What was John F. Kennedy referring to when he said “a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy”?
Excerpt
For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence–on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations.
Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed. It conducts the Cold War, in short, with a war-time discipline no democracy would ever hope or wish to match.
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.