War is a Racket: The Antiwar Classic by America's Most Decorated Soldier

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.

War Is a Racket is the title of two works, a speech and a booklet, by retired United States Marine Corps Major General and two time Medal of Honor recipient Smedley D. Butler. In them, Butler frankly discusses from his experience as a career military officer how business interests commercially benefit from warfare.

After his retirement from the Marine Corps, Gen. Butler 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 small book with the same title that was published in 1935 by Round Table Press, Inc., of New York. The booklet was also 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, the "as told to" author of Butler's oral autobiographical adventures, praised Butler's "moral as well as physical courage".

79 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1935

Reviews

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

A scathing condemnation of the corporate-military complex by a quirky retired general who was one of the biggest legends and role models in the U.S. Marine Corps; Smedley Butler, nicknamed "Old Gimlet Eye," had a tattoo of the USMC emblem that covered his chest and was the only Marine officer to win the Medal of Honor twice, America's highest decoration for both effectiveness and outrageous courage in combat (a high percentage of Medals of Honor must be awarded posthumously; you can't do something that will win this medal and have any realistic expectation of living through it even once.)

However, after retiring, he came to the conclusion that much of the fighting he had done had ultimately served the interests not of the American people or the people of the countries where he fought, but those of big businesses such as the United Fruit Company. He refers to it as a racket in the sense that the corporate world that pulls the strings of the U.S. government uses the American military as muscle essentially the same way as organized crime uses its low-ranking members.

Butler was not a pacifist - he advocated a true department of defense, staffed, organized, stationed, and equipped so as to protect America but not to create or maintain an empire.

He showed his integrity once again in retirement, when a group of industrialists, concerned by the Depression and outraged by FDR's New Deal programs, planned to carry out a coup, overthrow the government, and put a puppet "president" in office. They asked Butler to lead their coup and be that puppet president. Instead, he immediately turned them in, pointing out that he had sworn a lifelong oath to support and defend the Constitution. One of my heroes.

I encourage anyone contemplating military service to read this, to see another side than they've probably been shown - we do need armed forces, so the right thing to do may indeed be to enter or stay in the military. But it should be an informed decision.

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

50 must-read pages, especially for "American patriots".

The Brilliant:
--Read it here: https://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/...
--I’m upgrading my rating because of this book's usefulness for specific audiences, i.e. soldiers/“support our troops” culture given the author’s military accolades (Major General of the Marine Corps, x2 Medal of Honor, etc.).
--It’s quite something to hear someone so high-ranking debunk the myths of “making the world safe for democracy” by explaining how US foreign policy = poor Americans sent to kill even poorer people abroad to secure greater profits for the richest Americans. Thus, we get chapters “Who Makes the Profits” and “Who Pays the Bills?”.
--As veteran anti-war activist Michael Prysner says, “our enemies are not in the poorest countries on the planet, but right here in the richest one!”. The scum of the earth are revealed to be the major war profiteers, which happens to be the wealthiest US capitalist shareholders/bondholders/chicken-hawks.

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 the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

--My favorite quote from Butler came from his speeches:


The Good:
--Let us fill in the gaps to this 1935 intro:
1) Capitalism and War:
--Butler reveals astronomical wartime profits, and how top capitalists (industrialists and financiers) all share in the spoils. Thus, his #1 step to “smash this racket” is to take the profit out of war (his other steps were #2: vote for war taken from those who risk their lives, i.e. soldiers, and #3: military limited to self-defense).
--Butler suggests a wartime conscription income for everyone to match that of soldiers: “Let all these kings and tycoons and masters of business and all those workers in industry and all our senators and governors and majors pay half of their monthly $30 wage to their families and pay war risk insurance and buy Liberty Bonds.”
--We need to dig deeper into the byzantine nature of capitalism's:
i) money creation: businesses start with debt; capitalists seek profit where money is a store of value
ii) accumulation by dispossession: the Enclosures of the Commons, colonialism and continued privatizations create crucial markets, i.e. labour market and land market at the heart of capitalism
...both money/debt and violence are conveniently omitted by mainstream economics' utopic and myopic equilibrium focusing on the brief moment of market exchange; what is abolishing capitalism’s concentrated ownership of capital and money-creation. Michael Hudson details the economics of U.S. imperialism like no other: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLS...
--The relationship between capitalism and war was a crucial topic during WWI. Capitalism’s logic of endless growth (since economic action is driven by profits, economies-of-scale reduces costs while profits are threatened by competition and saturated markets) requires imperialist expansion. Unlike the notion of peaceful commerce, W.E.B. Du Bois connected the imperialist Scramble for Africa to the rivalry that led to WWI in “The African Roots of War” (1915). Lenin (the Russian Revolution had strong anti-WWI sentiments) soon published Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism in 1916.
--Given capitalism’s boom/bust nature of profits, war is the ultimate reset button (like a perverse debt jubilee). War vanquishes stagnant capital that has lost profitability (regardless of social needs); it was WWII (not the insufficient New Deals) that was the creative destruction to revive global capitalism from the Great Depression, leaving behind the U.S. Military Industrial Complex.

