Military Industrial Complex Quotes

“Victory or defeat will be determined by the skill and ingenuity of our scientists. If we put them to work making poison gas and more and more fiendish mechanical and explosive instruments of destruction, they will have no time for the constructive job of creating greater prosperity for all peoples.”
― Smedley D. Butler, War Is a Racket

“When foreign military spending [bombing Korea and Vietnam] forced the U.S. balance of payments into deficit and drove the United States off gold in 1971, central banks were left without the traditional asset used to settle payments imbalances. The alternative by default was to invest their subsequent payments inflows in U.S. Treasury bonds, as if these still were “as good as gold.” Central banks have been holding some $4 trillion of these bonds in their international reserves for the past few years — and these loans have financed most of the U.S. Government’s domestic budget deficits for over three decades. Given the fact that about half of U.S. Government discretionary spending is for military operations — including more than 750 foreign military bases and increasingly expensive operations in the oil-producing and transporting countries — the international financial system is organized in a way that finances the Pentagon, along with U.S. buyouts of foreign assets expected to yield much more than the Treasury bonds that foreign central banks hold.”
― Michael Hudson, The Bubble and Beyond

“In actual fact it would seem that during the Cold War, if not during World War II, this country has become frankly a warfare state built on affluence, a power structure in which the interests of big business, the obsessions of the military, and the phobias of political extremists both dominate and dictate our national policy. It also seems that the people of the country are by and large reduced to passivity, confusion, resentment, frustration, thoughtlessness and ignorance, so that they blindly follow any line that is unraveled for them by the mass media.”
― Thomas Merton, Cold War Letters

“These days about the worst job you can have is be a US military man. It's so shameful. You're so expensive, yet so completely useless. You know you can't fuck with Russia because they'll just start blowing nukes up for shits and giggles. And you can fuck with China because they probably have a shitton of biological weapons stashed in every Chinatown to take out most US population very, very quickly. At least that’s what I would do, and THEY are a lot smarter than I am. So you keep busy and pretend to be useful by killing Arabs in caves and shit, cuz that seems like a pretty low risk adventure. but... even that's gonna come back and bite you in the Ass eventually... these things usually do...”
― Dmitry Dyatlov

“Very few people in the USA realize that a nuclear war was waged with nature in the southwest by their own military.”
― Steven Magee

“War is like a vacuum cleaner that sucks tax dollars out of your pocket and funnels the money directly into the pockets of the robber barons who own the weapons factories.”
― Oliver Markus Malloy, How to Defeat the Trump Cult: Want to Save Democracy? Share This Book

“That war only made billionaires out of millionaires. Today's war is making trillionaires out of billionaires. Now I call that progress.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., A Man Without a Country

“Another painful irony is that, in exile, many refugees strive to stay alive, while watching an absurd show of fraud politicians, experts, pundits, academics, and journalists on the empire’s payroll fighting about them merely to serve their own careers and fortunes. Some promise to imprison refugees, some promise to build walls to stop their influx, some promise to deny them any human rights, others promise to publicly shame and attack them. Many ask refugees to ‘fuck off and go back to their countries,’ forgetting that their empire left nothing to go back to. Yet, conveniently, nobody promises to stop waging wars against refugees. Nobody promises to stop destroying and economically exploiting the places from which refugees escaped. They discuss everything except the actual solution to the refugee crisis, which is simple: stop waging wars of any sort against other people! Everyone loves hearing themselves talking about the refugee crisis, but almost never talking with refugees in meaningful and honest ways. If they talk with them, it is only to depict them as victims or villains in the unjust courts of the empire’s arrogance. They defend them or hate them, depending on the direction in which they wish to advance their fortunes and careers. It all depends on what they need to put on their CVs at any given time or in any given situation. The last piece of this absurd game is that the careers of every self-appointed mouthpiece for refugees are almost always dependent on paychecks paid by those who directly or indirectly run the military-industrial-complex, the biggest producer of refugees. This last piece is precisely what makes breaking the vicious cycle almost impossible. And such continues the game, all while refugees are sitting and watching in bitter silence.”
― Louis Yako

“Te US's outsized military exists not only to ensure the US's quite unjust share of the world's riches, but to also ensure that those riches are not shared with the poor huddled masses in this country through annoying things such as social programs and works projects. Instead, a disproportionate amount of tax revenue (about 54% of the US's discretionary budget) is sucked right back into the military-industrial complex, a form of welfare for the rich, while the working class and poor are left on their own to suffer. One commentator correctly described this as "Redistributive Militarism"- that is, the process by which income is redistributed from bottom to top through the escalation of military spending.”
― Dan Kovalik, The Plot to Scapegoat Russia: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Russia

