Posted by andreas from p3EE3C6F0.dip.t-dialin.net (62.227.198.240) on Saturday, November 30, 2002 at 10:23AM :
In Reply to: In This Great Democracy... posted by pancho from pool0073.cvx20-bradley.dialup.earthlink.net (209.179.250.73) on Saturday, November 30, 2002 at 10:00AM :
US Democracy? Broken promises ...
But that is not really ground breaking news.
Take e.g. this one:
"Jim Garrison's Playboy Interview"
[Jim Garrison (1921- 1995)
Born November 20, 1921, in Knoxville, Iowa, Earling Carothers Garrison
(...) age 19, one year before Pearl Harbor, he joined the army. In 1942, he
was sent to Europe, where he volunteered to fly spotter planes over
the front lines. Following the war, he attended law school at Tulare,
joined the FBI, and served as a special agent in Seattle and Tacoma.
After growing bored with his agency assignments, he returned to New
Orleans to practice law. He served as an assistant district attorney
from 1954 to 1958.
In 1961, Garrison decided to run for district attorney on a platform
openly hostile to then-New Orleans Mayor Victor Schiro. To the
surprise of many, he was elected without any major political backing.
He was 43 years old and had been district attorney for less than two
years when Kennedy was killed. "I was an old-fashioned patriot," he
writes in On the Trail of the Assassins, (Sheridan Square Press, NY),
"a product of my family, my military experience, and my years in the
legal profession. I could not imagine then that the government would
ever deceive the citizens of this country." ]
(...)
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.
(....)
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 and there has been no progress and there has been no increase of understanding on the part of men for their fellow man.
What worries me deeply, and I have seen it exemplified in this case, is that we in America are in great danger of slowly evolving into a proto-fascist state. It will be a different kind of fascist state from the one of 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 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. But this isn't the test. The test is: What happens to the individual who dissents? In Nazi Germany, he was physically destroyed; here, the process is more subtle, but the end results can be the same.
I've learned enough about the machinations of the CIA in the past year to know that this is no longer the dreamworld America I once believed in. The imperatives of the population explosion, which almost inevitably will lessen our belief in the sanctity of the individual human life, combined with the awesome power of the CIA and the defense establishment, seem destined to seal the fate of the America I knew as a child and bring us into a new Orwellian world where the citizen exists for the state and where raw power justifies any and every immoral act. I've always had a kind of knee-jerk trust in my Government's basic integrity, whatever political blunders it may make. But I've come to realize that in Washington, deceiving and manipulating the public are viewed by some as the natural prerogatives of office. Huey Long once said, "Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism." I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security.
(...)
-- andreas
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