War Is a Racket

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War Is a Racket is the title of two works, a speech and a booklet, by retired U.S. Marine Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, one of only 19 people to be twice awarded the Medal of Honor, in which Butler frankly discusses from his experience as a career military officer how business interests have commercially benefited from warfare.

After he retired from the Marine Corps, Gen. Butler made a nationwide tour in the early 1930's giving his speech "War is a Racket". [1] The speech was so well received that he wrote a longer version as a small book with the same title that was published in 1935 by Round Table Press, Inc., New York. The booklet was also 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, the "as told to" author of Butler's oral autobiographical adventures[2], praised Butler's "...moral as well as physical courage... "

Contents

[edit] Book

In War Is A Racket, Butler points to a variety of examples, mostly from World War I, where industrialists whose operations were subsidised by public funding were able to generate substantial profits essentially from mass human suffering.

The work is divided into five chapters:

  1. War is a racket
  2. Who makes the profits?
  3. Who pays the bills?
  4. How to smash this racket!
  5. To hell with war!

It contains this key 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."

The book is also interesting historically as Butler points out in 1935 that the US is engaging in military war games in the Pacific that are bound to provoke the Japanese.

"The Japanese, a proud people, of course will be pleased beyond expression to see the United States fleet so close to Nippon's shores. Even as pleased as would be the residents of California were they to dimly discern through the morning mist, the Japanese fleet playing at war games off Los Angeles."

Butler explains that the excuse for the buildup of the US fleet and the war games is fear that "the great fleet of this supposed enemy will strike suddenly and annihilate 125,000,000 people."

In his 1987 biography of Butler, Maverick Marine,[3] Hans Schmidt gave a brief review:

"Butler's particular contribution was his recantation, denouncing war on moral grounds after having been a warrior hero and spending most of his life as a military insider. The theme remained vigorously patriotic and nationalistic, decrying imperialism as a disgrace rooted in the greed of a privileged few."

[edit] References

  1. ^ Excerpts from the speech are available on the internet, for example, War Is a Racket - 1933 Speech
  2. ^ OLD GIMLET EYE: Adventures of Smedley D. Butler, Farrar & Rinehart, 1933
  3. ^ MAVERICK MARINE: General Smedley D. Butler and the Contradictions of American Military History, University Press of Kentucky, 1987 ISBN: 978-0-8131-0957-2

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

Sister project Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Smedley Butler
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