From The Ramparts

The War Con Game Continues

The War Con Game Continues

“Who provides the profits – these nice little profits of 20, 100, 300, 1,500 and 1,800 per cent? We all pay them – in taxation. We paid the bankers their profits when we bought Liberty Bonds at $100.00 and sold them back at $84 or $86 to the bankers. These bankers collected $100 plus. It was a simple manipulation. The bankers control the security marts. It was easy for them to depress the price of these bonds. Then all of us – the people – got frightened and sold the bonds at $84 or $86. The bankers bought them. Then these same bankers stimulated a boom and government bonds went to par – and above. Then the bankers collected their profits. But the soldier pays the biggest part of the bill. If you don't believe this, visit the American cemeteries on the battlefields abroad. Or visit any of the veteran's hospitals in the United States. On a tour of the country, in the midst of which I am at the time of this writing, I have visited eighteen government hospitals for veterans. In them are a total of about 50,000 destroyed men – men who were the pick of the nation eighteen years ago. The very able chief surgeon at the government hospital; at Milwaukee, where there are 3,800 of the living dead, told me that mortality among veterans is three times as great as among those who stayed at home. Boys with a normal viewpoint were taken out of the fields and offices and factories and classrooms and put into the ranks. There they were remolded; they were made over; they were made to ‘about face’; to regard murder as the order of the day. They were put shoulder to shoulder and, through mass psychology, they were entirely changed. We used them for a couple of years and trained them to think nothing at all of killing or of being killed. Then, suddenly, we discharged them and told them to make another ‘about face’! This time they had to do their own readjustment, sans [without] mass psychology, sans officers' aid and advice and sans nation-wide propaganda. We didn't need them any more. So we scattered them about without any ‘three-minute’ or ‘Liberty Loan’ speeches or parades. Many, too many, of these fine young boys are eventually destroyed, mentally, because they could not make that final ‘about face’ alone.” Gen. Smedley D. Butler War Is a Racket 1935

As we watch the AmeriKKKan Empire implode on itself and we pretend not to know what we really know; the rulers of this country are evil and insane beyond comprehension, the message of truth gets lost amidst the propaganda and deceit the ruling elites use to foment incessant wars, carnage and plunder. The Eurasians are a war loving species who have played the same game throughout their history, modifying it as they transformed themselves from marauding nomads raping, pillaging and plundering everywhere they went to warmongering settlers with an insatiable lust for war. In ancient times the Aryan modus operandi was for the whole pack or tribe to share in the bounty and booty of their plunder with the leader and his inner circle taking the most. As barbarian sacking and pillage gave way to “mercantile capitalism” colonialism and later, neocolonialism the imperialism game changed so the ruling elites get the most while the peons they use as cannon fodder get scraps or a bump in their standard of living due to the plunder and expropriation of raw materials which result in new finished consumer products. Nowadays Indo-European barbarian tribes don’t wander around looking for settled communities to invade, loot and plunder. They don’t send in their missionaries and anthropologists to scout the people they plan to invade, exploring ways to undermine their indigenous values and culture so they can use their tried and true strategy of divide and rule to subjugate the natives who outnumber them.
Now the ruling elites and their operatives (both covert and overt) scour the world for natural resources, viable markets to pirate and human resources they can monopolize and exploit. They still use the same old’ bum rush where they go in and steal the resources but they now have to use cunning and sophisticated propaganda to convince the suckers they need for cannon fodder that this latest adventure is a noble and glorious cause. Unlike their Aryan ancestors who reveled in war, rapine and bloodletting, modern Westerners must convince themselves and the rest of the world (who should be hip to their game by now and know better) they are peace loving, civilized humanitarians. How do they do it? They trick the people by lying. Herman Goering a Nazi war criminal and Hitler’s second in command explained how it was done, in Germany and around the world. “Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England, nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a parliament, or a Communist Dictatorship… The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. IT WORKS THE SAME IN ANY COUNTRY.” Herman Goering, Adolph Hitler’s second in command testifying at his war crimes trial.
Just prior to WWII retired US Marine Major General Smedley D. Butler wrote a pamphlet entitled War Is A Racket. I suggest you go online and either purchase it or read it. It is just as timely and apropos today as it was in 1935, even more so because we should know better!!! By the way, Smedley who was by all accounts an honest man, helped thwart a fascist coup attempt against President Franklin Delano Roosevelt lead by prominent super rich AmeriKKKan fascists like Irenee DuPont, Al Smith who conspired with a consortium of DuPont, J.P. Morgan bank representatives, leading industrialists from Bethlehem Steel, Goodyear and Wall Street bankers to usher in corporatist fascism in the 1930’s. (I’ll bet you didn’t learn about that in school. Check it out at http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/Coup.htm or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot ) Smedley hit it right on the head when he said, “But don't forget – the soldier paid part of the dollars and cents bill too. Up to and including the Spanish-American War, we had a prize system, and soldiers and sailors fought for money. During the Civil War they were paid bonuses, in many instances, before they went into service. The government, or states, paid as high as $1,200 for an enlistment. In the Spanish-American War they gave prize money. When we captured any vessels, the soldiers all got their share – at least, they were supposed to. Then it was found that we could reduce the cost of wars by taking all the prize money and keeping it, but conscripting [drafting] the soldier anyway. Then soldiers couldn't bargain for their labor. Everyone else could bargain, but the soldier couldn't. Napoleon once said, ‘All men are enamored of decorations...they positively hunger for them.’ So by developing the Napoleonic system – the medal business – the government learned it could get soldiers for less money, because the boys liked to be decorated. Until the Civil War there were no medals. Then the Congressional Medal of Honor was handed out. It made enlistments easier. After the Civil War no new medals were issued until the Spanish-American War.

