War is a Racket
by Major General Smedley Butler (1933)
Book Review
Published in 1933 by retired Marine Major General Smedley Butler, War is a Racket is a historic expose of the role of Wall Street profiteering in instigating war.
The book begins with the startling statistic that World War I created 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires. President Woodrow Wilson borrowed (from Wall Street banks) the $50+ billion to pay for World War I, increasing the national debt from $1 billion to $52 billion. Of this amount, $16 billion was pure profit. Butler lists specific companies, starting with Du Pont and US Steel, and the obscene profits they made from World War I.
He also deplores the systematic inefficiency and fraud that caused the War Department to pay two to three times the retail charge for equipment such as saddles and mosquito nets that had no possible use in a modern European war. This was on top of millions spent on poorly crafted wooden ships that sank when put to sea and airplanes that were technologically obsolete by the time they were delivered.
Wilson had been elected to his second term based on a campaign promise to keep the US out of the Great War. War is a Racket also discusses his secret White House meeting with a European commission that caused him to reverse himself. After informing Wilson the allies were losing the war, they warned that they couldn’t repay the $5-6 billion they owed American bankers, manufacturers and munitions makers if they were defeated.
Butler maintains the real reason the US entered the war was to protect these Wall Street interests. Obviously this isn’t what Wilson and his Committee on Public Information (run by Edward Bernays, the father of public relations) told the American people. They would be barraged with incessant propaganda about the Germans being monstrous barbarians and the Great War being the war to end all wars because it would make the world safe for democracy.
War is a Racket: free PDF
Major General Smedley Butler is best known for foiling the 1933 Bankers’ Putsch. This was a failed military coup, instigated by America’s leading bankers and industrialists, to remove Roosevelt from office and replace him with a Mussolini-style dictatorship. Butler, who was recruited to lead the coup, blew the whistle to the House McCormick-Dirkson Committee. They responded by launching a cover-up. Details of the Bankers’ Putsch only became public knowledge in 1967, when journalist John Spivac uncovered the committee’s secret notes.
Yup, you’re right. I must write a song about that.
Leslie
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Looking forward to it, Leslie.
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Reblogged this on gail007 and commented:
War is exactly what Smedley Butler said “profits reckoned in dollars and the losses in human lives”…as if those lives mean nothing!
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Obviously the lives of the 99% mean nothing, or the corporates wouldn’t be poisoning our air, water and food chain. Your life only matters if you belong to the 1%.
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The world needs a lot more straight talkers like Smedley Butler.
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At present it would seem that straight talking is extremely dangerous. Recently it seems to have gotten a number of people killed.
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Reblogged this on Puppet Master's Slave Market and commented:
Thank you, Dr. Bramhall. Well here it is the truth revisited. Dwight Eisenhower knew it and warned us in his 1961 farewell speech. The Kennedys died trying to change the paradigm, and here we all are in deeper than ever, locked in the Zionist hellhole without a key, this time. America was the last great hope, and now we are the greatest evil, we have been conquered by the tyranny of capital, and the Zionist protocols for global domination. The New World Empire has smothered our freedom, and civil-class war is our moral obligation and only alternative to slavery. Where is Spartacus ?
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I have a feeling it’s up to all of us together to be Spartacus. I see a lot of people fighting back in my community.
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Reblogged this on Amanah Satu – Malaysia.
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Thank you for bringing this remarkable man to our attention. There is still so much to learn. I downloaded the file and will read it with great interest. I never heard of the “Bankers Plot”.
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It’s a sad day when someone in power is considered remarkable for being honorable and telling the truth.
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There are so few of them.
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Today you commented about Hungary, and I thought about the West’s wrath and backlash against the defiant Prime Minister Viktor Orban:
THEY have labelled him as “Putin’s Little Brother”!
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I think I can smell another color revolution brewing in Hungary. Hopefully the US is putting out so many fires already they will leave Hungary alone.
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