JFK and the Unspeakable

[Joseph Tracy]

Japan has faced its crimes far more deeply than the US. No one on the p-list has remotely rivaled Oliver Stones artistic output or skill though the JFK focus on Jim Garrison was a mistake. If  Stone was on the p-list I doubt he would be treated with dismissal. Anyway Jim Douglas is not  Oliver Stone and the book is worth reading. The problem is pretty fucking obvious and it isn't in ancient history. The president is a pawn played by the national security state. There's hole in big brother's arm where the money and the power goes and pretending won't make it go away.
  
On Jan 12, 2014, at 6:56 PM, Rich wrote:

> Japan hasn't really fessed up to the war. Ask the Chinese or the Koreans
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> Didn't realize we had Oliver Stone on the plist. You're smarter than that man c'mon
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>> On Jan 12, 2014, at 5:52 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
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>> I disagree. It matters. It is about a point of departure, and it is precisely because there was this challenge to and defiance of the prevailing myth that it matters. It is critical that we have a line that can't be crossed and crimes that must be faced just as Germany and Japan have faced their crimes. Kennedy represents  a point where the peacemaking that is currently deemed by the dominant culture to be unspeakable became both speakable and persuasively refreshing. Kennedy was loved and the love was growing and changing the culture. His death was not a meaningless accident. Not a paranoid fantasy.  Even the most cursory look at the assassination unleashes a flood of official denial, lies, manipulations, and  non-credible coincidences that demand that we simply refuse the official story. The narrative which the CIA tried to erase returns again and again and all the evidence functions as an Occam's razor to point to the CIA as the center of a successful plot to shift power away from elected leaders to an empire of secretive alliances between military, industrial, resource extraction and investment forces. Civilian and democratic oversight died with Kennedy. The only challenge to that was Carter who was easily relegated to one term and was still the vector of Breszinski's tenure as manager of imperial agenda.  
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>> When you speak of thought crimes you relegate yourself to a cage which only you have the lock or key for.  
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>>> On Jan 12, 2014, at 8:21 AM, 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. 
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>>> 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.
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>>>> 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.
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