Is War Still a Racket?
An Ex-Marine Compares Gen. Smedley Butler's 1933 with 2003
By CHRIS WHITE
As a Marine serving on a ship in the Pacific in 1997, the ship's commander ordered the dumping of the ship's refuse into the ocean. I asked around to see if this was a common event, as this was my first time at sea in the military, and was told that the Navy had no other way of dumping while at sea, and that it was standard procedure. In order to make this environmental atrocity productive, the Marines used the big, filled, plastic garbage bags as target practice. For a good two hours, we fired thousands of rounds out of our .50 caliber machine guns and sniper rifles at the trail of waste that stretched for miles toward the horizon.
The above story is meant to illustrate how counterproductive the military is, and this applies to this essay's discussion of how the military is inherently bound to the interests of the power elite, and against everything else, especially the defense of freedom. After his retirement in 1931, Marine Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, one of only two Marines in history to have received two Medals of Honor, spoke out against the U.S. government's use of force in world affairs. He wrote and spoke of the way in which corporations profited from war, while countless millions suffered as a result. This essay compares General Butler's analysis of this process in 1933 with the use of war for power and profit in 2003, with the goal of establishing that not only has the racket expanded tremendously, but our national security has correlatively reduced. I am not anti-American. I am an ex-Marine sergeant and current doctoral student in history who is concerned about the consistent destruction of this planet and its people carried out by my government in the false name of the promotion and defense of freedom.
Paradoxically, the tremendous proliferation in military spending and ventures that the U.S. has carried out since WWII has made us less safe than ever by creating anti-U.S. hatred that manifests itself from time to time in the form of random acts of violence. If one were to look closely at the past 58 years, one would be hard pressed to find a single U.S. military or C.I.A. intervention that has brought us one iota of safety, or, for that matter, that has actually been done for national defense purposes. As Butler illustrated in 1933, and it is even truer now than then, the U.S. engages in interventions meant to protect the interests of the powerful and wealthy of our nation and our allies, and rarely, if ever, in order to actually protect its citizens.
For some reason, many who have little understanding of our foreign policy history prefer to point to the three instances in our nation's history when the military was used for defending the people: the War of 1812, WWI, and WWII. Moreover, while one can certainly find fault with aspects of our involvement in those three wars, nonetheless, every other one had nothing to do with national security, and everything to do with profits and power. While we draped our foreign policy in the cloak of beneficence in order to fight the Cold War, we instead killed over six million union leaders, peasants, teachers, priests, and resistance fighters in the developing world. We were not fighting the Soviets and the Chinese on their soil; we were busy setting the developing world back a century in their development.
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http://www.counterpunch.org/white01092003.html
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