War Is a Racket
War Is a Racket (1935) is a short work by former U.S. Marine Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, in which Butler discusses how business interests have commercially benefited from warfare. Butler points to a variety of examples, mostly from World War I, where industrialists whose operations were subsidised by public funding were able to generate substantial profits essentially 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!
and contains this key 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 the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."
See also
External links
Wikiquote has quotations related to Smedley Butler.
- War is a Racket (online text). Libertarian website.
- War is a Racket (images of original publication)
- War is a Racket (feralhouse press)
 | This article about a political book is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |