By Sam Alves
Pax Christi USA Young Adult Caucus
When I spoke to author Jim Douglass1 about his most recent book, Martyrs to the Unspeakable, he said “This story contains the world.” Douglass echoes the words of Jesus, who speaks prophetically two millennia on through the theologian-turned-historian’s most recent tome:
“I have told you this so that you might have peace in me. In the world you will have trouble, but take courage, I have conquered the world.” (John 16:33)
How exactly are we to find peace through this story, one which contains the titular assassinations of JFK, Malcolm, Martin, and RFK? Let’s take a look.
Douglass’ book is a follow-up to his 2008 classic, JFK and the Unspeakable, which makes a definitive case for a conspiracy organized by the CIA against the life of President John F. Kennedy. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy sought to end the Cold War rather than “win” it through imperial and genocidal violence; therefore, he was killed. Douglass borrows the term “Unspeakable” from Thomas Merton to describe “an evil whose depth and deceit seemed to go beyond the capacity of words to describe.”
Douglass focuses more on the reasons for Kennedy’s assassination rather than the methods and does the same for the assassination conspiracies against Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King. The evidence is just as damning.
For instance, Thomas Noguchi, coroner in the RFK case, testified that the bullet which killed Kennedy must have been fired from a barrel three inches behind Kennedy; the ruling against alleged assassin Sirhan Sirhan places him feet in front of Kennedy. This autopsy report was not made available to Sirhan’s team until a week after the case started. (Martyrs, 388-391)
Douglass then asserts the assassinations of Malcolm X and Dr. King were made possible by a conspiracy between local police and the FBI in Memphis and New York, as withdrawn security teams allowed the kill shots to be fired. In the case of Dr. King, officers under the authority of Frank Holloman, a former FBI agent and office manager for J. Edgar Hoover, destroyed key evidence from the crime scene which likely would have incriminated a shooter other than James Earl Ray. (344-345)
What becomes clear in reading this book is that overwhelming evidence reveals the interconnectedness of four conspiracies involving the CIA, FBI, local police, mafia figures, and/or the mysterious gun runner Raul—who appears in Dallas in 1963 and Memphis in 1968. This is the shadow of the Cross: extrajudicial murder at the center of Passion narratives also characterized by surveillance and infiltration, then rationalized by the authorities for national security concerns (read: “so that the whole nation might not perish.”)
These prophets knew their deaths were coming, but they persevered in their peacemaking efforts anyway, sustained by their faith in a saving God who they encountered in those who are poor, oppressed and/or children around the world. This is the witness that moves me as a young peacemaker: to refuse to harden my heart despite the immense violence in our world. As a Peace Coach with Little Friends for Peace, I encounter the same preciousness in children which drove President Kennedy to avoid nuclear war in the waning months of his life (JFK, 389).
This book is a must-read for all those concerned with US American state-sponsored murder, in the streets or elsewhere; those concerned with Zionist criminality and entanglement with our own government; and anti-nuclear weapons activists.
Douglass’ masterwork begins with President Kennedy’s failed attempts to block Israel from acquiring nuclear weapons (the CIA reportedly provided Israel with crucial technical data itself) and ends with the story of the assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN mediator in Palestine who was working towards the creation of an Arab-Jewish confederation (Martyrs, 56-58; 555). To this day, Zionist and US American priorities remain inseparable and the nuclear threat backs up illegal Israeli aggression.
Douglass concludes by arguing these assassinations constituted a consolidation of power for the nuclear-crazed US national security state. Unflinchingly, he writes:
“Those executions and their cover-ups were a destruction of democracy for every generation of Americans since then and a catastrophe for the world. The ultimate climax of our nation’s history, unless we turn around, will be the extinction of the life of humanity and a vast number of other creatures on Earth through nuclear omnicide.” (475)
So to whom shall we look to for consolation and peace against the backdrop of naked state violence? If we contemplate such unspeakable “powers and principalities,” we will be led deep into the mysteries of our Catholic faith and, on the other side, the shocking revelation of the Resurrection.
“For God was pleased to have his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things…making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.” (Colossians 1:19-20)
Martyrs to the Unspeakable by James Douglass
Published by Orbis Books, 2025
616 pages
ISBN 978-1-62698-626-8
- Jim Douglass and his wife Shelley Douglass were the 1994 Pax Christi USA Teachers of Peace. Watch a 2022 video interview with them here. ↩︎
Sam Alves is a lay missioner in the DC Service Corps, a year-long volunteer program run by the Franciscan Mission Service. He currently serves as a communications coordinator and peace coach with Little Friends for Peace, a placement he sought out because of his disillusionment with the warmaking organized in his hometown and diocese of Arlington, Virginia. He previously served as a mission intern with the Kinship Community Food Center in Milwaukee, WI, where he was introduced to the spirituality of the Catholic Worker movement.