2) Whose Enemies?:
--When Butler says he was a “gangster for capitalism”, US imperialism was rising; it was not until WWII, when the other world powers decimated each other as US capitalists profited from selling to both sides, that the empire was fully formed. The empire made sure no challenges to capitalism could emerge, in particular the countries fighting to liberate themselves from colonialism: Washington Bullets
--The U.S. Military Industrial Complex needs "enemies": the Red Scare was crucial. Communism, in its attempt for the underclass to seize the state and control capital, was indeed the ultimate threat to capitalists... but any form of self-determination during the 20th century's struggle for decolonization could be deemed a "communist" threat (hence the sprawling list of interventions)! Western capitalism praised European Fascism for its ability to whip labor into shape (and kill dissent) to secure commercial profits; Fascism only become a problem when their expansionism threatened Western capitalist markets. After WWII, the freedom-loving West had no problem reviving WWII fascists and funding similar reactionaries to stamp out decolonization.
-The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World
-Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
-Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II
-poetic fire on Colonial brutality returning to Europe as Fascism: Discourse on Colonialism
--In fact, Butler personally experienced Fascism in the US! In the Business Plot, a group of US capitalist elites tried to recruit Butler to perform a fascist coup against FDR: The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking True Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow FDR
--The Cold War “arms race” was closer to an arms chase, where the USSR (ravaged by the Nazi invasion, rapid industrialization, and civil war) could not keep up with the US’s Madman strategy risking annihilation (The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner) and dollar hegemony (Super Imperialism - New Edition: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance).
--After USSR collapsed, the War on Terror found a new "enemy" in the same reactionary forces that the US had weaponized against USSR. The symbiosis of violence legitimates the zealots on all sides: The Management of Savagery: How America's National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump
--US foreign policy for the 1%: https://youtu.be/DiHtfeof15s?t=51
--Michael Parenti on capitalism’s global wars: https://youtu.be/O8k0yO-deoA?t=26
--veteran anti-war activist Michael Prysner: https://youtu.be/RHGM0ni7Yx4

3) Capitalist Propaganda and Democracy:
--While Butler recognizes the use of propaganda to sell WWI, he seems to think a “free press” is a sufficient counter (provided it had access to the secrecy). However, “freedom” in a capitalist society prioritizes the freedom of capital (one-dollar-one-vote), and the corporate media has evolved to be the key tool for war propaganda: Prospects for Democracy
--The millions who protested the 2003 invasion of Iraq were able to overcome corporate media propaganda, only to be ignored as the war continued. “Democracy” is not handed down from above; it must be taken from below (ex. shutting down capitalist profits via mass strikes, not just weekend parades).
--Imperialist media's global ideological censorship: https://youtu.be/6jKcsHv3c74
--The sophistication of capitalist propaganda: Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies
--Case studies in US corporate media coverage of foreign policy: Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media
--US war culture: https://youtu.be/G3OuoQvHUvQ

The Bad:
--My previous lower rating was for readers not indoctrinated by US war propaganda or sitting one-the-fence; this book is a bittersweet admission of guilt by a general to war crimes… For all the talk about the hardship of imperialism’s soldiers, imagine what it is like for the world’s poorest to experience imperialism’s high-tech bombs and chemical weapons...

[Chris Dietzel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This falls under the category of "Must Read." Butler's argument is that the wealthy elite benefit financially from war while everyone else suffers, either through fighting in the wars or else from paying for the war that the rich get richer from. Part of what makes the book so powerful is Butler's history: he fought in WWI and was the most decorated soldier of his lifetime when he wrote this. For me, that gives him credibility that can never be matched by a politician (who probably never fought in a war) going on TV and giving reasons for yet another conflict. Read this each time some person on the news states the case for another war and you'll likely see how hollow their words are and how much weight Butler's words carry.

