WAR IS A RACKET by Major General Smedley Darlington Butler

[no_hypocrisy]

War Is A Racket (1933)

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.

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?

-more-

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