1993 The Second Biggest Lie
[This was published as Ch. 2 of Looking for the Enemy and originally online by something called NY Transfer News Collective on misc.activism.progressive, a Usenet newsgroup that has disappeared, but this chapter of my book (first self-published on paper in 1994, 50 copies) was passed on and (fortunately!) preserved in a Google Group here, here, and here on July 8, 1993. I have saved these pages in case they also disappear, just to prove to my satisfaction if to no one else's that I was onto something that mainstream historians did not "discover" (not having read my articles, obviously) until ten years later, namely that "most Vietnam historians…have asserted continuity between Kennedy’s policy and Lyndon Johnson’s (James K. Galbraith, "Exit Strategy," Sept. 1, 2003).
The history of these early online communications is interesting but evanescent, liable to disappear at any moment like everything else on the internet (except at the NSA!), so having found this information on Striders's Journal about "The disappearance of misc.activism.progressive…" from 15 Feb. 2015 I will preserve it here in case it too disappears.
Almost four years ago, the articles in the USENET newsgroup misc.activism.progressive ground to a halt, and moderator Rich Winkel has all but disappeared from the USENET, whom I learn resided in Harrisburg (up until 2010, at least), a half hour or so drive from his former employer, the University of Missouri. He is now a computer systems analyst, and in his spare time, is a writer for the Thought Crime Radio blog.
misc.activism.progressive (MAP) was a moderated newsgroup which accepted submissions from authors of left-leaning articles. Opinions ranged from the mainstream NY Transfer News Collective (who often sent articles from, or based on news from Reuters, Wall Street Journal, the UK Independent and other feeds from the popular press) to the conspiracy theorists at InfoWars.
Some time between 2007 and 2008, one of the biggest contributors to MAP, NY Transfer News Collective, stopped posting articles, and its parent company, Blythe Systems seems to have folded, leaving no Internet trace of itself. The daily output of MAP was cut in half as a result.
Postings gradually died out until March 2011 when they died out completely. As far as I had been able to search out, there appeared to be no warning of this in previous years. Mind you, one would have to search through tens of thousands of posts going back to 2007 just before things started to peter out. By about 2010, name searches for “Rich Winkel” began to come up empty, but his email address was still around.
This newsgroup was always a great source of thought and news regarding labour, politics, and “alternative voices” (as long as you stay away from Infowars). It was always weak on health and science coverage. Medicare was well-covered (because that was more about government, and they were always better at that), but articles along the lines of “chemical xyz can kill you” were usually flaky and withered once you did your own research.]
The biggest lie of our time, after the Warren Report, is the notion that Johnson merely continued or expanded Kennedy's policy after the assassination.
This essay is divided into five sections: