Monika Wiesak is the author of America’s Last President: What the World Lost When It Lost John F. Kennedy . In it, she explains in detail why the loss of JKF mattered far more than not only the likes of Chomsky claim, but even more than most of Kennedy's admirers realize. She also dares to explore the possibility, following Michael Collins Piper, Laurent Guyenot, and Ron Unz, that Israel was the prime force behind the assassination. Check out her new Substack article on that increasingly hot topic…it’s very useful background information for those wondering why so many voices with huge audiences including Cenk Uyger and Tucker Carlson, Lawrence Wilkerson and Judge Napolitano, Wilkerson and Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Candace Owens, and most importantly former CIA officer John Kiriakou, who says that more than 10,000 JFK files have been illegally withheld because they reveal that Israel did it have been saying such things.

Transcript

Kevin Barrett: Welcome to Truth Jihad Audio Visual. I’m Kevin Barrett, doing the radio show for years and now some video too. I try to bring on important authors and writers to translate the written word into some spoken dialogue. We have a very important author today, Monika Weisak. She’s written some great books on a number of topics, probably none more important than America’s Last President: What the World Lost When It Lost John F. Kennedy. So…hello Monika, how are you?

Monika Wiesak:I’m good. Thank you very much for having me on today.

Kevin Barrett: It’s great to have you and meet you. I admire your work. Here is your book on JFK, America’s Last President: What the World Lost When It Lost John F. Kennedy. And I think it’s an important book because the only thing remotely close to it that I know of anyway is the James Douglass book JFK and the Unspeakable, which is primarily about the assassination, but it touches on the reasons for the assassination, which were essentially that John F. Kennedy was standing up for the public interest against a long list of people who didn’t have the public interest in mind at all. But your book focuses on that and not so much on the assassination, and I think it’s a great contribution, so congratulations.

Monika Wiesak: Thank you.

Kevin Barrett: The last chapters on the assassination kind of hint—actually, you could go from that last chapter to the Douglass book, and it would be a pretty good segue, wouldn’t it?

Monika Wiesak: Yeah, what I wanted to do is, I felt like nobody had really answered the question. The subtitle of the book is What the World Lost When It Lost John F. Kennedy. And I felt like no book had really properly answered that question because the first question to ask about any massive historical assassination is what changed, or what did we lose, or why does it matter? And I felt like a lot of the books were focusing on the technicalities of the assassination or were theorizing about what might have happened.

Kevin Barrett: That’s a great point. And that’s actually something that doesn’t come out nearly as forcefully in the Douglass book. It’s kind of implicit, right?And it’s quite shocking, really, how radically different the world might have been had the Kennedy program succeeded. And how do we even start to think about something that massive?

Monika Wiesak: Yes. It’s sort of why I put it together, because it was so much more than I imagined. Before I studied his presidency, what I’d kind of heard rumblings of was, oh, maybe Vietnam or things of that nature, but it’s really the whole world. It’s Africa, it’s the Congo, it’s Latin America, it’s Indonesia, it’s Laos and Vietnam, it’s the Middle East, it’s Palestine. All of these policies changed drastically upon his assassination.

Kennedy was very much in support of Third World nationalism. He gave a lot of foreign aid to Africa, to Latin America. I think foreign aid to Africa increased something like fivefold. He did the Alliance for Progress for Latin America, which was to help those countries become independent and help make them not so reliant on just a primary export, but really to develop their own economies.

I think he just viewed the world as sort of... We were catering to the ultra-wealthy in the United States, as we do today, rather than the lives of your average American.

Kevin Barrett: Right. That quality of Kennedy’s, that he actually had compassion for ordinary people and wanted to set policies that served their interests, really shines through in your book. And that includes both Americans and people outside of the U.S. And I think a lot of people have missed much, if not all, of this. I know for many years I’d read people like Noam Chomsky, who is anti-Kennedy and basically tries to claim that anybody who cares about that assassination is completely misguided and Kennedy was ruthless.

So to what do you attribute that kind of second assassination of Kennedy that came from many different quarters, including from the left, from Chomsky? What was behind that?

Monika Wiesak: Yeah, it’s got to be because they don’t want people to care, right? If you want to cover up a coup d’état that occurred, one of the easiest ways to cover it up—there’s two ways to cover it up, right? One is to cover up the crime itself, which they did with the Warren Commission and whatnot. But they didn’t do a great job of it because it’s a difficult crime to physically cover up.

So the other way to cover it up is to make people not care. And in some ways that’s a more effective way.

Like Chomsky said, “Who cares who killed JFK? Who cares if it was a jealous husband?” Implying it doesn’t even matter if it was a conspiracy. It doesn’t even matter if it wasn’t Oswald because Kennedy meant nothing to this world.

Kevin Barrett: Was he alluding to Cord Meyer and Kennedy’s relationship?

Monika Wiesak: I don’t know what he was alluding to, but I think what he was alluding to was that it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if Oswald did it or not because nothing changed when Kennedy died, I think is what Chomsky’s argument is. And you have to really question Chomsky because it’s very obvious that a massive amount did change. One just needs to look at the historical record to see that. So one has to wonder what Chomsky’s intentions were in downplaying it.

And I think his intentions were to make people not care. He said that bluntly: why should anyone care?

And so I think it’s because something like the assassination of a president is something that can really mobilize people. There are a lot of atrocities happening around the world, and it’s a horrible thing to say, but it’s difficult to get Americans to really understand those atrocities or really put in the effort to try to correct them because they don’t really grasp them. They’re so distant from Americans’ everyday lives.

But the murder of America’s president—people understand that. People grasp that. People are impacted by that. So that’s something that could actually mobilize the public.

Kevin Barrett: Chomsky also said at one point—and I think when people pressed him on JFK and made some of the points you just made—he switched tacks and said that it would be sort of fatal for the left, meaning his people, to try to take on the people who had the power to kill a president. They would be far too powerful to take on. It would be suicide to try to take them on. He actually said that, which struck me as bizarre.

Monika Wiesak:Yeah, that is bizarre, because if enough people speak about it, there’s nothing that can be done about it. You can’t stop the truth if enough people speak on it. Chomsky had a pretty large following, so he absolutely could have mobilized people to try to do something about the Kennedy assassination if he wanted to.

Kevin Barrett:Or 9/11, for that matter.

Monika Wiesak:Yeah, or any major crime. I think he could have mobilized people, but he chose not to, and I think that makes his career look highly problematic.

Kevin Barrett:Yeah, I agree completely. So getti...