In 1933, Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, Marine Corps (RET), gave a speech entitled “War Is a Racket.” What made this speech so credible, if not surprising, is the fact that Smedley Butler was the highest decorated Marine of all time. Marines today still learn about him, but they aren’t taught that he came from Quaker roots and began to castigate the United States and its wars of aggression after his retirement from the Marines.
General Butler is not too well known outside of military/peace circles. Indeed, even though I was a US history major at university and most of what we learned about was war, I don’t think I had ever heard of him until about a year after my son was killed in action in Iraq.
In about March 2005, I received an email from a person who had read one of my articles and he sent me a link to the treatise War Is a Racket. By the time I first read Butler’s work, I didn’t need any more convincing that my son Casey died for no reason except profit, but after I read it, I began to understand that the concept of “good war” was a bogus one. Indeed, Butler says this in the first chapter:
For a great many years, as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it. Now that I see the international war clouds gathering, as they are today, I must face it and speak out.
It seems like every generation, more or less, in the United States we wage a significant war. My generation’s “War on Terror” was Vietnam. Smedley Butler wrote War Is a Racket between the “good wars,” World War I and World War II.
What also makes this treatise so incredible is that in eighty-three years since the original speech, nothing much has changed. If you just change some of the names to the current crop of culprits, it is eerily identical to today.
The poor of our nation kill the poor of other nations, who are unfortunate enough to live in the way of extreme profit. The rich always benefit during war and the poor always pay—always, no exception.
From the treatise:
Yes, the soldier pays the greater part of the bill. His family pays too. They pay it in the same heart-break that he does. As he suffers, they suffer. At nights, as he lay in the trenches and watched shrapnel burst about him, they lay home in their beds and tossed sleeplessly—his father, his mother, his wife, his sisters, his brothers, his sons, and his daughters.
My son, Casey Austin Sheehan, SPC US ARMY, paid that terrible price and we, his family, continue to suffer and miss him so much. Hopefully, this book will save lives and prevent more heartbreak.
Take it to heart.
—Cindy Sheehan, author/activist
Mother of Spc Casey A. Sheehan, KIA in Iraq 04/04/04
www.CindySheehansSoapbox.com[URL inactive]