Back during my days at the union office I made an interesting discovery. One day I was looking through a couple of American Heritage dictionaries and I discovered that the definition of "fascism" had changed over the years.
The 1975 edition defined fascism this way: "A philosophy or system of government that advocates or exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with an ideology of belligerent nationalism."
By 1993 the definition of fascism in The American Heritage Dictionary had changed to this: "A system of government marked by a totalitarian dictator, socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition, and usu. a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism."
Why would the concept of fascism shed the "dictatorship of the extreme right" and "the merging of state and business leadership"? Why would that be replaced with "totalitarian dictator" and "suppression of the opposition." Does that mean that fascism has to have a guy on the podium shouting "Heil Hitler"? Would somebody dressed up in a flight suit and prancing around on an aircraft carrier do? Does that mean people have to be lined up against walls and shot for there to be fascism? And why replace "merging of state and business leadership" with "socioeconomic controls"? Every governmental system, even the most extreme, dogmatic free-market right-wing government, has some kind of socioeconomic control. That particular part of the definition worthless. So identifying the "extreme right" and "business" are gone and replaced with... bullshit. In our dictionaries. Even our dictionaries are now bullshit.
I was reminded of this when I read Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years. I had mentioned here that I started the book, and for the most part I thought it was pretty good. It gave a glimpse into what the Kennedys were thinking during those years when both brothers were assassinated.
The one chapter that struck me as way out of line, though, was the one about the Garrison investigation. Here was a DA investigating the murder of his brother and Robert Kennedy was beyond hostile to him. Much of the chapter relies on the recollections of Walter Sheridan, who helped Bobby investigating mobsters. It was Sheridan who kept feeding Bobby negative things about Garrison and his investigation. It was Sheridan who said that Garrison was steering clear of Mafia connections and essentially running a big hoax. Something was wrong about this.
A few weeks later I received a comment from Lisa Pease on that particular blog. Pease was one of the editors of the great collection of essays, THE ASSASSINATIONS. Here's what she wrote on the Talbot book:
Talbot's book is excellent, with a couple of notable exceptions, one being the Garrison chapter, which literally made me sick to my stomach. I consider Talbot a friend, which makes it all the harder to say that.
When he first started writing his book, he was pretty convinced that the Kennedys had ordered Castro killed. I argued hard with him about that and insisted he look into the role of Sam Halpern in spreading that awful disinformation. Talbot really looked into it, and saw the truth of what I was saying. But I didn't press as hard on Sheridan, and how Sheridan's first loyalty was not to Bobby, but to the CIA. I wish now I had. But even so, Talbot's contribution to the true history of the Kennedy's is immense, and despite the upset stomach, I'm still very grateful that he wrote (most of) what he did.
So, ultimately, Sheridan was a babysitter for the Agency. He watched Bobby, fed him enough to steer him away from Garrison and his investigation. The rest is, well, history.
I dug into my stacks and pulled out the October 1967 issue of Playboy. It has a truly remarkable interview with Jim Garrison. Did Garrison concentrate on the CIA to the detriment of the Mafia involvement. Sure, but who were pulling the strings? It wasn't Carlos Marcello. No Trafficante wrote the Warren Report.
At the end of the interview this is how Garrison answered this question:
"Where would you place yourself on the political spectrum--right, left or center?"
This is what he said. In 1967. My bold:
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 thumbscrews-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 don't think I've ever tried to formulate this into a coherent political, 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 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 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 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.
Then the final question to him:
Considering all the criticism that has come your way, would you still launch your investigation into the assassination if you had it to do over again?
And this is what Garrison said:
As long as the men who shot John Kennedy to death in Dallas are walking the streets of America, I will continue this investigation. I have no regrets about initiating it and I have no regrets about carrying it on to its conclusion. If it takes me 30 years to nail every one of the assassins, then I will continue this investigation for 30 years. I owe that not only to Jack Kennedy but to my country.
Well, it's now forty years since he gave that interview. Garrison's dead. RFK's dead. It's a different war, different conditions, different "national security" concerns. Right now close to seventy percent of Americans want us out of Iraq. The American people voted out the party that brought us the war. "Belligerent nationalism," anyone? A majority of Americans are actually ready to impeach George Bush (whose father was head of the CIA). So with such a mandate from the people what is our Congress? A debating society.
