... And I got to tell you, folks, I don’t get all choked up about yellow ribbons and American flags – I consider them to be symbols – and I mean symbols – to the simple-minded. Me, I look at war a little bit differently. To me war is a lot of prick waving, OK? A simple thing, OK? A whole lot of men standing in a field waving their pricks at each other ... It’s called dick-fear ... Basically, men are killing each other in order to improve their self-esteem ... the bombs and the rockets and the bullets are all shaped like dicks. It’s a subconscious need to project the penis into other people’s affairs. It’s called fucking with people! So, as far as I’m concerned, that whole thing in the Persian Gulf was nothing more a big prick-waving dick-fight ... What did we do in Vietnam? We pulled out ... George Carlin, We Like War, on stage New York
Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our own society and abroad.
We tear down the old order every day, from business to science, literature, art, architecture, and cinema to politics to the law.
Our enemies have always hated this whirlwind of energy and creativity, which menaces their traditions (whatever they may be) and shames them for their inability to keep pace.
Seeing America undo traditional societies, they fear us, for they do not wish to be undone.
They must attack us in order to survive, just as we must destroy them to advance our historic mission. Michael Ledeen, The War Against the Terror Masters
To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war. Winston Churchill, misattributed; According to Churchill’s biographer, Sir Martin Gilbert, Churchill actually said ‘Meeting jaw to jaw is better than war’; Harold Macmillan later wrongly attributed jumbled quote to Churchill
In war: resolution. In defeat: defiance. In victory: magnanimity. In peace: goodwill. Winston Churchill, inscription for French war memorial
War is mainly a catalogue of blunders. Winston Churchill
When war is declared, Truth is the first casualty. Hiram Johnson, attributions & variations
They don’t have any skin in the game. So it’s easy for them to say, you know, let’s keep our troops over there, let’s complete the mission even though we don’t know what the mission is. Cindy Sheehan, television interview
We live in a time when we have a man sending us out to war for fictitious reasons. Michael Moore, accepting Oscar
Today we have naming of parts. Henry Reed, Lessons of the War: I, Naming of Parts 1946
And as for war, my wars
Were global from the start. ibid. 3, Unarmed Combat
In a civil war, a general must know – and I’m afraid it’s a thing rather of instinct than of practice – he must know exactly when to move over to the side. Henry Reed, Not a Drum Was Heard, 1959
I believed that all one did about a war was go to it, as a gesture of solidarity, and get killed, or survive if lucky until the war was over … I had no idea you could be what I became, an unscathed tourist of wars. Martha Gellhorn, The Face of War, 1959
I daresay we all become more competent press tourists of it, since we never again cared so much. You can only love on war; afterward, I suppose, you do your duty. Martha Gellhorn, The Honeyed Place 1953, re Spanish Civil War
War is hell, and all that, but it has a good deal to recommend it. It wipes out all the small nuisances of peace-time. Ian Hay, The First Thousand Years, 1915
It is very difficult to get up resentment towards persons whom one has never seen. John Henry Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua, 1864
There is such a thing as legitimate warfare: war has its laws; there are things which may fairly be done, and things which may not be done. ibid.
Wars are not ‘caused’ by international conflicts of interest. Proper logical sequence would make it more often accurate to say that war-making societies require (and thus bring about) such conflicts. Report from Iron Mountain 1967, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 67-27553
War as a general social release: This is a psycho-social function serving the same purpose for a society as do the holiday, the celebration, and the orgy for the individual. ibid.
Nevertheless, an effective political substitute for wars would require ‘alternative enemies’ some of which might seem equally far-fetched in the context of the current war system.
It may be, for instance, that gross pollution of the environment can eventually replace the possibility of mass destruction by nuclear weapons as the principle apparent threat to the survival of the species.
Poisoning of the air, and the principle sources of food and water supply is already well advanced. ibid.
War provides for the periodic necessary readjustment of standards of social behaviour (the moral climate) and for the dissipation of general boredom, one of the most consistently undervalued and unrecognised of social phenomena. ibid.
A viable political substitute for war must posit a generalised external menace to each society of a nature and degree sufficient to require the organisation and acceptance of political authority. ibid.
At present the United States faces no global rival. America’s grand strategy should aim to preserve and extend this advantageous position so far into the future as possible ... Rebuilding America’s Defenses, A Project for the New American Century: Creating Tomorrow’s Dominant Force 2000, ch V
Social engineering (the analysis and automation of a society) requires the correlation of great amounts of constantly changing economic information (data), so a high-speed computerized data-processing system was necessary which could race ahead of the society and predict when society would arrive for capitulation.
Relay computers were too slow, but the electronic computer, invented in 1946 by J Presper Eckert and John W Mauchly, filled the bill.
The next breakthrough was the development of the simplex method of linear programming in 1947 by the mathematician George B Dantzig.
Then in 1948, the transistor, invented by J Bardeen, W H Brattain, and W Shockley, promised great expansion of the computer field by reducing space and power requirements.
With these three inventions under their direction, those in positions of power strongly suspected that it was possible for them to control the whole world with the push of a button.
Immediately, the Rockefeller Foundation got in on the ground floor by making a four-year grant to Harvard College, funding the Harvard Economic Research Project for the study of the structure of the American Economy. One year later, in 1949, The United States Air Force joined in.
In 1952 the grant period terminated, and a high-level meeting of the Elite was held to determine the next phase of social operations research. The Harvard project had been very fruitful, as is borne out by the publication of some of its results in 1953 suggesting the feasibility of economic (social) engineering. (Studies in the Structure of the American Economy – copyright 1953 by Wassily Leontief, International Science Press Inc White Plains New York).
Engineered in the last half of the decade of the 1940s, the new Quiet War machine stood, so to speak, in sparkling gold-plated hardware on the showroom floor by 1954.
With the creation of the maser in 1954, the promise of unlocking unlimited sources of fusion atomic energy from the heavy hydrogen in seawater and the consequent availability of unlimited social power was a possibility only decades away. The combination was irresistible.
The Quiet War was quietly declared by the International Elite at a meeting held in 1954.
Although the silent weapons system was nearly exposed 13 years later, the evolution of the new weapon-system has never suffered any major setbacks.
This volume marks the 25th anniversary of the beginning of the Quiet War. Already this domestic war has had many victories on many fronts throughout the world. Bill Cooper, Top Secret: Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars, Operations Research Technical Manual TM-SW7905.1
What Mr Rothschild had discovered was the basic principle of power, influence, and control over people as applied to economics. That principle is, When you assume the appearance of power, people soon give it to you.
Mr Rothschild had discovered that currency or deposit loan accounts had the required appearance of power that could be used to induce people (inductance, with people corresponding to a magnetic field) into surrendering their real wealth in exchange for a promise of greater wealth (instead of real compensation). They would put up real collateral in exchange for a loan of promissory notes. Mr Rothschild found that he could issue more notes than he had backing for, so long as he had someone’s stock of gold as a persuader to show his customers.