"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."This book was originally printed in 1935, but is relevant today given the propensity of the chickenhawks in the Bush administration to go to war for big business.
"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 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 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."
"How many of these war millionaires shoulder a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dugout? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?"
"The general public shoulders the bill. This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones, Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations."
"Let the officers and the directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories and our steel companies and our munitions makers and our ship-builders and the manufacturers of all the other things that provide profit in war time as well as the banners and the speculators, be conscripted."
Read Ralph Nader's comments here.
See what modern generals and ambassadors have to say about Bush's fatally flawed foreign policy here.
