Just after last month’s anniversary of JFK’s assassination, I followed a link from a Mefi thread to a site analysing the theories around it and ended up reading the whole thing. It’s a sober and clear laying out of all the elements and evidence. Personally, I’ve heard enough over the years to doubt the Warren Commission’s findings that Lee Harvey Oswald was Kennedy’s sole assassin, which means I have to conclude it was a conspiracy of some kind—much as I dislike the thought of being lumped in with WTC-controlled-demolitionists and Moon-landing deniers.

We’ve been conditioned to think that a conspiracy has to involve the deep state, the entire machinery of an arm of government or a crime organisation or a foreign power… but the word just means a secret agreement among a number of individuals to do something illegal. That number could be small, and doesn’t have to include every member of the CIA, the Mafia, a right-wing movement or whoever else your explanation prefers. If Oswald didn’t do it, or didn’t do it alone, it was a conspiracy.

While I personally suspect that Oswald was what he always said he was, a patsy, I’m not sure for whom, and it doesn’t really matter what I think… I wasn’t even born until five years after it happened, and I’m not even American. At this remove, even if we found a secret cache of evidence that established the facts unequivocally, it wouldn’t change the world we’re living in.

I watched the 2016 miniseries 11.22.63 a few months back, based on Steven King’s 2011 novel, and while it was entertaining enough, it accepted as fact that Oswald was the lone culprit. King was 15 when JFK was killed, so like many who lived through that moment he probably at some level needs Oswald to have been the lone culprit, because otherwise it means that that entire period of his life, before and after the event itself, was being shaped by anti-democratic actors who felt themselves to be above the law.

We’re living in a time when it’s patently obvious that our lives are being shaped by anti-democratic actors who feel themselves to be above the law. They aren’t hiding on grassy knolls any more. They’re standing in the middle of Fifth Avenue.

That doesn’t mean that every single person doing something anti-democratic and/or illegal is connected to every other, either then or now. Every individual shooting at a democratically elected representative is doing something anti-democratic and illegal. Millions of people did something anti-democratic last November when they voted in an aspiring autocrat. Democratically elected representatives the world over have broken laws. Some of it will have involved conspiracies, some won’t. We’re living in countries with millions of people, tens or hundreds of millions in many cases, and an unsettling proportion of them are psychopaths. What seems more unlikely in such a world: that there are conspiracies, or that there aren’t?

And if there are, what does that mean for us as individuals? Most of us aren’t in a position to do anything to investigate or disrupt conspiracies directly. Obsessing about specific possible conspiracies, especially conspiracies long past, is for most people a hobby at best and a disorder at worst. It’s more productive to behave and to live as we think is right, and to support others who are doing the same, and to find the courage to intervene if we see wrongdoing taking place.

But even as I write that, I know that our personal definitions of right and wrong won’t be universally shared; that sometimes they’ll conflict with other people’s. The laws of any particular time and place won’t always align with what’s right. Depending on our perspective and on the circumstances, right-thinking people can be part of conspiracies. We just choose not to call them that.

← 7 December 2025 · Politics