Na mu myo ho renge kyo. (bowing to the Buddha in all)
Guruji taught us by his life the nonviolent practice that will
overcome war and terrorism—tangyō
raihai—bowing to the Buddha in everyone.[2]
I bow to the Buddha in our brother,
Anwar Al-Awlaki.[3]
I bow to the Buddha in our brother, Barack Obama.
I bow to the Buddha in our brother, Osama bin Laden.
I bow to the Buddha in our brother, George W. Bush.
I bow to the Buddha in our brothers and sisters who belong to
Al-Quaida.
I bow to the Buddha in our brothers and sisters who belong to the
United States Joint Special Operations Command.
And I pray that we all bow to the Buddha in our brothers and
sisters as Guruji and Gandhi did, venerating the lives of
everyone without exception and resisting nonviolently the evils
of war and terrorism.
Terrorism is the use of violence to intimidate a population or
government into granting demands.
I believe the terrorism that has inflicted the most damage on the
world is the warmaking terrorism of my own government, the United
States of America. War, as waged by the United States, has
terrorized much of the world—beginning with this
nation’s terrorism over the land’s First People, who
have welcomed us here today with prayers and great compassion.
Our nation’s warmaking has terrorized the world abroad for
the sake of its granting our demands: from the firebombing of
Tokyo and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the
systemic use of violence to intimidate people in Vietnam, Laos
and Cambodia to, in more recent days, our warmaking in Iraq,
Afghanistan and Pakistan.
It was ten years ago that our government
began terrorizing Afghanistan by war. That war is part of a
much larger battlefield which covers most of the planet. By
the end of this year, the U.S. military will be conducting
special operations in 120 countries, in about 60 percent of
the world’s nations.[4]
That ever-expanding secret war across the globe has included
hundreds upon hundreds of assassinations, whether by drones or
Special Forces teams, and is the descendant of
the CIA’s notorious Operation
Phoenix that terrorized the Vietnamese with similar night raids
and assassinations.[5] On
the night Osama bin Laden was killed, “special-operations
forces in Afghanistan conducted 12 other missions,”
assassinating between 15 and 20 targeted
individuals.[6] According
to the Defense Department official who gave these figures, it
was not an unusual night for Special Operations. “He
likened the routine of evening raids [and assassinations] to
‘mowing the lawn’”[7]
Our government’s systemic terrorism has become so routine,
so accepted by the media and the public, that an official can
compare it to “mowing the lawn” without fear of
protest.
Until this century, the U.S. government seemed to have the
privilege of inflicting terrorism on other parts of the world
without our own people being struck by terrorism at home. Then
came the shock of 9/11. We, too, were targeted. But by whom?
The
Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth have provided
overwhelming evidence that buildings don’t fall down the
way World Trade Center Buildings 1 and 2 supposedly did on 9/11
from being hit by jet planes—the way WTC 7 did without
being hit by any plane at all.[8] Those buildings must
have come down by controlled demolition—meaning an inside job.
Did Al-Quaida have the access and resources to set up the demolition
of those three buildings on 9/11? If not, then who did?
There were important, unrecognized precedents to 9/11 within the
United States related to the warmaking terrorism our forces
inflicted on other countries. At the same time as the CIA and
U.S. Special Forces terrorized Vietnam, they also terrorized the
United States. The terrorism that caused the most damage in our
own country was the chain of assassinations of President John F.
Kennedy, Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King and Senator Robert F.
Kennedy. The evidence in all four cases points directly to covert
intelligence operations launched from high-level sources.
Consider what we lost in this country by the
assassinations of a peacemaking president,[9]
two revolutionary prophets,[10]
and a president-to-be who was integrating their insights. The murders
of those four leaders were carried out covertly by U.S. agencies,
and then covered over for the last half century
by waves of propaganda.[11] They were devastating
acts of terror. The terrorism of those assassinations was critical
in discouraging a broadening movement for nonviolent change in the
United States.
