http://www.disinfo.com/pages/article/id1767/pg1/
in defense of conspiracy theories
by Craig DiLouie ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) - November 01,
2001
In Defense of Conspiracy Theories
An Introduction to the World of Conspiracy Theories
for the Mainstream American
Craig DiLouie is the author of Paranoia, a
psychological thriller based on conspiracy theories
and published in trade paperback by Salvo
Press--available nationwide in bookstores,
BarnesandNoble.com, Amazon.com and direct from the
publisher. For more information, visit the Paranoia
Web site. ©2001, Craig DiLouie. Permission to publish
this article as a whole or in excerpts is granted on a
non-exclusive, probono basis to all printed and
electronic media, so long as it is not edited to
substantially change its content and/or meaning.
While I was writing Paranoia, many of my friends
wondered why I was interested in conspiracy theories.
They are fringe territory in American culture.
Strangely, while "conspiracy theories" are for "crazy
people," many of my friends also believe that various
conspiracy theories are true. While I'm not a
conspiracy theorist, I have always been fascinated by
them--introduced to alternative histories by a friend
living in Santa Fe; Robert Anton Wilson and Robert
Shea's Illuminatus trilogy; and Umberto Eco's
Foucault's Pendulum. Conspiracy theories contain a
certain power, and those who treat them as a casual
belief, hobby or lifestyle collectively function a bit
like a secret society themselves, with various degrees
of initiation into the deeper mysteries. After some
exploration my imagination, "Okay, what if all of this
were true? And what if an average Joe, a non-believer,
suddenly got proof that the biggest conspiracy theory
of all were true?"
In researching Paranoia, I learned a lot not only
about conspiracy theories, but also the culture
surrounding them, a culture that has seeped into the
mainstream culture in the past few decades, including
the paranoid '60s and the conspiracy theory-rich '90s,
which probably had more conspiracies per capita than
any previous decade. Interestingly, this has led to
"conspiracy theories," which mainstream people think
are craziness, and individual conspiracy theories,
which many mainstream people believe are true. And
while I still do not believe conspiracy theories
(although a good amount are plausible), I found a new
respect for conspiracy theorists. These are people
with their eyes wide open. They may see too much or
imagine seeing things at times, but they are vigilant
about civil liberties and challenge complacent
Americans to question their media-framed beliefs about
government and the world. The result in Paranoia is an
attempt to introduce this culture, illustrate the
seductive power that conspiracy theories have, and
frame the debate over whether they are credible or
craziness—all packaged within a taught thriller with
plenty of revelations, twists and surprises. In this
article, we will examine these same issues fairly.
Both conspiracies and conspiracy theories have always
existed in history. Benjamin Disraeli, the Prime
Minister of England, said to Parliament in 1856:
It is useless to deny, because it is impossible to
conceal, that a great part of Europe--the whole of
Italy and France and a great portion of Germany, to
say nothing of other countries--is covered with a
network of … secret societies . . . They do not want
constitutional government . . . They want to change
the tenure of land, to drive out the present owners of
the soil and to put an end to ecclesiastical
establishments.
President Woodrow Wilson wrote in 1913:
Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the
field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of
somebody, are afraid of something. They know there is
a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so
watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive
that they had better not speak above their breath when
they speak in condemnation of it.
At all times in human history, people have gathered in
secret societies and conspired to commit crimes and
acts of evil, going back to Adam and Eve, who decided
to eat the apple and keep it from God. The American
Revolution was the result of conspiracy to rebel
against the British Crown. Watergate, Iran-Contra,
abortion clinic bombings, the Lincoln assassination
and major terrorists attacks in the past few years
were all the product of conspiracies. Conspiracies are
so common, in fact, that there should be wacko
theorists making Web sites that reveal "rare
coincidences that just plain happen." Meanwhile, at
all times in human history, other people have
theorized that secret societies and conspiracies were
the root cause of calamities and other current events.
The most ambitious linked different theories into a
Plan passed down from one generation of secret society
members to the next--a Plan that will be culminated in
their control of the world.
Today, in the communication age, people have much
greater access to information, particularly via the
Internet, the world's greatest public access channel.
