JFK and the Unspeakable

[Martha Rooster-Singh]

Douglas doesn't have to prove that the CIA killed JFK. It doesn't much
matter at this point. In fact, I question why bring the assassination into
it? It only muddies the waters.  The obvious reason is that he wants to
show us how we got to this point from 1960. If we agree with his assessment
of where things are and how things got to be as they are, the assassination
is only a distraction. The unspeakable now is not the assassinations. And
JFK's assassination, if you think the CIA killed him and the others, was
only one of several unspeakable murders. The unspeakable is not nuclear war
with the Soviets.  This is not 1960. But the counter to unspeakable
violence has not changed. Peace is still unspeakable. The kind of world JFK
described in the University Speech is, in 2014, unspeakable. It is a
thought crime. You can't even think it.

On Sunday, January 12, 2014, Joseph Tracy wrote:

> The reek of conspiracy is deep  and the obvious center is the CIA. What
> becomes clear is why. And how they had so many allies or sympathizers that
> they could be pretty certain they would get away with it.  The continuous
> growth of the Military industrial complex and the power of intelligence
> agencies along with the erosion of civil liberties points to the
> fundamental success of a coup. The degree and depth of Kennedy's embrace of
> an alternate vision to the cold war( which he seemed to foresee as the
> beginning of a permanent state of war) is made evident by Douglas through
> Kennedy's speeches and conversations with  his few  friends and allies.
> On Jan 11, 2014, at 9:53 AM, Mark Kohut wrote:
>
> > Yeah, the CIA did it.
> >  Read Bugliosi's book as well.
> >
> >
> > On Friday, January 10, 2014 10:20 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net<javascript:;>>
> wrote:
> > Starting into Jim Douglas's book, JFK and the Unspeakable. I didn't know
> he was part of the Catholic worker movement and had written mostly as a
> Christian pacifist. So far the prose and organization of information is
> engaging and substantive. As he tracks Kennedy's confrontation with the
> Military and CIA he also follows the contemporaneous work of Thomas Merton
> to confront the immoral essence of nuclear military power( while being
> obedient to church authorities). The phrase ' the unspeakable' was used by
> Merton to describe  the mentality and unscrupulous behavior of those who
> have accustomed themselves to enormous power and will do anything to retain
> it.
> >   Just the clarity with which he tracks the postwar rise of the national
> security state gives the book a rare quality. He is not trying to be
> inductive, but sets out his contention from the start, provides a timeline
> and begins to fill in the JFK timeline with asides to examine the parallel
> peace work of Thomas Merton.
> >   Other works on the JFK assassination seem to get whelmed in competing
> theories, players, elaborate timelines, scientific issues, etc.  Douglas
> sets out to detail the motives of the CIA  and to elaborate how the CIA
> planned and covered up the assassination, as though he were a prosecutor
> making a case.
> >
> > What gives the book an added power is the concept of what is
> unspeakable,and how even when overwhelming evidence points to a reality,
> there are realities that remain unspeakable. The article on holocaust film
> footage also deals with the phenomenon. Pynchon spends much of his energy
> as a writer bringing us into proximity to unspeakable parts of human
> experience. He backs us into it with jokes and wonders, coincidences and
> seedy lost souls, lists, and the inevitable force of history. But it is
> that feeling of scraping up against the raw madness that compels one to
> think and speak about the unthinkable and unspeakable.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > -
> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
> >
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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