The following are quotes from two famous world leaders in the 1950s at the height of the Cold War:
"Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear-kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fever-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. "
"Russia has a right to feel assured as far as human arrangements can reach that the terrible events of the Hitler invasion will never be repeated and that Poland will remain a friendly power and a buffer .... "
Before giving you the answer, I would like to give you a comparison of statements from two equally famous world leaders in the late 1940s after the War:
GENERAL OF THE ARMY DOUGLAS MACARTHUR
"The Communists in the Kremlin are engaged in a monstrous conspiracy to stamp out freedom all over the world. If they were to succeed, the United States would be numbered among their principal victims. It must be clear to everyone that the United States cannot -- and will not -- sit idly by and await foreign conquest. The only question is: When is the best time to meet the threat and how? "
WINSTON CHURCHILL
Sinews of Peace, (the Iron Curtain Speech), at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri on March 5, 1946:
"From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. "
As we all know the alliance of the armaments industry along with the "red scare " brought together the geopolitical madness that resulted in the Cold War and the out of control "military industrial complex. " in the words of Eisenhower in his farewell address. This combination of corporations and our feeling of military invincibility after the War as expressed by MacArthur and Churchill made for a perfect alliance as dangerous as any psychopathic relationship.
In explaining this psychopathic relationship as dangerous as Leopold and Loeb, we first have to understand the psychology of corporations. The best psychological description of a corporation is found in the wonderful documentary The Corporation written by Joel Bakan.
"To more precisely assess the "personality" of the corporate "person," a checklist is employed, using actual diagnostic criteria of the World Health Organization and the DSM-IV, the standard diagnostic tool of psychiatrists and psychologists. The operational principles of the corporation give it a highly anti-social "personality": It is self-interested, inherently amoral, callous and deceitful; it breaches social and legal standards to get its way; it does not suffer from guilt, yet it can mimic the human qualities of empathy, caring and altruism. Four case studies, drawn from a universe of corporate activity, clearly demonstrate harm to workers, human health, animals and the biosphere. Concluding this point-by-point analysis, a disturbing diagnosis is delivered: the institutional embodiment of laissez-faire capitalism fully meets the diagnostic criteria of a "psychopath."
Many have described this symbiotic relationship of government and corporations as "fascism " or "corporatism. " I have come up with a better name for this. I call this "psychopathism. "
By the way, the opening sensible quotes mentioned earlier were from the following:
GENERAL OF THE ARMY DOUGLAS MACARTHUR
"Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear-kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fever-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. " (as a corporation head of Sperry Rand to its shareholders in 1957, The Nation, August 17, 1957, p. 62).
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