Therefore it is much easier to discover, share and
promote conspiracy theories and expand them to include
more current events. Like everything else in our
society, conspiracy theories have become
hyper-accelerated--every time a major figure dies, or
a major event happens, conspiracy theorists are there
to point out the connections and explain what happened
in sinister terms. Although the Internet is free
speech at its best, what we have gained in quantity,
perhaps we have lost in quality--anybody with anything
to say can build a web site and say it, and it carries
some credibility precisely because it is published.
The result is noise. One could argue that with so much
noise, with so many theories, conspiracy theory itself
loses more credibility even while real conspiracies
may actually be happening. Conspiracy theories have
become so accelerated that the theorists are the boy
who cried wolf. Investigative journalists, once
considered something of conspiracy theorists
themselves, are continuously taking themselves more
seriously and conspiracy theories less seriously, and
now deride them in print. Stories about alleged
connections between the CIA and the crack epidemic are
met with open hostility and ridicule by the media
(although the Director of the CIA took them seriously
enough to hold a televised town meeting with LA
residents). Plots to take over the government are met
with laughter.
When we think of conspiracy theorists, we picture a
ranting bearded man in a camo jacket spending his
weekends firing machine guns at cardboard cut-outs.
And yet most people are conspiracy theorists to an
extent. If we compare conspiracy theories to religion,
similar because both deal with belief in the
unknowable, we see a spectrum of conspiracy theorists
from the very strange to your friend who believes JFK
was assassinated by more than one shooter. It's funny,
but many people I talk to, one of the first things I
tell them is that I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but
as we start talking about various theories I consider
on the wild side, I see them nodding in agreement.
It's even funnier that if I were to share the same
theories in a crowd, people would glance at each other
and laugh skeptically. I can only conclude that
conspiracy theories are both stigmatized and widely
accepted. I've watched scary movies by myself and with
somebody else, and we get scared; but if I watch them
with a group of people, we usually end up laughing and
poking fun at the movie.
Why do conspiracy theories have so much appeal in the
American mainstream? We see them in novels, movies,
web sites and in every other medium. More than half of
Americans believe that the JFK assassination was the
result of a conspiracy. Richard Belzer believes in
almost all conspiracy theories. Bill Cosby said that
AIDS was "started by human beings to get after certain
people they didn't like." At a town hall meeting in
Los Angeles in the Clinton era televised on C-SPAN on
November 15, 1996, community residents roasted the
Director of the CIA about the Agency's alleged
connections to the crack epidemic:
MIKE RUPPERT: Hi, I am a former Los Angeles police
narcotics detective, and I worked South Central Los
Angeles. And I will tell you, Director Deutsch,
emphatically and without equivocation, that the Agency
has deal drugs throughout this country for a long
time.
DCI JOHN DEUTSCH: If you have information about CIA
illegal activity in drugs, you should immediately
bring that information to wherever you want, but let
me suggest three places: the Los Angeles Police
Department--
(audience shouts)
DCI JOHN DEUTSCH: It is your choice: the Los Angeles
Police Department, the Inspector General, or an office
of one of your Congresspersons . . .
(some people are still shouting)
MIKE RUPPERT: That's what I did eighteen years ago,
and I got shot at for it.
Perhaps one reason for the popularity of conspiracy
theories is that they stimulate the brain to make new
connections, and this mental activity raises
consciousness. The titillation experienced is similar
to hearing gossip, urban legends and ghost stories. We
want to believe. How many people believed the Blair
Witch Project was real, even after the media carefully
explained that it was just a movie? How many people
read The Weekly World News and believe in Bigfoot or
that a cemetery or a B-17 bomber was found on the
moon? From there, it is not too far-fetched to believe
that the lunar landing was faked, that something funny
is going on with the Freemasons--which has so many
presidents and bigwigs as members, or that there are
sinister overtones to the ultrasecret meetings of the
Bildergers, Trilateral Commission and other groups
that bring together the world's elite. When people
hear about the eye-in-the-pyramid on the back of the
dollar bill, their eyes go wide in a special kind of
disbelief, the kind that says, "Wow. Tell me more."
Conspiracy theories, it is strange to think, might be
a way for adults to rediscovery mystery, to become
children again who see bogeymen in the closet or under
the bed.
