Home > Uncategorized > War is a racket

War is a racket

January 30, 2012 Leave a comment Go to comments

from David Ruccio

Here’s the link to the text of the booklet published with the same title (and a link to images of the original publication).

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.

By the same token, isn’t the current economic crisis also a racket? If so, who is the Major General Smedley Butler of our time?

About these ads
Categories: Uncategorized
  1. jimcraven10
    January 30, 2012 at 11:24 pm | #1
    Reply | Quote

    Smedley Butler was a hero but not, and he said so himself, for that which got him nominated three times and awarded twice the Medal of Honor. His real heroism came when he was approached in 1934 by a representative of a cabal of right-wing businessmen (including the Bushes of course) plotting to overthrow FDR and establish a fascist dictatorship with Butler (who commanded the affection of many troops unlike McArthur, also involved in the plot who was hated by the troops) commanding a 500,000 man army of veterans as shock troops for the oligarchs. Butler went along with them long enough to expose them publicly and bring on an investigation that went nowhere because those involved were “too big to fail” and would have taken out FDR as colateral damage at minimum,

    But here is a serious question: Why are often the most “ardent” and visibly pious Zionists outside of Israel not inside? Why are the most pro-war and most pro-”support-our-troops” those, and their kids, who have never “served” and will never see military “service” let alone combat? Why are the most visibly religous and pious the converts rather than those born into the faith? Why do we censor the real costs of war and hype the supposed benefits on our side and the other side? Why is my degree and my colllege top-rate while others are frauds and paper mills?

    I believe the answer is cognitive dissonance. When there is a contradiction between belief and clear facts (e.g. America is number one in respect for human rights as a belief versus the facts of a long list of ugly dictatorships installed and kept going by the US) or, there is a contradiction between emotion and fact (e.g. if you are such a super Zionist why are you not living in and sharing the real costs and risks of living and military service in Israel or perhaps, if you are such a supporter of the troops why have you and your kids not served when you were needed, others went, in a cause you supported at the time of your draft dodging?) and then all sorts of dissonance ensues. Who will say that their time in academia was mostly pure fraud with starting off going to school to learn and winding up learning how to go to school and I do not mean in the sense of higher learning and cognitive skills in separating out the pepper from the fly shit? Who will say most of their profs were arrogant, legend-in-their-own-mind scholar despots, more full of themselves than or in lieu of testosterone, as arbitrary and capricious as anything in the soft non-sciences they routinely decried?

    So to stop war it has to be visible, accountable and that means in all directions. As a veteran of the U.S. Army 1963-66 I do not say nor appreciate hearing “thank you for your service”. I regard military academies as not real universities but rather clone factories for career tools and whores of US Imperialism as I once was and fully admit, along with my sincere apology in all public venues. I never saw anyone in the militarty that initirally went in for any kind of patriotic reasons (that comes later to help handle the cognitive dissonance between killing strangers still human beings and “Christian” upbringing about the Ten Commandments) it was always about some form of running from something dressed up as running to something (money,adventure, travel, self-esteem, training, family tradition, job, education, in lieu of prison, girlfriend pregnant, Audie Murphy syndrome, etc but never join now and kill Commies for Jesus!

  1. No trackbacks yet.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out / Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 1,305 other followers