ANTI-WAR THEME

Today’s blog is from material I’ve been working on:

Returning to our anti-war theme, the following is written by someone I’ve actually known for many years:

“(Ex-soldiers continue to drain the budget, of course. Your tax dollars paid for my graduate work in mathematics, and thanks to all that math I can calculate how much of your money my wounds are going to cost: at my 40% disability, if I live to be 90 and inflation continues at a modest rate, I’ll have extracted a million dollars from the VA. How about that? Would you take a million dollars to go out and kill a bunch of strangers and collect two hundred wounds, and spend the rest of your life thinking about it while you go in and out of hospitals? Be my guest.)” This is from the Foreword by Joe Haldeman from Smedley D. Butler, War is a Racket, Veterans For Peace, Sixth printing, July, 1995.

Opening words of War is a Racket:

“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.” p 1

For a fast, almost easy anti-war education I can think of nothing better than the perusal of War is a Racket either the 2004 or the 2016 editions. And there is also a new printing by Skyhorse Publishing, War Is A Racket: The Antiwar Classic by America’s Most Decorated Soldier with a new Foreword, Introduction & Afterword and more pictures.

Here is more from the newest edition of War is a Racket:

“Butler’s inspirational life story and antiwar passion remain as relevant as ever today. A state of permanent war has become the norm in America. During the Cold War, American democracy had to contend with the growing power of the military-industrial sector. But during the endless War on Terror—a war that expands with every murky group and remote region that Washington declares our enemy—it’s the entire nation that has become militarized. . . . This is the sorry state of our war-obsessed, blood-saturated nation today. It was nearly half a century ago then Martin Luther King Jr. warned America about the violent path down which it was headed. “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death,” declared King. Today—nearly fifty years after King himself fell victim to gunfire—the United States remains more deeply enthralled by the reign of violence and death than ever.”

Smedley Darlington Butler and the Foreword by David Talbot, War is a Racket: The Antiwar Classic by America’s Most Decorated Soldier: Brigadier General Smedley Darlington Butler, Skyhorse Publishing, 2016, pp xv, xvi.