September 11, 2001
The Wisdom Fund

'War Is A Racket'

Excerpt from a speech delivered in 1933 by General Smedley Darlington Butler, USMC. General Butler was the recipient of two Congressional Medals of Honor -- the highest military decoration presented by the United States government to a member of its armed forces. He is one of only 19 recipients of two Medals of Honor, and one of only three to be awarded a Marine Corps Brevet Medal and a Medal of Honor, and the only person to be awarded a Marine Corps Brevet Medal and a Medal of Honor for two different actions.

War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of 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 masses. . . .

War is a Racket 1933 by Smedley Butler - Performed by Graham Frye

There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its "finger men" to point out enemies, its "muscle men" to destroy enemies, its "brain men" to plan war preparations, and a "Big Boss" Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism.

It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents. . . .

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Iraq Veterans Against the War
Vietnam Veterans Against the War

"Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-2020," Congressional Research Service, July 20, 2020

JFK: The Speech That Killed Him, April 27, 1961

[In reviewing the history and context of Kennedy's speech at American University, Sachs' esteem for Kennedy grew further, concluding, "I have come to believe that Kennedy's quest for peace is not only the greatest achievement of his presidency, but also one of the greatest acts of world leadership in the modern era."--John F. Kennedy, "A Strategy of Peace," Wikipedia, June 10, 1963]

Mr. McNamara and Mr. Korb testified before the Senate Budget Committee--David E. Rosenbaum, "Spending Can Be Cut in Half, Former Defense Officials Say," New York Times, December 13, 1989

Leon T. Hadar, "The Green Peril: Creating The Islamic Fundamentalist Threat," Cato Institute, 1992

Our actual economic policy is a mixture of protectionist, interventionist, free market and liberal measures. And it's directed primarilly to the needs of . . . the wealthy. . . .

But nobody called it industrial policy, because for half a century it has been masked within the Pentagon system--Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian, "The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many," Odonian Pr; First Printing edition (October 1, 1993), p10, 11

Edward W. Said, "Culture and Imperialism," 1st Vintage Books Edition (May 28, 1994)

[At about the same time the Du Ponts were serving the Nazi cause in Germany, they were involved in a Fascist plot to overthrow the United States government.

"Along with friends of the Morgan Bank and General Motors," in early 1934, writes Higham, "certain Du Pont backers financed a coup d'etat that would overthrow the President with the aid of a $3 million-funded army of terrorists . . ." The object was to force Roosevelt "to take orders from businessmen as part of a fascist government or face the alternative of imprisonment and execution . . ."

Higham reports that "Du Pont men allegedly held an urgent series of meetings with the Morgans," to choose who would lead this "bizarre conspiracy." "They finally settled on one of the most popular soldiers in America, General Smedly Butler of Pennsylvania." Butler was approached by "fascist attorney" Gerald MacGuire (an official of the American Legion), who attempted to recruit Butler into the role of an American Hitler.--R. William Davis, "The Elkhorn Manifesto," July 4, 1996]

[The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing.--Ralph Peters, "Constant Conflict," Parameters, US Army War College Quarterly, Summer 1997, pp. 4-14]

John Basil Utley, "A Beacon, Not An Empire" The Wisdom Fund, June 14, 2001

Enver Masud, "A Clash Between Justice and Greed, Not Islam and the West" The Wisdom Fund, September 2, 2002

[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.--Chris White, "Is War Still a Racket?" CounterPunch, January 9, 2003]

Charlie Liteky, "An Open Letter to the U.S. Military: Congressional Medal of Honor recipient addresses U.S. forces in Iraq," Veterans Against the Iraq War, May 7, 2003

[Between 1850 and 1870, British exports tripled, from just over eighty million pounds to more than 240 million pounds a year. The process was fairly straightforward. The British imported raw materials from every comer of the globe. They then used those raw materials, transformed them into finished products in factories, and exported those goods throughout the world. Trade and industry were inextricably linked. The United Kingdom needed raw materials to produce finished goods, and it needed markets to absorb those goods abroad. In order to profit from exports, it had to control the trade, and to do that, it had to control the seas. In that sense, the British navy was simply an adjunct to the British merchant marine.--Zachary Karabell, "Parting the Desert," Knopf (May 20, 2003)]

