WAR IS A RACKET!
General Smedley Butler’s frank book shows how American war efforts were animated by big-business interests. This extraordinary argument against war by an unexpected proponent is relevant now more than ever.
War Is a Racket is a speech and a 1935 short book, by Smedley D. Butler, a retired United States Marine Corps Major General and two-time Medal of Honor recipient. Based on his career military experience, Butler discusses how business interests commercially benefit, such as war profiteering from warfare. He had been appointed commanding officer of the Gendarmerie during the United States occupation of Haiti, which lasted from 1915 to 1934.
After Butler retired from the US Marine Corps in October 1931, he made a nationwide tour in the early 1930s giving his speech “War is a Racket”. The speech was so well received that he wrote a longer version as a short book published in 1935. His work was condensed in Reader’s Digest as a book supplement, which helped popularize his message. In an introduction to the Reader’s Digest version, Lowell Thomas praised Butler’s “moral as well as physical courage”. Thomas had written Smedley Butler’s oral autobiography.
In War Is a Racket, Butler points to a variety of examples, mostly from World War I, where industrialists, whose operations were subsidized by public funding, were able to generate substantial profits, making money from mass human suffering.
The work is divided into five chapters:
War is a racket
Who makes the profits?
Who pays the bills?
How to smash this racket!
To hell with war!
It contains this summary:
War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small ‘inside’ group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.
Butler confesses that during his decades of service in the United States Marine Corps:
I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.
Well, it's a racket all right...A few profit—and the many pay. But there is a way to stop it. You can't end it by disarmament conferences. You can't eliminate it by peace parleys at Geneva. Well-meaning but impractical groups can't wipe it out by resolutions. It can be smashed effectively only by taking the profit out of war. The only way to smash this racket is to conscript capital and industry and labor before the nations manhood can be conscripted. One month before the Government can conscript the young men of the nation -- it must conscript capital and industry and labor. Let the officers and the directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories and our munitions makers and our shipbuilders and our airplane builders and the manufacturers of all the other things that provide profit in war time as well as the bankers and the speculators, be conscripted -- to get $30 a month, the same wage as the lads in the trenches get.
Major General Smedley Butler
Senior United States Marine Corps OfficerI wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.
Major General Smedley Butler
Senior United States Marine Corps OfficerTo Summarize: Three steps must be taken to smash the war racket
#1 We must take the profit out of war.
#2 We must permit the youth of the land who would bear arms to decide whether or not there should be war.
#3 We must limit our military forces to home defense purposes.
SHOW NOTES AND MP3: https://www.corbettreport.com/?p=34783
Have you heard of Major General Smedley Butler? If not, you might want to ask yourself why that is. As one of the most highly decorated Marines in the history of the US Marine Corps and as a passionate and eloquent speaker about the racket that is war, Smedley Butler deserves to be a household name. Find out more in today’s edition of Questions For Corbett.
https://www.corbettreport.com/flashback-butler/
FROM 2010: He was a tenacious soldier, the most decorated officer in the history of the U.S. Marine Corps . . . and he detested war. Find out about the tyrannical government moves and secretive fascist plots that turned this famous general into a campaigner against war on this week’s edition of The Corbett Report.
All Wars Are Bankers’ Wars explores a common central banking connection behind America’s wars. Direct quotes from the founders, presidents,and other world leaders are cited regarding each of the major wars America was involved in, beginning with the American Revolution, King George III and Benjamin Franklin, and culminating with a warning and solution to avoiding World War III.
Learn More Here: http://lookintoit.org/General-Summary-Crash-Course-3.html
RonPaulLibertyReport, Weekly Update — Apr 29, 2022
Read About It Here:
“War Is A Racket,” And That Includes The Ukraine War
Learn More Here: http://lookintoit.org/General-Summary-Crash-Course-3.html