Because we did not as a people overcome our
psychic denial and rise up nonviolently against the systemic
assassination of our leaders, the military-industrial complex took
increasing control over the United States.[12]
Today it is in almost total control—and perhaps on the verge
of making that control explicit.
Our current government policy of making assassinations the
centerpiece of U.S. warmaking provides dangerous options to the
military-industrial complex. The creation of a
“hit-list” of enemies abroad, following the example
of the CIA in the Cold War and the Vietnam War, is tailor-made
for regime change in our own government. The current
administration’s commitment to warmaking by covert action
and assassination has set up President Obama and other elected
officials for a total military-industrial takeover—at the
point of many covert action guns. The assassination politics that
took the lives of Osama bin Laden and U.S. citizens Anwar
Al-Awlaki and his companion, Samir Kahn, can be turned covertly
against any U.S. citizen who is thought to represent a threat,
including the president. It happened in the case of the Kennedys,
King and Malcolm. It can happen again to Obama and to us. We are
all in the same boat.
Yet that can be a providential truth, if we can see our situation
in common with 60 percent of the world’s people living in
the sights of our government’s guns. In fact, 100 percent
of the world lives under the threat of our nuclear weapons. What
was once called “a balance of terror” between the
United States and the Soviet Union is now a totally unbalanced
terror of the United States against the entire world. But all of
that is our providential invitation to act nonviolently in
solidarity with the whole world. We are being invited, in the
spirit of Guruji and Gandhi, into a revolution of total
compassion.
Guruji identified a revolution of total compassion with Gandhi.
Guruji said that Gandhi’s nonviolent revolution in India
fulfilled the tangyō raihai practice of Bodhisattva
Never Despise. Guruji said:
“What did Bodhisattva Never Despise do? He stopped reading
sūtras and instead walked about, bowing to others in
reverence. In response, people used force against him. They spoke
ill of him and beat him. He would then go away and continue to
venerate them with palms together saying, ‘I bow to you
because you all shall become the Buddha.’
“... It was India’s Mahatma Gandhiji,” Guruji
continued to say, “who came forward and followed in the
footsteps [of Bodhisattva Never Despise] in the Era of Declining
Dharma. [Gandhiji] was uncompromising in his rejection of
violence and held reverence for all. There was not a single
person he despised. This was what made it possible to resolve the
struggle with Britain without going to war.”
During the last year and a half of his life, Gandhi did indeed
follow in the footsteps of Bodhisattva Never Despise, just as
Guruji said. Gandhi walked step by step through the bloodbath of
a Hindu-Muslim Civil War, in the midst of colossal atrocities on
both sides, bowing in reverence to everyone, resisting the
violence and reconciling enemies.
Let Gandhi be our example, in the ever-expanding violence of our
nation toward the world. In 1947, Gandhi walked through the
region of Noakhali, which included 1.8 million Muslims and
400,000 Hindus. The minority Hindus were landowners and
professionals. They had grievances from Muslim workers, who,
incensed by tales of Hindus killing Muslims elsewhere, carried out
savage attacks on Noakhali’s Hindus.
Gandhi and his co-workers committed themselves totally to
stopping the violence. They fanned out one by one through the
bloody villages of Noakhali—living in the midst of the
conflict, rebuilding homes and reconciling battling neighbors.
Their mantra was "Do or Die" Some were in fact murdered,
including, in the end, Gandhi himself.
But in the process, nonviolence prevailed. In a seven-week
period, Gandhi visited 47 villages, walking 116 miles. He was 77
years old. Every morning he could be seen by the people crossing
Noakhali’s dangerously slippery narrow bamboo bridges, held
high on poles. Gandhi was outlined against the sky, as he went
from village to village, revering the people on the opposite
sides of the killing. It is an inspiring story of do-or-die
nonviolence. It was Gandhi’s final experiment with truth,
which also included two fasts risking his death that stopped the
violence of both Hindus and Muslims in first Calcutta and then
Delhi. And he finally succeeded in stopping the civil war
altogether—through his own martyrdom, his very final
experiment with truth.
