War Is a Racket
“I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”
Abraham Lincoln
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.
Read more...
---
Learn more about General Smedlley Bulter, the Fighting Quaker.
4 comments:
Your Lincoln quote is bogus. Too bad, since it fits the liberal narrative about Bush so well.
Anyway, read this:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/08/AR2007060802470.html
Your link doesn't work.
Try going to http://tinyurl.com/
Paste your link in and it will give you a small link that takes you to the same URL as the original.
Anonymous:
You don't expect us to take the word of Andrew Ferguson, an editor for the Weekly Standard? The same opinion piece was in the Pioneer Press. I put it in this post to see if anybody was paying attention.
Snopes urban legend site says this about the quote:
The
above quote, attributed to President Abraham Lincoln, has been periodically dusted off and presented to the public as a prophetic warning about the destruction of America through the usurpation of power and concentration of wealth by capitalist tyrants for over a century now, undergoing a renewed burst of popularity whenever wartime exigencies stir public debate over governmental policies.
Link:
http://www.snopes.com/quotes/lincoln.htm
666,
Thanks for the link, but I guess you didn't read all of it. It immediately goes on to say"
" These words did not originate with Abraham Lincoln, however — they appear in none of his collected writings or speeches, and they did not surface until more than twenty years after his death (and were immediately denounced as a "bold, unflushing forgery" by John Nicolay, Lincoln's private secretary)."
The rest of the entry continues to debunk the pedigree of the quote; neither I nor Andrew Furguson could do so more thoroughly.
Post a Comment