Military-Industrial Complex Speech, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961
Public Papers of the Presidents, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1960, p. 1035- 1040
My fellow Americans:
Three days from now, after half a century in the service of our country, I shall lay down the responsibilities of office as, in traditional and solemn ceremony, the authority of the Presidency is vested in my successor.
This evening I come to you with a message of leave-taking and farewell, and to share a few final thoughts with you, my countrymen.
Like every other citizen, I wish the new President, and all who will labor with him, Godspeed. I pray that the coming years will be blessed with peace and prosperity for all.
Our people expect their President and the Congress to find essential agreement on issues of great moment, the wise resolution of which will better shape the future of the Nation.
My own relations with the Congress, which began on a remote and tenuous basis when, long ago, a member of the Senate appointed me to West Point, have since ranged to the intimate during the war and immediate post-war period, and, finally, to the mutually interdependent during these past eight years.
In this final relationship, the Congress and the Administration have, on most vital issues, cooperated well, to serve the national good rather than mere partisanship, and so have assured that the business of the Nation should go forward. So, my official relationship with the Congress ends in a feeling, on my part, of gratitude that we have been able to do so much together.
II.
We now stand ten years past the midpoint of a century that has witnessed four major wars among great nations. Three of these involved our own country. Despite these holocausts America is today the strongest, the most influential and most productive nation in the world. Understandably proud of this pre-eminence, we yet realize that America's leadership and prestige depend, not merely upon our unmatched material progress, riches and military strength, but on how we use our power in the interests of world peace and human betterment.
III.
Throughout America's adventure in free government, our basic purposes have been to keep the peace; to foster progress in human achievement, and to enhance liberty, dignity and integrity among people and among nations. To strive for less would be unworthy of a free and religious people. Any failure traceable to arrogance, or our lack of comprehension or readiness to sacrifice would inflict upon us grievous hurt both at home and abroad.
Progress toward these noble goals is persistently threatened by the conflict now engulfing the world. It commands our whole attention, absorbs our very beings. We face a hostile ideology -- global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method. Unhappily the danger is poses promises to be of indefinite duration. To meet it successfully, there is called for, not so much the emotional and transitory sacrifices of crisis, but rather those which enable us to carry forward steadily, surely, and without complaint the burdens of a prolonged and complex struggle -- with liberty the stake. Only thus shall we remain, despite every provocation, on our charted course toward permanent peace and human betterment.
Crises there will continue to be. In meeting them, whether foreign or domestic, great or small, there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties. A huge increase in newer elements of our defense; development of unrealistic programs to cure every ill in agriculture; a dramatic expansion in basic and applied research -- these and many other possibilities, each possibly promising in itself, may be suggested as the only way to the road we wish to travel.
But each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs -- balance between the private and the public economy, balance between cost and hoped for advantage -- balance between the clearly necessary and the comfortably desirable; balance between our essential requirements as a nation and the duties imposed by the nation upon the individual; balance between actions of the moment and the national welfare of the future. Good judgment seeks balance and progress; lack of it eventually finds imbalance and frustration.
The record of many decades stands as proof that our people and their government have, in the main, understood these truths and have responded to them well, in the face of stress and threat. But threats, new in kind or degree, constantly arise. I mention two only.
IV.
A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.
Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.
Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present
- and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientifictechnological elite.
It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system -- ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.
V.
Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society's future, we -- you and I, and our government -- must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.
VI.
Down the long lane of the history yet to be written America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.
Such a confederation must be one of equals. The weakest must come to the conference table with the same confidence as do we, protected as we are by our moral, economic, and military strength. That table, though scarred by many past frustrations, cannot be abandoned for the certain agony of the battlefield.
Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative. Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose. Because this need is so sharp and apparent I confess that I lay down my official responsibilities in this field with a definite sense of disappointment. As one who has witnessed the horror and the lingering sadness of war -- as one who knows that another war could utterly destroy this civilization which has been so slowly and painfully built over thousands of years -- I wish I could say tonight that a lasting peace is in sight.
Happily, I can say that war has been avoided. Steady progress toward our ultimate goal has been made. But, so much remains to be done. As a private citizen, I shall never cease to do what little I can to help the world advance along that road.
VII.
So -- in this my last good night to you as your President -- I thank you for the many opportunities you have given me for public service in war and peace. I trust that in that service you find some things worthy; as for the rest of it, I know you will find ways to improve performance in the future.
You and I -- my fellow citizens -- need to be strong in our faith that all nations, under God, will reach the goal of peace with justice. May we be ever unswerving in devotion to principle, confident but humble with power, diligent in pursuit of the Nation's great goals.
To all the peoples of the world, I once more give expression to America's prayerful and continuing aspiration:
We pray that peoples of all faiths, all races, all nations, may have their great human needs satisfied; that those now denied opportunity shall come to enjoy it to the full; that all who yearn for freedom may experience its spiritual blessings; that those who have freedom will understand, also, its heavy responsibilities; that all who are insensitive to the needs of others will learn charity; that the scourges of poverty, disease and ignorance will be made to disappear from the earth, and that, in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love.
Edited Under Fr. Leonard Feeney M.I.C.M. — Saint Benedict Center
September, 1958
HOW THE JEWS INVADED THE HOLY LAND
Four Men Who Built The Zionist State
It is a peculiarity of history that the farther back we stand to get a look at it, the better we see it. And thus, with the smoke lifted and the rubble swept aside, those two increasingly distant calamities, World Wars I and II, are every day making a clearer picture.
It may be argued that the abiding effects of a war are not always the precise effects intended by the war’s planners. But when two international conflicts, fought within twenty-five years of each other, have both resulted in the establishment and extension of the same two world powers (to the detriment of all others), then there is more than mere chance to be reckoned with.
Those two powers, the chief two in the world today, are Communism and Zionism. The First World War gave them both a solid footing: the tracts of land they needed if they were to continue. The Communists announced a claim to all of Russia; the Zionists were granted one to Palestine. And World War II more than made good these claims. It gave the Communists the largest empire the world has ever known — stretching from Berlin to the China Sea. More unlikely, it gave the Zionists a sovereign Jewish state in the Holy Land.
That the fortunes of Zionism and Communism have been complementary, that world events of the past several decades have been to their common advantage, is obvious. That both movements are avowedly anti-Christian, and that both are in origin and direction Jewish, is a matter of record. But although the Jewish power of Communism has been quantitatively a greater oppressor of the Church — having killed more priests and desecrated more altars — the Jewish power of Zionism has hit the Church at the very core by seizing and profaning the one land which above all others is the Holy Land.
As an organized program of racism and revenge, fulfilling centuries of thwarted Jewish dreams, Zionism is larger than any one of the men who have been its leaders. Out of the last hundred years, however, there are four of these men who stand as symbols of Zionist progress. Considered in sequence, these leaders of Zionism will tell all of the story that must so urgently be known.
Moses Hess
In the year 1862, a German Jew named Moses Hess published at Paris a book called Rome and Jerusalem. If modern Zionism must be assigned a specific starting point, this was it. Hess’s message was straightforward. “Papal Rome,” he writes, “symbolizes to the Jews an inexhaustible well of poison.” But the Jews should not be discouraged, Hess continues. A “regeneration” of the world has been going on since the “great” French Revolution. Rome is already on the way down, he declares, and the job of the Jew is to establish Jerusalem in place of it. Christianity will be “finally replaced among the regenerated nations by a new historical cult. To this coming cult, Judaism alone holds the key.”
Hess nailed the whole argument in with the resounding blasphemy: “Every Jew has within him the potentiality of a Messiah and every Jewess that of a Mater Dolorosa ... The Messianic Era is the present age.”
There was no Jew in Europe that was not interested. But, for many, Hess’s call to arms was too dangerous. There would be Christian resentment, they said. There would be a reaction, and all those new liberties so lately acquired by the Jews, as a result of the Masonic revolutions, would be revoked. To these “assimilated” Jews of Western Europe, Hess was a stab of bad conscience. He was telling them that, despite their white gloves and tall hats and changed names, they were still, and irrevocably, Jewish.
On the other hand, to the Jews of Eastern Europe, still confined in the Polish and Russian ghettos, Moses Hess was a prophet. His book begot a dozen secret societies dedicated to a revived Jewish nationalism. And it set the stage for a more versatile Jewish leader.
Theodore Herzl
If Moses Hess was the violent revolutionist that Zionism needed to start it off, Theodore Herzl was the capable calculator who brought order to the Zionist frenzy, won for Zionism the support of Western Jews, and gave permanent direction to the Jewish resurgence by advocating the immediate establishment of a self-governing Jewish state.
