Global Research

Featured image: Picture of President Kennedy in the limousine in Dallas, Texas, on Main Street, minutes before the assassination. Also in the presidential limousine are Jackie Kennedy, Texas Governor John Connally, and his wife, Nellie. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

The two foundational events of the past half-century that are essential to understand if one wishes to grasp the truth of U.S. foreign and domestic policies are the subjects of the following interview. 

In the first part I am asked to reflect on JFK’s murder through the lens of James W. Douglass’s masterpiece, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters; the second part is devoted to my analysis of why I don’t speak about 9/11 anymore, my ongoing study of the linguistic mind control used to conceal the truth of the attacks and the subsequent “war on terror” that ensued and that has claimed millions of lives. Seventeen years and ongoing, this “war on terror,” is itself an example of language as sorcery, even as the justifications for this reign of death-dealing have become transparently ridiculous.  But we live in the age of the ridiculous, when the claims of charlatans are offered as serious arguments and are presented as such by their court stenographers of the corporate mainstream media, which is another branch of the CIA.  As the CIA’s “Mighty Wurlitzer” plays on (CIA officer Frank Wisner’s term for the way he could play any propaganda tune with the assistance of the agency’s people throughout the media, academe, the arts, etc.) and the “liberal” left joins in the anti-Russia and anti-alternative media campaign, understanding their language and logic games becomes more and more important.  James Douglass’s quotation on the “Unspeakable” from the Trappist priest Thomas Merton, who was himself assassinated followed by a 50 year cover-up that numbs the mind and pierces the heart at the extent of human treachery, rings truer with every passing day.  Merton described it thus:

It 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.

While so many Americans do their utmost to avoid the consequences of the void in which they dwell, perhaps talking and writing about it will still reach them before they too become victims of the system they support that continues to victimize millions throughout the world.  Perhaps.

Listen to the interview here.

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Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely; he is a frequent contributor to Global Research. He teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His website is http://edwardcurtin.com/.

Philip A Farruggio is a son and grandson of Brooklyn , NYC longshoremen. He has been a free lance columnist since 2001, with over 300 of his work posted on sites like Consortium News, Information Clearing House,  Global Research, Nation of Change, World News Trust, Op Ed News, Dissident Voice, Counterpunch, Activist Post, Sleuth Journal, Truthout and many others. His blog can be read in full on World News Trust., whereupon he writes a great deal on the need to cut military spending drastically and send the savings back to save our cities. Philip has a internet interview show, ‘ It’s the Empire… Stupid’ with producer Chuck Gregory, and can be reached at [email protected]