to expose the truth about the Kennedy murder, numerous television networks, reporters, lawyers, and private individuals have done just that only to find Oswald alone in the sniper’s nest window.

Apparently, reality doesn’t set well with the Hollywood filmmaker. Denial is so much more comforting.