by Robert Gore
Deception can be an effective tactic: the Trojan horse; Roosevelt promising in the 1932 campaign to cut government spending and balance the budget; the Allies fooling the Germans about where the D-Day invasion would land. What is neither generally recognized nor recorded in the annals of history is a tactic that has achieved far greater victories, the most powerful tactic of them all: getting one’s enemies to fool themselves.
Governments and their people are natural enemies. The former are parasites; the latter are hosts. For governments to survive, they must trick their people into believing they are necessary and beneficial, not coercive and parasitic. The easiest way to do so is to convince them that their security is threatened and that only the government can protect them.
Göring: Why, of course, the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.
