War Is a Racket (1935)
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Still as relevant to today's veterans as in 1935.
Wars have generally been money losers for the nations involved and money-makers for businesses and individuals connected to power (Krupps to United Fruit to Wagner Group to etc). Wars have generally involved the egos of leaders but these leaders nearly always consider their friends who'll get rich through it.
Government loses (we'll, distributes conjured dollars from it's balance sheet), taxpayers lose, and war fighters lose. But profiteers win -- hence: War is a Racket.
"The goal is to use Afghanistan to wash money out of the tax bases of the US and Europe through Afghanistan and back into the hands of a transnational security elite. The goal is an endless war, not a successful war"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IGU_7alJ80
How likely is it that he was completely wrong about that, and this wasn't a motivation for any of the key decision makers?
So the reason I say I have mixed feelings is because I can imagine a world where the entities that make profit off of war can use their influence to prod the nation into war. And this should be prevented. I suspect this has happened in the past.
Governments have basically no agency or will of their own. They're like a mecha suit from an anime. Lots of infrastructure, but where they go and what they do is up to whomever's at the controls at the time.
Where is the evidence for this ?
Wars are generally not started by the arms makers, rather, the profiteer off of the situation.
Obviously there might be influence but I don't think that industrial complex is in charge of anything really.
Goldman Sachs has basically kept an office in the White House since FDR (https://archive.is/WJnkD), though BlackRock is becoming the new Goldman (https://archive.is/kPJOY). Once they're there they can influence policy to benefit the company they came from (and all their tight-knit peers).
After they're done in office they move on to another executive position where they can use their government contacts. Private companies regularly hire government officials, both to help make sales, and to work around any pesky regulators.
"Since 2018, Amazon Web Services has hired at least 66 former government officials with acquisition, procurement or technology adoption experience, most hired directly away from government posts and more than half of them from the Defense Department. That’s a small portion of AWS’ tens of thousands of employees, but a particularly key group to its federal business. Other AWS hires have come from departments including Homeland Security, Justice, Treasury and Veterans Affairs." (https://www.politico.com/news/2021/06/04/amazon-hiring-forme...)
Literally in the first reference, the first reference given of the 'Goldman Man' ... is Steve Bannon (!) as if he's part of that crew.
Goldman is the top financial firm in the world, and yes, they're going to use their status to move people in and out and leverage relationships.
That does not mean they are working for Raytheon trying to start wars.
The AWS statement doesn't add anything to the position - Amazon is one of the biggest employers in the US, and a huge DoD contractor, it's entirely rational for them to be hiring out of the DoD, and they do it from the rest of government as well. CGI (contractors in Canada) hire a ton of ex-gov people from Ottawa and the Military. It doesn't mean they are leaning on policy makers to start wars.
The fact of the matter is there isn't a lot of direct influence to start wars 'because future projects'. Obviously that is a constituency, and sometimes there is a big conflict of interest (as mentioned below Dick Cheney) but even aside from Halliburton relationships I actually don't doubt Cheney would have the same position otherwise.
So if you mean to say certain alpha corporations have undue influence via networked relationships within governance - yes - but that doesn't map at very well to 'they are pushing to start wars for Raytheon'. Aside from the Bushes, you'd have to go back to maybe 1 or 2 presidents during the intervening war periods to say that's even kind of true, or you might be able to throw Reagan in there as a 'Cold War Mega Buildup' guy but he wasn't swashbuckling around trying to start wars either, rather, he 'built out gear faster than the Soviets'.
The Military Industrial Complex is a real thing with real influence, it was no less than former Supreme NATO Allied Commander that gave us the starkest warning about that system, but it's also something that is misrepresented due to a lack of context about how that power really works.
Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney seem to fit this mold squarely
If all you've ever used is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
Really ? Military lobbyists for the "big 5" are as common as parking slots in Capitol hill - it is established standard operating practice that no one talks about it much any more. Its like asking for evidence at the sun rising in the East.
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2021/09/02/top-defense-fir... https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2022/11/defense-sector-spen...
Reminds me of the covid pandemic. Pfizer made $100 billion last year
And the profits they generated by COVID could well save countless more lives given that their MRNA technology is successfully being applied to other use cases.
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/PFE/pfizer/revenue
Instead https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cost-of-i...
[0] https://www.transportation.gov/office-policy/transportation-...
Ridiculous.
https://www.oxfam.ca/news/vaccine-monopolies-make-cost-of-va...
If they really wanted to save lives they should have liberalized the vaccine's production, but all they cared for was profit, the life saving just a coincidence.
After the weak and inept leadership shown by France and Germany in their response to Russia's aggression the hopes for a EU defense capability is all but finished. Eastern European countries would rather have the US to defend them [1].
And I think more appreciation needs to be given to the US for supporting Ukraine in those early days because if Russia over-ran Kyiv it's quite possible that Belarus, Moldova, Estonia etc could have been next. US military leadership can credibly be argued to have saved Europe.
[1] https://twitter.com/ulrichspeck/status/1661710156944535554
Why on earth would Russia invade its closest ally? It is alarming that we see such confident justifications of US foreign policy from people who don't know the basic facts of IR and world history.
"War is God's way of teaching Americans geography"
more than once
> In the fall of 1946, the US military authorized elections to an interim legislature for southern Korea, but the results were clearly fraudulent. Even General Hodge privately wrote that right-wing "strong-arm" methods had been used to control the vote. The winners were almost all rightists, including [Syngman] Rhee supporters, even though a survey by the American military government that summer had found that 70 percent of 8,453 southern Koreans polled said they supported socialism, 7 percent communism, and only 14 percent capitalism. [...]