In the World War, we used propaganda to make the boys accept conscription. They were made to feel ashamed if they didn't join the army. So vicious was this war propaganda that even God was brought into it. With few exceptions our clergymen joined in the clamor to kill, kill, kill. To kill the Germans. God is on our side...it is His will that the Germans be killed. And in Germany, the good pastors called upon the Germans to kill the allies...to please the same God. That was a part of the general propaganda, built up to make people war conscious and murder conscious. Beautiful ideals were painted for our boys who were sent out to die. This was the ‘war to end all wars.’ This was the ‘war to make the world safe for democracy.’ 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 they might be shot down by bullets made by their own brothers here. 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.’ Thus, having stuffed patriotism down their throats, it was decided to make them help pay for the war, too. So, we gave them the large salary of $30 a month. All they had to do for this munificent sum was to leave their dear ones behind, give up their jobs, lie in swampy trenches, eat canned willy (when they could get it) and kill and kill and kill...and be killed… Yes, the soldier pays the greater part of the bill. His family pays too. They pay it in the same heart-break that he does. As he suffers, they suffer. At nights, as he lay in the trenches and watched shrapnel burst about him, they lay home in their beds and tossed sleeplessly – his father, his mother, his wife, his sisters, his brothers, his sons, and his daughters. When he returned home minus an eye, or minus a leg or with his mind broken, they suffered too – as much as and even sometimes more than he. Yes, and they, too, contributed their dollars to the profits of the munitions makers and bankers and shipbuilders and the manufacturers and the speculators made. They, too, bought Liberty Bonds and contributed to the profit of the bankers after the Armistice in the hocus-pocus of manipulated Liberty Bond prices. And even now the families of the wounded men and of the mentally broken and those who never were able to readjust themselves are still suffering and still paying.” War Is A Racket Chapter 3.
War is still a racket only this time it’s GE, Lockheed Martin, Bechtel, Halliburton, Dyncorp, Boeing, the private bankers and the Carlyle Group that are raking in the profits and blood soaked money as they push to establish a fascist corporate plutocracy in the US. The War Con Game/Racket will continue unless and until the people of the world say enough! As Smedley said in the closing of his book, “To summarize: Three steps must be taken to 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.” Smedley Butler made his transition in 1940 but his words live on. Perhaps we should revisit them during these insane times.

-30-

posted by Junious Ricardo Stanton @ 12:17 PM