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Complete 1935 edition of War is a Racket by retired Major General Smedley D. Butler USMC. Butler turns against his life-long profession and exposes war as a racket, in which the few profit and the many pay the aching costs.
This is a hard-hitting book by a hard-hitting soldier.
He does more than expose and denounce the racket of war. He outlines a program for the control of wars in future-a simple, hard headed program, based on his own experience, his knowledge, and his patriotism. Here is a man who knows, writing of things he knows about.
All students of thought should get this historic book. This 1935 edition is provided in a slim volume with full text at an affordable price.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE
CHAPTER ONE WAR IS A RACKET
CHAPTER TWO WHO MAKES THE PROFITS?
CHAPTER THREE WHO PAYS THE BILLS?
CHAPTER FOUR HOW TO SMASH THIS RACKET!
CHAPTER FIVE TO HELL WITH WAR!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Complete 1935 edition of War is a Racket by retired Major General Smedley D. Butler USMC. Butler turns against his life-long profession and exposes war as a racket, in which the few profit and the many pay the aching costs.
This is a hard-hitting book by a hard-hitting soldier.
He does more than expose and denounce the racket of war. He outlines a program for the control of wars in future-a simple, hard headed program, based on his own experience, his knowledge, and his patriotism. Here is a man who knows, writing of things he knows about.
All students of thought should get this historic book. This 1935 edition is provided in a slim volume with full text at an affordable price.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE
CHAPTER ONE WAR IS A RACKET
CHAPTER TWO WHO MAKES THE PROFITS?
CHAPTER THREE WHO PAYS THE BILLS?
CHAPTER FOUR HOW TO SMASH THIS RACKET!
CHAPTER FIVE TO HELL WITH WAR!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
War is a Racket is marine general, Smedley Butler's classic treatise on why wars are conducted, who profits from them, and who pays the price. Few people are as qualified as General Butler to advance the argument encapsulated in his book's sensational title. When War is a Racket was first published in 1935, Butler was the most decorated American soldier of his time. He had lead several successful military operations in the Caribbean and in Central America, as well as in Europe during the First World War. Despite his success and his heroic status, however, Butler came away from these experiences with a deeply troubled view of both the purpose and the results of warfare.
2024 Reprint of the 1935 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition and not reproduced with Optical Recognition software. Butler was a retired United States Marine Corps Major General and two-time Medal of Honor recipient. Based on his career military experience, Butler discusses how business interests commercially benefit from warfare. After Butler retired from the US Marine Corps in October 1931, he made a nationwide tour in the early 1930s giving his speech War Is a Racket. The speech was so well received that he wrote a longer version as a short book published in 1935. His work was condensed in Reader's Digest as a book supplement, which helped popularize his message. In an introduction to the Reader's Digest version, Lowell Thomas, who wrote Butler's oral autobiography, praised Butler's moral as well as physical courage. 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:
War is a racket
Who makes the profits?
Who pays the bills?
How to smash this racket!
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 very many.
Major General Smedley D Butler was a military hero of the first rank, the winner of two Medals of Honour, a true 'fighting marine' whose courage and patriotism could not be doubted. Yet he came to believe that the wars in which he and his men had fought and bled and died were all pre-planned conflicts, designed not so much to defend America as to bloat the balance sheets of US banks and corporations. Filled with astounding details of the benefits the few make from the sufferings of the many, 'War is A Racket' is as relevant today as when it was first written. Mark Twain's 'The War Prayer' was considered so explosive by his contemporaries that the short anti-war piece was authorized for publication only after his death. 'The Complaint of Peace' was written in 1521 by Desiderius Erasmus, one of the greatest scholars of his day, as a reaction to the warlike times in which he lived. After an interval of nearly 500 years, this thoughtful critique of war still rings true.
Major General Smedley Darlington Butler was a maverick Marine, the emblem of the old corps, and one of the most controversial figures in Marine history. He was a high school dropout who became a major general; a Quaker and a devout family man who was one of the toughest of the Marines; an aristocrat who championed the common man; a leader who thought of himself as striving to help the oppressed of the countries he occupied as the commander of an imperial fighting force. This work is an annotated edition of his letters covering the period from Butler's commissioning as a Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps to his retirement as a Major General.
This is the first time the majority of these letters have been made public, and the book offers the reader a first-hand look at the motivations and attitudes of the American military as it implemented U.S. foreign policy at the turn of the century. There is extensive coverage of U.S. interventions in Nicaragua, Haiti, and China from a man on the scene, offering an immediate perspective to those events. General Butler won two Congressional Medals of Honor, as well as numerous other U.S. and foreign medals, including two Umbrellas of Ten Thousand Blessings from two Chinese cities--honors never before given to a non-Chinese. Military and diplomatic historians, as well as Marine and Navy enthusiasts, will find this superbly edited and annotated collection of interest and value.