How the FBI targeted Camus, and then Sartre after the JFK assassination (2013)

https://www.openculture.com/2013/11/the-existentialism-files-how-the-fbi-targeted-camus-and-sartre.html

by pablode • 2 years ago

128 69 2 years ago

openculture.com

aebtebeten• 2 years ago

... there must be some kind of conspiracy between communists, blacks, poets and French philosophers.

If you can connect these dots, then https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illuminati_(game) might be for you!

zozbot234• 2 years ago

I'm pretty sure that "... there must be some kind of conspiracy" is the literal definition of a Conspiracy Theory. Nice to see that even the FBI is into that fun stuff.

pstuart• 2 years ago

The FBI has a checkered history. We do need federal level policing but, like all policing, it needs to be buttressed by accountability and oversight.

Exoristos• 2 years ago

Wait till you learn about RICO.

underlipton6• 2 years ago

Accusation, confession, etc.

neovialogistics• 2 years ago

At what point in history did the FBI first begin to require aptitude tests to become an agent?

throwaway88777• 2 years ago

There is necessarily no cross-links between all of them, but there is a link. If you can't imagine that a state that is obsessively dreaming about the world revolution and has a wide spy network and large group of naive sympathisers doesn't try to infiltrate all the possible influential counter cultures then you are a little too naive.

pessimizer• 2 years ago

"If you can't imagine" is a bad start. If you're imagining people obsessively dreaming about destroying you, and using the naive "blacks" to do it, you're about a millimeter away from joining the fight against "Judeo-Bolshevism."

hk__26• 2 years ago

If you can't imagine that a state that is obsessively dreaming about the world revolution and has a wide spy network and large group of naive sympathisers doesn't try to infiltrate all the possible influential counter cultures then you are a little too naive.

How are Blacks, communists and poets “counter cultures”?

saghm2• 2 years ago

If you can't imagine that a state that is obsessively dreaming about the world revolution and has a wide spy network and large group of naive sympathisers doesn't try to infiltrate all the possible influential counter cultures then you are a little too naive.

Being able to imagine something isn't concrete proof that it exists. "There's a first time for everything" isn't literally true; plenty of totally plausible things don't end up happening.

avgcorrection• 2 years ago

Okay, I can imagine it. Mission accomplished?

Using public French intellectuals who dabble in socialism to plot the assassination of an American president would be the dumbest thing imaginable. (If that is what the topic is about? The submitted article is awfully vague about what the McCharthian fears were even about.)

gosub100• 2 years ago

so anything is falsifiable if you create a board game using its components? Moon-landing conspirators unite!

pfdietz• 2 years ago

Conspiracies can be dismissed if they are presented without convincing evidence. After all, the space of possible conspiracies is vast; all but a tiny fraction must be nonexistent.

082349872349872• 2 years ago

Could it be that instead of attempting to falsify anything I had merely been attempting to promote a really fun game? Ancient astronaut theorists say yes!

jbm• 2 years ago

I loved that game, but in my friendless highschool youth I never found anyone interested in playing the version I had (the "New World Order" card game).

I do remember the Talented and Gifted English teacher at my school randomly saw me with cards for the "John Birch Society" and "FNORD" and guffawed.

blindriver• 2 years ago

I’m starting to agree that the fbi and cia need to be dismantled and something new with new leaders and workers need to replace it.

jjackson53243• 2 years ago

Funny enough, if you look at polling data of Americans... amongst people who actually lived during the JFK assassination & later investigation and kept up with all the details.... only about 11% believed the official narrative. More than 80% thought the official narrative was a lie.

Nowadays (when most Americans have just read about it in history textbooks), it feels like most people believe the official narrative and dismiss conspiracy theories as "crazy".

rootusrootus• 2 years ago

Nowadays

This makes sense to me, because after all this time if we don't have anything which backs up the conspiracy theories it is sensible to believe that the results of the official investigation are largely accurate.

jjackson53243• 2 years ago

The House Select Committee on Assassinations was established to investigate the assassinations of JFK and MLK.

After their investigation, they concluded that the official narrative was most likely wrong and they found a high probability that two gunmen fired at President John F. Kennedy.

There were no investigations after that..

Scientific acoustical evidence establishes a high probability that two gunmen fired at President John F. Kennedy. Other scientific evidence does not preclude the possibility of two gunmen firing at the President. Scientific evidence negates some specific conspiracy allegations.
The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. The committee is unable to identify the other gunman or the extent of the conspiracy.

https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/select-committee-repor...

woodruffw4• 2 years ago

Nowadays (when most Americans have just read about it in history textbooks), it feels like most people believe the official narrative and dismiss conspiracy theories as "crazy".

A significant confounding factor here is the encompassing and totalizing nature of modern conspiracy theories: there's a substantial difference in breadth, depth, and assumed priors between a JFK assassination conspiracy (painted against the backdrop of 1960s social and political upheaval) and something like QAnon.

