“In his devastatingly prophetic book, Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell points out that one reason why it is possible for those in authority to maintain the barbarities of the police state is that nobody is able to recall the many blessings of the period which preceded. . . The great majority of [Western people today] have known only a world ravaged by war, depressions, international intrigues and meddling, vast debts and crushing taxation, the encroachments of the police state, and the control of public opinion by ruthless and irresponsible propaganda. . . . Military state capitalism is engulfing both democracy and liberty in countries which have not succumbed to Communism. . . . During the years since 1937, the older pacific internationalism has been virtually extinguished, and internationalism has itself been conquered by militarism and aggressive globaloney. Militarism was, formerly, closely linked to national arrogance. Today, it stalks behind the semantic disguise of internationalism, which has become a cloak for national aggrandizement and imperialism. . . . The obvious slogan of the internationalists of our day, who dominate the historical profession as well as the political scene, is ‘perpetual war for perpetual peace.’ This, it may be noted, is also the ideological core of ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ society. . . . The security measures alleged to be necessary to promote and execute global crusades are rapidly bringing about the police state in hitherto free nations, including our own. Any amount of arbitrary control over political and economic life, the most extensive invasions of civil liberties, the most extreme witch-hunting, and the most lavish expenditures, can al be demanded and justified on the basis of alleged ‘defense’ requirements. . . . This is precisely the psychological attitude and procedural policy which dominate ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ society.” [from “Revisionism and the Historical Blackout,” Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace]

“Today, partisan political strategy overrides business independence and sagacity, and the manner in which we shall utilize our technology is keyed more to vote-getting and the associated military program than to producing goods and services and assuring human well-being. . . . [In this program, the politicians] are aided and abetted by military leaders [who seek] . . . to put the Pentagon group in a position of greater prestige and power than was ever enjoyed by the Prussian military caste in Imperial Germany. . . . [The oil interests wished] to protect their far-flung interests and possessions. . . . [W]ars must be . . . made perpetual . . . so as to assure full employment and facilitate the propaganda of fear and terrorism upon which the maintenance of the regime depends.” [from “How ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ Trends Threaten American Peace, Freedom, and Prosperity,” in Revisionism: A Key to Peace and Other Essays]

“[The Smith Act] repudiated the fundamental principles on which our nation was founded. . . . Though the Smith Act is now being used to suppress the vending of unpopular Communist opinions, it could readily be turned against thevery conservative groups that have sponsored the law. . .”

“[If maximum murder of the enemy is the sole aim of a war, then a call for unconditional surrender is only the logical conclusion of a conflict in which] there were no actual peace aims or programs. . . . The Allies won just exactly what they fought for--and all they fought for: an astronomical number of enemy scalps and incredible physical destruction of enemy property and homes . . . . In the second World War, it was only a matter of killing Germans and Japanese; today, we are confronted with the threat of killing everybody on the planet with no basic plans or motives other than a 'massive surprise attack,' to be followed by the mopping up of survivors through a ‘massive retaliation.’ The origins and motives of the Cold War were as sordid and ethically bankrupt as those of the Second World War: Stalin’s determination to hold his illicit gains, the British effort to regain their balance of power position which they had lost in the war which was designed to preserve it, and the effort of Truman and Clark Clifford to pull [up] Democratic political prospects. . . in late February 1947. . . . The world was soon consigned to the Orwellian pattern of linking up bogus economic prosperity and political tenure with cold and phony war, from which the only relief may well be devastating nuclear warfare, set off by design or accident. . . . ” [from “Revisionism Revisited,” Liberation, Summer 1959]

“As a result [of abandoning neutrality and embracing hysterical anti-communism], the conservatives overlook entirely the fact that this very globalism and spatial fantasy, with the astronomical expenditures involved, are the main cause of the growing statism, debt burden, inflation . . . which are destroying the free economy that they abstractly worship. . . . The building of a public dam costing some millions is denounced as ‘pure socialism,’ while a rigidly State-controlled armament economy costing forty or more [now over seventy] billions each year is hailed as the chief bulwark of free enterprise.”

“They [liberals and progressives] pretend intense devotion to a welfare state, but at the same time warmly uphold the allocation of over three-fourths of our national budget to armament and to war. . . . The liberals exhibit great agitation concerning alleged threats to our civil liberties, but most of them support the ‘Cold War,’ which is far and away the chief cause of the more serious invasions of civil liberties and intellectual freedom.”

