Freedom Lawyers of America

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 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. 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 are 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 long experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of
national security.