Douglas MacArthur's 1952 and 1957 comments about American warmongering — accurate and intentionally ignored

© 2018 Peter Free

 

06 February 2018

 

 

I return to yesterday's theme about Rampant Capitalism

 

This time not from Martin Luther King Jr's perspective — and RAM Trucks mangling of it — but from General Douglas MacArthur's.

 

Two such different people you will not easily find.

 

Yet, their messages against unrestrained greed overlap.

 

 

In 1952, General Douglas MacArthur cogently warned against warmongering

 

He said that:

 

 

It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear.

 

While such an economy may produce a sense of seeming prosperity for the moment, it rests on an illusionary foundation of complete unreliability and renders among our political leaders almost a greater fear of peace than is their fear of war.

 

© 1952 Douglas MacArthur and Edward T. Imparato (editor), Speech to the Michigan Legislature (15 May 1952), contained in General MacArthur Speeches and Reports 1908-1964 (Turner, 2000) (at page 206)

 

 

The admired man repeated this gist in 1957

 

Speaking to Sperry Rand stockholders, he said that:

 

 

Our swollen budgets constantly have been misrepresented to the public. Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear . . . 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.

 

© 1952 Douglas MacArthur and Edward T. Imparato (editor), Address to the Annual Stockholders Sperry Rand Corporation (30 July 1957), contained in General MacArthur Speeches and Reports 1908-1964 (Turner, 2000) (at page 206)

 

 

The moral? — We eagerly praise the people, whom we most want to ignore

 

Wisdom is no match for profit's lure in an avarice-based culture like ours.

 

When we find ourselves worshipping persons, but ignoring their insights, we should intuit that something is awry.

 

Perhaps there is something wrong with a cultural construct that encourages limitless greed and splashy self-centeredness at the expense of community, easy peace and admirable personal and organizational rectitudes.