War is a Racket
“War is a Racket” by Smedley D. Butler is a critical examination of the intersection between business interests and warfare, published by Martino Fine Books on February 27, 2024. This 62-page reprint of the original 1935 edition presents Butler’s insights, drawn from his extensive military career as a retired Major General and two-time Medal of Honor recipient. The book discusses how industrialists profit from wars, particularly focusing on examples from World War I, and critiques the financial motivations behind armed conflicts.
In this work, Butler outlines the mechanisms of war as a “racket,” emphasizing the disparity between the profits gained by a select few and the human suffering endured by the many. The book is structured into five chapters, each addressing different aspects of this theme, including the financial beneficiaries of war and the societal costs involved. Readers will find a thought-provoking analysis that touches on subjects such as political science, international relations, and the philosophy of war, providing a historical context to the ongoing discourse about the economics of conflict.
Official synopsis Publisher
2024 Reprint of the 1935 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition and not reproduced with Optical Recognition software. Butler was a retired United States Marine Corps Major General and two-time Medal of Honor recipient. Based on his career military experience, Butler discusses how business interests commercially benefit from warfare. After Butler retired from the US Marine Corps in October 1931, he 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 short book published in 1935. His work was 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, who wrote Butler’s oral autobiography, praised Butler’s “moral as well as physical courage”. Butler points to a variety of examples, mostly from World War I, where industrialists, whose operations were subsidized by public funding, were able to generate substantial profits, making money 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!
It contains this 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 very many.
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