“every time a bomb exploded, every anti-personnel weapon that sent its hundreds of particles tearing through the sift tissues of soft bodies, every helicopter that was shot down with its crew, every plane hit with a missile: brrrring, brrrring, on the great cash register in the homeland bank. It was all profit. It would have to be replaced. It was the perfect form of fantastically expensive and forced consumption, paid for by taxes.”
― Marge Piercy, Dance the Eagle to Sleep

“The ease with which money
forgives bayonets and lies
to justify the massacre with reasoned arguments”
― Liu Xiaobo, June Fourth Elegies

“People are not only talking glibly about War but working for it. The universe is a huge munitions factory. Fear and spiritual negation keep that factory always at work piling up armaments ready for use at any moment. Humanity spends £200 every minute on armaments, and that in what is supposed to be a period of Peace!”
― The Layman with a Notebook, What Is the Oxford Group?

“The reason for breaking out an old Soviet military textbook is to show that Russia is still following Soviet ideas. At the same time, America does not seriously embark upon war preparations of its own. The American side does not place its key military industries under mountains, and does not teach its population the principles of nuclear civil defense (as the Russians do). Even more critical, the American people have never received any schooling on the Russian threat. With rare exception, American schools do not teach students about the enemies of America. This was not even done at the height of the Cold War. In fact, Marxists were busy infiltrating U.S. schools and universities during the 1970s and 1980s. American students were more likely to receive indoctrination closer to that given in communist countries than to receive any proper orientation about a communist threat to the United States. And so, there was never any similarity between Russian war preparations and American war preparations. This is a fact that ought to make a deep impression, as it dispels the usual propaganda about the all-powerful U.S. military-industrial-complex.”
― J.R.Nyquist

“The answer to the question of why we have war is this: we have war because we have war. War is overdetermined; its supporting norms are self-fueling and robustly redundant. Wars produce the conditions for future wars.”
― Kent D. Shifferd, From War to Peace: A Guide to the Next Hundred Years

“The intimate relationship between the military-industrial-complex and the refugee-industrial complex is that they serve each other by first destroying nations and controlling their resources; and second by bringing to the West cheap laborers who do both menial and highly skilled work. This means that the system benefits from the victims twice: once by destroying their nations and stealing their resources, and twice by capitalizing on their labor and skills. More ironically, refugees often make ideal consumers for goods produced and promoted by the same corporations and warmongers who destroyed their countries, lives, histories, and memories forever.”
― Louis Yako

“The few powerful Western elites…benefit from wars twice: first, by destroying other countries and stealing their resources under different pretexts. Second, by bringing millions of refugees to Western countries and using them as cheap labor. This is where the strong connection between the military-industrial-complex and the refugee-industrial-complex precisely lies.”
― Louis Yako

“After living more than a decade in America now, I have come to accept that most of my fellow American citizens are as powerless as I am in influencing the American foreign policy, especially in the Middle East. Even more discouraging is that, by pointing out this reality, one is immediately labeled as ‘un-American’, ‘anti-American’, or other misleading adjectives and accusations to silence any voices seeking to change this bleak reality.”
― Louis Yako

“A refugee is someone who was forcefully taken out of their time and place. They were then placed in another time and another place that insist on dehumanizing them. It is a tragedy. The ultimate paradox and irony of this tragedy is that, in many cases, those who caused their displacement and those who hate them in their newfound ‘homes’ in exile are the same people! In this way, they leave no place for a refugee to feel at home or even alive.”
― Louis Yako

“A speech that I heard Hugo Chavez give at a meeting in Caracas in July of 2010 comes to mind. He said something that seemed quite profound to me and which has stuck with me ever since: that the 20th Century was not "The American Century" at all as the US claims, but it was indeed the Century of Revolutions- for example, the Mexican, Russian, Chinese, Cuban, Vietnamese and Nicaraguan Revolutions- and the US violently opposed every single one of these.
I would soon come to realize that the Cold War, at least from the vantage point of the US, had little to do with fighting "Communism," and more to do with making the world safe corporate plunder.”
― Dan Kovalik, The Plot to Scapegoat Russia: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Russia

“War!
What is it good for?
It's good for business.

