John Foster Dulles on the military establishment's need for external enemies

In order to bring a nation to support the burdens incident to maintaining great military establishments, it is necessary to create an emotional state akin to war psychology.  There must be the portrayal of an external menace or of internal conditions rendered intolerable by the unjust restraints of foreign nations.  This involves the development to a high degree of the nation-hero nation-villain ideology and the arousing of the population to a sense of the duty of sacrifice.

~ John Foster Dulles, "War, Peace and Change"

 

Jeffrey Tucker on the military industrial complex and external enemies

In foreign relations, here we are today: the US is in a de facto but undeclared war with Russia.  No one calls it that, but that’s what it amounts to when the US is providing armaments through intermediaries to the forces that Russia is battling on its border.  This intensifies and escalates conflict, same as sanctions.  The dangers right now are intense, on all fronts.  It’s not clear that decision makers even understand what they are doing. 

Or maybe they do.  Since the end of the Cold War, the US military-industrial complex has been searching for a reliable enemy that the US population could hate, as a way to distract from the misdeeds of the political elite at home.  After decades of cycling through them, it appears that the old enemy was the best enemy.  And with a small turn of a dial, vast swaths of high-end opinion are exclusively focused on the terrible plight of Ukraine.

~ Jeffrey Tucker, "How Seventy Years of Progress Came to an End," Brownstone Institute, March 11, 2022

Doug Casey on why governments need external enemies

Over thousands of years of history, governments have always threatened each other with war.  It’s a good part of what they do to justify their existence, and it’s been said, correctly, that war is the health of the state.  Nothing has changed in that regard. 

The main reason that the US government is beating the war drums is that war [Russia-Ukraine] has always been a distraction from domestic problems.  Create a foreign enemy on whom to blame domestic problems, and it will reliably divert the news cycle from things you don’t want the hoi polloi to hear or talk about.  A real or fabricated foreign enemy unites the public.  The further the economy and the society deteriorate, the more war-mongering we’ll hear from Washington.

~ Doug Casey, "Doug Casey on the Likelihood of a Military Conflict Over Ukraine…," International Man, February 4, 2022

Doug Casey on the Russia threat

Russia itself isn’t a threat to anybody.  It’s really nothing but a gas station with an attached gun store in the middle of a wheat field. 

~ Doug Casey, "Doug Casey on the Likelihood of a Military Conflict Over Ukraine…," International Man, February 4, 2022

Osama bin Laden on the 9/11 attacks

I would like to assure the world that I did not plan the recent attacks, which seems to have been planned by people for personal reasons…  I have been living in the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and following its leaders’ rules. The current leader does not allow me to exercise such operations.

I have already said that I am not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States.  As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie.  Neither I had any knowledge of these attacks nor I consider the killing of innocent women, children and other humans as an appreciable act.  Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent women, children and other people. 

I have already said that we are against the American system, not against its people, whereas in these attacks, the common American people have been killed.  The United States should try to trace the perpetrators of these attacks within itself; the people who are a part of the US system, but are dissenting against it. 

Or those who are working for some other system; persons who want to make the present century as a century of conflict between Islam and Christianity so that their own civilization, nation, country or ideology could survive.  Then there are intelligence agencies in the US, which require billions of dollars worth of funds from the Congress and the government every year…  They need an enemy.

~ Osama bin Laden, interviewed by the Urdu newspaper Karachi Ummat, September 28, 2001

(As quoted by Pepe Escobar, "9/9 and 9/11, 20 Years Later," LewRockwell.com, September 11, 2021.)

Doug Casey on how government uses fear

Fear is one of the most powerful and primal emotions, and government has always used fear to unite the people behind it.  Government—which produces nothing—only exists because of fear.  Fear of foreigners is allayed by its army.  Fear of domestic chaos is allayed by its police.

~ Doug Casey, "Doug Casey on the Real Reason Why the Mainstream Media is Dialing Up the Fear," Doug Casey's International Man, September 8, 2021

James Madison on external enemies

If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.

~ James Madison

Marc Faber on governments finding scapegoats for its failures

Every failed state has always accused somebody else for its own shortcomings.  The Bolsheviks blamed foreign interference and foreign spies; Stalin blamed Hitler; Hitler blamed the Communists and Jews; Trump blamed the Chinese; and the Democrats blamed Trump for everything that went wrong, etc.