> Chung Koo-Hun, the observant young student of the late 1940s, said of the villagers' attitude: "The Americans simply re-employed the pro-Japanese Koreans whom the people hated." [...]
> Seventy of the 115 top Korean officials in the Seoul administration in 1947 had held office during the Japanese occupation.
> In the southern city of Taegu, people verged on starvation. When 10,000 demonstrators rallied on October 1, 1946, police opened fire, killing many. Vengeful crowds then seized and killed policeman, and the US military declared martial law. The violence spread across the provinces, peasants murdering government officials, landlords, and especially police, detested as holdovers from Japanese days. American troops joined the police in suppressing the uprisings. Together they killed uncounted hundreds of Koreans.
> American anthropologist Cornelius Osgood, spending much of 1947 in a village west of Seoul, watched as police carried young men off to jail by the truckload. A "mantle of fear" had fallen over once peaceful valleys, he wrote. The word "communist," he said, "seemed to mean 'just any young man of a village.'" On August 7, 1947, the US military government outlawed the southern communists, the Korean Worker's Party. Denied a peaceful political route, more and more leftist militants chose an armed struggle for power.
quotes from The Bridge at No Gun Ri
The alternative was that the entire peninsula would be "North Korea". And then there would never be any chance of formulating a functional democratic society.
Imagine if they weren't defeated. Because they where one of the most preeminent countries in the world before defeat as well.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhejiang-Jiangxi_campaign
[1] https://www.historynet.com/jimmy-doolittle-and-the-tokyo-rai...
Before attacking the US, they had Korea and Manchury invaded, and Russia in check. The extent of their dominance relative to their country size was really impressive, and they went for the US because they needed to feel unstoppable.
Then of coure, they were stopped. But none of the base roots of the war were removed, the emperor was allowed to stay, they made token trial of random generals who committed atrocities.
But no one was allowed to officialy question:
- the US carpet bombing entire Tokyo (for comparison we questionned Germany carpet bombing EU towns) and dropping the bombs on civilians
- the Japan's spiritual leader and basic phyolosophy. Really, imagine Hitler being excused as a mere puppet and staying as a philosophical leader after the war.
In that respect, The compromise the US took looks to me like the critical difference from Germany, where they could move on and jointly create the EU. Instead, Japan and Korea are still barking at each other over the war almost a century later.
People think the existence of emperor (thousand years long) itself wasn't the root cause (or at least think it's better than changing everything), unlike Hitler.
How people seriously can blame North Korea for poverty if it is deliberately being suffocated by USA for decades?
Also having actually been to the country the issue isn't sanctions. It's the lack of foreign investment and restrictions on business. Many China businesses for example would love to have broader access to the North Korean market not just for exports but as a source of cheap labour. But this is not happening because North Korea is fearful of their population being 'indoctrinated'.
If only we could get US marines to read this before their service started. :-(
If we go to war with China, and it's not just some minor skirmish, I expect there to be a draft.
The desert stuff was not so bad by comparison. These were asymmetrical conflicts. The emerging threats are near-peer forces. Even fewer will want to sign up for that!
>I expect there to be a draft.
And if there is a draft there will be mass noncompliance. It won't work. If they're smart they won't try it because that would look weak.
You might see people drafted into factories, given how much stuff is made in China and the impact on global trade, though.
All those wars Switzerland has fought...
"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenhower%27s_farewell_addres...
In my 20+ years in software engineering, I've yet to meet a Chinese or Russian colleague who thinks it would be better if China or Russia had more military/political power. I've even argued in favor of that position in the past (that the world would be better off if there was more multipolarity), and they fervently opposed my position. They are keenly aware of the kind of crimes their ex-governments engage in.
US military dominance is hegemonic, yes, but it would be far worse to have it any other way currently.
Edit: nor does any of what you’ve said negate the sentiment Eisenhower was advocating, which relates directly back to the Vietnam and Iraq wars. Having power and wielding it responsibly are not the same.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Counci...
Even then, the US government and economy is organized in ways that make it disturb the trivial-to-maintain peace its position as hegemon affords it(see Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and various covert operations that succeeded before escalating to direct intervention) to secure itself minor advantages or even for entirely domestic reasons.
If you account at all for the inherent advantages of a unipolar world, the US's record is shockingly poor. I'm fine with rolling the dice on multipolarity in hopes of a less irrational hegemon emerging.
The problem is that multipolarity is often meant to mean spheres of influence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_of_influence). Which is just imperialism by another name.
I agree that the power the US can exercise should be checked by other powers (the desired "benefit" of multi polarity), but I also think the idea of promoting "rule of law" needs to be the frame of conversation.
"What pole of power do you belong to" is a very different question than "what is justice?"
> If you account at all for the inherent advantages of a unipolar world, the US's record is shockingly poor.
I think this statement isn't very well thought out or at least not well founded or self evident.
It's also important to understand that peace is not the absence of physical violence, but the presence of justice. Justice sometimes cannot be achieved without a fight.
> disturb the trivial-to-maintain peace
The "peace" between African slaves and American plantation owners was probably fairly easy to maintain. That doesn't make it a good "peace".
China is exercising coercive power over Taiwan. Are they at peace?
Who?
If you look at past hegemons—Rome, the Mongols, Britain—the US has the best record of them all. And, incidentally, if you look at past periods of multipolarity, you get a series of progressively more deadly and destructive wars.
The entire existence of the Roman republic and empire was bookended by China, for example, and Rome was almost continuously at war with almost all of its neighbors. Some of whom repeatedly beat them and eventually definitely outlasted Rome.
