Critical Analysis War is a Racket

Critical Analysis: War is a Racket
Butler is correct: war is racket. He describes a racket as an operation that costs many but benefits a few—and that describes war well enough. Hundreds of thousands of lives are put on the line while a handful profit—investors, bankers, speculators and industrialists, for example, all of whom stood to make out like bandits from the Spanish-American war. Wars are invariably fought over some pretense: the Spanish-American War was launched because of an explosion on The Maine, which our yellow journalists quickly blamed on Spain, which allowed our leaders (who always have a cozy relationship with our bankers, speculators and industrialists) to go take the Philippines. In WWI, it was the Lusitania. In Vietnam, it was Gulf of Tonkin. In WWII, it was Pearl Harbor. For the current ME disaster, it was 9/11 and then the mobile weapons labs and phony evidence regarding yellow cake uranium, Assad gassing his own people, and so on. It never ends—and the same clique always profits, generation after generation, while tax payers foot the bill. During the Civil War, it was the clothing manufacturers who got a big contract from Uncle Sam and then proceeded to make clothes for the soldiers that literally dissolved in the rain. During the Great War, it was the bankers with their Liberty Bonds, which our soldiers were obliged to buy only to find that they couldn’t sell them back at cost but rather had to take a nice haircut on the bonds to the tune of 14-16%.
I don’t think Butler’s days were any different from our own. Consider the fact that Rumsfeld announced the Pentagon had lost more than a trillion dollars of funding that it simply could not account for—this on the day before 9/11. The racket continues—whether it’s shipping opium out of Afghanistan under the pretext of fighting the War on Terror, doling out fat contracts to the warfare state (i.e., Lockheed Martin, Boeing, et al.) for billion dollar flying jets that serve no purpose in an age of hypersonic missiles and missile defense shields like the kind being produced by Russia.
Soldiers pay the biggest part of the bill, however, because they are the ones digging the trenches, losing limbs (and sometimes their minds from PTSD), losing friends, and losing lives. They are the ones who get stiffed by the government when they buy the bankers’ Liberty Bonds. They are the ones wearing the cheap uniforms that dissolve. They are the ones who get sent around the world to places they really have no business being. Butler identified 18 government hospitals for veterans, treating 50,000 destroyed men, their lives shattered by war. The soldiers certainly pay the highest cost.
Butler may be a whistleblower but that does not make him a bad or unpatriotic American. We pledge allegiance to the flag—not to the bankers and Robber Barons and industrialists and speculators (and dual citizens) whose puppets in the U.S. government get us into foreign entanglements. Butler is swinging for America. It’s not fair to label someone like that as un-American—not when his sympathies obviously lie with the common people. In fact, people should speak out—they should not remain silent: silence is consent, and the quieter we are, the more it means we don’t mind the racket.
Three lessons we can learn from the article are: 1) war is a racket—it benefits a handful of people and groups while costing many dearly; 2) our leaders are complicit—they allow the racket to continue and never hold anyone accountable; on the contrary, they conspire with the racketeers to keep the whole thing going; 3) the way to smash the racket is to change the way we go to war as a nation; instead of allowing Congress (or the President, as it seems to go today, declare war), the ones actually doing the fighting should have the final say: they should be the ones voting to determine whether or not we go to war—not some white-haired senator who won’t be digging any trenches in a foreign land.