In the last moments of his life, Mohandas Gandhi bowed to his
Hindu assassin, Nathram Godse, at the same time as his assassin
was bowing to him and shooting him to death. As Gandhi fell,
blessing his assassin, his last words were of God: “Rama!
Rama!”
As we face the towering violence of our own nation, we can
remember the do-or-die nonviolence of Gandhi and his co-workers.
Gandhi had no illusions. He knew the size of the problem. And he
and his community knew the nonviolent way to a solution. They
maintained a personal reverence for every person on every side of
the revolving massacre. They bowed to the Buddha in everyone. Let
us do the same.
At the dedication of the Milton Keynes Peace Pagoda in England in
1979, Guruji stated a vision of unity. He said, echoing the
nonviolent faith of Gandhi, “I believe in the possibility
of uniting the minds of billions of people in goodness.”
Guruji could make that act of faith uniting the minds of the
world’s people in goodness because he already knew it in
his heart. Because I saw Guruji walk this earth as a deeply
disciplined teacher, one who like Gandhi lived out nonviolence, I
can affirm his great statement of unity as not only visionary. It
is based on his realization of who he is, and of who we all are.
What he says is realistic. It tells us simply who we are in our
heart of hearts, if only we realize it. And we can. Peace is
possible.
I bow to the Buddha in our brother, Anwar Al-Awlaki.
I bow to the Buddha in our brother, Barack Obama.
I bow to the Buddha in our brother, Osama bin Laden.
I bow to the Buddha in our brother, George W. Bush.
I bow to the Buddha in our brothers and sisters who belong to
Al-Quaida.
I bow to the Buddha in our brothers and sisters who belong to the
United States Joint Special Operations Command.
And I pray that we all bow to the Buddha in our brothers and
sisters as Guruji and Gandhi did, venerating the lives of
everyone without exception and joining together in a revolution
of total compassion.
Na mu myo ho renge kyo.
Notes
Hyperlinks to most book titles
go to WorldCat.org, “the
world’s largest network of library content and services.
WorldCat libraries are dedicated to providing access to their
resources on the Web, where most people start their search for
information.” These links were accessed from the greater
Boston area. Enter your zip or postal code (e.g. 43017 or
S7K-5X2), City and/or state (e.g. Cincinnati, Ohio or Ohio or
OH), Province: (e.g. Ontario or ON), Country: (e.g. United
States or United Kingdom), or Latitude Longitude (e.g.
40.266000,-83.219250) to see listings of libraries where you
live. Where possible book title links reference the precise
edition cited in these footnotes. Where such editions could
not be found, alternate versions are linked to. Alternatively
to worldcat.org, some titles link to
OpenLibrary.org, an open,
editable library catalog, building towards a web page for every
book ever published. Open Library is a project of the non-profit
Internet
Archive, and has been funded in part by a grant from the
California State Library and the Kahle/Austin Foundation.
-
James Douglass,
Gandhi
and the Unspeakable: His Final Experiment With Truth
(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2012). From the dust jacket:
In 1948, at the dawn of his country’s independence,
Mohandas Gandhi, father of the Indian independence movement
and a beloved prophet of nonviolence, was assassinated by
Hindu nationalists. In riveting detail, author James W. Douglass
shows as he previously did with the story of JFK how police and
security forces were complicit in the assassination and how in
killing one man, they hoped to destroy his vision of peace,
nonviolence, and reconciliation. Gandhi had long anticipated
and prepared for this fate. In reviewing the little-known story of
his early experiments in truth in South Africa the laboratory for
Gandhi’s philosophy of satyagraha, or truth force, Douglass
shows how early he confronted and overcame the fear of death. And,
as with his account of JFK’s death, he shows why this story
matters: what we can learn from Gandhi’s truth in the
struggle for peace and reconciliation today.
See also: “Jim
Douglass’ new book, Gandhi and the Unspeakable, review by
by John Dear SJ, 14 February 2012, National Catholic Reporter.
