MD,
Re: war is hell
A more sophisticated and honest assessment is that War is Just a Cynical Racket played by the Rich for Fun and Profit.
Part 1 of 2:
counterpunch.org
Is War Still a Racket?
An Ex-Marine Compares Gen. Smedley Butler's 1933 with 2003
By CHRIS WHITE
As a Marine serving on a ship in the Pacific in 1997, the ship's commander ordered the dumping of the ship's refuse into the ocean. I asked around to see if this was a common event, as this was my first time at sea in the military, and was told that the Navy had no other way of dumping while at sea, and that it was standard procedure. In order to make this environmental atrocity productive, the Marines used the big, filled, plastic garbage bags as target practice. For a good two hours, we fired thousands of rounds out of our .50 caliber machine guns and sniper rifles at the trail of waste that stretched for miles toward the horizon.
The above story is meant to illustrate how counterproductive the military is, and this applies to this essay's discussion of how the military is inherently bound to the interests of the power elite, and against everything else, especially the defense of freedom. After his retirement in 1931, Marine Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, one of only two Marines in history to have received two Medals of Honor, spoke out against the U.S. government's use of force in world affairs. He wrote and spoke of the way in which corporations profited from war, while countless millions suffered as a result. This essay compares General Butler's analysis of this process in 1933 with the use of war for power and profit in 2003, with the goal of establishing that not only has the racket expanded tremendously, but our national security has correlatively reduced. I am not anti-American. I am an ex-Marine sergeant and current doctoral student in history who is concerned about the consistent destruction of this planet and its people carried out by my government in the false name of the promotion and defense of freedom.
Paradoxically, the tremendous proliferation in military spending and ventures that the U.S. has carried out since WWII has made us less safe than ever by creating anti-U.S. hatred that manifests itself from time to time in the form of random acts of violence. 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.
For some reason, many who have little understanding of our foreign policy history prefer to point to the three instances in our nation's history when the military was used for defending the people: the War of 1812, WWI, and WWII. Moreover, while one can certainly find fault with aspects of our involvement in those three wars, nonetheless, every other one had nothing to do with national security, and everything to do with profits and power. While we draped our foreign policy in the cloak of beneficence in order to fight the Cold War, we instead killed over six million union leaders, peasants, teachers, priests, and resistance fighters in the developing world. We were not fighting the Soviets and the Chinese on their soil; we were busy setting the developing world back a century in their development.
In the early 1980s, with the Cold War still on, we began in force the wars on terrorism and drugs, neither of which has brought us any closer to the proclaimed goals over twenty years later. Instead, the prison industry has inflated to the point that it has become incredibly profitable to corporations, and we have lost billions to national law enforcement efforts and military aid to Latin American and other nations, who repress and imprison their own citizens as they did during the Cold War. Corporations have profited from all of these wars, and they in turn support politicians and own the media, both of which present these wars as necessary measures for protecting freedom. The mutual support between the rich and the politicians (the power elite) has always dictated this nation's political process, and as long as there is profit to be made from destruction and suffering, especially of those who are not reaping the profits thereof, war will be facilitated and promoted.
In 1933, Butler lamented how as a Marine officer, he assisted Wall Street in their efforts to extend their empires into the Caribbean Basin and other places in the developing world. His opening statement follows:
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 is 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 is 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.
My mission as a Marine veteran is to continue Smedley Butler's (as well as all other veteran dissidents) legacy of exposing the truth about the purpose of military.
According to Butler, World War I cost the U.S. 52 billion dollars, giving 16 billion in profits to private corporations. He illustrated the significance of this by comparing the profits of several large companies before and during the war. According to Butler, Du Pont (who produced powder) went from 6 million to 58 million in annual profits, Bethlehem Steel went from 6 million to 49 million, U.S. Steel went from 105 million to 240 million, Anaconda's copper production (ammunition casings) helped the company to go from 10 million to 34 million, and Utah Copper went from 5 million to 21 million in annual profits during the war. The Great War cost each American 400 dollars and these companies benefited from the deaths of over 130,000 U.S. soldiers and countless Europeans.
Other sectors profited enormously from the War. From leather companies to chemicals, to nickel, to sugar refining, to banks, to coal, to shoes, to field gear, to tools, to ship builders, to airplane and auto engine manufacturers, companies had profits ranging from 30 to 300 percent. The leftover waste was also a point of contention with Butler (and this is certainly worse today), as he explained that millions of pieces of equipment never made it to the soldiers, and were in fact never used due to regulation adjustments and extreme overproduction. Moreover, while this racket was immense back in Butler's day, it was quite paltry when compared with that of today.
<Part 2 Continues Below..........> |
