hour-long audio interview: "Unspeakable" author

[Ed Jewett]

George Kenny at Electric Politics interviews James Douglass on his book
“JFK and the Unspeakable”. (one hour mp3)
http://www.electricpolitics.com/media/mp....05.15.mp3 [/FONT]

[Magda Hassan]

Thanks Ed! This will be a treat :willy:

[Ed Jewett]

I'm half-way through, and it already is. Moves the purchase of the book up to 'very soon'. Very rich stuff.

[Ed Jewett]

See also these videos (roughly an hour-long each):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srstQVfVNEM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jacbZjouJ0

each about an hour long, probably overlapping in material because they seem to be drawn from book-tour appearances, and which reference the following books also by Douglass:

Resistance and Contemplation: The Way of Liberation

http://www.amazon.com/Resistance-Contemp...1597526096

Dear Gandhi: Now What? Letters from Ground Zero

http://www.amazon.com/Dear-Gandhi-What-L...0865711259

The Non-Violent Cross: A Theology of Revolution and Peace

http://www.amazon.com/Non-Violent-Cross-...1597526088

[Ed Jewett]

And this one-hour video
MLK, JFK, RFK and the Unspeakable

(fimed during the writing of the book)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUdqgD6-cLM&NR=1

[Nathaniel Heidenheimer]

This book went up to 499 on Amazon two days ago, which was the highest it has been since in 5 months since the TV boost it got in late June.

Moreover it remained inside the top 1000 for six days in a row for the first time since that summer boost period.

Moever for the two weeks before that it spent almost all of the time btw. 1,000 and 1,600 level?

Well what is the point?

This books build up has been both steady and wide over a long period. It may or may not have the capacity to be a best seller, but regardless, it is and will be the first JFK book in a long long time to reach a relatively wide audience over a long time since perhaps 1992 boomlet years. That means
a gateway to a new "generation"

That also means a good way of using this book to direct new readers to other great books. I hope Charles or someone who has read the new edition
of Evicas book will use this opportunity to plant a link to Evicas book in a review for Unspeakable.

Unspeakable WILL BE VISIBLE FOR A LONG TIME NOW. SOON IT WILL BE AT LEAST AS VISIBLE as say the Diary of an Economic Hitman book.

If the product link bar is used on the Amazon reviews, then others could hit the "I think this review is helpful button" If a lot of people do that then that could put the new Evica book in a permanent page one review of Unspeakable.

Sounds like minutia I know. But l really think this could be a the difference btw. a book that stays in the 300,000 range and one that gets inside 2,000 and lingers....

With today's Corporate Book censorship we need to use the avenues that are still available to us. We need to take the JFK Assassination from the back roads of history to the interstate of Current Events.

[James H. Fetzer]

15 April 2009
James Douglass was my guest on "The Real Deal" for two hours.
The program's archives are at http://radiofetzer.blogspot.com
The archive for this specific program may be found at this link:
http://nwopodcast.com/fetz/media/jim%20f...uglass.MP3

[Ed Jewett]

Thanks, Dr. Fetzer. I'm on the way out today to buy the book, and perhaps others written by Douglass. I am struck by what I have read and discovered thus far about the author, and I am struck by the parallels to what Dr. David Ray Griffin has written and said about the evil behind 9/11. I will listen to this interview; there is one other I flashed past last night that I will re-discover and re-post.

I must say, too, that I am a wee bit non-plussed by -- in awe of -- the fact that I am typing on a discussion board with you and your peers. I'm gonna have to sharpen my pencil and my wits and my cognitive skills. I re-read the American University commencement address and parts of Pacem in Terris last night. The work continues. Thank you for yours, and everyone else here as well.

[Ed Jewett]

The Saddest Story

Submitted by davidswanson on Mon, 2010-03-01 16:56.

• Military Industrial Complex
  
• Spying
  

By David Swanson
One of the most unusual books and far-and-away the saddest I have ever read is James Douglass's "JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters." This is the best documented account ever produced of why and how the CIA assassinated John F. Kennedy. That the CIA did this is beyond dispute, and that the first President Bush was involved is well established by Russ Baker's book "Family of Secrets." What separates Douglass's book from the pack is his account of how Kennedy lived his final months, the actions he took that turned the CIA against him but saved the world from a nuclear holocaust and -- had he lived -- would probably have avoided the Vietnam War and brought the Cold War to a swift and peaceful conclusion.
Kennedy was a cold warrior who turned away from orthodoxy and became a heretic to those within the military industrial spook complex. He defied the demands of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA on the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis, on Laos and Congo, on Berlin and Indonesia and -- above all -- on Vietnam, in opening up a dialogue with Khrushchev and with Castro, by creating a nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviet Union, by taking on the steel corporations, by firing the director of the CIA and other top officials, by planting a false story that his military advisors opposed escalation in Vietnam, by ordering a withdrawal from Vietnam, by selling wheat to the Soviet Union, by publicly and privately setting an agenda for peace and complete disarmament and world law, and by making plans to visit the Kremlin and declare the Cold War over.
This is not the Kennedy we think we know. It is certainly not the Kennedy the History Channel claims to document. But this is a Kennedy thoroughly researched and documented by the author. And if the History Channel's portrait of a sex-obsessed president has any relevance to how Kennedy acted on the large issues of war and peace, then we have an absolute moral duty to get President Obama some girlfriends fast!
Douglass has been a religious writer on the topic of religion, and that background shows up in this book, especially in the opening pages, but this atheist did not find that framing of the story distracting or troubling in the least. This is a history text and a dramatic tale by a talented researcher and summarizer of facts and their broader import.
Kennedy was the president of a nation that had already -- long before the Bush-Cheney age -- transferred tremendous power from the legislative branch to the president. This was not government of the people, but government of the person. But it was a person under the threat of death if he stepped too far out of line, a person unable to control his own military and CIA, a person able to make progress toward world peace only once Khrushchev and Castro understood that Kennedy's greatest impediment was his own bureaucracy.
Douglass shows us that Kennedy knew he was risking assassination but chose to take that risk, and that Johnson and later presidents knew what had transpired and chose not to put their necks on the line. The fear that presidents, congress members, and millions of other Americans have lived with -- allowed themselves to live with, CHOSEN to live with -- since the Kennedy assassination is the unspeakable weight dragging our republic and the world back to the abyss that Kennedy so narrowly avoided during the missile crisis, and which the powers behind the US throne would have plunged the world into could they have had their way.
Last year, Congressman Barney Frank, whose every utterance is usually televised, held a press conference to propose cutting 25% from the military budget. Not a single reporter came. This is also the story of President Kennedy's greatest and least known speech, a commencement address he gave at American University on June 10, 1963 -- a thing of beauty that no politician in Washington, outside of Dennis Kucinich, would ever come close to uttering today. Kennedy spoke of complete disarmament and world government, and announced the unilateral cessation of nuclear testing. He was urging the public toward peace, reversing the relationship the public has had with politicians ever since. In private Kennedy wrote:
"Things cannot be forced from the top. The international relinquishing of sovereignty would have to spring from the people -- it would have to be so strong that the elected delegates would be turned out of office if they failed to do it. . . . War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today."
Kennedy, like any president or member of Congress, knew that decisions he made risked many other people's lives, including those of soldiers in the U.S. military. He found the courage to risk his own life in order to save those of many others. We must demand that our elected officials today, in an era of greatly expanded power for the CIA, act on the same courage. To do so, we must find that courage ourselves.
Sometimes a sad story can be a beautiful guide forward.


http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/50424