Early last year, during the height of the Mo Toons eruption, in a post documenting a remarkably Neville Chamberlain-like response to the cartoons from the State Department, Glenn Reynolds wrote:

I'm sorry, but the lesson here is that if you want to be listened to, you should blow things up. That's a very bad incentive structure, but it's the one the allegedly responsible parties have created.

Political asssassination, which posits that merely killing one man can cause enormous ripples in society if he's powerful enough (see War, Great), is very much a form of terrorism. That's one of the reasons why James Piereson’s new Camelot and the Cultural Revolution seems remarkably current, at least to me, despite its 1960s timeframe. As the book’s subtitle implies--How The Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism--I don’t think Piereson wrote it primarly to be another debunking, ala Vincent Bugliosi, of the usual Oliver Stone-style “mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma” conspiracy hash. Piereson’s much more interested in the enormous ripple in history that Kennedy’s assassination caused, coupled with the cognitive dissonance amongst American liberals who couldn't process the ideology of JFK's assassin.

As Piereson told John J. Miller yesterday:

Liberals who were rational and realistic accepted the fact that Oswald killed JFK but at the same time they were unable to ascribe a motive for his actions. They tended to look for sociological explanations for the event and found one in the idea that JFK was brought down by a “climate of hate” that had overtaken the nation. Thus they placed Kennedy’s assassination within a context of violence against civil rights activists. They had great difficulty accepting the fact that Kennedy’s death was linked to the Cold War, not to civil rights. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., in his 1,000-page history of the Kennedy administration, published in 1965, could not bring himself to mention Oswald’s name in connection with Kennedy’s death, though he spent several paragraphs describing the hate-filled atmosphere of Dallas at the time — suggesting thereby that Kennedy was a victim of the far right. The inability to come to grips with the facts of Kennedy’s death pointed to a deeper fault in American liberalism which was connected to its decline.

There’s a passage deep in Piereson’s book that builds on that interview quote:

Oswald thus brought about some surprising consequences by his intrusion into history. From the perspective of more than forty years, it appears that the assassination saved Castro from Kennedy’s concentrated efforts to overthrow or assassinate him, led to a change in focus in American foreign policy, and created an environment favorable to liberal reform. At the same time, it also led to confusion and disorientation among the American people, and it played an important part in turning many Americans against their country in the latter half of the 1960s when blame for the assassination was deflected from Oswald to the country more broadly. The effects of the Kennedy assassination, combined with the domestic backlash against the war in Vietnam, were so profound for the United States that for a period of years in the 1960s and 1970s they shifted the ideological momentum of the Cold War in the direction of the Soviet Union. If an assassin is judged by the far-reaching consequences of his act, Lee Harvey Oswald, in contrast to John Wilkes Booth, might rank as one of the more consequential assassins in history.

I remember back in 1977 watching a ponderous ABC TV movie called The Trial Of Lee Harvey Oswald. What if Oswald had actually lived to stand trial? He'd have likely faced a state-mandated death sentence, rather than the business end of Jack Ruby's pistol. But the appeals process would probably have ground on long enough so that Oswald would have seen society reshaping itself in the mid-to-late 1960s as a direct consequence of his actions in November of 1963.

When you flash-forward to this decade, and how the events of September 11th have transformed the left, both in terms of its pivoting away from a policy in the Middle East that Bill Clinton favored in the 1990s, and the concoction of a conspiracy theory regarding the origins of 9/11 that dwarfs anything that Oliver Stone or his writers could have dreamed up, you can’t help but think that when accomplished on a large-enough scale, terrorism works. All too well.

And that’s one utterly depressing thought.

Update: Norm Geras looks at the left's confusion over Salman Rushdie's recent knighthood and the Islamofascist response and writes, "What a disgraceful capitulation to legitimating the taking of offence as a form of argument in the public domain".

Unfortunately, it's far from the first instance.

Another Update: Welcome readers of Jules Crittenden, and Salon's Blog Report. Please look around--you're sure to find much cheerier topics than this!