Noam Chomsky - Turning the Tide U.S. intervention in

The Race to Destruction
and you need to sell this factor, you can’t sell Harlem and Watts
but you can sell self-preservation, a new environment. We’re going
to increase defense budgets as long as those bastards in Russia
are ahead of us. The American people understand that.
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
332
This was in 1968, when “those bastards” were no more ahead of us
than they are now. But that is beside the point. With a properly
functioning propaganda system, the American people can be made to
“understand” what is plainly false, and the system of public subsidy,
private profit, can march onward.
The method is constantly employed, with great skill. As the press
loyally played its assigned role in whipping up hysteria and indignation
after the Soviet Union shot down a South Korean civilian airliner—a
reaction radically at variance with its behavior in many similar cases
when “our side” was implicated, some at exactly the same time—the
New York Times business pages noted that the event “has helped heat
up the sluggish stocks of military contractors” and strengthened
Reagan’s hand in pressing for military spending, quoting an aerospace
analyst who said: “The Korean jetliner incident provided a spark for a
more positive reappraisal of the defense industry . . . And virtually all
defense stocks have gone up.” 92 As noted, far more than the “defense
industry” is at stake.
It is a rare political leader who can face the public with the news that
it is necessary for the poor to bribe the rich, who control investment, for
the ultimate benefit of the economy. The citizen can, however, be
mobilized to this effort in fear of the great enemy about to destroy us.
Kennedy did attempt another method, the man-in-space program,
presented in quasi-military terms of national grandeur, but people soon
became bored at the sight of heroic figures walking on the moon and
this device had to be abandoned. Military spending does not have this