Because of the stimulation that conspiracy theories
deliver, they can be addictive. They can really cast a
spell, and one level of belief leads to another. If
you buy into one theory, that makes it easy to believe
the next, until you're up late breathlessly reading
web sites that appear to offer solid evidence, such as
photos of concentration camps, that the United States
government will be overthrown by unseen forces. Some
become information addicts, and they're never
satisfied—the conspiracy has to get bigger and bigger.
After the World Trade Center attack, Web site traffic
at www.GrandConspiracy.com, the official web site for
the novel Paranoia, jumped 1000%. Big events get the
gears turning. Imagine having a giant puzzle and after
months you're given another piece to try to fit into
the whole.
Other reasons conspiracy theories are popular is that
people don't trust the government anymore, because
there is usually just enough evidence to make most
conspiracy theories sound true, to rebel against
economic trends such as "globalization," and because
the world just keeps getting more complicated, making
people paranoid. In Paranoia, Palmer explains to Chad
that in the modern age of technology, global community
and terrorism, the natural state for humans is
Paranoia:
You get an e-mail from a friend's address that gives
your computer a virus, then automatically opens up
your address book and sends the virus to your friends
. . . You answer a fake marketing call and get tricked
out of your credit card number. A guy knocks on your
door saying there's been an accident and after you let
him in he kills you . . . You punch your calling card
number into a public pay phone and somebody with a
pair of binoculars picks it up and sells it and your
phone bill shows thousands of dollars in calls to
China. You register at an Internet site and it sells
your private information all over the world . . . Your
company wants to do a drug test. Your company monitors
what Internet sites you visit, taps your phone and
reads your e-mails. A woman at your company accuses
you of sexual harassment and gets you automatically
fired . . . The IRS audits you. Your wife loads a
program into your computer that records everything you
type into it to make sure you're not having cybersex.
Somebody steals your identity . . . You find out your
wife is cheating on you, or maybe she's just talking
about missing being single. You get a phone call and
the caller hangs up. You hear a noise downstairs. You
hear a click on the line . . .Well, guess what, Chad.
There really is a bogeyman under your bed. There
really is a man under your car at the mail waiting to
slash your Achilles tendon with a razor. And it's not
happening to somebody else. It's happening to you.
There's certainly much to be paranoid about in an age
of hyper-accelerated technology, culture,
globalization, change and marketing. Unfortunately (or
fortunately, depending on how you look at it), most
conspiracy theories are like cold fusion--they look
like they work and produce a Eureka moment but the
reality usually does not match appearances. Ray Brown,
a Bowling Green University professor, writes, "There
is just enough sanity in some of these conspiracy
theories to make them almost believable. By and large,
however, they are creations of very rich imaginations
because we simply can't accept life as it is."
Usually, the essence of conspiracy theory is that an
event happened; there are connections between the
person involved in the event and other people with
their own agendas; and it could be theorized that all
of these people were linked to make the event happen
for a specific reason. To use the World Trade Center
attack as an example:
1. The World Trade Center is attacked.
2. George W. Bush is an oilman and many of his friends
are oilmen.
3. One of Osama Bin Laden's brothers was a partner of
Bush's.
4. Afghanistan, where Bin Laden is hiding, is where
oil companies want to run a pipeline but the Taliban
government is unfriendly.
5. The intelligence community knew that something
"spectacular" was going to happen but did not prevent
it.
6. Therefore, Bush allowed Bin Laden to attack the
World Trade Center in order to have an excuse to
invade Afghanistan and set up a friendly government,
which would allow the pipeline to run through and make
oil companies money.
Events, connections, agendas form the basis for
conspiracy theories. If we take the above example and
flesh it out with more direct and indirect connections
between various players, then it could sound
plausible. I personally don't believe it, but it could
sound plausible to many rational people. And this gets
to the root of the problem with many conspiracy
theories, the attempt to indict people and
organizations based purely on circumstantial evidence.
We could make the process of logic even simpler in
this example:
1. Joe was murdered.
2. Bob hated Joe.
3. If Joe would die, Bob could try to date Joe's
girlfriend.
4. Bob murdered Joe.
Another problem, with the massive, elaborate theories,
is a lack of common sense. One has to ask how the
world's greatest secret societies have volumes of
material written about their inner plans and workings.