[Vannessa Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

War Is A Racket is an in your face exposé about the lies politicians tell American taxpayers to justify their bloodthirsty and psychopathic lust for war.

Impressive quotes:

I spent 33 years in the Marines, most of my time being a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for Capitalism. Front cover.

I helped make Mexico, 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 benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. P. 10

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 again gathering, as they are today, I must face it and speak out. P. 24

Yes, they are getting ready for another war. Why shouldn’t they? It pays high dividends.

But what does it profit the masses?
What does it profit the men who are killed?
What does it profit the men who are maimed?
What does it profit their mothers and sisters, their wives and their sweethearts?
What does it profit their children?
What does it profit anyone except the very few to whom war means huge profits?
Yes, and what does it profit the nation?

Take our own case. Until 1898 we didn’t own a bit of territory outside the mainland of North America. At that time our national debt was a little more than $1,000,000,000. Then we became “internationally minded.” We forgot, or shunted aside, the advice of the Father of our Country. We forgot Washington’s warning about “entangling alliances.” We went to war. We acquired outside territory. At the end of the World War period, as a direct result of our fiddling in international affairs, our national debt had jumped to over $25,000,000,000. Therefore, on a purely financial bookkeeping basis, we ran a little behind year for year, and that foreign trade might well have been ours without the wars.

It would have been far cheaper (not to say safer) for the average American who pays the bills to stay out of foreign entanglements. For a very few this racket, like bootlegging and other underworld rackets, brings fancy profits, but the cost of operations is always transferred to the people—who do not profit. P. 26

Beautiful ideals were painted for our boys who were sent out to die. This was the “war to end wars.” This was the war to make the world safe for democracy.” No one told them that dollars and cents were the real reason. No one mentioned to them, as they marched away, that their going and their dying would mean huge war profits. No one told these American soldiers that bullets made by their own brothers here might shoot them down. No one told them that the ships on which they were going to cross might be torpedoed by submarines built with United States patents. They were just told it was to be a “glorious adventure.” p. 35

smash the war racket. We must take the profit out of war. We must permit the youth of the land who would bear arms to decide whether or not there should be war. We must limit our military forces to home defense purposes. P. 42

War Is A Racket is a brilliantly written expose on war and why politicians like them.

If your stomach is sensitive to horror, avoid looking at the pictures depicting the horror of war.

War Is A Racket is a must read!

[Stefania Dzhanamova · Rating 5 out of 5]

General Smedley Butler knows whereof he speaks when it comes to war: having served honorably in the military and hailed as "an outstanding American soldier" by Theodore Roosevelt himself, he understood the soldiers who fought for their country, and he came to be outraged by those who meanwhile were making another kind of killing of their blood, sweat, and tears. He also realized that he had spent most of his active military service being a "high-class muscle" for Big Business, a gangster for capitalism. With his witty humor, he remarks, ". . . 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."

