Friendly Reminder: War Is STILL A Racket

  

By Ajax the Great (Pete Jackson)

Originally posted on the "Vive La Difference!" blog, formerly known as "The Chalice and the Flame"

(Updated for 2024, in light of current events.  See also this article as well.)

WAR.  It seems to be as old as time itself.  And so many people seem to think it is inevitable.  However, it turns out that is not really true. War is neither timeless nor inevitable.  It has a beginning, and it has an end.  The beginning was about 7000 years ago (with the advent of patriarchy), while the end will be coming very soon (with the inevitable fall of patriarchy and rise of Matriarchy in the not-too-distant future).  And the end can't come soon enough!

(Especially now with the world being at 90 seconds to midnight (!) on the Doomsday Clock. That is, the risk of nuclear war is the highest it has been in quite a while now.  If, God forbid, a "hot" war between the USA and Russia and/or China were to occur, the odds of it going nuclear are practically certain.)

Patriarchy inherently rewards aggression and violence, no doubt about that.  And it messes with our heads so as to condition us to accept such violence as normal.  And of course there is men's tendency to think that war and scarcity are inevitable, which become self-fulfilling prophecies.  Women, on the other hand, would tend to reject such backwards thinking if they were in charge.  The late, great Buckminster Fuller himself said as much.

But there is also another reason why war is likely to occur under patriarchy, and that reason is discussed in depth by Major General Smedley Butler in his 1935 book, War Is A Racket.  Put simply, war is indeed a racket that is designed to further enrich the already ultra-rich oligarchs.  In other words, its genesis is none other than evil and powerful men who are willing to lie, cheat, steal, and kill for filthy lucre, and those sycophantic lackeys and ignorant masses who are brainwashed and duped to go along with it.   And of course, we know that patriarchy itself inevitably leads to oligarchy in the first place due to its "might makes right" and "winner take all" paradigm (that is nowadays most often cleverly disguised by the persistent and utterly hollow myth of "meritocracy").

Indeed, patriarchy itself can be thought of as a gender war writ large, and the only way to end it once and for all--and all other wars that come from it--is for men to surrender to Women.  It's a war men have lost before the war even began, despite winning nearly every battle--men just don't realize it yet.

That said, General Butler's book is more about how the perennial racket of war actually works in practice, and how to smash it for good (as opposed to the why the oligarchy exists in the first place).  But it goes a very long way towards explaining it, and he would be spinning in his grave if he were to see today's massive, imperialistic war machine.

From the Wikipedia article:

In War Is a Racket, Butler points to a variety of examples, mostly from World War I, where industrialists, whose operations were subsidized by public funding, were able to generate substantial profits, making money from mass human suffering.

The work is divided into five chapters:

1. War is a racket
2. Who makes the profits?
3. Who pays the bills?
4. How to smash this racket!
5. To hell with war!

It contains this summary:

"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."

Then he goes on to discuss who exactly profits from it and how.  It turns out it is not just weapons manufacturers, but also the big banks and other businesses that directly or indirectly deal with it as well.  In fact, the banksters are probably the biggest beneficiaries of war, since they lend money to finance it and then claw back so much in interest.  And manufacturers of non-weapons goods also have a market to sell their wares to in the military.  And of course, let's not forget all the resources plundered from the other countries as "spoils of war".

(And now we can add "defense contractors", aka mercenary corporations, such as DynCorp, Blackwater, Halliburton, KBR, Raytheon, et al. to the list of war profiteers as well.)

War is, of course, a negative-sum game overall.  It does not really create wealth on balance, it actually destroys far more than it creates.  But it certainly brings in a ludicrous amount of ill-gotten wealth in the form of profit, plunder, and usury for the oligarchy.  As for the idea that it "stimulates the economy" in the short run, that is technically true, but as neo-Keynesian economist Dr. Paul Krugman has famously noted years ago, a faked alien invasion would be every bit as stimulating, but without all of the serious side effects such as countless deaths, injuries, PTSD, family breakdown, resource depletion, pollution, ecological damage, and property damage.

In other words, it steals, kills, and destroys.  Kinda like....SATAN. 

And guess who foots the bill for it all?  You guessed it--the taxpayers.  The oligarchs pull the wool over our eyes, while laughing all the way to the bank.  But truly the biggest part of the bill is paid for in blood by the soldiers themselves.  And even for those who survive the horrors of war, it still takes its toll on them regardless, both physically and psychologically.  And these soldiers generally hail not from the ranks of the wealthy, but rather from the poor and broader working class.  Not much has changed in that regard today, it seems.

(Note that since the gold standard was abolished in 1971, our Monetarily Sovereign federal government does not actually need taxes to fund anything, since they can just "print" (create) the money now if they wanted.  But since wars inherently chew through ludicrous amounts of non-monetary resources, all wars are thus inflationary regardless, so We the People still pay for it in the form of higher prices.)

And that's to say nothing of the human toll of civilians in the other countries as well, who bear the brunt of it.

Then, General Butler discusses how to smash this evil racket once and for all.  To summarize, the three steps are as follows:  1) Take the profit out of war, 2) Put it up to a vote (limited to those who would be eligible for the draft) as to whether or not a war should be declared, and 3) Limit our military forces to home defense purposes.  Otherwise, nothing will stop the racket.