-
From the Great Smoky Mountain Peace Pagoda page on
Most Venerable
Nichidatsu Fujii:
The Most Venerable Nichidatsu Fujii [1885-1985], more commonly known
as Guruji, is founder of the Buddhist religious order, Nipponzan
Myohoji, which is dedicated to working for world peace through Peace
Walks and the construction of Peace Pagodas.
Born August 6, 1885 in Aso, Kyushu Island, Japan, he became a Buddhist
monk at age 19 in opposition to the tendencies of the time, which
strongly encouraged a military career. At age 32, following much study
and severe ascetic practice, he arrived at the realization that his
mission–to spread world peace–would be accomplished through
the practice of beating a drum and chanting
Na Mu Myo Ho Ren Ge Kyo
Guruji first traveled to India in 1931 to return countless times in
the next 52 years. During his pilgrimage and missionary work in India,
he developed deep spiritual ties with the nonviolent independence movement
and with Mahatma Gandhi himself who bestowed the name “Guruji”
on him and who took up the practice of drumming and chanting which Gandhi
continued for the rest of his life.
Guruji and his disciples have walked through all the continents beating
the drum, chanting and offering prayers for peace. The atomic bombings of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 marked the dawn of the nuclear age, and
Guruji recognized the grave danger in humanity’s new and unprecedented
capacity for self-annihilation.
After World War II, Guruji began the construction of Peace Pagodas as a
means to build a universal, spiritual foundation for peace in this world.
Peace Pagodas [stupas in Sanskrit] enshrine holy relics of the Buddha.
Guruji began building his first Peace Pagoda in Hanaokayama in Kyushu
Island, Japan immediately after the war, offering a new vision and hope
not only amid the deprivation of post-war Japan but to the entire world.
Today,Peace Pagodas exist throughout the world and continue to be built
by Nipponzan Myohoji and others in a practice directly from the Lotus
Sutra.
-
From American
Civil Liberties Union:
“Anwar Al-Awlaki (a.k.a. Anwar Al-Aulaqi) was an American-born
Muslim cleric who was killed by U.S. forces in a targeted drone strike.
Al-Awlaki was never charged of a crime. In 2010, the ACLU and the
Center for Constitutional Rights brought a lawsuit on behalf of
Al-Awlaki’s father, challenging the government’s asserted authority
to carry out "targeted killings" of U.S. citizens located far from any
armed conflict zone. We argued that such killings violate the
Constitution and international law. The case was dismissed in federal
district court in December 2011.”
See Also: Center for Constitutional Rights’ presentation of information
on its and the ACLU’s lawsuit,
Al-Aulaqi
v. Panetta, filed on 18 July 2012, and
- “In
assassinating Anwar al-Awlaki, Obama left the Constitution behind,
Memo or no memo, the administration lacks any legal principle
behind the killing of the anti-American American citizen”
David Dow, The Daily Beast, 16 March 2012
- “Execution
by secret WH committee,
Reuters describes the bureaucratic panel that, with no
oversight or transparency, orders citizens killed by the CIA”
Glenn Greenwald, salon.com, 6 October 2011
- “The
due-process-free assassination of U.S. citizens is now reality,
Without a shred of due process, far from any battlefield,
President Obama succeeds in killing Anwar al-Awlaki”
Glenn Greenwald, salon.com, 30 September 2011
-
As estimated by the U.S. Special Operations Command spokesman,
Colonel Tim Nye. Cited by Nick Turse,
“A
Secret War in 120 Countries: the Pentagon’s New Power
Elite,” (4 August 2011, tomdispatch.com)
The endless terror war, the cold war’s twin, continues to
expand its sphere of operations. See Lolita Baldor,
“US Army teams to train Africans
as terror threat increases,” Associated Press /
Boston Globe, p. A7, 25 December 2012.
-
See Douglass Valentine, The Phoenix Program, published in 1990 and 1992.
