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Saturday, February 25, 2012

War is a racket that enriches and empowers the low-cunning elements of society, and impoverishes and kills off the patriots and upstanding citizenry

Introduction by Chris Moore:

In a video I recently posted on this site, Pat Buchanan discusses the steep economic and social decline of America since it was lied into Middle East wars by the corrupt two party regime in Washington, with support from powerful elements within the larger liberal-neocon State Capitalist and crony corporatist establishment. He points out that even as the bottom has fallen out from under America since, China and India have seen an economic and social boom.

After retiring from the military and touring the U.S. to visit those lives, families and communities still devastated by WWI and then devastated again by the Great Depression that followed the post-war "boom" like night follows day, Smedley Butler published the pamphlet War Is A Racket in 1935, which I have excerpted below. He makes clear that it is not the average person who benefits from war, but rather the most greedy, scurrilous, ruthless and sociopathic elements of society who profit and are empowered whenever a country is thrust into massive conflict.

Some people wonder why Western civilization is dying, even as Asia is now thriving.

Shouldn't it be crystal clear by now?

Warmongering militancy has enriched, empowered and promoted the most selfish, corrupt and venal elements into the "leadership" of society, sent off many of the patriots to be killed or broken in battle on foreign soil, and marginalized the sane, grounded and responsible elements who can see the big picture and aren't warped by greed, short-term thinking, a taste for quick profits, and a perverse, primal desire to incite massive bloodshed at every opportunity.

In short, an "elite" of parasitic, reptilian sociopaths that cares only about its self-enrichment, self-aggrandizement and egomania has long since been running the show in the the West, and will continue to ravage and suck the economy and life from American and Western civilization until it is turned into an empty husk of its former self and finally collapses and dies off completely, or until the People rise up and smite the self-serving Parasite Class that is leading us to bankruptcy and ruin, and has been for quite some time.

Butler helps capture the essence of the Parasite Class below, and how it exploits, manipulates, victimizes and plunders the responsible and decent folk.

What we should take from his writing is the hard-learned Western lesson that it is ultimately up to the decent, peaceable folk to organize, defend and ultimately aggress against the savage predators to restore law, order and sanity to their environment, or accept their own enslavement and annihilation at the hands of a more vigorous and ruthless species so highly adept at destruction.

Has Western civilization deteriorated too far and been too systematically corrupted from within now to resist and repel the parasitic, self-serving Zionist and Globalist predators within? Is the tank now empty? Or will the People rally and do what needs to be done to restore democracy and the rule of law by seizing back their government and their country, and purging the contemporary sociopathic "elites" from the seats of power they are currently using to plunder and destroy their own constituents?

Will America survive, or continue to deteriorate and ultimately collapse at the hands of the cunning, criminal gangsters who have slowly and systematically seized the power and moral authority from the People in order to line their own pockets and engineer Western demise by way of internal corruption and plunder?

We shall see.


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From:
WAR IS A RACKET

(lexrex.com) -- Written by Two-Time Congressional Medal of Honor Recipient Major General Smedley D. Butler, published 1935

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 [I] 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?

Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few – the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.

And what is this bill?

This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.

For a great many years, as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it. Now that I see the international war clouds gathering, as they are today, I must face it and speak out...

Yes, they are getting ready for another war. Why shouldn't they? It pays high dividends.

But what does it profit the men who are killed? What does it profit their mothers and sisters, their wives and their sweethearts? What does it profit their children?

What does it profit anyone except the very few to whom war means huge profits?

Yes, and what does it profit the nation?

Take our own case. Until 1898 we didn't own a bit of territory outside the mainland of North America. At that time our national debt was a little more than $1,000,000,000. Then we became "internationally minded." We forgot, or shunted aside, the advice of the Father of our country. We forgot George Washington's warning about "entangling alliances." We went to war. We acquired outside territory. At the end of the World War period, as a direct result of our fiddling in international affairs, our national debt had jumped to over $25,000,000,000. Our total favorable trade balance during the twenty-five-year period was about $24,000,000,000. Therefore, on a purely bookkeeping basis, we ran a little behind year for year, and that foreign trade might well have been ours without the wars.

It would have been far cheaper (not to say safer) for the average American who pays the bills to stay out of foreign entanglements. For a very few this racket, like bootlegging and other underworld rackets, brings fancy profits, but the cost of operations is always transferred to the people – who do not profit...

Who provides the profits – these nice little profits of 20, 100, 300, 1,500 and 1,800 per cent? We all pay them – in taxation. We paid the bankers their profits when we bought Liberty Bonds at $100.00 and sold them back at $84 or $86 to the bankers. These bankers collected $100 plus. It was a simple manipulation. The bankers control the security marts. It was easy for them to depress the price of these bonds. Then all of us – the people – got frightened and sold the bonds at $84 or $86. The bankers bought them. Then these same bankers stimulated a boom and government bonds went to par – and above. Then the bankers collected their profits.

But the soldier pays the biggest part of the bill.

If you don't believe this, visit the American cemeteries on the battlefields abroad. Or visit any of the veteran's hospitals in the United States. On a tour of the country, in the midst of which I am at the time of this writing, I have visited eighteen government hospitals for veterans. In them are a total of about 50,000 destroyed men – men who were the pick of the nation eighteen years ago. The very able chief surgeon at the government hospital; at Milwaukee, where there are 3,800 of the living dead, told me that mortality among veterans is three times as great as among those who stayed at home.

Boys with a normal viewpoint were taken out of the fields and offices and factories and classrooms and put into the ranks. There they were remolded; they were made over; they were made to "about face"; to regard murder as the order of the day. They were put shoulder to shoulder and, through mass psychology, they were entirely changed. We used them for a couple of years and trained them to think nothing at all of killing or of being killed.

Then, suddenly, we discharged them and told them to make another "about face" ! This time they had to do their own readjustment, sans [without] mass psychology, sans officers' aid and advice and sans nation-wide propaganda. We didn't need them any more. So we scattered them about without any "three-minute" or "Liberty Loan" speeches or parades. Many, too many, of these fine young boys are eventually destroyed, mentally, because they could not make that final "about face" alone.

In the government hospital in Marion, Indiana, 1,800 of these boys are in pens! Five hundred of them in a barracks with steel bars and wires all around outside the buildings and on the porches. These already have been mentally destroyed. These boys don't even look like human beings. Oh, the looks on their faces! Physically, they are in good shape; mentally, they are gone.

There are thousands and thousands of these cases, and more and more are coming in all the time. The tremendous excitement of the war, the sudden cutting off of that excitement – the young boys couldn't stand it.

That's a part of the bill. So much for the dead – they have paid their part of the war profits. So much for the mentally and physically wounded – they are paying now their share of the war profits. But the others paid, too – they paid with heartbreaks when they tore themselves away from their firesides and their families to don the uniform of Uncle Sam – on which a profit had been made. They paid another part in the training camps where they were regimented and drilled while others took their jobs and their places in the lives of their communities. The paid for it in the trenches where they shot and were shot; where they were hungry for days at a time; where they slept in the mud and the cold and in the rain – with the moans and shrieks of the dying for a horrible lullaby...MORE...LINK

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