Original source URL: http://www.twf.org/News/Y2001/0911-Racket.html Released September 11, 2001 The Wisdom Fund, P. O. Box 2723, Arlington, VA 22202 Website: http://www.twf.org -- Press Contact: Enver Masud 'War Is a Racket' Excerpt from a speech delivered in 1933 by General Smedley Darlington Butler, USMC. General Butler was the recipient of two Congressional Medals of Honor - one of only two Marines so honored. War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of 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 masses. . . . There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its "finger men" to point out enemies, its "muscle men" to destroy enemies, its "brain men" to plan war preparations, and a "Big Boss" Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism. It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned 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 for 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 the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service. I helped make Mexico, 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 revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents. . . . --- [At about the same time the Du Ponts were serving the Nazi cause in Germany, they were involved in a Fascist plot to overthrow the United States government. "Along with friends of the Morgan Bank and General Motors," in early 1934, writes Higham, "certain Du Pont backers financed a coup d'etat that would overthrow the President with the aid of a $3 million-funded army of terrorists . . ." The object was to force Roosevelt "to take orders from businessmen as part of a fascist government or face the alternative of imprisonment and execution . . ." Higham reports that "Du Pont men allegedly held an urgent series of meetings with the Morgans," to choose who would lead this "bizarre conspiracy." "They finally settled on one of the most popular soldiers in America, General Smedly Butler of Pennsylvania." Butler was approached by "fascist attorney" Gerald MacGuire (an official of the American Legion), who attempted to recruit Butler into the role of an American Hitler.--R. William Davis, "The Elkhorn Manifesto," July 4, 1996] [The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing.--Ralph Peters, "Constant Conflict" Parameters, US Army War College Quarterly, Summer 1997, pp. 4-14] [If one were to look closely at the past 58 years, one would be hard pressed to find a single U.S. military or C.I.A. intervention that has brought us one iota of safety, or, for that matter, that has actually been done for national defense purposes. As Butler illustrated in 1933, and it is even truer now than then, the U.S. engages in interventions meant to protect the interests of the powerful and wealthy of our nation and our allies, and rarely, if ever, in order to actually protect its citizens.--Chris White, "Is War Still a Racket?" CounterPunch, January 9, 2003] Charlie Liteky, "An Open Letter to the U.S. Military: Congressional Medal of Honor recipient addresses U.S. forces in Iraq," Veterans Against the Iraq War, May 7, 2003 [Between 1850 and 1870, British exports tripled, from just over eighty million pounds to more than 240 million pounds a year. The process was fairly straightforward. The British imported raw materials from every comer of the globe. They then used those raw materials, transformed them into finished products in factories, and exported those goods throughout the world. Trade and industry were inextricably linked. The United Kingdom needed raw materials to produce finished goods, and it needed markets to absorb those goods abroad. In order to profit from exports, it had to control the trade, and to do that, it had to control the seas. In that sense, the British navy was simply an adjunct to the British merchant marine.--Zachary Karabell, "Parting the Desert," Knopf (May 20, 2003)] John S.D. Eisenhower, "War Turned Eisenhower Into a Pacifist," International Herald Tribune, June 6, 2004 VIDEO: An unflinching look at the anatomy of the American war machine, weaving unforgettable personal stories with commentary by a "who's who" of military and beltway insiders. The film surveys the scorched landscape of a half-century's military adventures, asking how and telling why a nation of, by, and for the people has become the savings-and-loan of a system whose survival depends on a state of constant war.--Eugene Jarecki, "Why We Fight," Sony Pictures Classics (2005) [A more honest estimate of ourselves as a nation would prepare us all for the next barrage of lies that will accompany the next proposal to inflict our power on some other part of the world.--Howard Zinn, "Lessons of Iraq War start with U.S. history," The Progressive, March 14, 2006] [". . . no nation had ever become great without control of foreign markets and access to the natural resources of foreign countries."--Stephen Kinzer, "Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq," Times Books, April 4, 2006, p. 33] -- -------------------------------------------------------- Escaping the Matrix website http://escapingthematrix.org/ cyberjournal website http://cyberjournal.org subscribe cyberjournal list mailto:•••@••.••• Posting archives http://cyberjournal.org/show_archives/ Blogs: cyberjournal forum http://cyberjournal-rkm.blogspot.com/ Achieving real democracy http://harmonization.blogspot.com/ for readers of ETM http://matrixreaders.blogspot.com/ Community Empowerment http://empowermentinitiatives.blogspot.com/ Blogger made easy http://quaylargo.com/help/ezblogger.html
