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… is from the posthumous 1965 collection of some of Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s papers and speeches, A Soldier Speaks [2], as this quotation from MacArthur appears on page 124 as the head of Chapter 6 of Robert Higgs’s excellent 2006 collection, Depression, War, and Cold War [3]:
Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear – kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor – with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.