With diabolical doggedness, Herzl peddled his plan for a Jewish homeland on every important doorstep in Europe. The Kaiser listened to him. And so did the King of Italy and the Sultan of Turkey. England offered him a piece of her own property in Uganda. But the Zionists were determined against second-class handouts. They wanted Palestine or nothing for their nation, and Jerusalem for their capital.
Herzl dared approach even the Pope, Saint Pius X, to ask support for a Jewish settlement in Palestine. To so fantastic a proposal, the Holy Father (says Herzl’s Diaries): “answered in a stern and categorical manner: ‘We are unable to favor this movement. We cannot prevent the Jews from going to Jerusalem — but we could never sanction it. The ground of Jerusalem, if it were not always sacred, has been sanctified by the life of Jesus Christ. As the head of the Church, I cannot answer you otherwise. The Jews have not recognized Our Lord; therefore, we cannot recognize the Jewish people.’ ”
The Pope did not discount the possibility of some measure of success for Zionism. Himself the virtual prisoner of Italy’s Masonic administrators, Saint Pius X held no illusory view of “Catholic Europe.” The men who were then running Europe’s governments were the offspring of those same Freemasons who had gloried in tearing down the ghetto walls while they sacked the churches. For Freemasonry had set the Jews up; and now that the Masons were in unchallenged power, the Jews could expect great things. But could they really expect Palestine? Besides being the Holy Land of the Christians, the territory of Palestine was the guarded property of the Turkish Empire, the centuries-old home of an established people. It seemed unlikely to the Pope that great numbers of Jews could ever settle there — and unthinkable that circumstances would ever permit the Jews to set up their own government in the place.
The Zionists, on their part, were confident that when desired circumstances do not present themselves on their own, they can be made to order. In a speech before the Sixth Zionist Congress in 1903, Herzl’s colleague, Max Nordau, said (and we repeat that the year was 1903): “Let me tell you the following words as if I were showing you the rungs of a ladder leading upward and upward: Herzl, the Zionist Congress, the English Uganda proposition, the future World War, the peace conference where, with the help of England, a free and Jewish Palestine will be created.”
Chaim Weizmann
When the World War that Nordau had foretold eventually came, in 1914, Herzl was ten years dead. But a new Zionist leader was on hand to oversee the expected Jewish triumph. This was Chaim Weizmann, an itinerant chemist who had moved from his native Russia to Manchester, England, sometime before the outbreak of the War. It was Weizmann’s task to acquaint the British government with Jewish designs on the Holy Land. In exchange for an official smile on these Zionist ambitions, Weizmann could promise that his race — its financiers, presidential advisors, newspaper publishers and all — would join whole-heartedly in helping Britain win the war. Consequently, on Nov. 2, 1917, the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Balfour, addressed a letter to Lord Rothschild, English representative of the powerful Jewish banking house.
“His Majesty’s Government,” wrote Balfour, “view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people ... ” Though the letter further specified that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine,” the Jews assumed this clause was meaningless. The Balfour Declaration, as this letter came to be called, gave the Jews a foot in the Holy Land, and they set out with determination to wriggle the rest of their bulk through the door.
To direct this operation, Chaim Weizmann went to Palestine in 1918, as head of the Zionist Commission. Under Weizmann’s supervision, armies of Jewish immigrants pushed into Palestine (made a British Mandate in 1922) till eventually they had swollen their numbers to one-half the total inhabitants. (Their land-purchases were less prodigal; by 1948 they owned only six per cent of the available property.)
Through all this, the Church remained adamantly anti-Zionist. In a 1921 allocution, Pope Benedict XV expressed his fear that “the Jews should come to take in Palestine a preponderant and privileged position.” Most Catholic observers, however, thought such a possibility remote. Father Bede Jarrett, noted English Dominican, gave the majority opinion when he wrote, also in 1921: “The Jew has always specialized in money. Industrial labor has no interest for him, and agricultural labor even less. Therefore, he will never go back to Palestine, where the wealth is almost entirely in agriculture. Indeed, why should he worry over Palestine when he has the whole world at his feet?”
What Father Jarrett did not realize was that “the Jew” intended to demonstrate just how abjectly at his feet the world was — and precisely by taking over Palestine.
