| This weekend, thousands of us will converge on Columbus, Georgia, for the annual protest at the “School of the Americas,” the official U.S. military training institution for Latin American militaries and death squads. Once again, we will mourn the dead, march for peace, and call for the closing of this terrorist training camp. [See: www.soaw.org] But Friday, November 22nd, of course, marks the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination. On Friday afternoon, at the Columbus Convention Center, I will take part in the premiere of “Project Unspeakable,” a theatrical production based on Jim Douglass’ exceptional book, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Way It Matters (Simon and Schuster/paper). Like the “Laramie Project,” “Project Unspeakable” (by Court Dorsey, see www.projectunspeakable.com) can be read by a dozen people and staged by activist groups around the country as a tool for political education and discussion. The goal is to use live political theater to break the silence and propaganda around the assassinations of the Kennedys, Malcolm X, and Dr. King, and to show how and why U.S. government and military forces systemically killed our best leaders. On Friday, Jim Douglass, Randy Kehler, Kathy Kelly and I will be among the readers. As we mark this anniversary, I certainly urge people to read Jim’s book–the best book on the assassination, perhaps the best book on a U.S. president, and one of the best books which explains these last fifty years of war and corruption. Jim Douglass uses the writings of his friend Trappist monk Thomas Merton as a sounding board of faith and reason throughout the story. “One of the awful facts of our age,” Merton wrote in 1965, “is the evidence that the world is stricken indeed, stricken to the very core of its being by the presence of the Unspeakable. Those who are so eager to be reconciled with the world at any price must take care not to be reconciled with it under this particular aspect: as the nest of the Unspeakable. This is what too few are willing to see.” The Unspeakable, Merton wrote, “is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said, the void that gets into the language of public and official declarations at the very moment when they are pronounced, and makes them ring dead with the hollowness of the abyss. It is the void out of which Eichmann drew the punctilious exactitude of his obedience.” Put another way, Merton’s term “the Unspeakable,” refers to the systemic evil and its darkness and shadow that surrounds us today. It’s the structures, institutions and spirit of violence, war and evil that run rampant across the globe. If we open our eyes, we see it everywhere—from the Snowden revelations that our government is spying and tracking possibly every human being on the planet to our secret wars and extrajudicial assassinations, the drone bombings, the loss of civil liberties, the total sell-out to corporations and weapons manufacturers, the ongoing preparations for nuclear war, the failure to serve the poor at home and abroad—not to mention our destruction of the environment and active pursuit of catastrophic climate change. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Unspeakable meant the “war on communism,” the active pursuit of global nuclear war, and war with Cuba, the Soviet Union, and Vietnam. By punishing, silencing, and killing off the voices of truth, this Unspeakable evil pursued its warpath in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Panama, and Colombia, and then the war on terrorism and the U.S. killings in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya and elsewhere. Through meticulous research, Jim Douglass argues that JFK began to understand our systemic commitment to war and nuclear weapons, and decided to confront it. During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, probably the most dangerous moment in human history, we came perilously close to killing millions of people in a nuclear conflagration. But JFK, with Khrushchev, choose peace instead. Then he began to take small steps to reverse our nuclear buildup and pull our troops out of Vietnam. Indeed, Douglass argues that because of JFK’s ongoing bad health, near-death experience on PT 109, and eyewitness experience at the failed founding of the League of Nations, JFK had always been determined to give his life for peace, to help prevent another world war. He paid for his pursuit of peace with his very life. “The Unspeakable is not far away,” Jim Douglass writes in a quote we will cite in Friday’s performance. “It is not somewhere out there, identical with a government that became foreign to us. The emptiness of the void, the vacuum of responsibility and compassion, is in ourselves. Our citizen denial provides the ground for the government’s doctrine of ‘plausible deniability.’ Kennedy’s assassination is rooted in our denial of our nation’s crimes in World War II that began the Cold War and the nuclear arms race. As a growing precedent to JFK’s assassination by his own national security state, we U.S. citizens supported our government when it destroyed whole cities (Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki), when it protected our Cold War security by world-destructive weapons, and when it carried out the covert murders of foreign leaders with ‘plausible deniability’ in a way that was obvious to critical observers. By avoiding our responsibility for the escalating crimes of state done for our security, we who failed to confront the Unspeakable opened the door to JFK’s assassination and its cover-up.
In his book, Jim Douglass asks “Why was JFK killed?” That’s a question few dare to ask. If we pursue the truth, he insists that we will find hope even in the darkness. “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit,” Jesus says in John’s Gospel (12:24). In that spirit, Douglass writes: What Jesus was all about, what we as human beings are all about in our deepest nature, is giving our lives for one another. By bearing that witness of martyrdom, he taught, we will come to know what humanity really is in its glory, on earth as it is in heaven. A martyr is therefore a living witness to our new humanity. Was John F. Kennedy a martyr, one who in spite of contradictions gave his life as witness to a new, more peaceful humanity? Did a president of the United States, while in command of total nuclear war, detach himself enough from its power to give his life for peace?… Kennedy was not naïve. He knew the forces he was up against. Is it even conceivable that a man with such power in his hands could have laid it down and turned toward an end to the Cold War, in the knowledge he would then be, in Merton’s phrase, marked out for assassination?
“Peace need not be impractical, and war need not be inevitable,” JFK said famously at American University a few months before those government forces killed him. He called for “a strategy of peace,” not “a strategy of annihilation.” “Is not peace, in the last analysis, basically a matter of human rights—the right to live out our lives without fear of devastation—the right to breathe air as nature provided it—the right of future generations to a healthy existence?” |
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