War Is A Racket - Book Review
62A man of many nick names.
"The first casualty
..of any war is the truth." Various versions of this statement have been attributed to philosophers as varied as Sun Zu and United States Senators and we won't argue the point here.
A statistic that seems to be quoted frequently with various different numbers inserted is that 95 to 98% of the world's money is controlled by from 2 to 5% of the population.
In spite of vocal cries to the contrary, most (if not all wars) are fought over some aspect of economic issues. For good or bad, it seems undeniable that whether we are speaking of purveyors of bows and arrows in medieval times, gun powder and bullets in the U.S. Civil War, or the manufacturer of Patriot missiles in the present, there are always those that profit financially from war while others pay with their lives. (In the 40's it would have been good to have been in the steel or leather business!)
Do these numbers and facts all add up to conspiracy? Brigadier General Smedley D. Butler thinks so. His thoughts are detailed in his book, War Is A Racket which I recently reviewed.
War Is A Racket
- Book Review: War Is A Racket
My review of Butler's book.
Buy it now!
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Excellent review, thank you for the hard work and interesting read(s). The very best to you. :0)
"War is a racket" A book review.
All actions are to be adjudged by the motives and intentions behind them.
The Creator of all the worlds has the right to be obeyed by all. His word is to be kept high.
He likes peace and order and dislikes mischief and disorder. Rights of the peole are of supreme value and those are to be protected. When arrogance, persecution and depriving the people becomes rampant the natural result is protest and when it boils to the highest point in turns into a war. Wars must be avoided to the maximum as it is always destructive. But when there is no other option even then there should be no aggression nor excessiveness and the old, weak and non participants must not be harmed. Eve if war is termed as a racket, there are rules for the use of racket.
Knowledge, cooperation, and giving due weight to a thig true are the instrumentalities to avoid a war.
May God bless all!
Thank you all for your comments. I sincerely hope you clicked through and read the entire review.
fce
It takes Money to Kill for it unfortunatly:(
Great hub. War is about many things. GBy.
FC - It is not easy to write a book review of any importance with only a very few words, but you seem to have done a good job of it. The cited statistics are not virginal, but they reflect a likely accuracy concerning who controls what and how things, like wars, are paid for by the controllers and the controllees.
Gus :-)~
FCEtier! Pretty interesting stuff. I clicked through to the actual article too :-)
I love the fact that it was written in 1935. We tend to think of such constructive commentary or cynicism (depending on which side of the rhetorical spectrum your are on :-) as exclusive to our own times. As you point out with this fairly old book, these discussions have been going on a long time, perhaps for the entire human existence.
Thanks!
Thanks again for all your comments and for reading my original article.
It's interesting to see what happened to Smedley as a result of war - he took the opposite view and then to the extreme. Thanks for your book review.
War is the advocacy of the adversarial positioning in the extreme, is it not?
Smedley experienced this and then moved to the advocacy of peace and perhaps to the extreme.
As I see it, we take positions of war when we take extreme positions of being ' in the right about something'. We can equally take a position that is about working towards agreement about something. It's our choice to wish to work something out or take a polarised position about it.
Thanks for the stimulation.
@chspublish,
I agree. And it's also ironic that both sides in the U.S. Civil War felt strongly that God was on their side. How could that be?
Thanks for the review - very interesting.
@Lady_E -- thanks for stopping by and commenting.
WillStarr Level 8 Commenter 17 months ago
"In spite of vocal cries to the contrary, most (if not all wars) are fought over some aspect of economic issues."
True. Money is power, and power over all others seems to be the final goal.