Brigadier General Smedley Darlington Butler "The Fighting Quaker" and "Old Gimlet Eye." At the time of his death, the most decorated Marine in U.S. History. More info about General Butler Here. This totally honest and candid account of who starts wars, who benefits from wars and who pays the price applies today just a much as it did in the early part of the 20th century when General Butler was alive.
This is the Complete 1935 edition of War is a Racket by retired Major General Smedley D. Butler USMC. Butler turns against his life-long profession and exposes war as a racket, in which the few profit and the many pay the aching costs. This is a hard-hitting book by a hard-hitting soldier
WAR IS A RACKET
BY SMEDLEY D. BUTLER
This short anti-war pamphlet was written by a Major General in the Marines who was an American military hero, but became disillusioned with the profiteering, propaganda, and injustice of the military-industrial and intelligence-foreign policy establishments , and came to oppose American involvement in foreign wars designed to benefit financial and industrial interests.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
WAR IS A RACKET!.......................................................................................................................................3
WHO MAKES THE PROFITS?...........................................................................................................................5
WHO PAYS THE BILLS? ...............................................................................................................................10
HOW TO SMASH THIS RACKET!....................................................................................................................13
TO HELL WITH WAR! ..................................................................................................................................15
COMMON SENSE NEUTRALITY.......................................................................................................................17
AMENDMENT FOR PEACE ............................................................................................................................23
APPENDIX I: HOW A MILITARY HERO BLEW THE WHISTLE ON WAR PROFITEERS. ..............................................28
APPENDIX II: BUTLER AND THE WALL STREET PLOT.......................................................................................30
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?