Or how many years the U.N. army is going to hide in
Mexico before they are finally allowed to invade the
U.S. Or why 13 rich white men who already rule the
world behind the scenes would want to stage a military
takeover of our country. The larger the conspiracy is,
generally, the more holes and greater contrariness to
common sense. A final problem with conspiracy theories
is that they are too often used to justify racial and
religious prejudice and hatred. When you hear somebody
say that Jews have a plot to take over the world, the
menace and hatred makes you wish conspiracy theories
didn't exist at all.
Perhaps conspiracy theories are most valuable in the
questions they ask, not always the answers they
provide. A free society should be asking many of the
questions raised by conspiracy theorists. And while
conspiracy theories have a lot of problems, they
should not be discounted lightly. History is rife with
conspiracies of all shapes and sizes. People like to
say that the government is too large, and too stupid,
to keep secrets. And yet the government does keep
secrets, even big ones, and it does so very well. In
fact, the U.S. government spends about $3 billion a
year protecting its secrets. The Freedom of
Information Act let us peek behind the curtain at many
conspiracies within the U.S. government. Those quick
to believe that conspiracy theories are the product of
insanity must first make a distinction between
conspiracy history and theory. For example:
1. The CIA knocked off foreign leaders, conducted LSD
research on unwitting Americans, recruited journalists
to help them in foreign intelligence operations, and
planted stories in the foreign press, hoping they
would be picked up in the domestic press. Below is a
brief excerpt of senate committee hearings on MKULTRA
program, a CIA program in which LSD was distributed to
unwitting Americans so as to study human behavior on
LSD:
SENATOR INOYE: In February, 19954, and this was in the
very early stages of MKULTRA, the Director of Central
Intelligence wrote to the technical staff officials
criticizing their judgment because they had
participated in an experiment involving the
administration of LSD on an unwitting basis to Dr.
Frank Olson, who later committed suicide . . . Even
though these individuals were clearly aware of the
dangers of surreptitious administration and had been
criticized by the Director of Central Intelligence,
Subproject 3 was not terminated immediately after Dr.
Olson's death. In fact, according to the documents, it
continued for a number of years. Can you provide this
committee with any explanation of how such testing
could have continued under these circumstances?
ADMIRAL TURNER: No, sir, I really can't.
2. The Army conducted drug research on its own
soldiers and sprayed San Francisco, the Pentagon and
the New York City subway system with germs as part of
its biological warfare testing program.
3. The FBI infiltrated and illegally harassed radical
organizations in the 1960s as part of its COINTELPRO
program; at one time, it even developed its own
chapter of the KKK. Below is an excerpt of a FBI
memorandum from J. Edgar Hoover to one of the FBI's
field offices, dated 7/5/68:
Bulet 5/10/68 requested suggestions for
counterintelligence action against the New Left. The
replies to the Bureau's request have been analyzed and
it is felt that the following suggestions for
counterintelligence action can be utilized by all
offices:
1. Preparation of a leaflet designed to counteract the
impression that Students for a Democratic Society
(SDS) and other minority groups speak for the majority
of students at universities. The leaflet should
contain photographs of New Left leadership at the
respective university. Naturally, the most obnoxious
pictures should be used.
2. The instigating of or the taking advantage of
personal conflicts or animosities existing between New
Left leaders.
3. The creating of impressions that certain New Left
leaders are informants for the Bureau or other law
enforcement agencies.
4. The use of articles from student newspapers and/or
the "underground press" to show the depravity of New
Left leaders and members. In this connection, articles
showing advocation of the use of narcotics and free
sex are ideal to send to university officials, wealthy
donors, members of the legislature and parents of
students who are active in New Left matters.
The above list, complete, is 12 items long in just
this one memo of several by the director of the FBI
and other senior officials at the Bureau, advocating
misinformation and disruption of New Left activities.
Congressman Don Edwards (D-California) said of
COINTELPRO in 1975 after a Congressional inquiry
revealed its activities to the public:
Regardless of the unattractiveness or noisy militancy
of some private citizens or organizations, the
Constitution does not permit Federal interference with
their activities except through the criminal justice
system, armed with its ancient safeguards. There are
no exceptions. No Federal agency, the CIA, the IRS,
the FBI can be at the same time policeman, prosecutor,
judge and jury. That is what constitutionally
guaranteed due process is all about. It may sometimes
be disorderly and unsatisfactory to some, but it is
the essence of freedom . . . I suggest that the
philosophy supporting COINTELPRO is the subversive
notion that any public official, the President or a
policeman, possesses a kind of inherent power to set
aside the Constitution whenever he thinks the public
interest, or "national security," warrants it. That
notion is postulate to tyranny.
