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A review by books_ergo_sum
War Is a Racket: The Antiwar Classic by America's Most Decorated Soldier by Smedley D. Butler
reflective
fast-paced
5.0
I highly recommend this little book—it was just a 40min audiobook.
It’s from 1935, but we need to this information now more than ever. Because yeah, war is 100% a racket.
👉 politicians who’ve been heavily lobbied by corporations decide if a country goes to war (even when the war is massively unpopular with voters), taxes are collected from regular people (even people getting paid peanuts to risk their lives in the war), and those taxes buy war-stuff from the corporations who did the lobbying in the first place.
Such that the US government spent 52 Billion dollars in WWI and corporations selling everything from steel, to food, to boots, to ammunition made up to 1,800% increases in their wartime profits. WHICH IS INSANE.
And there were two things that made this book really special:
▪️ the fact that the author was the most decorated US Marine at the time
▪️ the way that in 1935 corporations hadn’t figured out they needed to hide all these wartime profits—they were just hanging out with their wang out.
And by wang I mean 1930s federal business tax statements 😆
It’s from 1935, but we need to this information now more than ever. Because yeah, war is 100% a racket.
👉 politicians who’ve been heavily lobbied by corporations decide if a country goes to war (even when the war is massively unpopular with voters), taxes are collected from regular people (even people getting paid peanuts to risk their lives in the war), and those taxes buy war-stuff from the corporations who did the lobbying in the first place.
Such that the US government spent 52 Billion dollars in WWI and corporations selling everything from steel, to food, to boots, to ammunition made up to 1,800% increases in their wartime profits. WHICH IS INSANE.
And there were two things that made this book really special:
▪️ the fact that the author was the most decorated US Marine at the time
▪️ the way that in 1935 corporations hadn’t figured out they needed to hide all these wartime profits—they were just hanging out with their wang out.
And by wang I mean 1930s federal business tax statements 😆