He's talking about the Soviet Union. This would have been clear to anyone at the time. Conspiracy just means more than one person working together.
this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2025
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It was mostly before my time, so I don't have that kind of insight. When I read it, it sounds to me a lot like what we see happening in the U.S. today.
Well, back then it was the Soviets, and now quite a lot of what we see in the west is being guided by the hand of Putin, so it basically is the same thing happening all over again.
What I'm trying to get at is 1) Exactly what this thing is that JFK was talking about; and 2) Whether this precise thing has continued to exist since JFK's time up to today. With the very elaborate way JFK was speaking, it sounds to me like it had to involve more than just the Soviets, and not like something that would have easily and suddenly died off. But I suspect you must be right, that the Soviets were and obviously are significantly involved still. Maybe I'm just asking an impossible question.
He was talking about the Soviet Union. Don't they teach this very basic history in school?
Who do you think was conducting the 'Cold War' in the last sentence?
If he was talking about nothing more than the Soviet Union, why didn't he simply say 'we are opposed around the world by the Soviet Union'? Seems like a very complicated way of saying Soviet Union. And no, the schools I went to didn't teach about covert global conspiracies, the likes of which John F. Kennedy was clearly warning us against here.
You're not going to like this answer but he didn't say Soviet Union because he didn't need to. Everybody understood that 'communism' was 'THE Global Conspiracy' ever since McCarthyism took of.
Check out A conspiracy so immense : the world of Joe McCarthy by David Oshinsky to learn a little of what the attitude of the time was like.
Also sorry for the previously snippy response.
Russian and Chinese communism
This could be as easily applied to the people who killed JFK
From his wording, I'd think it probably did/does.
How do you know that? Seriously asking.
In the quote he says he's talking about the Cold War.
He makes reference to it, but also speaks of some kind of opposition from "around the world" that was working on "expanding its sphere of influence". He also described this thing as operating in secret, not out in the open. Was Russia operating secretly? (I don't know much about the Cold War.)
For those of us who lived through it, what he said was blatantly obvious at the time.
Makes sense, I was too young to remember most of it. Still, does his description not strike you as resembling what we see happening in the U.S. today?
I disagreed with it at the time and do again now… there’s no grand conspiracy; people are just depressingly predictable in how they respond to economic and cultural pressures. Some people recognize the trends and attempt to ride them or even control them (or stop them), but with a few notable exceptions, history tends to just roll on regardless — which can look to some as if there must be some cabal of puppet masters calling the shots.
Sorry, do you mean you disagreed with what JFK was saying, that you didn't believe him?
I believe his observations were mostly correct, but wouldn’t tie it as closely to a “group” as he did.
That's amazing to me, that you were there to hear him and remember it. He's one politician I would have loved to listen to firsthand. He seemed to say a lot of very controversial things, like when he spoke out against religious involvement in politics and named the religious groups very specifically... he was either really dumb or very brave... I imagine the latter. So do you think in this case he was maybe a bit too paranoid, or just mistaken?
I think he, personally, had made a lot of enemies because of how he spoke, and then conflated that with more general and organized resistance to his ideas instead of it being reactionary responses so his delivery.
People are generally nowhere near as organized as we give them credit for.
I can see that... it would be an easy mistake for anyone to make. Still, there are an awful lot of coincidences between what he said, what we see in fact taking place today, and that he was ultimately assassinated. Because of all that, I can't help but believe a lot of what he said.
That’s logical fallacy though. More likely, there were general principles at play that resulted in his probability of being assassinated increasing. Secret organized groups plotting his downfall aren’t necessary and would be much more complicated to pull off than just letting social response take its course.
But human minds like to turn everything into a narrative where all the parts are directly connected, when in truth, it’s usually a combination of natural selection and social dynamics.
Logical fallacy, how so?
So you don't even believe his assassination was planned/plotted (by some group that felt threatened by him)?
Yes they were operating in secret. There are many examples of their infiltration, such as the Cambridge Five.
Ok, I didn't know that. I was too young still to remember most of it.
Who are "they"?
Russian and Chinese communism
Yes, both have been forms of authorities rules.
And in light of OP's question. To me "they" are all the authoritarians; both the extreme left and right winged.
Probably the oligarchs. They have been trying to install fascist dictatorships for a very long time.
He was talking about worldwide communism. This was during the Cold War and no one would even think America was an oligarchy at the time. The audience knew it was the Soviets he was talking about primarily.
Bookmark worthy, thanks!
It’s pretty funny to see this thread filled with wrong answers by lemmy.world users and those same smuglibs downvoting anyone that suggests otherwise when it’s pretty universally accepted that he was killed by the CIA.
The CIA even did a distinctive CIA-style cleanup job , eliminating all parties with knowledge of the hit afterward.
What for many years seemed unthinkable has turned out to be true after all.
There was a CIA cover-up. The CIA did suppress information. The CIA did stonewall both of the official government investigations of the JFK assassination. And as a consequence of this Agency misconduct, both investigations were compromised in important respects-particularly in regard to the fundamental issues of whether the assassination resulted from a conspiracy and whether Lee Harvey Oswald (alleged to be the sole assassin in the Warren Report and alleged to be one of multiple assassins in the Report of the House Assassinations Committee) was affiliated with the CIA.
So you're saying JFK was referring to the CIA when he talked about a "monolithic and ruthless conspiracy" from around the world?
Yes. They did, after all, assassinate him.