Find a copy in
a
library near you. An
ebook is also available. Consider how
today’s killing program carried out by our U.S. Drone terror campaign,
can be seem as a direct descendant of The Phoenix Program. From
the author’s
website,
Because Phoenix “neutralizations” were often conducted at midnight while its
victims were home, sleeping in bed, Phoenix proponents describe the program
as a “scalpel” designed to replace the “bludgeon” of search and destroy
operations, air strikes, and artillery barrages that indiscriminately wiped
out entire villages and did little to “win the hearts and minds” of the
Vietnamese population. Yet the scalpel cut deeper than the U.S. government
admits. Indeed, Phoenix was, among other things, an instrument of counter-terror
– the psychological warfare tactic in which members of the VCI were brutally
murdered along with their families or neighbors as a means of terrorizing the
entire population into a state of submission. . . .
This book questions how Americans, who consider themselves a nation ruled by
laws and an ethic of fair play, could create a program like Phoenix. By
scrutinizing the program and the people who participated in it, and by
employing the program as a symbol of the dark side of the human psyche,
the author hopes to articulate the subtle ways in which the Vietnam War
changed how Americans think about themselves. This book is about terror and
its role in political warfare. It will show how, as successive American
governments sink deeper and deeper into the vortex of covert operations
– ostensibly to combat terrorism and Communist insurgencies – the American
people gradually lose touch with the democratic ideals that once defined
their national self-concept. This book asks what happens when Phoenix
comes home to roost.
-
Nicholas Schmidle,
“Getting
Bin Laden,” New Yorker (August 8, 2011), p. 41.
-
Ibid.
-
See the Architects & Engineers for
9/11 Truth website (AE911Truth.org),
a 501c3 non-profit organization, with on-going educational outreach projects
and news. See
9/11: Explosive Evidence
- Experts Speak Out (published, Sept 2012), a free 1-hour documentary, also
available for purchase as a DVD and streaming on
iTunes,
Hulu, and
Amazon.com.
See Also: Christopher Sharrett
“Without
restraint: 9/11 videos and the pursuit of truth,
Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, No. 50, spring 2008; and
David Ray Griffin,
9/11
Ten Years Later: When State Crimes Against Democracy Succeed
(Northhampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2011).
-
Concerning President Kennedy’s turning towards peace, in
1962 John Kennedy gave himself three Bay of Pigs -type events –
specific conflicts with his national security managers from the military and
intelligence establishments – before
a military coup would overthrow him and seize control of the United
States. A list of such conflicts between himself and his national
security state includes:
-
1961: negotiated peace with the
Communists for a neutralist government in Laos;
-
April 1961: Bay of Pigs and
JFK’s response: “[I want] to splinter the CIA in a
thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”
-
1961-63: Kennedy-Hammarskjöld-UN vision
kept the Congo together and independent;
-
April 1962: conflict
with big steel industrialists;
-
October 1962: Cuban Missile Crisis;
-
1961-63: Diplomatic opening
to Third World leadership of President Sukarno;
-
May 6, 1963: Presidential order NSAM 239 to pursue both a nuclear test ban and a policy of general and complete disarmament;
-
June 10, 1963: American
University Address;
-
Summer 1963: Nuclear Test Ban Treaty;
-
Fall 1963: beginning of back-channel
dialogue with Fidel Castro;
-
Fall 1963: JFK’s decision
to sell wheat to the Russians;
-
October 11, 1963: Presidential order
NSAM #263 to withdraw U.S. troops from Vietnam by 1965;
-
November 1963: Khrushchev
decides to accept JFK’s invitation for a joint expedition to the moon.
For a summary of JFK’s turning toward peace during his
Presidency that marked him out for assassination, see Jim Douglass,
“The Hope in Confronting the Unspeakable in the
Assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy,” Keynote Address
at the Coalition on Political Assassinations Dallas Conference, 20 November
2009. Many endnotes in this annotated transcript include segments from
JFK
and the Unspeakable.
-
See Jim Douglass, "“The Converging
Martyrdom of Malcolm and Martin,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Lecture,
Princeton Theological Seminary, 20 March 2006.