World War I, as Nordau revealed, had been the scheduled means for setting up a Jewish state. But it did not quite do the trick. A second World War was needed to bring the Jews’ otherwise unthinkable scheme to perfection. At the conclusion of World War II, Chaim Weizmann came to America to claim the spoils. Spurred on by him and fellow-Zionists, the United Nations obediently decreed that at the expiration of the British Mandate, the Holy Land should be partitioned into two areas; the smaller to be governed by Arabs, the larger by Jews.
The British were to withdraw on May 15, 1948. At midnight of May 14, Zionist leaders announced the formation of a Jewish State. Ten minutes after their announcement, President Harry Truman, defying all protocol, accorded this infant monstrosity official United States recognition. Later, Mr. Truman was to write in his published memoirs: “I do not think I ever had as much pressure and propaganda aimed at the White House as I had in this instance. The persistence of a few of the extreme Zionist leaders — actuated by political motives and engaging in political threats — disturbed me and annoyed me.”
Even if it were not known otherwise, events of the last decade would bear stern witness that the Masonic Mr. Truman overcame his annoyance.
David Ben-Gurion
Though Chaim Weizmann was duly named President of the Jewish State, and held that office until his death in 1952, it was a position of honor only. The Jews were grateful for all Weizmann had done, but they were confident they had come to a new season: the full flowering of that “Messianic Era” that Moses Hess had proclaimed. And they had a new leader: their Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion.
As effective head of the Jewish State, Ben-Gurion represents the fulfillment of Hess, Herzl, and Weizmann; the achievement of Zionist victory. He is the symbol of Jewry on its own — the crucifiers of Christ free at last of Christian standards and surveillance. How alien the Jews are to those standards, their ten years of sovereignty have enabled them to show.
The acts of Jewish terrorism that had marked the final months of the British Mandate (when Jews were blowing up British buildings in Palestine, hanging British soldiers, mailing time-bombs to members of the British cabinet) seemed like mere schoolboy pranks when the Jews went to work on the Arabs. One million Arab residents of Palestine were forced to flee their ancestral homes — the orchards, pastures, and farms their people had worked for centuries. And as Archbishop George Hakim of Galilee insisted: “They were terrorized out.” The persuasive device employed by the Jews was simple: they massacred one whole Arab village; then they sent a sound-truck through all the neighboring villages, promising each one the same fate unless the people evacuated their homes immediately.
All this was apart from the military aggression, when Jewish soldiers, with arms supplied by Communist Czechoslovakia, invaded the Arab-assigned regions of Palestine and increased their national holdings by forty per cent. Feats like this thrilled the Jews who were watching from afar, swelled the fantastic sums being poured into Palestine by World Jewry, and provoked statements like this one by New York’s Jewish Congressman, Emmanuel Celler: “Maybe the Israelis may have to give the Arabs another lesson and cut through their forces again like a hot knife through butter. Only this time the pleas of the United Nations will not deter them. They will shoot their way clear into Beirut, Amman, and Alexandria.”
When Prime Minister Ben-Gurion’s plans for the further expansion of the Jewish state are realized (when international circumstances have been ordered to that end), there will be a fresh field open to the Jews. And it will be open not only for additional confiscation of Arab property, but for further desecration of Christian shrines and churches in those parts of the Holy Land that the Jews do not yet control. Bethlehem, for example, can expect a repetition of the profanity and sacrilege that the Jews have already perpetrated in Mount Carmel, Ain-Karim, Haifa, Capharnaum, Tiberias, Beit-Jala, Katamon, in all of Galilee, and in Jerusalem, the Holy City itself. These previous desecrations, so well calculated by Mr. Ben-Gurion, prompted the well-known but little-heeded warning of the late Apostolic Delegate, Archbishop Hughes, who stated that there is in operation a “deliberate Jewish effort to decimate the Arabs and to destroy Christianity in Palestine.”
The consequences of this “deliberate Jewish effort” will spread in our time far beyond the borders of Palestine. For the once-Christian West has betrayed Our Lord’s Holy Land into the hands of His crucifiers, and already the price of the betrayal is being paid, in kind. It has cost England her empire. And it has put that other chief Zionist supporter, the United States of America, face to face with a Third World War — one that looms like a terror out of the Apocalypse, and that will provide the most fantastic chapter yet in the unfinished story of Zionism.
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