Oliver Stone --- American Fascism

The ghost of John F. Kennedy
  confronts us with the secret murder at the
     heart of the American dream
         

    The Official Legend is created and the media
   takes it from there.  The glitter of official
  lies and the epic splendor of the thought -
    numbing funeral of J.F.K. confuse the eye
      and confound the understanding.

  Hitler always said "the bigger the lie, the more
      people will believe it."  Lee Oswald - a
       crazed, lonely man who wanted attention and
    got it by killing a President, was only the
    first in a long line of patsies.  In later
     years Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King,
    men whose commitment to change and to peace
    would make them dangerous to men who are
       committed to war, would follow, also killed
    by such "lonely, crazed men," who remove
       our guilt by making murder a meaningless
       act of a loner.  


We have all become Hamlets
    in our country - children of a slain father
    - leader whose killers still possess the
       throne.  The ghost of John F. Kennedy
  confronts us with the secret murder at the
     heart of the American dream.  


He forces on us the appalling questions:  Of what is our Constitution made?  What is our citizenship,
   and more, our lives worth?  What is the
future of a democracy where a President can
    be assassinated under conspicuously
    suspicious circumstances while the machinery
   of legal action scarcely trembles?  How
many political murders, disguised as heart
     attacks, cancer, suicides, airplane and car
    crashes, drug overdoses will occur before
      they are exposed for what they are?


    "Treason doth never prosper," wrote an
 English poet, "What's the reason?  For if
      it prosper, none dare call it treason."
The generals who sent Dreyfus to Devils
Island were among the most honorable men
       in France, the men who killed Caesar were
      among the most honorable men in Rome.  And
     the men who killed Kennedy, no doubt, were
     honorable men.  

I believe we have reached
      a time in our country, similar to what life
    must've been like under Hitler in the 30's,
    except we don't realize it because Fascism
     in our country takes the benign disguise
       of liberal democracy.

  There won't be such
     familiar signs as swastikas.  We won't build
   Dachaus and Auschwitzes.  We're not going
      to wake up one morning and suddenly find
       ourselves in gray uniforms goose - stepping
    off to work ... "Fascism will come," Huey
      Long once said. "in the name of anti -
 fascism" - it will come in the name of your
    security - they call it "National Security,"
   it will come with the mass media manipulating
  a clever concentration camp of the mind.



       The super state will provide you tranquility
   above the truth, the super state will make
     you believe you are living in the best of
      all possible worlds, and in order to do so
     will rewrite history as it sees fit.  George
   Orwell's Ministry of Truth warned us, "Who
     controls the past, controls the future."



I submit to you that what took
       place on November 22, 1963 was a coup d'etat.
  Its most direct and tragic result was a
reversal of President Kennedy's commitment
     to withdraw from Vietnam.  War is the
  biggest business in America worth $80 billion
  a year.  The President was murdered by a
       conspiracy planned in advance at the highest
   levels of the United States government and
     carried out by fanatical and disciplined
       Cold Warriors in the Pentagon and CIA's
covert operations apparatus.  

It was a public execution and it was covered up by like - minded individuals in the Dallas Police
Department, the Secret Service, the FBI,
       and the White House - all the way up to and
    including J. Edgar Hoover and Lyndon
   Johnson, whom I consider accomplices after
     the fact.