The Mongols defeated the vast majority of entities they went to war with, but not all. This is the closest you'll come to your thesis, as it is probably true that no army or civilization existed from the Pacific to Atlantic oceans capable of defeating the Mongol empire at peak. It is alt history to debate what might have happened had they pushed to Paris etc. They didn't bother. They easily could have, in my opinion, but had other priorities in Asia.
However, the Mongols were definitively repulsed in the Middle East and generally speaking were not going to conquer Egypt or Africa. They didn't even try to hold Jerusalem (though interesting quirk of history they took it, once). The Mongols were also arguably repulsed by India, though that's complicated by their own factionalism (they arguably defeated themselves in a civil war at the border of India).
It is probably true that the Mongols occupied any territory they chose to, at the peak of their power. However, they often chose not to, either because they acknowledged the impossibility of doing so, or the complex multipolar reality within and surrounding their empire required their presence elsewhere to maintain power. So that is also not a hegemon, but is probably the most terrifying and powerful empire in history. Certainly the only one to execute all civilians in conquered cities, with knives, in one day. Repeatedly. For sure the Mongols out-murdered anybody ever until Stalin and Mao. But this is not so much unipolar as systemic genocide. The Mongols literally used genocide not as an end but a means, and killed millions to cause their next enemy to surrender without fighting. They called this "division" where all surrending civilian populations were divided by the number of Mongol executioners present that one day. And they did this routinely. Nothing like this ever happened before in recorded history, or ever since. Not at that scale and for that duration (centuries). For perspective, the Mongols leased Russia to the conquered Russians for longer than the US has existed.
Britain, at no point in its entire history from Roman withdrawal to today, has ever been a global hegemon. They were never even dominant or unipolar. Rather continuously struggling with France, Germany, Spain, and at times the Dutch; nevermind England struggling to first conquer and then rule their own immediate neighbors in the British Isles (Ireland, Wales, Scotland etc). Looking globally, it is true that at times Britain had economic superiority but these eras are measured in decades or at best generations and never approach hegemony or unipolarity on any one continent nevermind all. At or near the zenith of their power, they lose repeatedly. Sometimes to mere colonial farmers. If you pick any random decade for the last 500 years, we can find a significant military struggle for Britain ongoing. Many victories yes. But many loses too, and constant struggle. That is not hegemony.
The fact is the species has been at war with itself continuously for millennia. That was surely happening before we had kingdoms and nation states, too, when the violence had other names. But it was still war.
There is no oversimplifiable theory of war. It persists.
Even the USA and other nuclear powers are obviously still today in a persistent state of mutual deterrence. While the many wars since 1945 have been horrible by any definition, the fact is they pale in comparison to the mass lethality of WW1 and WW2 and we should all be thankful for the relative peace dividend created by nuclear deterrence.
We experienced COVID as ghastly and it was, killing perhaps 1% of all humans infected? WW2 killed 6%. That could have kept happening every generation since. The reason it didn't is #1 the US prevented that from happening, globally, at considerable expenses; and #2 restrained itself, generally speaking, from occupying other countries. Fighting, yes. Conquering and keeping, no.
In this regard, agree with you the US has the best record. For all its struggles and imperfections and systemic issues, nobody has ever done better.
But for the US, we would all be slaves of somebody right now. Either the "Third Reich" or Imperial Japan, or Russian and/or Chinese autocracy pretending to be communism. Even the patriots born there were, slaves to obviously wrong ideas and obviously evil governments. This is easily proven by trying to count the tens of millions of corpses they created. Try. The numbers get over 100M just in the last century, and the unknowable "rounding" errors and margin of error of the estimates is itself horrific and evil. When we're not sure whether Russia or China killed 45 million or 62 million of its own citizens by policy, this is when you should just stop and rethink saying nonsense like the "US's record is shockingly poor." Compared to what?
>I never understood the good effects of American hegemony until they started breaking down.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a harbinger of what a world without American hegemony looks like. In that world, you're going to have a very bad time.
The 90s was also the decade of American hegemony. The hegemony started breaking down in the aftermath of 9/11, when the US decided that they care more about revenge than soft power.
I would diagnose it differently. If all the US looked for was revenge, we could have been in and out of Afghanistan much more quickly and accomplished the mission. The mistake in Afghanistan was to engage in a poorly conceived twenty year experiment in nation building.
If anything the problem is that Americans are too isolationist to take the duties of hegemony seriously. There’s really no reason we couldn’t occupy Afghanistan in perpetuity if we actually cared to bother, but it became politically unpopular for some reason. Maybe because we were never honest with ourselves about what we were doing.
I really don't see an argument for US influence being better than the status quo, except for the US. It didn't stop wars or ethnic cleansings either when it was at its peak.
This is obvious if you answer the following questions:
1) Was Russian influence and power in Ukraine increasing or decreasing prior to the invasion?
2) Was Russian economic and military power increasing or decreasing in Europe prior to the war?
3) Is Russia stronger or weaker relative to NATO than the USSR was?
I dont see how you can claim US and NATO power is in decline and was challenged more by Russia in 2022 than it was in the 20th century.
To the contrary, the war in Ukraine is the result of growing hegemony in Europe, as hegemony expands outward and more Nations fall into the orbit of the US. Russia is fighting to preserve it's sphere of influence and prevent further collapse of its influence.
I'm not saying that makes Russia a 'good guy", but I don't think there is any other way to interpret the shifting power balance leading up to the war.
Putin has been but Russia could have gone a different route rather than keep Putin in power all these years.
Russia really doesn't win keeping itself xenophobic of the West.
Japanese, Korean, & German culture are all very popular here in American entertainment today.
