The Zapruder film is an interesting historical source because it can be viewed in two different lights. It can make people aware of the awfulness of the assassination and how it must have felt to be watching the Kennedys as JFK got shot, but it is also a platform for conspiracy discussions that disregard the emotions experienced by those in the car and those watching it. If you dissect the film, looking carefully at the all the frames to see what clues you can find that point towards a government conspiracy, you risk becoming used to the sight of someone having their brains blown out. Then you also risk forgetting that this caused everyone a great deal of pain; JFK obviously suffered physically, but Jackie and the people watching suffered emotionally. It strikes me that the Zapruder film is very similar to the films of 9/11 that people have tried to dissect, searching for clues about government involvement.
There is much more footage of 9/11 than of the Kennedy assassination, and this means that there is a lot more material to work from when forming conspiracy theories. There are dozens of videos on Youtube about conspiracy theories, all showing in detail how the planes crashed into the World Trade Center. They examine how the floors collapsed, claiming that there must have been explosives placed inside the building. Other films, however, show a more human side. They show people jumping out of the buildings because they don't know what else to do. They show pictures of people in the street, screaming and running in panic. They include recordings of phone calls made from the buildings from people who were about to die to the people they love. If you watch the first type of video, you don't understand the despair that people felt, just as you lose the human side of the story if you watch the Zapruder film with an analytical mindset.
Of course, these are tragedies on very different scales. In one, one man was killed, and another was killed in the aftermath. In the other, thousands of people lost their lives and thousands of families lost their loved ones. But they are both tragedies, and perhaps that fact should be more important than the government's possible role. I do not mean to say that it is not important to figure out the truth. But since it may not be possible to know the truth, perhaps it is better to focus on the sadness and the ways that people reacted to these events after they happened. Focusing too much on how it happened feels somehow disrespectful to the people who died.
In the 9/11 case--and I know this is still a very emotionally charged issue--the "truther" movement (a basically derogatory term that puts all such people who raise challenges into a marginalized "nutjob" category) largely originated FROM the families who lost loved ones in the attacks and had serious questions about the way the response was handled, at the city, state, and federal levels. The impetus to dig deeper than the official story allowed came from family members who believed they were being lied to by public officials and who resented the idea that the attacks were perhaps being used by the Bush administration to justify an attack on Iraq, a country that had no connection whatsoever to the attacks (although, somehow, a majority of Americans believed they were solely responsible at one point--a staggering fact to take into account, when thinking about how official sources distort history as it's happening!).
ReplyDeleteSo some of the "truther" stuff did spin out into implausible and even offensive stories about high officials in the government "planning" the attacks, or sending secret messages to Jewish employees to stay home from work that day--stuff that is justly marginalized from serious discource. But at its core, the movement raised questions about what the Bush administration knew and should have known in the months before the attacks, what was done and what wasn't done, and how the attacks were used for propaganda purposes. Officials within the Bush administration are on record wishing for a "new Pearl Harbor" to bolster American support for military action in the Muslim world. To say that 9/11 furnished such a justification is not the same as saying that they *planned it*, or even knowingly allowed it to happen. But it does at least raise serious questions for the historian and the citizen, and I have a lot of sympathy for the 9/11 families who continue to be marginalized and stonewalled when they raise questions, but whose suffering faces are readily used as photo-ops when those same politicians who blow them off need to summon some patriotic cred.