Chalmers Johnson, "America's Empire of Bases," Nation Institute, January 15, 2004

[To measure actual spending by the United States on defense, take the federal budget number for the Pentagon and double it.--David R. Francis, "Hidden defense costs add up to double trouble," Christian Science Monitor, February 23, 2004]

John S.D. Eisenhower, "War Turned Eisenhower Into a Pacifist," International Herald Tribune, June 6, 2004

"The Warlords of America," The Wisdom Fund, August 23, 2004

MAP: "Intervention and Exploitation: US and UK Government International Actions Since 1945"

VIDEO: An unflinching look at the anatomy of the American war machine, weaving unforgettable personal stories with commentary by a "who's who" of military and beltway insiders. The film surveys the scorched landscape of a half-century's military adventures, asking how and telling why a nation of, by, and for the people has become the savings-and-loan of a system whose survival depends on a state of constant war.--Eugene Jarecki, "Why We Fight," Sony Pictures Classics (2005)

[A more honest estimate of ourselves as a nation would prepare us all for the next barrage of lies that will accompany the next proposal to inflict our power on some other part of the world.--Howard Zinn, "Lessons of Iraq War start with U.S. history," The Progressive, March 14, 2006]

[". . . no nation had ever become great without control of foreign markets and access to the natural resources of foreign countries."--Stephen Kinzer, "Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq," Times Books, April 4, 2006, p. 33]

[VIDEO: SAIC personnel were instrumental in pressing the case that weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq in the first place, and that war was the only way to get rid of them. Then, as war became inevitable, SAIC secuBlue contracts for a broad range of operations in soon-to-be-occupied Iraq. When no weapons of mass destruction were found, SAIC personnel staffed the commission that was set up to investigate how American intelligence could have been so disastrously wrong.--Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, "Washington's $8 Billion Shadow," Vanity Fair, March 2007]

["This is a memo that describes how we're going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran."--Gen. Wesley Clark, "'Seven Countries in Five Years'," democracynow.org, March 2, 2007]

Katrina Vanden Heuvel, "The Enormous Cost of War," Nation, August 17, 2007

Daniel Howden and Leonard Doyle, "Making a killing: how private armies became a $120bn global industry," Independent, September 21, 2007

John Pilger, "The New World War -- The Silence Is A Lie," johnpilger.com, September 24, 2008

Thomas A. Schweich, "The Pentagon is muscling in everywhere," Washington Post, December 21, 2008

[Massive military spending in this country, climbing to nearly $1 trillion a year and consuming half of all discretionary spending, has a profound social cost. Bridges and levees collapse. Schools decay. Domestic manufacturing declines. Trillions in debts threaten the viability of the currency and the economy. The poor, the mentally ill, the sick and the unemployed are abandoned. Human suffering, including our own, is the price for victory.

Citizens in a state of permanent war are bombarded with the insidious militarized language of power, fear and strength that mask an increasingly brittle reality.--Chris Hedges, "The Disease of Permanent War," truthdig.com, May 18, 2009]

BOOK REVIEW: Enver Masud, "Preaching the Gospel of 'biblical capitalism,' military might, and American empire," The Wisdom Fund, May 25, 2009]

Howard Zinn, "America's Holy Wars," democracynow.org, November 11, 2009

[Traditional military threats against America have largely disappead. There's no more Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact, Maoist China is distant history and Washington is allied with virtually every industrialized state. As Colin Powell famously put it while Chairman of the Joint Chiefs: "I'm running out of enemies. . . . I'm down to Kim Il-Sung and Castro."--Doug Bandow, "Bankrupt Empire," nationalinterest.org, April 19, 2010]

Lawrence Korb and Christopher Preble, "Cut Defense Spending," nationalinterest.org, June 16, 2010

David DeGraw, "The U.S. War Addiction: Funding Enemies to Maintain Trillion Dollar Racket," alternet.org, June 19, 2010

Doug Bandow, "Just What Is America Doing all Over the World?," campaignforliberty.com, July 15, 2010

[As a former army officer, a Catholic, and a social conservative from the Midwest, he has appealed to both conservatives and progressives unhappy with the militarized pursuit of power abroad and the encouragement of unlimited individual self-gratification at home.