Russia could have continued to preserve, celebrate, and expand her culture around the world through Western entertainment and alliances.
Instead out of fear to preserve it Russia has become isolated from people that otherwise would have happily bought her stuff.
It is possible that Russia could have gone a different way.
Japan, Korea, and Germany all gave up significant autonomy by falling into the US alliance, but also reaped significant rewards.
I think it is debatable if the west would want Russia in alliance.
I think the really interesting question is what a country like Russia or China would have to give up to be on good terms with the US.
For one, I think they would have to give up any ability to militarily defend themselves against the US. They would also probably have to give up any allies that the US doesn't approve of. Last, they would probably have to share control over any countries are territories currently in their sphere of influence with the West.
How would your government react to russians trying to establish military bases in mexico, on your border? Oh, we know ... we can look what you did to Cubans. Are they still in blockade?
I don't endorse what Russians are doing. But somebody was helping them to decide to attack. If it was successfull or not, we'll never know.
So kinda not the same.
the bigger problem is that Russia is a backwards country with caveman ideology modeled on the strong Mongolian empire who wants to oppress everybody around them because they have narcissistic tendencies
If American hegemony brings peace, why are you using an example where there this supposed peace effect obviously failed?
American hegemony did not prevent the Russian invasion into Ukraine as we all know. It is not an example of a world without American hegemony, it is clearly and example of the world with American hegemony.
If you want an example of the world with American hegemony, consider that the longest sustained period of peace in Western European history began when Western Europe was first occupied by American troops in 1945.
But my god, the inefficiency & fleecing being done by corporations is ghastly. It's an absurd detriment that the system is robustly categorically fucked, incapable of getting effective help to aid/drive/support the cause. The US taxpayer pays out the nose, when we could be bettering ourselves greatly, because of this systematic incompetence that we suffer.
I don't see your comment as replying to anything whatsoever topical here. You've paved over concerns with jingoism. We can debate that jingoism, but - at a minimum - I don't feel like America should suffer itself to keep getting fleeced by an ineffective & ghastly expensive defense industry. We could do this without it being such a racket.
> Over 937,000 people have died in the post-9/11 wars due to direct war violence, and several times as many due to the reverberating effects of war
> An estimated 3.6-3.7 million people have died indirectly in post-9/11 war zones, bringing the total death toll to at least 4.5-4.6 million and counting.
Not any more, Japan is. China has been reducing it's dollar holdings at breakneck speed once it saw the US freeze dollars held by Russia.
https://www.ceicdata.com/en/china/holdings-of-us-treasury-se...
I’m half inclined to believe the US populace would revolt before any meaningful military confrontation because all their stuff is made in China.
No more toilet paper, no more TV, no more phone. No more… everything! Kind of wonder how much military components are sourced/built in China.
Its just how it is.
The US military industrial complex is incredibly complex and somewhat corrupt - it is a revolving door between industry and government, but the alternative is far worse and leads to genocide on a scale unimaginable since WW2.
lmao the ones who live in america? yeah, of course. they don't want to get deported.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Initiative
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wen_Ho_Lee <-- taiwanese lolol
Are you serious? No US person seriously believes we will deport a Chinese national on a legitimate visa for their political views. Can you point to a single example of this happening?
then why wasn't he convicted of it? LOL why is he walking around free, and with a bunch of money he won from a civil suit filed against the government?
who's incompetent here, the FBI, the DOJ, or the courts? how can we assure that every east asian accused of espionage is convicted?
it's a shame you aren't a federal judge, then no spy would ever get away.
"In 2016, America dropped at least 26,171 bombs authorized by President Barack Obama. This means that every day in 2016, the US military blasted combatants or civilians overseas with 72 bombs; that’s three bombs every hour, 24 hours a day" https://old.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/x332z...
Black sites, extraordinary renditions, torturing people in third countries ... that's deterrence?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_mili... (Read it all, I dare you)
Imagine foreign power's drones over your own country, over your city. Imagine hearing exploding homes in your town, maybe few homes away. Imagine unmarked millitary men going through your street and home with their rifles scaring your children. Imagine that your children would refuse to play outside when it isn't cloudy, because they're afraid of blue skies. You cannot, can you? Would you feel safe and glad?
Imagine foreign powers overturning your democraticaly elected leaders and instead putting in their puppets, all for profit again, of course.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CIA_controversies
I'll now let Carl Sagan talk on the topic:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/BYdxFKTYJIQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWPFmdAWRZ0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KcoPODwvW4
And Charlie Chaplin:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8HdOHrc3OQ
With 5+millions of millitary contractors and many more employees, many of them here, maybe this quote will fit.
"It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It"
Except it hasn't been. Pinker's "long peace" theory with respect to global conflict is bad statistics - 20th-21st century under US military hegemony had a comparable if not higher number of conflicts, see Max Roser’s work documenting global conflicts over the past 600 years. What has changed is that war now is generally shorter and less deadly especially towards combatants, but that's more reflective of the pace of modern war enabled by modern weapons. High intensity wars don't last for 20+ years anymore because you can pretty much destroy nations in 1-5, and belligerents are quicker to exhaust and forced to settle. In aggregate war fatalities is down, but not # of conflicts. US hegemony didn't stop USSR and RU from warring in their periphery, nor PRC border skirmishes pre 90s when US had vast more naval power asymmetry. When countries want to fight for their interests, especially regional, they still do. His conjectures on QoL indicators around the world are improving, and we can credit some of that to US/western innovation, but it’s also a byproduct of technology disseminating as societies develop.