4. The U.S. government performed radiation experiments
on people and kept it a secret for decades; in these
experiments, Americans were fed, injected or otherwise
exposed to radioactive materials. It also knew that
atom bomb testing in Nevada and Utah in the 1950s was
giving its own citizens cancer and kept that secret,
too. Below is an excerpt of a letter from Congressman
Edward Markey, chairman of the Subcommittee on Energy
Conservation and Power of the Committee on Energy and
Commerce, to the Secretary of Energy, dated October
24, 1986:
The report reviewed Department of Energy documents,
which revealed the frequent and systematic use of
human subjects as guinea pigs for radiation
experiments sponsored by the Department's predecessor
agencies. Some of these experiments were conducted in
the 1940s and 1950s, and others were performed during
the supposedly more enlightened 1960s and 1970s. The
report describes in detail 31 experiments during which
about 695 persons were exposed. In many of these
experiments, individuals were exposed to radiation
which provided little or no medical benefit to the
subjects. The purpose of several of these experiments
was actually to cause injury to the participants. Many
others sought simply to measure the effects of
radiation on humans. American citizens thus became
nuclear calibration devices for experimenters run amok
. . . These experiments, and others described in the
Subcommittee staff report, shock the conscience and
represent a black mark on the history of nuclear
medical research. They raise one major horrifying
question: Did the intense desire to know the
consequences of radioactive exposure after the dawn of
the atomic age lead American scientists to mimic the
kind of demented human experiments conducted by the
Nazis?
5. Between 1932 and 1972, the Public Health Service
held some 400 poor black sharecroppers who had
syphilis but denied them treatment, even after a cure
was discovered, so as to study the effects of
syphilis. Below is an excerpt of the official apology
for the infamous Tuskegee, AL syphilis study,
delivered by President Clinton in the East Room on May
16, 1997:
PRESIDENT CLINTON: The eight men who are survivors of
the syphilis study at Tuskegee are a living link to a
time not so very long ago that many Americans would
prefer not to remember, but we dare not forget. It was
a time when our nation failed to live up to its ideas,
when our nation broke the trust with our people that
is the very foundation of our democracy. It is not
only in remembering that shameful past that we can
make amends and repair our nation, but it is in
remembering that past that we can build a better
present and a better future. And without remembering
it, we cannot make amends and we cannot go forward. So
America does remember the hundreds of men used in
research without their knowledge and consent. We
remember them and their family members. Men who were
poor and African-American, without resources and with
few alternatives, they believed they had found hope
when they were offered free medical care by the United
States Public Health Service. They were betrayed . . .
The United States did something that was
wrong--deeply, profoundly, morally wrong. It was an
outrage to our commitment to integrity and equality
for all our citizens . . . The American people are
sorry--for the loss, the years of hurt . . . I
apologize and I am sorry that this apology took so
long in coming . . .
These are just some examples of roads to hell paved by
good intentions--crimes planned and committed by
members of the U.S. government and kept secret,
sometimes for decades. Other examples include
Watergate and the Iran Contra arms-for-hostages deals.
(In both situations, the major players got pardoned,
which makes Bill Clinton's last-minute pardons while
in office sound pretty trivial in comparison.)
The point is that conspiracies do happen, are likely
happening right now, and will in all probability go on
happening. Conspiracy theorists will be racing to keep
up. They don't assume that somebody's out there taking
care of every good cause they believe in. They don't
trust the government, and they have a right not to
since the government abused that trust in the past too
many times. Many have learned also not to trust
corporations, which have committed their own share of
conspiracies, from pollution to big tobacco, that are
too numerous to describe here. Conspiracy theorists
remind us all to be vigilant about our civil
liberties, not to take anything for granted, and that
a little Paranoia is healthy--encouraging us to
realize that liberty in America is a personal
responsibility, not a constant in physics. Conspiracy
theorists, for example, are alarmed at the Justice
Department for chipping away at civil liberties in the
Anti-Terrorism Act of 1995 and current anti-terrorist
legislation in the wake of the World Trade Center
attack, finding a strange ally in the ACLU. While most
Americans would not argue with any new laws that would
help them feel more secure against the still
unbelievable tragedy of large-scale terrorism, some
reasonably question how these laws might be used in
the future when the immediate threat is gone. Said
Laura W. Murphy, Director of the ACLU Washington
National Office:
"This bill [new 2001 anti-terrorism 'USA Act'
legislation] has simply missed the mark of maximizing
security and, at the same time, minimizing any adverse
effects on America's freedoms. Most Americans do not
recognize that Congress has just passed a bill that
would give the government expanded power to invade our
privacy, imprison people without due process and
punish dissent."
