On the ominous continuity of history

Was Jim Garrison a time traveller?

This morning, I was reading a post by

Mark Crispin Miller

, who writes the must-read Substack

News from Underground by Mark Crispin Miller

, when a reader comment by Jeff caught my eye.

Professor Miller’s post was a compilation of interviews from the late 1960s and early 70s with Jim Garrison, the New Orleans District Attorney who was played by Kevin Costner in Oliver Stone’s 1991 political thriller, JFK.

Jim Garrison on "The Steve Allen Show" in 1971: Just think where we'd be now if "our free press" would always give such mavericks a respectful hearing, instead of jeering them (as the CIA requires)

Garrison doggedly investigated the real culprits behind the assassination of President John F. Kennedy for years, but his efforts to bring the conspirators to justice were thwarted both by the many and varied deep state operators and assets who were involved in the plot, and by the media which, by and large, were content to serve as mouthpieces for the official narrative

.

Jeff’s comment contained a lengthy excerpt from an interview with Jim Garrison that Playboy magazine published in October 1967. I tracked the interview down and found it on the trusty Internet Archive.

I was astounded to discover that the introduction to, and transcript of, the interview spanned 28 pages, nearly half of them solid 3-column text. (The cartoons on most of the remaining pages are a fascinating window into what constituted edginess in the late 1960s.)

I guess men really could argue back then that they only read Playboy for the articles! Can you imagine any magazine publishing a 28-page article now? No editor would accept it, because only an infinitesimal proportion of their readership would have the concentration span to read it!

What’s even more striking is the erudition and eloquence with which Garrison lays out his case. Even allowing for some editing on the part of the publisher, it’s impossible not to be struck by the contrast between Garrison’s articulateness, and the incoherence of practically all contemporary public figures. I find it hard to escape the conclusion that people are, in general, becoming increasingly more stupid.

I had to read all the way to the final page of the article to find the quote posted by Jeff. As you read it, mentally set aside the references to World War II and ask yourself whether a time-travelling Jim Garrison could have described our contemporary plight, in exactly the same terms he used back in 1967. I have added the sentence before the quote that Jeff excerpted, because I think it provides crucial context:

"I don't think I've ever tried to formulate this into a coherent political philosophy, but at the root of my concern is the conviction that a human being is not a digit; he's not a digit in regard to the state and he's not a digit in the sense that he can ignore his fellow men and his obligations to society. 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 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."