As for the opinion of your colleagues, consider some sort of self-selection bias happening - I've not met many from PRC that don't think China needs better military and regional hegemony to forward her interests the same way US does hers, especially post Belgrade embassy bombing in 99 by US/NATO. And frankly even among PRC diasporas, most people I know except very liberal types are increasingly unabashedly pro PRC military power - they’re just too polite to say so. See how PRC students in the west generally become more pro China the more they’re exposed to western society. Many are smart enough to not voice "objectionable" opinions.I can't speak for RUs.
Ultimately, US military dominance is good for US+LIO interests, but hard to extrapolate anything more. IMO multipolarity will increase the chance of "smaller" conflicts as poles assert their own interests for sure, but it's going to be around the baseline of conflicts that's consistently been simmering throughout history. The fear is increasing large-scale conflict between poles/blocks - ending the cyclic gap between major wars among major powers - but that's what happens when declining hegemon pushes their interests to the exclusion of others too intensely for too long.
The Vietnam War began under one Democrat, escalated and spread beyond Vietnam under his Democratic successor, and then under a Republican. It was ended by another Republican.
The Persian Gulf War was entirely a Republican affair.
The Bosnian war and the bombing of Serbia were overseen by a Democrat.
The "war on terror" was started by a Republican who invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and continued for nearly 8 more years under a Democrat.
democrats are centrist relative to the left.
Ignoring the whole background of Korea, it's occupation by Japan, and split at the end of WW2, the Korean War began when the North invaded the South.
For Vietnam, the war ended when the North Vietnam 'won' and the South collapsed.
Antiwar sentiments existed for many of these, though it's notable that considerable anti-war sentiment in the US against entry into WWII had a distinctly hard-right flavour to it. Not all anti-war sentiment, as there can be many possible motiviations, but in this specific case, domestic groups sympathetic with (and often orchestrated by) rightest European belligerents had an outsized role.
The anti-war movement of the 1960s and 1970s became associated with Democrats as that party swung leftward and shed its own long-standing Southern affiliations, and grew our of anti-nuclear and civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s, all of which saw Vietnam specifically as an unjustified and unjust war, with considerable merits to that viewpoint.
Painting pro- or anti-war sentiments as distinctly left or right, or aligned with either of the two present major parties is not historically accurate and misses considerable nuance.
And ended by a Republican
It's not necessarily meaningful to call one party more or less hawkish than the other. It often comes down to the leader, era, and coalition behind them. Bush/Cheney were definitely more aggressive than Gore would have been, but HRC was positioning herself to be much more hawkish than Trump ended up ruling as. That's why in the post-2016 era many infamous hawks like Bill Kristol and David Frum have been Democrat-aligned.
You might be mixing up anti-imperialism with antiwar sentiment. In the past, the 2 were typically hand-in-hand due to the geopolitics of the day, but it is not a given - depending on the circumstances[0].
It's interesting how the American right is also taking up an anti-war stance, while maintaining pro-imperialist attitudes[1]
0. Cf. The left's attitude towards the Vietnam war vs. the Apartheid government in South Africa.
1. With Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and the "peace with North Korea at all costs" under Trump
Republicans are a lot more interested in the militarization of the pacific and southern border.
As left people gain political maturity, they understand that those in power will not give up their power willingly, so force is required.
As a liberal person I am suspicious of any liberal who does not believe in gun rights, and I am even more suspicious of a liberal person who does not believe in unions, which is the 2nd amendment of labor rights. Neither the 2nd amendment nor unions can be used for their purpose within the bounds of the law.
Believing in human rights means believing in defending human rights with force, otherwise what is to stop someone from violating human rights?
If a powerful person uses their power against you, your choices are submit or fight. Leftists are slowly understanding:
1. There are powerful people
2. They will arbitrarily use your power against you
3. Those people use their power to influence law so the law will not protect you
4. You can't solve this problem within the bounds of the law
It also assumes that such disagreements require force to be resolved, and that's just demonstrably not always true. Even if it sometimes is.
Truman, Johnson, Clinton, Obama, etc.
The only difference between now and the 70s is that the politicians have more control over the left.
The Carter presidency is in the running for the most peaceful modern presidency. He did start arming the rebels in Afghanistan, and ordered what I guess amounts to a brief invasion of Iran, but overall, pretty peaceful. It's either him or Trump.
Antiwar doesn’t really make any sense because you can’t end wars without fighting in wars. Or surrendering but that proves the “doesnt really make sense” point. It also just encourages more wars in the future. There can be diplomatic solutions but you still have to embrace the war until then.
It requires fiat control of the situation.
That control of sovereign entities can only be attained by threat or actualised violence.
Putting it another way.
That you even consider yourself entitled to tolerate a sovereign nation requires that you believe you are entitled a degree of control it.
Anti-war thinking requires not just that you consider war a last resort. But you consider that you have no option at all. War is not another just lever.
If it is then you do not have anti-war beliefs you just are more adverse to it than some hawks.
COVID is similar; Trump fucked it up because everything he touches turns to shit, not a surprise. Biden continues to fuck it up to this day and... crickets from Democrats.
Thankfully, Biden is doing the right thing, very skillfully, with Ukraine. I wish he could get it together on domestic policy. Making his bumblefuck COVID czar his chief of staff was a incredibly bad decision, though.
As an "anti-war leftist", I find myself cheering on the assistance to Ukraine, as that is the first war in my memory that seemed worth fighting.
Still no love for the Military Industrial Complex though...
what is there left to do on COVID? The healthcare system is not collapsing and lockdowns have ended. Remember, the lockdowns where there only to prevent the healthcare system from collapsing. We even have vaccines and a host of other treatments widely available. If you're expecting total eradication of an airborne respiratory virus I don't think you're being realistic.
