A focus of national attention and resources on defeating real or imagined enemies. The arch-foe is typically "capitalism" or some group seen as representing capitalism, e. g., the Jews in Nazi Germany, the kulaks in Stalinist Russia, or the United States in Saddam Hussein's Soviet-styled régime. In several cases, this process of demonization has culminated in mass exterminations, of which the Nazi Holocaust is only the most familiar. Unfortunately, American observers have tended to attribute the latter event to a supposed fault in the German "national character," while overlooking similar instances of mass genocide by other socialist governments (cf. p. 5.3:3). Such tunnel vision increases the danger that we will ignore the social and political conditions that lead naturally to such acts of carnage, thereby permitting them to happen again.

The logical outcome of the continued application of these two devices is, of course, warfare. Socialist nations therefore typically allocate much larger portions of their national budgets to military ends and are almost constantly at war, both with one another and with relatively free nations. These military expenditures increase the economic hardships borne by most citizens.