The legislation was rammed through Congress despite
tough opposition from some Democrats. With Anthrax
cropping up and grabbing a huge share of media
attention, hardly anybody noticed. As an American, on
one hand, I want the government to act quickly to
protect the country from foreign attack, and yet as an
American I also love the Constitution and become
concerned when legislation is worded that could lead
to violating its purpose. During the Cold War,
excesses for a good cause resulted in an internal
assault on American democracy; during the future
tensions of a prolonged struggle against implacable
terrorist organizations, will similar excesses,
enabled by new legislation, be coming?
Conspiracy theorists, as information addicts, are
extremely well-informed. Again, they may see too much
in the news or make the news fit into a preconceived
theory, but other Americans can learn something from
them, which is not to accept everything the media
force-feeds the public. The media, which in the past
20 years went through colossal mergers until about 10
conglomerates control most media, is heavily
influenced by corporations and government, and the
news is often skewed and censored, if not by the
government, then by program sponsors. (It's also
nonsense to continue believing in the "liberal media
establishment," which no longer exists, if it ever
did.) It is the responsibility of every American, I
believe, to be well-informed, which may require more
than watching TV news programs, which often have their
own bias, agendas and often focus on the sensational
(such as hyper-coverage of the Anthrax scare, which
clouded coverage of other news, such as the
anti-terrorism bill and the voices of opposition to
it).
What is perhaps most alarming to many conspiracy
theorists are powers that the President and the
Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) can assume
during a state of national emergency, which the
President can (and has) declared at any time. Each
president going back in recent history declared
75-200+ national emergencies to justify issuing
executive orders that have the power of legislation.
Most of these executive orders have to do with the
operation of government and foreign policy; one of
Bill Clinton's executive orders, for example, required
Federal buildings to become more energy-efficient.
Other executive orders, however, are more ominous,
which rendered into law powers of the Federal
government during a national emergency. On September
30, 1973, Senators Frank Church (D-Idaho) and Charles
McMathias (R-Maryland) made a joint statement
regarding these orders:
"The President has the power to seize property,
organize and control the means of production, seize
commodities, assign military forces abroad, call
reserve forces amounting to two and a half million men
to duty, institute martial law, seize and control all
means of transportation, regulate all private
enterprise, restrict travel and in a plethora of
particular ways, control the lives of Americans . . .
"Most [of these laws] remain a potential source of
virtually unlimited power for a President should he
choose to activate them. It is possible that some
future President could exercise this vast authority in
an attempt to place the United States under
authoritarian rule.
"While the danger of a dictatorship through legal
means may seem remote to us today, recent history
records Hitler seizing control through the use of
emergency powers provisions contained in the laws of
the Weimar Republic."
How did the President gain these broad and dramatic
powers? Again, by granting them to himself via
executive order. In current times, despite the present
wave of patriotism (with the Michigan Militia
reportedly offering to help President Bush with
homeland security), these powers, coupled with genuine
emergencies now and in the future, could make one
concerned. Coupled with ECHELON, a vast global
intelligence-gathering network (and Carnivore, the FBI
capability to read emails), they could make one
nervous. Even paranoid.
I believe that Earling Carothers "Jim" Garrison,
District Attorney for New Orleans who put local
businessman Clay Betrand on trial in connection with
the assassination of John F. Kennedy, sums it all up
perfectly in the October 1967 Playboy interview:
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.
=====
http://www.iraqwar.org/
http://www.centrexnews.com
http://www.earthchangestv.com/warroom/beginning.htm
http://www.sfbg.com/reality/24.html
http://www.dc.peachnet.edu/~shale/humanities/composition/assignments/experiment/paperclip.html
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