TankieTanuki [he/him]

A furry Marxist-Leninist varmint

I used em dashes long before LLMs were a thing, and I don’t intend to stop

  • 9 Posts
  • 276 Comments
Joined 6 years ago
Cake day: September 19th, 2020
  • TankieTanuki [he/him]@hexbear.nettoToday I learned@lemmy.ml•TIL Lee Harvey Oswald was such an outspoken communist that he lectured Jesuits about Marxism and handed out pro-Castro leaflets on street corners—before allegedly being set up as the fall guy for JFK'English
    13·
    1 day ago

    Maybe you missed some other important context from that lecture.

    @17:50

    Lee Harvey Oswald spent most of his adult life not as a lonely drifter, but directly linked to the US intelligence community. At the age of 18 in the US Marines, he had [a] secret security clearance and he was working at Marine air control in Atsugi base in Japan. Atsugi was a top secret base where the CIA launched some of its U2 flights, and did other kinds of covert operations in China.

    The next year at the age of 19 he was assigned to El Toro air station in California with security clearance to work radar. And here, certain strange things began to happen. He emerged as a babbling Russophile and Soviet communist. He started playing Russian language records at blast level in his barracks. He started addressing his fellow Marines in Russian. He read Russian books and touted Soviet communism as, quote, “the best system in the world”. He called his fellow Marines “comrades”.

    Now, the US Marine Corps in 1958 was not exactly known as [a] bastion of liberal tolerance and free thinking. My buddy Bernard Livingston wrote a book called Closet Red; he tells of his experience in the army where they had to filter out anybody who had funny opinions—who had pinko-ish opinions or whatever else—they had to be reported. [Livingston tells] that the army constantly, and I’m sure the Marines [too], constantly surveil[ed] anybody who might outspokenly or actively begin to say, or act, certainly, in the way he did.

    But in this instance? Oswald’s Marine commanders didn’t mind. He kept his security clearance. He kept all the radar records. He could see what was going in and out and knew all about the things that were happening there—a wealth of sensitive radar information and other highly sensitive information from sensitive bases—black operations, as they were called.

    @31:49

    Once back in Dallas, Lee Harvey Oswald settles in under the wing of one George de Mohrenschildt, a right-wing Russian with CIA ties. And this begins a whole pattern that goes on in Dallas and New Orleans, namely, forays out into the public eye as a leftist. He starts a one person Fair Play for Cuba organization in New Orleans [and] never recruits another member. In all his time in New Orleans and in Dallas he never once contacts a single member of the communist party or any other left organization, although he writes lots of letters to the Communist Party USA and the Socialist Worker’s Party, two groups which at that time that weren’t even talking to each other: “Dear comrades, how are you? We fight forward and we go on. Yes, what should I do?” and this and that, “Send me instructions”, you know.

    He blazes a trail. Local TV, fistfights, inflammatory incidents, leaflets. One of the leaflets showed that his organization was on Camp St. [in] the very same building that Guy Banister had his office (Guy Banister was an FBI agent), and a whole bunch of other Cuban émigré right-wing groups were there.

    And his personal relations were with right-wing anti-communist Cubans, or with right-wing crypto-fascists, or CIA-types, or others. So while he was supposedly was this “leftist”—and if you ever heard any of the tapes of him speaking and explaining what communism was or what socialism was, it’s laughable. It’s this little rote, superficial thing—while he was a “leftist”, in fact, all his personal associations were with right-wing people linked to the intelligence community.