-
A central component of the production of propaganda in the United States
is the infiltration of news media by intelligence agencies of the
federal government. See
William
Schaap’s testimony as an expert witness in the
Martin Luther King Assassination Conspiracy Trial
held in Memphis, Tennessee from November 15 to December 8, 1999. The King
Family were Plaintiffs, represented by William Pepper. In his
closing statement to the jury, Pepper summarized Schaap’s
testimony,
about media distortion and the use of media for propaganda. He gave you the
history of how it has developed particularly over the 20th century America
but, of course, it is a long-standing activity throughout history in older
nations than this.
But Schaap took you painstakingly
through that history down to the
present time when he dealt with the way the media handled Martin Luther King,
how they handled his opposition to the war in Vietnam, how he was attacked
because of that opposition to the war.
Then he moved on. There were similar, comparable attacks on the King family
since they decided they wanted the truth out in this case and they decided that
James Earl Ray was entitled to a trial, similar media treatment happened to
them that happened to Martin, similar loss of contributions and money for the
work that happened to Martin back in those days. The same thing.
Bill Schaap led you through that. There were a couple of instances where he
referred to the huge network of
ownership and control of media entities all over the world by the Central
Intelligence Agency. It is a matter of public record. It has appeared in
Congressional hearings, Senate hearings, which most people don’t read, don’t
know anything about, and, of course, the media only covers in sparse fashion,
because it is contrary to their interests to show that great numbers of
newspapers, radio stations, television stations, may in fact be actually
owned by the Central Intelligence Agency in this country as well as elsewhere.
He talked about the numbers of actual agents who work for media companies,
who are placed in positions in network television company positions, in newspaper
company positions, on newspaper editorial board positions.
If you see the history of how national security cases are covered and this
is one, you will be amazed that some of the most liberal columnists, writers,
respected journalists, Pulitzer Prize winners, who have all the liberal
credentials, when it comes to this kind of case, they all of a sudden are
totally with the government because national security cases are a different
ball game.
Ambassador Young ran into one at one point in an airport, and he said to him,
’How can you do this, Tony, about this case? You have great credentials
in every other way. What is it about this case?’ His response was,
‘You’ll be happy to know my wife agrees with you.’ But that was it.
That was the end of the response.
The point is on these cases there is a special type of treatment that is given.
It is important to understand that across the board. That explains a lot of what
we’re talking about. Examples: Column
1, New York Times, November, the article is here, Alton, Illinois, bank
robbery, Wendell Rose, Jr., the Times wrote this whole piece, fabricated,
whole cloth, that the Ray brothers robbed the bank in Illinois and that’s where
James got his money and therefore there is no Raul.
The problem was that the article said that the Times had conducted a
special investigation that paralleled that of the House Select Committee and
that of the FBI, and all three investigations indicated this was the case.
Case closed, this is where Ray got his money.
The problem is they never talked to the chief of police in Alton, Illinois.
They never talked to the president of the bank in Alton, Illinois. There was
no investigation. And when those people were talked to by myself or by Jerry
Ray, who went down there to turn himself in – You think I did this,
I’m prepared to turn myself in – the guy said,
Go away, you’ve never been a
suspect. Isn’t that amazing, out of whole cloth. But it appears,
and that’s the mindset that the people have.
You heard Earl Caldwell say he was
sent to Memphis by his national editor, New York Times national editor,
Claude Sitton at the time, and told to go to Memphis and his words were
“nail Dr. King.”
Nail Dr. King. That is what he said he was told was his mission here in
Memphis as a New York Times reporter. I can go on. But these are
examples of what happens with the media.
Now, Bill Schaap told you the impact of that out of thirty-one years is very
devastating, is very hard to hear this for thirty-one years and have somebody
come along and say, No, you’ve been told the wrong thing and here are a
whole set of facts that are uncontrovertible and this is why you’ve been
told the wrong thing.
The reaction is still, Oh, yes, that’s interesting, but the next day we
still believe, because it is almost
implanted neurologically. That’s the problem that this kind of
distortion, media propaganda abuse, just raises.
