The Racket Thanks you for Your Service

Worshiping Instead of Questioning

All politicians, “Left” and “Right,” will pay some kind of homage to our fallen soldiers today. They will reference their “dying so that you could be free,” or variants upon that theme. The unquestioned message will be that their sacrifices were not in vain. They were heroes, and we should thank any living military personnel for their “service.”

Ever wonder why, even now with the deluded “Woke” Leftists in charge, that no serious discussion ever takes place about scaling back our bloated Military/Intelligence Industrial Complex? The misnamed “Defense” budget is always increased, by Republicans and Democrats. America’s number one business, for over a century, has been preparing for, advocating for, and fighting wars. The money doesn’t “defend” us from anyone, as witnessed by the decades long invasion through our continuously wide open southern border.

The Founding Fathers never intended for this country to have a permanent military force. They would be appalled by the Pentagon. Of course, you must have lots of soldiers in order to fight perpetual wars. So our corrupt leaders certainly need a powerful military, and unconstitutional intelligence agencies with secret budgets, to assure they remain in power. Witness the troops still assembled in Washington, D.C., to prevent another “insurrection” by citizens armed only with cell phones.

Our standing military force doesn’t represent the “people,” as the Founders intended those well-armed state militias to do. The patriotism we see at professional sporting events, on Fox News and other conservative media outlets, and in the halls of Congress, isn’t based on fond remembrances of the Boston Tea Party, or Lexington and Concord, and it doesn’t extoll the timeless principles in the Declaration of Independence. Instead, it’s the patriotism born under the leadership of our greatest tyrant, Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln despised the Founders, especially Thomas Jefferson. They would certainly have despised him. Once the Constitution and Separation of Powers was eviscerated during the War Between the States, the system the Founders devised was gone. The guiding principle of the War for Independence was the concept of the consent of the governed. Clearly, in 1860, those southern states who wanted to secede no longer consented. When Lincoln and the already growing federal government forced them to stay in the Union, the reason for our founding disappeared.

The false flag of “Remember the Maine” ushered in American imperialism abroad in the Spanish-American War of 1898, as well as the future false flags we’ve all come to know so well. Then early globalist Woodrow Wilson sent American boys to Europe “in search of monsters to destroy,” as John Quincy Adams warned against, and the United States the Founders sacrificed their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor for became a relic of the past.

Memorial Day is devoted to honoring those who “sacrificed.” But you won’t hear a mention of those Founders, who did indeed sacrifice everything for the principles this country was built upon. You won’t hear much about the Revolutionary War soldiers, or even George Washington, who like many early American leaders, was no armchair chicken hawk. He led the troops in battle, and was subject to the same deadly risks. Memorial Day is no different from any other day, in terms of the Founding Fathers being depicted, when they are mentioned at all, as hopeless dead White racists.

Instead, Memorial Day is a collective tribute to all the soldiers- and all families have them in their ancestry- who were killed in one of our countless battles. The presumption is that, the reality of their dying on the battlefield automatically bestows heroism on them, and in essence validates the reasons behind our involvement in that particular war. When Donald Trump caused a ruckus last year by questioning, in his typical clumsy, inarticulate way, just what these soldiers died for, he was absolutely right. The pomp and pageantry, and the flag-draped coffins, distract the masses from the sorrow they should feel, especially for their own loved ones.

A few of those who suffered the most personal loss imaginable, like my friend Cindy Sheehan, get it. Cindy blanches at the notion that her son Casey, killed senselessly in “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” died heroically. The family of ex-NFL player Pat Tillman likewise refuses to be persuaded by elegies to their fallen loved one. Tillman, like untold numbers of other American soldiers, was killed by “friendly fire” from his own troops. That doesn’t make for a suitable story on Memorial Day. As Oliver Stone showed in his film Platoon, this kind of horror is all too common, and rarely discussed.

It’s hard to have a genuine peace movement when those running this Banana Republic insist on celebrating past wars, and present military personnel, on a constant basis. Americans have fallen for the same hackneyed demonization of various foreign bogeymen and nations for well over a century now. The only war that was widely questioned at all in this country was the Vietnam War. But the hippies and future yuppies who led that counterculture movement seem generally pretty cool with the nonstop, pointless bombings and occupations of small countries for more than thirty years now. Where are the large anti-war marches protesting our years in Afghanistan? Our occupation in and embargoes against Iraq, which killed so many civilians?

I admit that I’ve never understood the military mindset. I don’t think I could ever kill somebody who wasn’t attacking my family. I mean no disrespect to those in the military. I hear from many who’ve read and like my work. I just wish Americans would understand how foreign a concept “Uncle Sam” and “Johnny Doughboy” and “Victory Gardens” and “Buy Bonds” would be to those who fought for our Independence. The nearly 7,000 who died in the Revolutionary War (a microcosm of those who would fall in every senseless conflict to come) certainly didn’t die so that their descendants could bomb infant formula factories and help bring illegal drugs into this country.

The greatest peace activist of all time, General Smedley Butler, produced the timeless little 1935 book War is a Racket. As Butler described it, “I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers.” Butler had a birds-eye view of World War I, and understood clearly that war was not about enemies, but opportunities for profit. It still isn’t about the “endless series of hobgoblins” H.L. Mencken mentioned as being the driving force behind modern politics.

Smedley Butler was Huey Long’s prospective Secretary of War, which he announced in the Kingfish’s posthumously published My First Days in the White House. Butler considered it the greatest honor of his life. As Butler noted, “Three steps must be taken to smash the war racket. 1. We must take the profit out of war. 2. We must permit the youth of the land who would bear arms to decide whether or not there should be war. 3. We must limit our military forces to home defense purposes.”

Huey Long was assassinated in 1935, just after announcing his presidential candidacy. Butler died at a relatively young age, before our entrance into World War II. There have been other prominent voices for peace since then. Senator Robert Taft was a strict noninterventionist who was screwed out of the 1952 Republican presidential nomination by the same “Wall Street and the bankers” Butler wrote about. John F. Kennedy was arguably the only pro-peace president we’ve had since the early days of the Republic. We all know what happened to him.

Where are the voices for peace now? Cynthia McKinney was run out of Congress by the powerful Israeli lobby, which controls our disastrous modern foreign policy. Dennis Kucinich has left politics. Pat Buchanan never had a chance. The majority of the American public has always been more receptive to the parades featuring processions of military veterans, flag waving, and fiery speeches from politicians who never saw a battlefield, than to the most eloquent words of the Smedley Butlers. They aren’t swayed by the beauty in JFK’s American University speech, which was the greatest plea for peace ever spoken or written by a U.S. politician.

I’ll eat hamburgers and hot dogs today, without a mask. But I won’t pretend that any soldier who fought for this country, from the Civil War on, did so for reasons other than to further the financial and political interests of diabolical forces. If they died for our freedom, it was in vain, because our own leaders, not the foreign hobgoblins they fought, are doing everything they can to eliminate our civil liberties. Exactly what is any American soldier fighting for today? Black Lives Matter? Cancel Culture? The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)?

Harry Patch, the last surviving World War I soldier, said it best when he declared, “War is organized murder and nothing else.” Why are we celebrating the criminal slaughter of so many youngsters, past and present? They died only to increase the fortunes and power of the evil people who have all but destroyed this country.