~ Marc Faber, The Gloom, Boom & Doom Report, February 1, 2021

Robert Higgs on how government uses fear to maintain control

Government, it is claimed, protects the populace from external attackers and from internal disorder, both of which are portrayed as ever-present threats.

~ Robert Higgs, "Fear: The Foundation of Every Government's Power," Independent Institute, May 17, 2005

David Stockman on the perceived Russian military threat to the U.S.

Russia’s pint-sized economy can not support a military establishment anywhere near to that of Imperial Washington.

To wit, its $61 billion of military outlays in 2018 amounted to less than 32 days of Washington’s current $750 billion of expenditures for defense. Indeed, it might well be asked how Russia could remotely threaten homeland security in America short of what would be a suicidal nuclear first strike.

That’s because the 1,600 deployed nuclear weapons on each side represent a continuation of mutual deterrence (MAD) – the arrangement by which we got through 45-years of cold war when the Kremlin was run by a totalitarian oligarchy committed to a hostile ideology; and during which time it had been armed to the teeth via a forced-draft allocation of upwards of 40% of the GDP of the Soviet empire to the military.

By comparison, the Russian defense budget currently amounts to less than 4% of the country’s anemic present day economy – one shorn of the vast territories and populations of Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and all the Asian “stans” among others. Yet given those realities we are supposed to believe that the self-evidently calculating and cautious kleptomaniac who runs the Kremlin is going to go mad, defy MAD and trigger a nuclear Armageddon?

Indeed, the idea that Russia presents a national security threat to America is laughable. Not only would Putin never risk nuclear suicide, but even that fantasy is the extent of what he’s got. That is, Russia’s conventional capacity to project force to the North American continent is nonexistent – or at best, lies somewhere between nichts and nothing.

~ David Stockman, "Congrats, Dems! You've Empowered a Pack of Paranoid Neocon Morons," LewRockwell.com, November 23, 2019

Goering on herding the sheep-like people

... the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

~ Field Marshall Hermann Goering, upon being interviewed by Gustave M. Gilbert, the German-speaking prison psychologist who had free access to all prisoners during the Nuremberg trails.

(This was reported in Robert Higgs, "How the State Leads People to Destruction." Higgs cites the Nuremberg Diary, pp. 278-279)

James Madison on threats to liberty: gradualism and external enemies

I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.... The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.

~ James Madison

FDR on sacrifice

It is not a sacrifice for any man, old or young, to be in the Army or Navy of the United States. Rather it is a privilege. It is not a sacrifice for the industrialist or the wage-earner, the farmer or the shopkeeper, the trainman or the doctor, to pay more taxes, to buy more bonds, to forego extra profits, to work longer or harder at the task for which he is best fitted. Rather it is a privilege. It is not a sacrifice to do without many things to which we are accustomed if the national defense calls for doing without.

~ Franklin Delano Roosevelt, December 9, 1941

(From FDR's radio address two days after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.)

Glenn Greenwald on conservatives and external enemies

When Communists were the Enemy du Jour -- Ronald Reagan's "Evil Empire" -- they were the root of all Evil, the Soul-less, God-less Machiavellian Warriors with designs on World Domination who posed a grave, imminent and existential threat to our nation, to everything we held dear. Back then, in the Era of The Communist Enemy, even to suggest that there was anything restrained or unthreatening or at least rational about the Evil Communists would subject one to all sorts of invective -- involving allegations of anti-Americanism and treason and moral relativism and the like -- from the National Reviews of the worlds.

But no longer. Now that the Communist super-villains of yesteryear have been replaced by Islamic Terrorists as today's Prime Enemy, Communists have undergone a radical, retroactive make-over. According to National Review, back then we could afford laws like FISA and we could expect our Government to abide by annoying constitutional guarantees (such as the Fourth Amendment) because those Communist simpletons were rational, sensible, even honorable enemies -- and not very sophisticated.

Identically, and hilariously (in the most perverse way imaginable), some "conservatives" are even arguing that we treated Nazi detainees well during World War II only because -- unlike the primitive (though simultaneously cunning and sophisticated) Islamic mongrels we battle today -- Nazis were honorable Western gentlemen who posed a far less formidible threat and thus could be treated in accordance with civilized norms.

~ Glenn Greenwald, "The conservative vision of America, by National Review," salon.com, October 16, 2007