In what way? Don't get me wrong, I think Biden sucks. But when wearing a mask became an issue of deepest political ideology before Biden was elected, it's a tough task to change public opinion when you're a politician.
> Six House Republicans and one Independent joined 126 Democratic members of the House of Representatives in voting NAY. In the Senate, 21 Democrats, one Republic, and one Independent courageously voted their consciences in 2002 against the War in Iraq.
https://www.thoughtco.com/2002-iraq-war-vote-3325446
Worth mentioning among the NAY votes is Barbara Lee representative of California’s 12th congressional district (9th during the vote) who has announced she’ll be running to take Dianne Feinstein’s (who voted YAY) seat in the 2024 senate race, and is a favorite among many progressives (i.e. left wing Democrats).
What does helping Ukraine defend themselves have to do with 'war fervor'?
Putin invaded Ukraine in 2014 and Obama/Trump reaction was to ignore it - which directly resulted in a much bigger war.
The US Military Industrial Complex is why there are no wars against rich allied states. If Ukraine were part of the system and had a well managed, functional military - Putin could not have invaded, in fact he never would have tried.
For me: the manner in which it is done (the rhetoric in media, etc).
That's why it was so important that it come from someone like a 5 star general and Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe during World War II. No one was going to mistake Eisenhower for a tinfoil-hat wearer, a pacifist, or an appeaser.
So I think that instead of "Afghanistan" we should call it "Lockheed's War" or something like that.
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron." Eisenhower
There are, however, plenty of people who say with a straight face wAr Is GoOd FoR tHe EcOnOmY
Important in this ideology is that flying a boeing into a building and killing 3000 people is not bringing war to your doorstep.
Furthermore, this is a bit of a counterfactual as we don't actually know the trajectory of technology without the war. Some thing we know for certain though, mass electrification and public health were well underway before the war and continued through it. These being probably the two most important developments that improved productivity and the quality of life for most people.
People who fought in and justified WWII contrasted it with WWI. The claim being that WWI was a war fought on behalf of the old world system. And WWII was a true war for Democracy. I think it would've been very hard after that kind of mobilization, sacrifice and rhetoric to re-instute the Gilded Age ethos of a system which the rules of the game were sacred about the outcomes.
In this way American Democracy is born of the FDR era. I don't mean this in the narrow sense of the size of the electorate though that is important. At every level, America's systems Democratized. From the way the Supreme Court interpreted the law, to the choices of industry in what to produce, to how the rewards of production were distributed. There was a broad transition from the notion that institutions existed to maintain rules towards a notion that these institutions in their largest sense needed to serve the people.
I think a lot of what has happened since 1970 is a transition back to a way of looking at the world through the pre-democratic lense. The biggest difference being that now there is a plurality which is the upper half of the middle class who have some similar interests to the wealthy in protecting their wealth.
I agree although I believe that the upper middle class and the capital class still don't actually have similar interests if you think about things that are actually in the upper middle class's best interest. In the context of a propaganda model (1), most people just aren't exposed to opinions that even align with their true economic interests. They are often exposed to opinions that actually kowtow the economic status quo that benefits the existing elite establishment more than anything. Mass media has been able to stratify labor: it has divided the working poor among right and left on cultural considerations versus unifying it through economic arguments, and made the white collar class which still has to sell their labor for wages believe they are no longer of the working class, and have little need to organize themselves. Labor as a unified movement has been divided and effectively conquered. A sad state of affairs.
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There are conspiracy theories (which I don't believe) that the latter two were known, but deliberately permitted to happen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_Harbor_advance-knowledge...
The US was "properly attacked" -- and capital burned -- though whether they were attacked first is a matter of debate.
The 1880s.
And earlier, but then it was Britain being run by business interests, and the main reason for the US becoming independent was conflict between local and remote business interests. (Particularly, North American interests and regulation serving the East India Company.)
Hopefully the Republicans choose an adult this time who will not try that again but that is doubtful given the choices so far.
You may be interested in this pamphlet written by founding father Thomas Paine:
That's one way of looking at it. Another way would be: he made enough basic concessions to the working class to prevent an outright socialist revolution. We weren't very far from it at that point in history.
The welfare state is a safeguard. Every modern state has social supports, just like every modern road system has traffic control devices and other safety measures. The alternative, as we've seen repeatedly, is to allow unchecked profit motive to grind the masses down to the point that they start erecting guillotines.
He claimed to had stayed in the conspiracy long enough to find out the identity of the conspirators (owners of big america monopolies), and denounced their plans to the president.
These conservative groups were also heavily involved with extremist anti-communist and oft times pro-fascist efforts, even involving the CIA such as that covered by "The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government" [3] that shows how Dulles & Co. supported these same rightist American elites' business interests. One of these was Fred Koch - ie father of the infamous Koch Brothers, who expanded his campaign massively to this day.
Eisenhower's "Military Industrial Complex" final speech [4] actually was made because he was heavily pressured by these same groups to both profit from fighting the Cold War and as well as encourage its anti-communism to remove the threat to their wealth.
Anti-communism in the West can largely be viewed as wealthy businessmen being scared of getting their assets seized and making a long-term scare campaign to get the public onboard. I'm not saying I like communism at all, but their reaction was often very bad for the American people and the world in general, and it continues in forms to this day.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
[2] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/2751831
[3] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/24723229
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenhower%27s_farewell_addres...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1932_German_presidential_elect...
Communists on the other hand will seize their means of production.
Fascism and capitalism are complementary, communism excludes both.
