War Is A Racket By Major General Smedley Butler

Image by Steve Rhodes via Flickr

Dandelion Salad
Originally published January 16, 2011

numoleen on March 11, 2009

War is a Racket by Smedley Butler is a famous speech denouncing the military industrial complex. This anti-war speech by two-time Congressional Medal of Honor recipient exposes war profits that benefit few at the expense of many. Throughout his distinguished career in the Marines, Smedley Darlington Butler demonstrated that true patriotism does not mean blind allegiance to government policies with which one does not agree. To Hell with war.

WAR is a racket

by Two-Time Congressional Medal of Honor Recipient Major General Smedley D. Butler USMC, Retired

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.

In the World War [I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.

How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?

Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few – the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.

And what is this bill?

This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.

For a great many years, as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it. Now that I see the international war clouds gathering, as they are today, I must face it and speak out.

[…]

via WAR is a racket – www.lexrex.com

Smedley Butler excerpt from the movie “The Corporation”

rosc2112 on Apr 4, 2010

[Longer version; audiobook read by Jules Harlick]

War Is A Racket By Major General Smedley Butler

Julia Clark on Jan 5, 2014

Transcript for the booklet; free download

From the archives:

Russiagate is not Pearl Harbor, 9/11 was not Pearl Harbor, and Pearl Harbor was not Pearl Harbor by David Swanson

Chris Hedges: We Are All Complicit In The Crimes Of Empire

Trump’s Tomahawks, Double Standards – Using Chemical and Radioactive Weapons for Profit? by Felicity Arbuthnot

The Losing Warfare State by Ralph Nader

End Game: The War Machine Goes On, Part 4 by Arthur D. Robbins

The Great American Perpetual Motion War Machine by Greg Maybury

Don’t Enlist, But Don’t Just Take My Word For It by Lo (repost)

Don’t Enlist, But Don’t Just Take My Word For It by Lo

The Corporation (2003) (must-see video)