posted on Mar, 19 2007 @ 08:44 AM
This is something that shouldn't go down the memory hole. It's not specifically on-topic to JFK and UFOs, but it is a remarkably prescient analysis
of our present condition by Jim Garrison, District Attorney for New Orleans, who placed local businessman Clay Bertrand on trial for conspiracy in the
assassination of JFK. He is the focus of Oliver Stone's film, JFK. From a Playboy interview in 1967:
PLAYBOY: Many of the professional critics of the Warren Commission appear to be prompted by political motives: Those on the left are anxious to prove
Kennedy was murdered by a internal conspiracy within the establishment; and those on the right are eager to prove the assassination was an act of
"the international Communist conspiracy." Where would you place yourself on the political spectrum--right, left or center?
JIM GARRISON: That's a question I've asked myself frequently, especially since this investigation started and I found myself in an incongruous and
disillusioning battle with agencies of my own Government. I can't just sit down and add up my political beliefs like a mathematical sum, but I think,
in balance, I'd turn up somewhere around the middle. Over the years, I guess I've developed a somewhat conservative attitude--in the traditional
libertarian sense of conservatism, as opposed to the thumbscrew-and-rack conservatism of the paramilitary right--particularly in regard to the
importance of the individual as opposed to the State and the individual's own responsibilities to humanity . . .
I was with the artillery supporting the division that took Dachau; I arrived there the day after it was taken, when bulldozers were making pyramids of
human bodies outside the camp. What I saw there has haunted me ever since. Because the law is my profession, I've always wondered about the judges
throughout Germany who sentenced men to jail for picking pockets at a time when their own government was jerking gold from the teeth of men murdered
in gas chambers. I'm concerned about all of this because it isn't a German phenomenon; it's a human phenomenon. It can happen here, because there
has been no change, there has been no progress and there has been no increase of understanding on the part of men for their fellow men.
What worries me deeply, and I have seen it exemplified in this case, is that we in America are in great danger of slowly eroding into a proto-fascist
state. It will be a different kind of fascist state from the one the Germans evolved; theirs grew out of depression and promised bread and work, while
ours, curiously enough, seems to be emerging from prosperity. But in the final analysis, it's based on power and on the inability to put human goals
and human conscience above the dictates of the State. Its origins can be traced in the tremendous war machine we've built since 1945, the
"military-industrial complex" that Eisenhower vainly warned us about, which now dominates every aspect of our life. The power of the states and the
Congress has gradually been abandoned to the Executive Department, because of war conditions; and we've seen the creation of an arrogant, swollen
bureaucratic complex totally unfettered by the checks and balances of the Constitution.
In a very real and terrifying sense, our Government is the CIA and the Pentagon, with Congress reduced to a debating society. Of course, you can't
spot this trend to fascism by casually looking around. You can't look for such familiar signs as the swastika, because they won't be there. We
won't build Dachaus and Auschwitzes; the clever manipulation of the mass media is creating a concentration camp of the mind that promises to be far
more effective in keeping the populace in line. We're not going to wake up one morning and suddenly find ourselves in gray uniforms goose-stepping
off to work.
(cont...)