— US Civil war: Rifles, telegraph, railroads
— World War 1: Optics, radio communication, aviation, tracked vehicles
— World War 2: Computers, cryptography, atomic energy, radar and microwave communication, global logistics (fuels, containerization, etc)
— Cold War: SPAAAAACE
Very apt then, & what a crazy topic! How the government has payed a ton of money to develop & purchase jets it basically doesnt/can't own operate or repair. Right to repair/upgrade at the highest level. A racket!
Just because people make fortunes from war doesn't mean that this is the essential characteristic of war. People make fortunes out of everything regardless of its cause.
War is a historic universal, and in fact it was most intense in pre-modern societies. Aboriginal cultures went to war not just for material reasons, but also for cultural reasons, ritualistic, and religious reasons. Long before we had organized commercial activity or opportunity for rackets we had warrior cultures.
The conspiratorial idea that war is largely driven by shadowy elites doesn't really hold up to anthropology. Far from it elites often even have to reign the flames of war in as populations whip themselves into a frenzy. The fact that war generally benefits few people, or sometimes even nobody at all doesn't imply that the majority of people weren't genuinely enthusiastic about it, although they'll typically deny it later.
Of course not, Bush jr and his administration made up a war right in public. That we had no business in the middle east is not conspiracy. That Bush wanted to go to war in the middle east is also not conspiracy. Those WMDs never existed, and they knew that, yet off to war we went. How is that not elites driving war?
Those are always just emotional excuses for gaining more power over resources. If you ignore incentives and take everyone's word at face value, then we're all saints and nary a sin has ever been committed in the name of some righteous cause. Mutual misunderstandings, is all, I suppose.
> People make fortunes out of everything regardless of its cause.
Author took care to mark the fortunes of companies at peacetime vs war time and noted that fortunes increased by an order of magnitude in some cases, as a result of war. If your net worth or social standing is due to jump one or two orders of magnitude as a result of a war or two, your subconscious mind will find more reasons than are rational to justify and support a war. You'll say it's to save your people. You'll say it's self-defense. You'll say it's necessary and just. You'll ignore any path to peace that might avert such a disaster, in particular if you never have to enter the fox holes yourself. That's the author's point.
Rackets aren't always some men conspiring to gain power or money or fame in smoke-filled parlor rooms. Often, they are emergent properties of incentivized systems.
> The conspiratorial idea that war is largely driven by shadowy elites doesn't really hold up to anthropology.
The only part that is wrong about that statement is the idea of the elites being 'shadowy'. No, they conduct their racket right out in the public eye. This isn't a particularly insightful phenomenon, by the way. Power always follows a power law of distribution. Of course the elites are primarily responsible for war. If the elites are ever against war, it just means that the incentives of the moment are temporarily more favorable for peace.
As a blatant example, let's take the American Civil War for example. Well over 90% of white southerners didn't own slaves. So why would they go to war and lay down their life, by the hundreds of thousands, if they stood to gain almost nothing? Most of these kids were raised on subsistence farms and didn't even know how to read. Of course, to those boys it was a cultural cause, defense of their homeland, states rights, yadi yadi. That's what they were sold. But the ones really pulling the strings in that war, were the rich Southern elites, who did in fact own many slaves and stood to lose a great deal over Lincoln's election.
Again, this is true of the vast majority of wars and battles in human history. Pick your time and place in history.
It was explicitly to enforce the white mans superior position over the black man. That's what many confederate soldiers wrote about, that's what pastors gave sermons about, that's what the confederate government discussed in their legislative chambers. It wasn't even "states rights to own slaves", but explicitly that most of the southern population believed it was by god's will that the white man guide the black savage. They believed the north was morally wrong to elevate the black man as an equal. They were fighting to maintain their societal hierarchy.
And if you choose to discard all the other sides of the die, that's all there is to the story. Those words were spoken at various times. People earnestly meant them on some level. But it's not the whole picture. It's a flat, 2D perspective. It's jingoistic in the opposite extreme.
But what we do know from the so-called "War on Terror" (itself a propagandistic title), is that elites went so far as to even make up stories about fake nuclear weapons in order to drum up support for that war. We actually caught them in this blatant lie, for once. None of those people, of course, have gone to jail for it, but I digress. If you think that every war in history isn't similarly manipulated to drum up popular support, you don't know the first thing about war or propaganda.
But we also know, from a certain perspective, that in the wake of 9/11, there was some popular sentiment to do something in retaliation for the innocent lives lost. Nevermind that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. It was pitched as an extension of the War on Terror. And having been swept up in that, I can tell you, I didn't disagree with it at first either. The war was supported on both sides of the political aisle.
As for the Civil War, can you find damning documents if you look for them? Of course. But that doesn't tell you the whole story. My own brother was drafted into the War on Terror, not because he wanted to, but because he was a member of the National Guard. Similarly, in the South and the North and most wars in history: young men don't get a choice, they get drafted. If they don't go to war, and are fully capable, they get arrested or executed. Desertion is also punishable by death. But there's also softer influences. Your own brother is going to war, your cousins, your neighbors and best friends. Why wouldn't you go with them, to have their back? They would have yours, wouldn't they? Reciprocation is another extremely important influence in human psychology.
We actually have recordings of Civil War veterans taken from the early 20th century, when they were still alive: https://youtu.be/swifvJEOF6s?t=160
"I didn't feel much interest in it, because I felt kindly towards the darkers, and they were kindly towards me, and towards my family."
"Now, attending school, in Spring of '61, when news came war was declared...there was a rally among 75-100 boys at school. Well right then, about half of our pupils, boys around 18, quit school...I wanted to go too! But my father said I was too young, but if the war lasted long enough, you may have an opportunity."
