JFK and the Unspeakable
malignd at aol.com
malignd at aol.com
Mon Jan 13 17:28:38 CST 2014
Sentence one is Japan. Sentence two, Oliver Stone's "artistic" output, despite his film being completely wrong in its hypothesis. Sentence three, if Oliver Stone were on the p-list!. Sentence four, Jim Douglas is worth reading because he's not Oliver Stone who, one assumes, would not be worth reading (despite his artistic output and were he a writer). Sentence five, which ignores the four-sentence preamble, instead makes a claim for what is "just pretty fucking obvious." Sentence six -- which is that the President is a pawn of the security state. Sentence seven "there's a hole in (your?) big brother's arm ..." for which I'll have to take your word.
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.
-----Original Message-----
From: Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net>
To: P-list List <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Mon, Jan 13, 2014 1:29 am
Subject: Re: JFK and the Unspeakable
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
>
> Didn't realize we had Oliver Stone on the plist. You're smarter than that man
c'mon
>
>
>
>
>> On Jan 12, 2014, at 5:52 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> When you speak of thought crimes you relegate yourself to a cage which only
you have the lock or key for.
>>
>>
>>> 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.
>>>
>>> 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.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
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