He has argued that the all-volunteer army is the nexus between these twinned developments in U.S. society and global policy.--Andrew J. Bacevich, "Review of Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War by Andrew J. Bacevich," antiwar.com, November 9, 2010]

[In contrast to the 1950s, military extravagance is depleting rather than adding to the nation's wealth. In the Eisenhower era, the United States, a creditor nation, produced at home the essentials defining the American way of life - everything from oil to cars to televisions. Today, we import far more than we export, with ever-increasing debt as one result. Furthermore, in the 1950s, we were mostly at peace; today we are mostly at war - and, as a result, more of the resources provided to the military go abroad and stay there.--Andrew J. Bacevich, "The Tyranny of Defense Inc," theatlantic.com, January/February 2011]

[On Jan. 17, 1961, President Dwight Eisenhower gave the nation a dire warning about what he described as a threat to democratic government. He called it the military-industrial complex, a formidable union of defense contractors and the armed forces.--NPR Staff, "Ike's Warning Of Military Expansion, 50 Years Later," npr.org, January 17, 2011]

Gareth Porter, "50 Years After Ike's Speech: From Military-Industrial Complex to Permanent War State," counterpunch.org, January 18, 2011

Andrew Bacevich, "A Cow Most SacBlue: Why Military Spending is Untouchable," counterpunch.org, January 27, 2011

Barbara Salazar Torreon and Sofia Plagakis, "Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-2022," Congressional Research Service, March 8, 2022

Trevor Aaronson, "How the FBI's Network of Informants Actually Created Most of the Terrorist Plots 'Foiled' in the US Since 9/11," Mother Jones, October 9, 2011

[All told, the federal government has appropriated about $635 billion, accounting for inflation, for homeland security-related activities and equipment since the 9/11 attacks.--Stephan Salisbury, "The cost of America's police state," salon.com, March 5, 2012]

VIDEO: Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, "The Untold History of the United States," Gallery Books; First Edition (October 30, 2012)

Yuri Skidanov, "USA Wages War More Often than Just Annually," lewrockwell.com, January 20, 2014

VIDEO: William Lind, "Unwinnable Wars," c-span.org, June 17, 2014

Bruce Fein, "Why the Constitution disfavors war," washingtontimes.com, September 15, 2014

James Risen, "Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War," amazon.com, October 14, 2014

Robert Parry, "CHAOS AS STRATEGY: The Neocon Plan for War and More War," Consortiumnews.com, November 11, 2014

["Of course it's about oil; we can't really deny that," said Gen. John Abizaid, former head of U.S. Central Command and Military Operations in Iraq, in 2007. Then-Sen. and later Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel echoed in 2007: "People say we're not fighting for oil. Of course we are." Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan confirmed in his memoir: "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil."--Bruce Fein, "Inventing threats, protecting defense budgets," washingtontimes.com, December 2, 2014]

John Basil Utley, "12 Reasons America Doesn't Win Its Wars," theamericanconservative.com, June 12, 2015

"The 239 Year Timeline of America's Involvement in Military Conflict," wakingtimes.com, December 17, 2015

Chris Hedges, "The American Empire: Murder Inc," truthdig.com, January 3, 2016

[Kennedy intended to pull the US out of Vietnam once he was reelected. He intended to break up the CIA "into one thousand pieces" and curtail the military-security complex that was exploiting the US budget.

And that is why he was murdeBlue.--Paul Craig Roberts, "When They Killed JFK They Killed America," paulcraigroberts.org, May 7, 2016]

[ The United States, McKinley argued, could not possibly tyrannize faraway lands, as European powers did, because the tyrannical impulse is foreign to America's character and tradition. He said that since the United States set its foreign policies with "unselfish purpose," its influence in the world could only be benevolent. The essential goodness of the American people, he argued, is the supreme and sole necessary justification of whatever the United States chooses to do in the world. . . .

