the matthew show's
War Page
(CONTINUED)
(the matthew show offers these words without endorsement, but in the interest of provoking thought and discussion, here goes:)
Major General Smedley Butler, 1930s-era peace activist and former Marine:
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.
In the World War [I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.
How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?
Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few – the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.
And what is this bill?
This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.
For a great many years, as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it.
Premier Mussolini knows what they (his soldiers) are being trained for. He, at least, is frank enough to speak out. Only the other day, Il Duce in International Conciliation, the publication of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said:
"And above all, Fascism, the more it considers and observes the future and the development of humanity quite apart from political considerations of the moment, believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace... War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the people who have the courage to meet it."
Take our own case. Until 1898 we didn't own a bit of territory outside the mainland of North America. At that time our national debt was a little more than $1,000,000,000. Then we became "internationally minded." We forgot, or shunted aside, the advice of the Father of our country. We forgot George Washington's warning about "entangling alliances." We went to war. We acquired outside territory. At the end of the World War period, as a direct result of our fiddling in international affairs, our national debt had jumped to over $25,000,000,000. Our total favorable trade balance during the twenty-five-year period was about $24,000,000,000. Therefore, on a purely bookkeeping basis, we ran a little behind year for year, and that foreign trade might well have been ours without the wars.
It would have been far cheaper (not to say safer) for the average American who pays the bills to stay out of foreign entanglements. For a very few this racket, like bootlegging and other underworld rackets, brings fancy profits, but the cost of operations is always transferred to the people – who do not profit.
George Galloway, British Member of Parliament:
In an exclusive interview with Arab News on Tuesday (3/25/03), British Member of Parliament George Galloway said he had evidence that one motive for the war on Iraq is the eventual partition of the Mideast.
"Here in the Houses of Parliament there are people who have never set foot in an Arab country openly discussing the partition of Gulf States," he said in a telephone interview from London.
"They talk about whether it should be one country, two countries, three countries, even four countries. They openly discuss changing the boundaries of old countries, creating new countries removing this and that leader," he added.
Speaking about George W. Bush, Galloway said that he was unimpressive.
"These people have decided that Arab countries must metamorphose into countries acceptable to the US. That means they must change their way of life, their culture, even their religion. It’s openly stated in the American media that the Qur’an itself has to be changed, because in it there are concepts of justice and resistance which are completely unacceptable to the new American century."
Galloway argued that the British people and British soldiers were told that the Iraqis would be garlanding the GI’s who came to "liberate" them. "Of course, none of that has happened. The Iraqis, even in the south of the country, even the so-called disaffected Shiite population, have resisted."
"If the people in Arab countries could truly choose a representative government, then that government would be forced by public opinion to take a very different line on the assault on Iraq, betrayal of the Palestinians and so on. The US would not allow any such democracy to take root." Prime Minister Tony Blair, Galloway said, gambled everything on the invasion being a short, sharp and relatively bloodless.
"None of these conditions is currently being met. The spin-doctors in Downing Street boasted that it would be a six-day war, an allusion to the apparent triumph over the Arab armies in 1967. He is ignorant of the fact that when the Six Day War ended, the 35-year war between the Arabs and Israel began."