Again, as noted on Wikipedia:

In the booklet's penultimate chapter, Butler recommended three steps to disrupt the war racket:

1. Making war unprofitable. Butler suggests that the means for war should be "conscripted" before those who would fight the war:

It can be smashed effectively only by taking the profit out of war. The only way to smash this racket is to conscript capital and industry and labour before the nation's manhood can be conscripted. […] Let the officers and the directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories and our steel companies and our munitions makers and our ship-builders and our airplane builders and the manufacturers of all other things that provide profit in war time as well as the bankers and the speculators, be conscripted — to get $30 a month [NOTE: that's $667/month in 2024 dollars], the same wage as the lads in the trenches get.

2. Acts of war to be decided by those who fight it. He also suggests a limited referendum to determine if the war is to be fought. Eligible to vote would be those who risk death on the front lines.
3. Limitation of militaries to self-defense. For the United States, Butler recommends that the Navy be limited, by law, to operating within 200 miles of the coastline, and the Army restricted to the territorial limits of the country, ensuring that war, if fought, can never be one of aggression. 

Indeed, the time to end all of this insanity and evil is yesterday.  So what do we do in the meantime while patriarchy still exists?  Thus, inspired by Butler, I propose that a new law be passed that we call the War Pigs Act, named after both the ineffectual and toothless War Powers Resolution of 1973 and the 1970 Black Sabbath song "War Pigs".  The first part of the new law would put some teeth in the War Powers Act by closing the loopholes and holding the President liable for any consequences of a war that is not authorized by Congress and is not during a state of emergency caused by an attack on the USA.  And absent a formal declaration of war by Congress, absolutely NO war may last beyond 90 days (60 days followed by a 30 day withdrawal), save for a temporary authorization of force that expires 90 days after the authorization passes or 180 days after the war began (if it began before the new law went into effect), whichever occurs first.  After that, there must be a formal declaration of war, or the war must end.  Period.

The second part of the law would implement some of General Butler's recommendations from his book, taking into account that we currently have an all-volunteer military.  Take the profit out of war, first of all.  Use the tax code to do so.  And for any war lasting beyond six months (which by definition would now require a formal declaration of war), require an annual limited plebiscite of all citizens that would be eligible for military service.  Make it a non-secret ballot such that those who vote "yes" would be drafted if we run out of volunteers, followed by those who abstain from the vote if necessary.  Those who vote "no" would be exempt from any such draft.  A kind of "consensual conscription", if you will.  We would all have skin in the game.  Women would be included as well, but before they draft the very first Woman, we should draft men in their 40s and 50s first.  That's the demographic group who starts the wars but rarely fights them.  It's only fair, right fellas?  Watch as war becomes a thing of the past, at least for the stupid ones and decade(s) long quagmires like Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.

(It would also be a good idea to do like the Iroquois once did:  give Women elders the power to VETO any decision to go to war.  That alone would prevent essentially all wars that are not waged in strict and absolute defense of the homeland.)

For the record, I am personally 100% against the draft on principle.  Unless absolutely necessary, I view it as a form of slavery and involuntary servitude, and if there were ever such a thing as a truly just war (as per St. Augustine's Just War Theory criteria), which is about as rare as a unicorn, conscription would be unnecessary, since volunteers would be plentiful.  And today's technology further makes it largely obsolete to raise such large numbers of boots on the ground.  But since nuance, gray areas, and exceptions that prove every rule do in fact exist in the real world (see WWII and the American Civil War, for example), I will note that if we ever must have a draft, only those who voted yes (or chose not to vote) for such a war should be drafted.

General Butler was a true American hero and patriot.  After his distinguished career in the United States Marine Corps including during WWI (during and after which he eventually found out just how much of a racket it really was), he later quashed an attempted Wall Street fascist coup against FDR's government in 1933-1934.  Yes, there really was a plot by the Rockefellers, Mellon Bank, Standard Oil, General Motors, Goodyear, US Steel, and many others (including pro-Nazi forces!) to overthrow the federal government and install their own fascist dictatorship do their bidding, complete with concentration camps for, in their own words, "Jews and other undesirables".  And the money for the plot bankrolled by the big banks/corporations was funneled through Prescott Bush's companies (yes, THAT Bush, who also did business with the Nazis as well).  They all thought they could use Butler for the plot and he pretended to play along at first, only to foil their plot by telling Congress about it just before it went ahead.  He literally saved America from falling to full-blown fascism, in other words.  He was indeed history's original whistleblower, and then in 1935, he wrote his magnum opus, which unfortunately fell on deaf ears the world over.  

War was a racket then, and still is today.  And it always will be as long as it exists.

As General Butler famously said, 

"TO HELL WITH WAR!"

"Either war is obsolete, or man is."

-- Buckminster Fuller

"War, what is it good for?  Absolutely NOTHING!"

-- Edwin Starr

"Come the war, come the avarice, come the war, come hell...Come attrition, come the reek of bones, come attrition, come hell...This is why, why we fight, why we lie awake...And this is why, this is why we fight..."

-- The Decemberists

"Now the labor leader's screaming when they close the missile plant, United Fruit screams at the Cuban shore. Call it peace or call it treason, call it love or call it reason, but I ain't marching anymore."

-- Phil Ochs

"I declare the war is over, it's over, it's over..."

-- Phil Ochs

"But the hardest thing I'll ask you, if you would only try, is take your children by their hands and look into their eyes.  And there you'll see the answer you should have seen before.  If we win the wars at home, there'll be no fighting anymore"

-- Phil Ochs 

"We share the same biology, regardless of ideology. But what might save us, me and you, Is if the Russians love their children too"

-- Sting and Sergei Prokofiev