"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," begins he his 1931 speech. Indeed, as he further reveals, at least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during World War I. Who were those lucky guys? Did they come from the ranks of the physically and mentally maimed soldiers returning from the front? Had they ever shouldered a rifle or dug a trench? Had they spent "sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets"? Had they been wounded? Nope. The splendid fortunes were amassed by a chosen few: munitions makers, ship builders, manufacturers, meat packers, bankers, speculators.
One good example cited by Butler is the little steel companies that "patriotically" shunted aside the making of rails and girders and bridges to manufacture war materials. Their 1910-1914 yearly earnings averaged $6,000,000. Then came the war, and, like loyal citizens, Bethlehem Steel promptly turned to munitions making. Well, their 1914–1918 average was $49,000,000 a year, an increase by about 716%!
Meanwhile, eager not to be left behind, somebody made a profit on mosquito netting. They sold Uncle Sam 20,000,000 mosquito nets for the use of the soldiers overseas. "I suppose," comments Butler wryly, "the boys were expected to put it over them as they tried to sleep in the muddy trenches – one hand scratching cooties on their backs and the other making passes at scurrying rats. Well, not one of these mosquito nets ever got to France!" However, the thoughtful manufacturers wanted to make sure that no soldier would be without his mosquito net, so 40,000,000 additional yards of mosquito netting were sold to Uncle Sam. Long story short, there were pretty good profits in mosquito netting in war days, although there were no mosquitoes in France. If the war had lasted just a little longer, though, the enterprising manufacturers probably would have also sold Uncle Sam mosquitoes to introduce in France, so he would buy more mosquito netting.
Thus, the chosen few get rich. Who pays for it all, though? And most importantly, what is the price? The biggest part of the bill is shouldered by the soldiers. Normal, healthy boys are taken out of the fields, offices, factories and classrooms, and put into the ranks where they are "remolded", made to “about face”. Through merciless propaganda, they are trained to regard murder as the order of the day. So vicious is this war propaganda that even God, who taught us not to kill anyone, is brought into it: clergymen join in the clamor to kill, kill, kill. To kill the Germans in World War I, for instance, because "God is on our side . . . it is His will that the Germans be killed." (Meanwhile, in Germany, the good pastors called upon the Germans to kill the allies to please the very same God.) Is it God's will, really? Or is it the will of the bankers and the manufacturers to whom war pays high dividends?
Beautiful pictures were painted for young American boys who were sent out to die in "the war to end all wars", "the war for world democracy" (twenty years later, with the rise of totalitarism, the world became even less democratic), but no one told them they would be killed by bullets produced with US patents. Patriotism "was stuffed down their throats"; they were used as numb killing machines for a couple of years, and then, suddenly, those who managed to survive were discharged and left to make "another 'about face'" but this time without officer aid and nation-wide propaganda. Too many of them were eventually destroyed, mentally, because they could not make that final “about face” alone. "These boys don’t even look like human beings," describes Butler graphically his visit to a government hospital. "Oh, the looks on their faces! Physically, they are in good shape; mentally, they are gone." They had paid with their lives for the profits of others. And so did their families, girlfriends, friends, who had also contributed their dollars (in taxes) to the profits that the munitions makers, bankers, shipbuilders, manufacturers, speculators made, and who now suffered as much as, or even more than, their maimed brothers, friends, sons, fathers, boyfriends did.
It's a racket, all right. What is more important is that General Butler underscores that there is a way to stop this glaring injustice. And – say it louder – the way is not disarmament conferences. Who do the countries send to those conferences? Correct. They send professional soldiers, sailors, politicians, and diplomats. Naturally, the soldiers and sailors don't want to disarm. "No admiral wants to be without a ship. No general wants to be without a command," writes Butler. "Both mean men without jobs." Therefore, they are not for disarmament. Lurking behind these professional soldiers' backs, the politicians, the all-powerful, sinister agents of those who profit by war, are also ready to do anything to prevent disarmament. Consequently, the chief aim of any power at any of these conferences is not to achieve disarmament and prevent war, but rather to get more armament for itself and less for any potential foe. The only way to disarm for real is for all nations to get together and scrap every gun, every rifle, every tank, every war plane, every ship. But, of course, this is a utopian dream.
The only achievable way to "smash the racket", advises Butler, is for the Government to conscript capital, industry, and labor before the nation’s manhood can be conscripted. Let the officers, the directors, the high-powered executives of armament factories and steel companies, the munitions makers, the shipbuilders, the bankers, the speculators, and the manufacturers of all the other things – necessary and unnecessary – that provide profit in war time get $30 a month, the same wage as the soldiers in the rat-infested trenches get. Oh, how I wish this happened! A brilliant, fool-proof technique for quickly making peace doves out of warmongers.
WAR IS A RACKET is a must read, especially for the contemporary audience, for those young people who are prone to be swayed by rallying cries of fake patriotism. So many years after "the war to end all wars", so many years after Butler's speech, wars are still not over; they are still a source of excellent income for the few and of unfathomable grief and loss for the many. General Smedley Butler was a real hero, one who wasn't afraid to stand up for his country, to say out loud that boys and men give their lives for dollars and cents that stuff the pockets of a small elite, not for a safe world and democracy. It is important to read and understand what he wrote. Peace is much cheaper and safer than war.

[Jeremy Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Is War a Racket?

'For a great many years, as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket'. I have been told 'This was the "war to make (America) safe (from Terrorism)." No mentioned to (us), as we marched away, that (our) going and (our) dying would mean huge war profits'.

