Dear All,

I am just finishing Gaeton’s The Last Investigation (now going thru the Selected Chronology in the very back). It makes me wonder: who are the David Phillipses, the Richard Helmses, the James Angletons, Ted Shackleys, David Sanchez Moraleses, and William Harveys of today, who execute the imperatives of this era’s Terror Warriors? It seems that people who physically or psychologically murder other people are, in some elemental respects, walking dead themselves.

I know I do not truly grok Jim Douglass’ wholistic frame, expressed in “Guruji, Gandhi, and Terrorism,” that:

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.

I see I am caught up in projecting great amounts of negative vexation towards whoever the faceless present-day Cold/Terror/Shadow Warriors are that, to my mind, so warp and cloud the partial awareness of the mass of people in this authoritarian empire-state.

I used to think psychological projection was only/primarily a sexual thing. I now better apprehend that it covers any-and-all psychic processes of transferring outside myself that which I have not integrated inwardly concerning my own fears, doubts, confusions, anger.....

Two points. First, near the end of “King and the Cross” Jim makes the point of how suffering is transformative:

In the summer of 1961, a white student from Union Theological Seminary named Gurdon Brewster worked with Dr. King and his father, Martin Luther King, Sr., at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. Brewster was forced to confront a racist system made flesh for him in a group of white men who, in a parking lot one night, almost took his life for working with the Kings. The morning after that encounter, Brewster marched into Dr. King’s office and demanded of the prophet of nonviolence, “How do you love those people, anyway? How do you love the enemy, when all those people do such violent things to you? How do you still love them?”

Martin Luther King looked at him, sat still, and thought. King’s phone was ringing, and his secretary was rapping on his door, calling out that the Justice Department wanted to talk to him. Brewster waited for an answer to his question.

Finally King said softly, “You’ve got to reach deeper until you are transformed by your suffering. With your suffering and your love, you must cut the chains of hate. You’ve got to reach down deeper until your suffering and your love draw you closer to God.”

Secondly, as the cycles of violence on the micro and macro levels continue their exponential spirals, we are faced with an either/or - the choice is nonviolence or nonexistence as expressed in “A Letter to the American People”:

Here is a question for our souls: Was Gandhi right in proclaiming the transformation of every possible conflict by the force of truth and love? Or is the truth in this case overwhelmed by a corruption of such magnitude that we cannot possibly know how to deal with it?

May I suggest the possibility, to you and to myself, that we are ruled behind the scenes by a benevolent fascism? We consent to it by a tacit agreement.

Our rulers will allow us to do virtually anything we want in protest to their rule, just so long as we do not overcome our despair as a people. We’ll begin to break the chains of our agreement only when we embody the kind of vision for which Martin Luther King died, a global Poor People’s Campaign of massive nonviolent civil disobedience to poverty and militarism. When we regain our hope as a people, we can expect more executions. But hopefully we’ll be better prepared next time around, by recognizing the power of lived truth, satyagraha, to transform this and any system.

I believe the key to our hope, as it was to Martin Luther King’s hope, is compassion, love for our enemies. As King said often, it may be impossible to like people who are bombing one’s home, or people such as J. Edgar Hoover who were trying to destroy him in any way possible. But God knows, especially in this nuclear age, that it is necessary to love our enemies, however unlikeable they may be. And love means here something at a more realistic and transforming depth than liking people who are trying to kill us and our loved ones. That transforming kind of love will include both nonviolent resistance and respect. We can recall the prophecy King gave us: Nonviolence or nonexistence. In the nuclear age, unless we can both respect and resist, we are choosing nonexistence for the entire human race.

With such expansive searching consciousness seeking its own increase and further illumination, I am at the same time compelled to pass along reference to an article by David Lindorff on <thiscantbehappening.net> that I find expresses a healthy dose of the ability to exercise critical thinking regarding our sad world becoming evermore locked up:

Tsarnaev Brothers had a CIA Connection
Tue, 04/30/2013
Two degrees of separation:
by: Dave Lindorff
<http://thiscantbehappening.net/print/1727>

In it reference is make to one “high-ranking CIA operations officer named Graham Fuller”. Anyone ever heard tell of Mr. Fuller? Who are today’s shadow gallery of walking dead fulfilling the mission of killing others in the name of greater aggrandizement and influence of those who continue concentrating economic wealth into their poisonal hands.

And,

So we’re left to wonder: why would two intelligent and talented young men with no particular grievances against the United States or the Americans among whom they lived much or most of their lives, have decided to blow up and kill and maim a bunch of mostly young people like themselves in an event that had no political significance?

Ah, the question of WHY that never sees the light of day in this lockdown reality. Critical thinking is all but non-existent in the hollowed-out, formerly named Fourth Estate. Since April 15th, I keep thinking of fall guy Lee Oswald and how a trial has in effect already occurred and the pronouncement of "GUILTY" has already been concluded as was done in 1963. From Mark Lane’s “Oswald Innocent?—A Lawyer’s Brief”:

“From the moment of his arrest until his murder two days later, Oswald was tried and convicted many times over in the newspapers, on the radio, and over television by the public statements of the Dallas law enforcement officials. Time and again high-ranking police and prosecution officials state their complete satisfaction that Oswald was the assassin. As their investigation uncovered one piece of evidence after another, the results were broadcast to the public.

“ . . . Oswald’s trial would . . . have been nothing but a hollow formality.”

In a section headed “Police Responsibility for Oswald’s Killing” the ACLU stated that the concessions to the media “resulted in Oswald being deprived not only of his day in court, but of his life as well.”

On Dec. 4 the chancellor-elect of the Philadelphia Bar Association stated that Lee Oswald had been “lynched” and that this was an “indictment” of the legal profession for its failure to protect Oswald (New York Times, Dec. 5). These two comments, made after the death of Oswald and buried by the news media under the avalanche of news attacks against Oswald (including the FBI leaks of other crimes alleged to have been committed by him), constitute to date almost the only indication of sanity in the country.”

It is difficult to live in a world where virtually nothing is, as represented by commercial broadcast and print media, what it appears to be. I am grateful to have this conduit of communing with all of you, as abstracted and non-visceral as it is.
Dave