JFK and the Unspeakable

[Martha Rooster-Singh]

http://www.washingtondecoded.com/site/2009/12/unspeakably-awful.html


On Sunday, January 12, 2014, Martha Rooster-Singh wrote:

> 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>
>> 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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