"Well, so I rested. War began. And I heard about it. And I heard about at Williamsburg, some of my classmates fell in the battle there, and I grieved about it because the boys I had been brought up with. They were a little older than I, and I felt sorry they were killed."
"Then in 1862, General Lee began to need more men, naturally. Although the biggest battles had not come yet...I a boy, of 16 1/2 years old, joined a cavalry company."
"It was a great curse on this country that we had slavery, and I thank God that I did not bring up my boys and girls under a system of slavery which I was brought up under."
You can see in Howell's own retrospective about it. He was convinced it was about state's rights. He saw Virginia as his homeland moreso than even the U.S.A. In the 1860s, most men around the world would have done the same for wherever they resided, whatever tribe they belonged to, whatever monarch was in power and whatever cause was presented.
But that instinct that men have to fight for their tribe, well that has been tapped successfully by elites for millenia.
Source: New York Times.
https://www.nytimes.com/1931/01/30/archives/united-states-ap...
And to that matter, some of what brought the U.S. into the orbit of WWII was a lower key version of the kind of foreign policies of that earlier era. Disrupting Japanese interests in Asia was very much about economic benefit and power balance in the mode of realpolitik.
And in the end, the Roosevelt administration remains unique in American history for how hard it pushed against colonialism. Truman was much more aligned with British interests in this way than FDR. So while the war is justified in the name of stopping two monstrous regimes, its precursors and its aftermath do carry a fair amount of the same taint that Butler thoroughly observed in his time.
Even the example you've taken for WWII, UK and US weren't the aggressor. The war already at their door for British, so they had a little choice in it. Similarly for US they knew, if they don't do something early enough, they could end up being a victim or suffer from it eventually. So they had to support Britain in the war.
There are many wars where multiple sides are belligerent. There are wars where a side manages to profit or benefit from a conflict without appearing as a belligerent. And there are wars where it's not clear who the beligerent is.
In the French Revolutionary wars, France appears as the aggressor, as they declared war first. But they declared war as a pre-emptive to gain advantage in a conflict with Austria over Bourbon restoration that they felt sure would come. And judging by contemporary history (the partitions of Poland, the Hungarian rebellion, the Revolutions of 1848, etc), they were probably right.
There is the Franco-Prussian war, a war which was essentially desired by both sides.
Most civil wars rarely have a clear beligerent side with slow escalation of violence by multiple parties.
We are deep into the era of nationalistic propaganda so we are used to conceiving of wars as clear conflicts between two cohesive political units: one the aggressor and one the defender. But that is a concpetion mostly born out of our experiences in the 20th century and even then it is highly biased by the popular narrative of WWII.
All of them were completely devastated, while the US was largely unscathed.
I really wonder what the world would look like today if they'd managed to avoid this senseless war and/or the first World War.
Sadly, that is true.
> the US was selling weapons to the allies and making piles of money doing so
Indeed.
War Is a Racket.
“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.” - SB
We are told a version of things, and maybe that version is even mostly true, but I'm less sure about this now then I was when I was a kid in grade school.
(with the unstated assumption that the US was just in its choice to fight the Axis)
I actually don't think Smedley would have changed his message at all; I think he started from a false premise that he was 100% convinced of, and would have pointed at the enormous profits made by war industrialists in the US during WWII. He might not also notice that post-war US was the most economically productive country of all time, that it opened up huge options of African Americans, or even really recognize quite what motivated Hitler and the Nazis.
The USA started selling weapons to the allies long before it entered the war.
But what is undeniable is the US exited WWII in a very good position and lots of profits were made.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Butler's argument appears to be conflating two questions:
1. Does anyone unfairly profit from war?
2. Is the unfair profit the result of a racket?
I think few people would argue that the answer to #1 is "yes", but I don't think he's made a convincing argument that the unfair spoils of war are either necessarily or overwhelmingly the result of a racket.
Here I would like to note that the Butler's definition of "racket" is rather loose. The strongest interpretation of his definition, I think, is that a racket is something that is orchestrated covertly by few, for their own benefit, and at the expense of the many.
There is another word for this: a conspiracy. The American Heritage Dictionary has what I consider to be a fair definition for conspiracy: "an agreement to perform together an illegal, wrongful, or subversive act."
So to show that war is indeed a racket, Butler would have to demonstrate that one of two things is true:
1. War can only emerge from conspiracy
2. The overwhelming majority of wars have historically emerged from conspiracy
Demonstrating a conspiracy in turn is a two-part enterprise: (1) showing the act was illegal, wrongful or subversive, and (2) showing that a group of people agreed to perform it together. As far as I can tell, we are only shown instances of profiteering, and perhaps individual corruption in the form of draft-dodging and whatnot. This is outrageous, to be sure, but falls short of demonstrating that a "racket" is at play. And while I can think of recent examples of wars that do qualify as a racket (at least, IMO), Butler's more general claim that "War is (effectively always) a racket" seems like hyperbole.
It's no surprise the military didn't meet his idealistic expectations.
His awards were probably not legitimate. At the time, his father was the chair of the House Naval Affairs Committee, overseeing the budget of the Marines. E.g., one award was for a spy mission that consisted of taking a train incognito into Mexico.
His claims in "War is a racket" were designed to elevate his reputation as a truth-teller and good guy, an unwitting accomplice.
There are almost zero wars which are profitable even for the antagonist.
'Making needed weapons during war is exceedingly profitable' - yes it is, and often nations are in ruin after the fact, which will lead to profiteering like 'a racket'. And the proceeds will indeed go to very few.