Forget it, TB, it's Chinatown.

You just don't get it, do you? It's the same kid of question: multiple sources, multiple opinions, multiple points of view, multiple agendas. We'll never know. There is no objective truth, at least none so we can say "AHA! There's the smoking gun!" Now we know exactly what happened."

I agree a dictatorship was possible in the 30s, Americans were desperate. But would it have been Communism or Fascism? We know what happened in Europe. But did we get lucky because FDR was too weak to impose one, or because he was determined to preserve our democracy at any cost? How do we know? How can we know? How can anyone know? In the end, it is a meaningless question, one that it is impossible to answer. All we can say is it didn't happen, we can never answer "why". And there is no conceivable future event, either a left or right wing dictatorship, or a failure of either to materialize, which can be used to settle the question, either.

We are arguing philosophy, not physics, there is no objective truth here, no incontrovertible evidence, no unimpeachable sources. The best we can do is identify a few trends and themes or an occasional factoid which in isolation suggests something, but proves nothing. Clever people will always be able to find whatever information they need to make whatever point they want to believe, and most of the time they'll sincerely believe they are right. You believe climatology can be Lowellized; how can you not accept that history, politics and economics can too.

Was the Warren Commission right about JFK? Was it the Mafia, the Right, the Left, Castro, the anti-Castro exiles, the CIA, the Military, the Soviets, a crazy fanatic, or two, or the Grassy Knoll Gunmen? Or maybe some combination? Thousands of pages and millions of earnest footnotes and nobody really knows. When it comes right down to it we interpret history the way it best fits our own prejudices and intuition, and we impose on it our own logic and hidden forces. Who's to say what the motives of dead men were? Perhaps they themselves were just playing it by ear, merely responding spasmodically to events with no plan in mind. And if you reject that insight, find any historical event in the distant past and see how the historians of subsequent ages have seen it through the filters of their own time. Our view of the past is constantly changing, and vulnerable to shifts in fashion.

Everything you know, or think you know, is molded by what you have already decided must be true. And I don't doubt for a microsecond you believe the same about me. I think you understand this perfectly well TB, at some visceral level, but you just haven't admitted it to yourself. The reason you feel the need to persuade everyone else of this, to challenge any deviation from your world view, is not to convince anyone else, but to justify it in your own mind.

Like I said in an earlier post;

"It appears that neither of us is going to have much success convincing the other to switch sides."