Mr. Jowers here, the defendant, was a victim of that. They gave him –
ABC gave him a lie detector test and
they told him at the end of that
lie detector test that he had failed, why was he doing this, was he
looking for money, he had failed this lie detector test.
You heard from a cab driver [James
Adams], who has nothing to gain by this, take the stand and say, yeah,
he drove those ABC people to the airport, took them to the airport,
and he heard their conversation. His ears perked up when he heard
Jowers’ name because he heard them, the guy in the front,
the examiner, said, I
couldn’t get him to waver, I couldn’t get him to waver. They
were commenting on how much he remembered in so much detail and why he
remembered so much detail.
There is no question about him failing this test. They couldn’t get the
defendant to lie. And yet that program was broadcast, was put out to masses of
people in this country to believe to this day that the defendant lied, that he
lied.
-
Concerning the dynamics of mass denial, see Jim Douglass,
“A Letter to the American People
(and Myself in Particular) On the Unspeakable” 1999, updated in 2012;
and E. Martin Schotz, History Will Not Absolve Us: Orwellian
Control, Public Denial, and the Murder of President Kennedy, (Brookline,
Mass.: Kurtz, Ulmer, & DeLucia Book Publishers, 1996).
See also: E. Martin
Schotz, “The Waters of Knowledge versus the
Waters of Uncertainty: Mass Denial in the Assassination of President
Kennedy,” COPA Conference, 20 Nov 1998, Dallas, Texas. An excerpt from
this talk articulates how the perception of reality is altered through the
process of mass denial:
The lie that was destined to cover the truth of the assassination
was the lie that the assassination is a mystery, that we are not
sure what happened, but being free citizens of a great democracy
we can discuss and debate what has occurred. We can petition our
government and join with it in seeking the solution to this
mystery. This is the essence of the cover-up.
The lie is that there is a mystery to debate. And so we have
pseudo-debates. Debates about meaningless disputes, based on
assumptions which are obviously false. This is the form that
Orwell’s crimestop
has taken in the matter of the President’s murder. I am
talking about the pseudo-debate over whether the
Warren
Report is true when it is obviously and undebatably false. The
pseudo-debate over whether the Russians, or the Cubans, or the
Mafia, or Lyndon Johnson, or some spinoff from the CIA killed
the President. These are all part of the process of crimestop
which is designed to cover up the obvious nature of this
assassination. And let us not forget the
pseudo-debate over whether JFK would or would not have escalated
in Vietnam. As if a President who was obviously turning against
the cold war and was secretly negotiating normalization of
relations with Cuba,[14]
would have allowed
the military to trap him into pursuing our war in Vietnam.
Since the publication of History Will Not
Absolve Us, what I have found most striking is the
profound resistance people have to the concept of pseudo-debate,
a resistance in people which is manifest as an inability or
unwillingness to grasp the concept and to use it to analyze
their own actions and the information that comes before them.
Even amongst “critics” who are very favorably
disposed to my book, I note a consistent avoidance of this
concept. And I see this as part of the illness, a very
dangerous manifestation of the illness, which I want to
discuss further.
Perhaps many people think that engaging in pseudo-debate is a
benign activity. That it simply means that people are debating
something that is irrelevant. This is not the case. I say this
because every debate rests on a premise to which the debaters
must agree, or there is no debate. In the case of pseudo-debate
the premise is a lie. So in the pseudo-debate we have the parties
to the debate agreeing to purvey a lie to the public. And it is
all the more malignant because it is subtle. The unsuspecting
person who is witness to the pseudo-debate does not understand
that he is being passed a lie. He is not even aware that he is
being passed a premise. It is so subtle that the premise just
passes into the person as if it were reality. This premise
– that there is uncertainly to be resolved – seems so
benign. It is as easy as drinking a glass of treated water.
But the fact remains that there is no mystery except in the minds
of those who are willing to drink this premise. The premise is a
lie, and a society which agrees to drink such a lie ceases to
perceive reality. This is what we mean by mass denial.
Copyright © 2011, 2013 by James W. Douglass
Reproduced with annotations with permission and assistance of the author.
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