Can Obama Face the 'Unspeakable'?

[Algorem]

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/121409a.html

By Lisa Pease
December 14, 2009


...

Obama, like President John F. Kennedy, has had his first encounters with the permanent warfare establishment, and so far, has been persuaded by their arguments. This book could open his eyes – and ours – to the possibility of another path...



Merton coined the term “the Unspeakable” to describe the forces of evil that seemed to defy description, that took from the planet first Kennedy, then Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy, and which tragically escalated the war in Vietnam...



Douglass traces Kennedy’s confrontation with the Unspeakable and his efforts to escape that trajectory. Kennedy came to understand that peace through war would never bring us true peace, but only a “Pax Americana,” which would foster resentment among the conquered, sowing the seeds of future conflicts, a fear that has proven true over and over in the years following his death...

Douglass reminds us that “The Unspeakable is not far away. It is not somewhere out there, identical with a government that has become 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.’”...

[ananda]

1. The unspeakable has been here awhile.

nt

[midnight]

2. Maybe. He told us last night during his Oprah White House Christmas interview

that sending more troops was a decision that was very difficult to make.

[tiny elvis]

10. sounds like the dem congress saying they hated the idea of giving bear-stearns $40b

so they gave them 80 billion

[RufusTFirefly]

3. K and R for one of the very best books I've read in recent memory n/t

[Liberation Angel]

4. Very Very Important Book K&R Consortium News is the BEST site

for this information which we ALL need to support and stay on top of!

[nashville_brook]

5. simply the best book i've read on Kennedy, the assassination, and the era.

and, with it so fresh in mind, i can't help but wonder if the current president is experiencing similar difficulties. i have to imagine that the agencies/people involved have run roughshod pretty much since watergate, so, why wouldn't it be that way? in whole reality does the president actually get to make significant changes?

[nashville_brook]

6. dupe/delete

[MinM]

7. K&R for LP&JD

http://realhistoryarchives.blogspot.com/

JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters - Democratic Underground » Books: Non-Fiction

[bertman]

8. The answer is "yes, he can. In fact he already has and he has given in three times:

1) no investigations of Bush/Cheney administration war crimes; 2) no release of CIA torture photos that would generate a groundswell of anger; 3) the decision to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan and continue escalating that war.

Perhaps there is hope that he could read the book over the holidays and decide that he must follow the path of peace, but it's much more likely that he already knows the score and has decided to stay alive by taking the road more frequently traveled.

Recommend the thread and the book.

[yurbud]

9. if you ever run into in real life, it's hard to describe the effect it has on you

Doing union work, I have had the unfortunate opportunity to talk to employers who literally did not give a fuck if their employees lived or died, so long as they could make the books look the way they wanted. It made me feel like a scrap of meat being thrown into the grinder.