Blogs > Liberty and Power > Who Said This?

Dec 24, 2005

Who Said This?




"Our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artifically induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear."

For the answer, click Read More.

Douglas MacArthur (1952). See here. Hat tip to antiwar.com.



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David T. Beito - 12/31/2005

I suppose he should be given some credit for opposing Wallace's schemes to create a super New Deal after the war.


Robert Higgs - 12/28/2005

I can't imagine Truman's making any such statement, either, nor can I recall anything of the sort in his memoirs, which I read many years ago. Hardly surprising, given that the government during his presidency was a prime culprit in practicing the politics of foreign-bogey fear mongering and cashed in on this gambit enormously during 1951-53. (As Acheson wrote in his memoirs, "Korea saved us.")

Truman did have a great many harsh words, however, during World War II, for the corporate bigwigs who were raking in the loot from high-yielding munitions contracts. No doubt they were Republicans. Truman was nothing if not a Party man.


David T. Beito - 12/28/2005

I am no fan of MacArthur but I can't imagine that plucky little poker player from Missouri writing anything like that.


Robert Higgs - 12/26/2005

"Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear--kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor--with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real." (Source: General Douglas MacArthur, A SOLDIER SPEAKS (1965), p. 333.