What Killed Kennedy?
That is, if they are extremely charitable. But such attitudes are the death of thought, as they are of decency. One sees something similar in the current tone of anti-Americanism, which implies they are a terrible lot because one of them killed the President. But quite a few millions didn't -- and indeed voted for him and supported his policies, or opposed them in a decent fashion. But an even more unpleasant and significant thing has been the way in which the killer's motives have been prejudged, over here as much as anywhere. to suit the political bias of the com- mentator. Before any actual. facts were known, one Sunday paper , gave us pages of closely- reasoned rant by a well-known left-wing journalist concerned to implicate the entire South as accomplices : he feared that people might be misled into thinking that it was just an odd segregationist fanatic. The point most crucial to the entire unwieldy structure—whether the killer was indeed a segregationist—was not proved or even examined. It was simply deduced backwards from a mass of political theory. To my mind, this is a repulsive way of doing things. Of course, the assassin might well have been a right-wing fanatic: but it is a little previous and prejudiced to exclude the possibility of there being such a thing as a left-wing fanatic, too, isn't it? In fact, those who, either way, would blame political orientation for any of the crimes of our epoch
are acquitting the true offender-- political fanaticism. swinish idealism.
Previous page