“After 1945, we ran into a period of intellectual conformity perhaps unsurpassed since the supreme power and unity of the Catholic Church at the height of the Middle Ages. Between the pressures exerted by the military aspects of the Orwellian cold-war system and those which were equally powerful in the civilian or commercial world, intellectual individuality and independence all but disappeared.” [from “Revisionism: A Key to Peace,” in Rampart Journal, Spring 1966]

“In this era of Nineteen Eighty-Four, ‘The Organization Men,’ ‘The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit,’ the ‘Hidden Persuaders,’ and ‘Madison Avenue,’ even the average American college graduate became little more inclined to independent thinking than was a Catholic peasant during the papacy of Innocent III. As Irving Howell pointed out in the Atlantic of November, 1965, American higher education conformed to the Orwellian cold-war system about as conveniently as the Pentagon or American business. When, in the mid-1960’s, a small minority of students began to show signs of restlessness, this caused widespread surprise and alarm, and public leaders like Senator Thomas J. Dodd of Connecticut suggested procedures which would have won them kudos from Hitler.” [from "Revisionism: A Key to Peace," in Rampart Journal, Spring 1966]

“[The] series of lesser tactical or revolutionary ‘hot wars’ in Korea, South Vietnam, the Congo, and elsewhere, which are so needed to stoke the fires of our military state capitalist economy. Indeed, in Time of September 25, 1965, it was suggested in a lengthy and factual editorial that we might as well get adjusted to this situation of worldwide non-nuclear war as permanent until the final nuclear overkill comes along.” [from "Revisionism: A Key to Peace," in Rampart Journal, Spring 1966]

“Stalin and his successors were content with the Cold War because war scares and the alleged threat of capitalistic attack enabled the Politburo to maintain unity and prevent any threat of civil war in Soviet Russia, despite much slave labor and low living standards. . . . The antagonism of the Western Powers and the Korean War aided [the Chinese Communists] in instituting a reign of terror at home and eliminating their enemies under the guise of the needs of defense and national security.” [from “How ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ Trends Threaten American Peace, Freedom, and Prosperity,” in Revisionism: A Key to Peace and Other Essays]

“[The perpetual war system] could only work if the masses are always kept at a fever heat of fear and excitement and are effectively prevented from learning that the wars are actually phony. To bring about this indispensable deception of the people requires a tremendous development of propaganda, thought-policing, regimentation, and mental terrorism. . . . when it becomes impossible to keep the people any longer at a white heat in their hatred of one enemy group of nations, the war is shifted against another bloc and new, violent hate campaigns are planned and set in motion.” [from “How ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ Trends Threaten American Peace, Freedom, and Prosperity,” in Revisionism: A Key to Peace and Other Essays, pp. 142–43]

“[A f]ather . . . had every assurance that he could raise his family with his sons free from the shadow of the draft and butchery in behalf of politicians. The threat of war did not hang over him. There are some forms of tyranny worse than that of an arbitrary boss in a nonunion shop.” [from “Revisionism and the Historical Blackout,” in Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, pp. 5-6]

“[W]e are now passing into a period in which wars--hot, cold, or phony, but mainly cold and phony--are being used to an increasing extent as the basic instrument of domestic political strategy in order to consolidate the power of the class or party in office, to extend and retain tenure of office, to maintain prosperity and full employment and to avert depressions. The real enemy is not nations or forces outside the borders, but parties and classes within the country that are antagonistic to the party and class which hold power.” [from “A Glimpse at the Future,” An Intellectual and Cultural History of the Western World, vol. 3, p. 1326]

“One of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the great struggle for independence.”

“Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad with power.”

“The lines of the Wilsonian creed of world interventionism and adventurism are in substance: Imperialism is bad (well, partly); every nation must have a nice constitutional government, more or less like ours; if any government dislikes the settlement made at Versailles it must put up its guns and sit down with its well-armed neighbors for a 'friendly' conference; trade barriers are to be lowered and that will make everybody round the globe prosperous (almost, if not entirely); backward peoples are to be kept in order but otherwise treated nicely, as wards; the old history, full of troubles, is to be closed; brethren, and presumably sisters, are to dwell together in unity; everything in the world is to be managed as decorously as a Baptist convention presided over by the Honorable Cordell Hull; if not, we propose to fight disturbers everywhere (well, nearly everywhere).” [from Giddy Minds and Foreign Quarrels, pp. 24-25]