- North Sea Bubble”
― Billy Bragg, A Lover Sings: Selected Lyrics

“Strange as it may seem — and irrational as it would be in a more logical system of world diplomacy — the dollar glut is what finances America’s global military build-up. It forces foreign central banks to bear the costs of America’s expanding military empire. The result is a new form of taxation without representation. Keeping international reserves in dollars means recycling dollar inflows to buy U.S. Treasury bills — U.S. government debt issued largely to finance the military spending that has been a driving force in the U.S. balance-of-payments deficit since the Korean War broke out in 1950.

[...] “China National Offshore Oil Corporation go home” is the motto when foreign governments try to use their sovereign wealth funds (central bank departments trying to figure out what to do with their dollar glut) to make direct investments in American industry, as happened when China’s national oil company sought to buy Unocal in 2005.[...]

So Europeans and Asians see U.S. companies pumping more dollars into their economies not only to buy their exports (in excess of providing them with goods and services in return), not only to buy their companies and commanding heights of privatized public enterprises (without giving them reciprocal rights to buy important U.S. companies), and not only to buy foreign stocks, bonds and real estate. The U.S. media neglect to mention that the U.S. Government spends hundreds of billions of dollars abroad — not only in the Near East for direct combat, but to build military bases to encircle the rest of the world, and to install radar systems, guided missile systems and other forms of military coercion, including the “color revolutions” that have been funded all around the former Soviet Union.”
― Michael Hudson, The Bubble and Beyond

“And herein lies a key ambiguity about large defence contractors: they are pillars of the free market economy whose shareholders are supposed to provide oversight, while receiving extensive state support which insulates them from market vagaries and meaningful oversight. One thing, however, is constant: this either-or status has resulted in companies that are often badly managed and regularly find themselves in financial difficulties, despite their government’s efforts, sometimes illegal, to find them business.”
― Andrew Feinstein, The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade

“Military thinkers and actors dominated the new White House and the key departments of state, both military and civilian. Over thirty senior arms industry executives, consultants or advisers were placed in key positions in the military and across government... More than half a dozen important policy positions in the Bush administration were occupied by Lockheed Martin executives, lobbyists or lawyers, reflecting the influence of defence contractors across the breadth of government.”
― Andrew Feinstein, The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade

“These artists of war are active even when their societies are officially at peace, quests for power being unrelenting, and in the absence of open hostilities they can be found either hunting for ever-present enemies within or otherwise divvying up that booty always conveniently proximate to those capable of wanton slaughter, spoils these days often cloaked in purchasing contracts and share-price movements.”
― Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

“United States represents the hegemonic "culture of terrorism," providing the central model and leading example emulated by every other nation involved in state terror around the world ... The structures, tactics, and technology of state terror have been diffused, in fact aggressively marketed and exported as a form of "military aid" to developing countries. A focus on state terror at the level of individual countries tends to obscure the fact that it is a global phenomenon supported by an international structure or network, and local cases are only comprehensible within this encapsulating context.”
― Jeffrey A. Sluka, Death Squad: The Anthropology of State Terror

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
― Eisenhower

“The military needs an ample supply of gullible people.”
― Steven Magee

“Language shifted, as it always does…they endured the harsh world. They softened their edges in an attempt to soften the edges of opposing forces. Sometimes this didn’t work. Sometimes it worked. They sought a cure no more. They realized the cure is the journey of the struggle. They realized that those times of sharp edges come from the top of the pyramid, from a few, and not some swarm of many infected, evil souls.”
― Chase Griffin

“Eisenhower’s final warning was about the military-industrial complex. And what he didn’t say is that it developed while he was president.”
― Eugene J. McCarthy

“Had the United States taken the lead in such a world war against poverty, disease and ignorance it would itself have found some means of transition from the “military-industrial complex” escapism into which it has fallen. But aren’t we already doing enough with the four to five billion dollars annually expended in foreign aid? Directly and indirectly, by far the greater part of such sums go into military hardware that is of no value to the poor and is often used as a means of repressing and reducing any chance of peaceful change. In machine­ poor lands much of the rest goes into the pockets of military sycophants, profiteering merchants, landlords, politicians and the quick among the have-gots. It goes into cars and gasoline and freezers for the few. Too much of it tends to intensify class hatreds, the chasm between rich and poor, and dislike of the Yankees who bring gumdrops but not the means of work.”
― Edgar Snow, Red China Today: The Other Side of the River