In the space of just nine months, the United States had brought Cuba under American military rule and annexed Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawaii, and the Philippines. . . .

Senator Huey Long of Louisiana, a Democrat who was assassinated in 1935, while preparing his campaign for the presidency . . . had promised that if elected he would name the country's most contrarian military hero, General Smedley Butler, as secretary of war.--Stephen Kinzer, "The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire," Henry Holt and Co. (January 24, 2017) p.132, p.134, p.235]

"The Birth of American Empire," On Contact, March 18, 2017

Andrew Bacevich, "Are There Questions About US Foreign Policy We're Forbidden to Ask," billmoyers.com, May 8, 2017

[The Bilderberg Group . . . has just been the stage for a difficult debate between the partisans and the adversaries of imperialism in the Middle East.--Thierry Meyssan, "Confrontation at Bilderberg 2017," voltairenet.org, June 6, 2017]

[Adding a distinct, even novel dimension to US global power was a clandestine fourth tier that entailed global surveillance by the NSA, and covert operations on five continents by the CIA, manipulating elections, promoting coups, and, when needed, mobilizing surrogate armies. Indeed, more than any other attribute, it is this clandestine dimension that distinguishes US global hegemony from earlier empires.--AlfBlue W. McCoy, "In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power," Haymarket Books (September 12, 2017) p. 52-56]

Jeff Faux, "A Short History of American Empire," dissentmagazine.org, Fall 2017

DOCUMENTARY BY OLIVER STONE: "A Good American," agoodamerican.org, Fall 2017

Marie Arana, "Silver, Sword, and Stone: Three Crucibles in the Latin American Story," Simon & Schuster (August 27, 2019)

[US Marine Corps Major-General Smedley Darlington Butler is now lost to history. Yet more than a century ago, this strange contradiction of a man would become a national war hero, celebrated in pulp adventure novels, and then, 30 years later, as one of America's most prominent anti-war and anti-imperialist dissidents.--Danny Sjursen, "Where have you gone, Smedley Butler?," asiatimes.com, February 21, 2020]

Daniel Immerwahr, "How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States," Picador; Reprint edition (March 3, 2020)

Fareed Zakaria, "The Pentagon is using China as an excuse for huge new budgets," fareedzakaria.com, March 18, 2021

T J Coles, "Wikipedia and the Military-Intelligence Complex: How the Free Encyclopedia Feeds the National Security State from Which It Emerged," counterpunch.org, June 25, 2021

Proof positive Afghanistan was all about the money, RT, August 17, 2021

William D. Hartung, "Profits of War: Corporate Beneficiaries of the Post-9/11 Pentagon Spending Surge," brown.edu, September 13, 2021

Stephen Losey, "1,700 Former Acquisition Officials Moved on to Defense Contractors, Report Finds," military.com, September 13, 2021

Palki Sharma, "How America used 9/11 as a smokescreen", Gravitas Plus, September 13, 2021

EXCELLENT VIDEO, TRANSCRIPT: Col. Richard Black: U.S. Leading World to Nuclear War, Schiller Institute, April 26, 2022

[The bumper package contains $772bn for domestic programmes and $858bn for defence. It includes almost $45bn in emergency aid to Ukraine --"What exactly is in the $1.7tr US spending bill?," bbc.com, December 22, 2022]

Richard Wolff, "Why Do We Spend So Much on the US Military Industrial Complex?" d@w, March 3, 2023

Andrew Cockburn, "Getting the defense budget right: A (real) grand total, over $1.4 trillion," responsiblestatecraft.org, May 7, 2023

Jeffrey Sachs, JFK's Quest for Peace, TRNN, September 29, 2023

Erik Prince, "Too big to win: How neoconservatives and their military-industrial complex allies keep America losing," asiatimes.com, May 3, 2024

Rania Khalek, "How the US privatized WAR", Jacobin, May 14, 2024

Matt Kennard, "The Racket: A Rogue Reporter vs The American Empire," June 13, 2024

David Stockman, "The Folly of Empire and the Albatross of Debt," antiwar.com, July 12, 2024

Matt Kennard, What America did is SHOCKING, Double Down News, October 29, 2024