As a soldier I have to agree with almost everything that Gen. Smedley Butler, a two time Medal of Honor winner has to say in this book. He wrote this book over 70 years ago, frustrated at how the US goes to war. I have to say that not much has changed, except how the Racket is achieved.

Why is the US still currently in Afghanistan? Why am I, as a soldier on my third deployment to the Middle East? Simply put, Money. Yes, the politicians paint the picture that we are here to ensure that Al Qaeda doesn't come back to power, and so that Afghanistan can become an independent nation. No, this is not the case, we are still here because there is money to be made.

[Feliks · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's an extremely swift read. Strongly felt, and strongly worded, written by a simple, straightforward, outraged American. Justifiably outraged.

In a nutshell: the unholy trio of big business, lobby-driven government, and military--has only one result: vile war profiteering.

The awarding of military contracts--underpins capitalism and has us locked in a vicious cycle which still goes on today (Halliburton, KBR, etc).

Butler makes a great point: after the Civil War but before the age of 'gunboat diplomacy', before the age of American Imperialism, (before we had jingoistic adventures in Japan, China, Tripoli, the Philippines) we had a paltry national debt of just $1m.

After the pattern of foreign wars began, our national debt has never receded. Big, powerful companies--ever since the rise of the Rockefellers, Carnegies, and DuPonts--have raped the American economy for short-term profit and left US citizens holding-the-bag. Not to mention American lives that were lost.

President Woodrow Wilson got elected on an anti-war platform. So why did we wind up fighting in WWI? Because we had lent $6m to Britain & France and they warned us that if we lost, they would not be able to pay it back.

Sigh. A lot of people today talk of their hatred of socialism, and they label socialism with every epithet and criticism they can think of. Yet there is no economic system with as much blood on its hands as capitalism. We've got no high ground to stand on. How much blood has Sweden shed in the modern era?

[Jill Hutchinson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm just not sure how to rate this book, so I put it in the middle category of three stars. It is an odd little read and while you agree with some of the author's assumptions, others are contradictory. Written by a Major General in the Marines who won two Medals of Honor in WWI, there is no doubt that he knows of what he speaks as far as war is concerned. However, the fact that large companies and individuals reaped fortunes from the war, although somewhat disturbing, is a part of free trade and has been a side effect of war that will always hold true The author doesn't really expound on how that should be avoided. Additionally the book was published in the late 1930s, so the isolationist approach that the author takes may seem a little dated.

It is worth a try if you are interested in how business and war are so tightly intertwined.

[Edward Rathke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a simple and powerful and obvious statement.

What's interesting about Smedley is that he's not against war in a general sense. He's against the kind of war that had become common in the early 20th century (which is the model for all wars now). To put it a different way: he was not against war, but he was against imperialism.

Smedley dissects WWI in quick and simple ways that are sort of a cost benefit analysis.
Who benefits from war? Who pays the burdens of war?

Smedley answers these two questions, but also tells you how much the profiteers profited and how much the soldiers paid for the privilege of losing their lives or getting brutalized, both mentally and physically, in the grind of war.

Indispensable reading, really. I'm shocked I had never heard of it till relatively recently. Or, I'm not shocked, because this is exactly the kind of book that powerful people don't want you to read. But still, it's strange to know this book has existed for 80 years and I had never heard of it.

It really is a simple book, and a clear explanation of who benefits and who loses in war.

The TL;DR version is: you lose, and soldiers lose more.
Banks and arms-dealers make big.

[Cwn_annwn_13 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Written in the 1930's by a highly decorated Marine Corps General this short book is an essay exposing the utter scam that every war that America has been involved in for at least the past 100 years has been. Although it exposes the horrors and damage that war causes both in Butlers essay and with the inclusion of some gruesome photos War is a Racket is not some limp wristed pacifist liberal tripe. What it is is an essay by a man who connected the dots and realized after many years that he in his military sevice was nothing but "a high class muscle man for big business, for wall street and the bankers". He exposes how these wars are ferminted, who is behind them and who profits from them. He also talks about his own isolationalist political ideas that I can agree with most of his points on. There is also a introduction written by Adam Parfrey that gives a good basic history of Butler and his life. Butler was a great American that should be admired and honored but sadly few people have a clue as to who he is and what he did.