Retired Marine Corps General Smedley Butler (1881 – 1940) was well known for his 1935 book, War is a Racket in which he summed-up his military career as one in which he served as “a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the bankers”; he wrote of the importance of removing the profitability from war and cautioned his countrymen to be weary of American military adventurism. In this essay, Butler warned of well-healed, deep-pocketed “peace” organizations and prophesied that institutions like the League of Nation and the U.N. would be incapable of stopping wars.
“War is a racket. But the cause of peace is becoming another racket. There are a hundred or more peace societies operating in America, most of them in Washington, D.C., and probably several hundred minor groups. Every one of these organizations must have money with which to function – money for salaries, for printing, for office rents, for lecturers’ fees and expenses. Where are they getting all this money, running into the millions?”
During the Vietnam War, America’s Soviet enemies invested as much as one billion dollars in the the U.S. peace movement.
