War is a racket.

[lonestarnot]

Found this interesting. You might too.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4377.htm

War Is A Racket

Excerpt from a speech delivered in 1933, by Major General Smedley Butler, USMC.

Smedley Butler

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 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.

[cspanlovr]

1. Its a confidence game, isn't it?

[cassiepriam]

2. Many people will get very rich from this war..... nt

[Selatius]

3. Smedley Butler would be smeared like Murtha if alive today

Butler was a harsh critic of these corporatists.

[Imajika]

4. There will always be war...

...because humans are humans.

War is just a burglar stealing from a home, a bully on the playground, the gang in the neighborhood that makes plans to kill a pesky neighbor who organizes a neighborhood watch - but on a bigger scale. You can hope to contain it to some degree, but human nature is what it is. If a bully attacks you on a playground, you can opt for peace and not defend yourself, or you can fight back. Once you start fighting back, you've just gone to the equivalent of "war". If a thief breaks into your home to steal your jewelry, you can either opt for peace and let him/her have you stuff, or you can fight back. Once you fight back, your in the equivalent of your own mini "war". If you overhear a neighborhood thug talking about his gang burning down you house later in the evening, you can opt for "peace" and leave your home with your family, or you can organize a defense and fight back. If you fight back, you've just gone to "war".

There will always be someone to benefit at some other persons expense. There will always be those who feel justified, for whatever reason whether it be ideology or pure greed, in seizing something that another person, group or nation controls.

The day there are no burglars, bully's or neighborhood gangs is the day there will be no more war. But don't hold you breath for that day...

War exists because humans are humans. It is not a racket, it is our nature.

[Djinn]

5. Gangsters for capitalism

Anyone joining pretty much any western nation's armed forces, but particularly the US's (as the worlds only superpower - this isn't just "anti-americanism" whatever that's supposed to mean) is signing up to be a hired goon in the service of capitalism.

If you don't think securing fruit plantations for UFC or oil for Halliburton is worth killing and dying for then do not sign up for the military, you will not be defending your country you will be party to subjugating others

I spent thirty-three years and four months in active service in the country's most agile military force, the Marines. I served in all ranks from second Lieutenant to Major General. And during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all members of the military profession I never had an original thought until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of the higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.

Thus I helped make Mexico, and 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 revenue in. I helped in the raping of half-a-dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers and Co. in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras "right" for American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

Major General Smedley Butler November 1935...NOTHING has changed

[BushSpeak]

6. War is actually a tool used by the financial elite to

subjugate nations.

If you delve a bit deeper into history from the financial/industrial side, you'll see that war has been used for the past 300 years as a tool to weaken governments/monarchs.

In addition to the profits for the "Merchants of Death" (as they were called at the beginning of the last century), war also serves to drive nations into debt, thus enabling the big bankers to exact concessions and make the nations subservient to their wishes.

Check out "The Money Masters" - a 3 hr film on the history of banking and power.

Also works by Anthony Sutton on
Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution
Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler
Wall Street and FDR

Eustace Mullins - Secrets of the Federal Reserve

or just google: Rothschild, Rockafellar, JP Morgan, Paul Warburg...


I'm doing a study on the hidden face of neo-liberalism with a family tree for the past 300 years.

This should be basic reading for all DUers. It puts contemporary events into historical context and shows several basic patterns of manipulation that are used over and over again.

I can post links if anyone is interested.

I'll leave you with a couple quotes that sum it all up:

MAYER AMSCHEL ROTHSCHILD, UNOFFICIAL FATHER OF "CENTRAL BANKING"
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes its laws."

BARON NATHAN MAYER ROTHSCHILD
"I care not what puppet is placed upon the throne of England to rule the Empire on which the sun never sets. The man that controls Britain's money supply controls the British Empire, and I control the British money supply."


Professor Carroll Quigley (Clinton's mentor at George Washington Univ.)
Tragedy and Hope, Macmillan, New York, p. 326
"When people of this class are stricken by guilt feelings while plotting world wars and economic depressions which will bring misery, suffering and death to millions of the world’s inhabitants, they sometimes have qualms. These qualms are jeered at by their peers as "a failure of nerve". After a bout with their psychiatrists, they return to their work with renewed gusto, with no further digressions of pity for "the little people" who are to be their victims."


PRESIDENT THOMAS JEFFERSON
A democracy cannot be ignorant and free.

[lonestarnot]

7. kickn once.