Put another way: American culture is prone to conspiratorial beliefs, but isn't (yet) prone to Big Lies.

underlipton6• 2 years ago

Put another way: American culture is prone to conspiratorial beliefs, but isn't (yet) prone to Big Lies.

Lost Cause mythology, pretty much everything related to the popular conception of mid-century American society, "It's not a recession because hiring and consumer spending are strong," etc.

jacquesm2• 2 years ago

isn't (yet) prone to Big Lies.

I think it's very prone to it. In fact I think *most Western democracy's cultures are prone to such beliefs In some countries it now affects half of the population in others 'merely' 30%. But there isn't a country where this isn't a problem.

LtWorf• 2 years ago

Well I'm quite convinced that the crazy conspiracy theories are there to dismiss all of them in block. And of course some conspiracies ARE real.

krapp2• 2 years ago

The crazy conspiracy theories are there because people believe in crazy conspiracies.

Kamq3• 2 years ago

That seems to contradict the available data.

Using gallup: https://news.gallup.com/poll/514310/decades-later-americans-...

It seems that a majority doubt the official narrative these days (that LHO acted alone), but it was much lower in the past.

There are, of course, limits to polling. People will tend to lie about things with social consequences, but you specifically call out polling data in your post.

jjackson53243• 2 years ago

a majority doubt the official narrative these days (that LHO acted alone), but it was much lower in the past

Ah okay, didn't realize a majority of people still doubt the official narrative. Thanks for the link.

But yeah, it was previously at 11% believed official narrative and has now risen to 30% it seems.

ericfr113• 2 years ago

So many Americans are prone to conspiracy theories. Most of the flat-earther, no-climate-urgency, election-was-stolen are Americans who have access to lots of facts, but still are in denial

Hikikomori• 2 years ago

https://youtu.be/5u7euN1HTuU?si=G3HXkWKL3KeGJKQR

Worth a watch if you are interested in this. He reconstructs the physical space and where the people were and moved over time using witness testimony.

dang• 2 years ago

Camus died in 1960. That title is making its comma work too hard!

pvg2• 2 years ago

That comma went to Oxford, it can handle it.

hackandthink• 2 years ago

"Despite gathering years of NSA-worthy surveillance on the philosophers, Hoover’s agents were never able to discern the ideological program of the French. “I can’t work out,” wrote one in a note in Sartre’s file, “if he’s pro-Communist or anti-Communist."

I feel the same.

Lévy often seems to be a manichean ideologue, but I found his Sartre book revealing:

"Levy depicts Sartre as a man who could succumb to the twentieth century’s catastrophic attraction to violence and the false messianism of its total political solutions, while also being one of the fiercest critics of its illusions and shortcomings."

https://bernard-henri-levy.com/en/book/sartre/

saghm2• 2 years ago

"Despite gathering years of NSA-worthy surveillance on the philosophers, Hoover’s agents were never able to discern the ideological program of the French. “I can’t work out,” wrote one in a note in Sartre’s file, “if he’s pro-Communist or anti-Communist."

Honestly, what's crazy about that to me is the idea that he _must_ be one or the other. The idea that every writer is actively and wholeheartedly trying to advance exactly one side or the other of a geopolitical struggle is kind of silly. Maybe sometimes he thought about other stuff besides that?

BLKNSLVR• 2 years ago

The article does address that:

The black-and-white, spy-vs-spy world of the FBI left little room for philosophical nuance and literary ambiguity, after all.

It's classic authoritarian thinking where even the perception of a small stain ruins the entire outfit.

But then, in stating the above that way I have, that could be an example of the same; putting into a small box those who put others into a small box.

In defense of my argument: it is the policy and process of intelligence services and law enforcement that creates the small box thinking, not the individuals who are employed to pursue it, whilst those they are putting into the small boxes are individuals with all the many colours of opinion, subjectivity, and experience that make up their whole, and cannot be accurately small-boxed.

underlipton6• 2 years ago

It's almost as if exceptional thinkers don't always fit inside an ideological box or something.

marginalia_nu• 2 years ago

It's a tradition as old as Socrates.

aphroz• 2 years ago

Levy is not regarded as a serious person. He once quoted a made up philosopher and has some dubious interests. In the french speaking world most people treat him as a joke.

https://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1963338,0...

JadeNB• 2 years ago

The OpenCulture link points to an article http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/art-books/camus-sartre-fbi... on Prospect Magazine, but the link doesn't work. It appears to be meant to point to https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/culture/51776/the-fbi-fil... .

JustinGoldberg9• 2 years ago

Did they investigate the CIA and the warren commission? They all looked the other way.

How the FBI targeted Camus, and then Sartre after the JFK assassination (2013)

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