For anyone curious, Smedley Butler died in 1940[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smedley_Butler

To anyone just passing through the comments, the Wiki article on Butler is a worthy read. He was an interesting person.

The YouTube series Knowing Better had a very good episode about Butler and this essay too: https://www.yewtu.be/watch?v=74wrX8rKtzw

Which was probably good for his reputation. Some people die at the right time. Had he lived a bit longer he might have come out against entry into WWII, which would not have aged well.

He was an Anti-Fascist, but wanted to prevent a war with the Fascists. In fact, he was so Anti-Fascist, that the US Government apologized to Benito Mussolini on his behalf, and court-martialed him over his Anti-Fascist comments about Mussolini.

Source: New York Times.

https://www.nytimes.com/1931/01/30/archives/united-states-ap...

Sounds like he won a moral victory over the US Government and the Fascists, and then the US Government (ever full of contradictions) later helped depose the actual Fascists through the war he wanted to avoid.

Also, record of the apology from the Department of State.

https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1931v02/d6...

> He was an Anti-Fascist, but wanted to prevent a war with the Fascists

That's rich :) For all intents and purposes you're supporting it, you just like to support it while feeling morally superior.

General Rule: If a war is existential, then countries which want to keep existing usually find ways to turn down the "racket" aspects.

I appreciate the brevity but what exactly are you saying? That WW2 wasn't a racket? Is that your thesis here?

I'd interpret the question as: "given the copious evidence that the US did not enter WWII intentionally to make money for industrialists, is Smedley's thesis that all war is a racket reasonable? To what extent are humanitarian or democratic concerns as important as war profits in the decision to go to war?"

(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.

Maybe the US didn't enter WWII with the idea of making a profit. I don't know.

But what is undeniable is the US exited WWII in a very good position and lots of profits were made.

What does that matter though? Should we have bombed ourselves because germany and japan couldn't do it?

So, yes. You are saying "nuh uh smedly, ww2 was a proper justified fight"

Actually, the only thing I said above was that I think he started from false premises.

> given the copious evidence that the US did not enter WWII intentionally to make money for industrialists

The USA started selling weapons to the allies long before it entered the war.

The USA sold weapons to the allies largely because the president genuinely believe hitler would invade everything if not stopped. Congress wouldn't let him enter the war, because the US has a strong Isolationist vibe, but the President believed if we didn't go stop hitler in europe, hitler would eventually find his way to coming after the US and by that point we wouldn't have any allies left.

This is AFTER the allies attempted appeasement. If a foreign country wants to war, you can't not war. The only alternative is to roll over and accept new ownership, but usually new ownership disagrees with the people on how things should be done, so that "solution" largely isn't.

There was a period were Germany seemed unstoppable remember.

I'm referring to our entry into the war. That the US is an arms merchant is well understood- and didn't have the costs (to Americans) that Smedley describes.

Just because it's a racket, doesn't mean its unjustified?

WW2 was a fight against evils of an absolute and appalling nature.

A lesser evil against a greater evil. And then the lesser evil became the greater evil.

The US has death camps? The US was prepared to have 70 million citizens commit glorious smashed-jewel suicide rather than surrender?

Your facile equivalence is rejected with prejudice.

>Your facile equivalence is rejected with prejudice.

It's your facile equivalence, that because these specific things don't apply to the US, American imperialism was morally justified.

You could just read the Wikipedia article on American war crimes, or learn about how much of the Nazi's ideology was based on American eugenics and racial segregation, or take even a glance at the last several decades of American militarism throughout the Middle East, but I guess you won't.

And how do European countries view America's role in defeating Nazis Germany, or supporting NATO against Russia?

How would I know? Opinions are bound to be all over the map over that large a population.

The US absolutely had a purposeful genocide of native americans, and directly implemented prison camps and some property confiscation of japanese immigrants and citizens.

This is explicitly not a support of the parent's comment. The US was not great, and even had explicit segregation, but was not trying to spread it's own abysmal ideals to all of europe. Hitler was clearly trying to spread facism through all of europe, and eventually the world. His desire to do so was broadly popular in Nazi Germany, so the country's people were never going to stop him. Going to war to grind Nazi Germany into the dust was the only option. It is justified. We also didn't preempt anything. We sacrificed two sovereign countries hoping to avoid that war, which should be clearly not acceptable.

What would you expect?

I suspect he may have had a preemptive opinion on that even though he wasn't around any more when it started.

“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.

We are often told that the conflict in WW2 was a conflict between a clearly good side and a clearly evil side. While it's true one of the sides was certainly the a much greater evil, it would be disingenuous to hide the short comings of the "good" side. The USA was a country that at the time still practiced segregation, and was the only country to use nuclear weapons. The British, French and Belgian empires and their conduct in India and their African colonies was not far off from what the Germans were accused of. It's not good to whitewash these facts.

So, resisting attack isn't allowed unless you're pure as the driven snow? This is nonsense.

The points I am trying to make is that it isn't black and white as "resisting attack", and that the history that is taught shouldn't be whitewashed. The Indians fought in the 2 world wars for the freedoms of others while their own freedoms were not guaranteed under British colonialism. 1/6th of all the "British" forces in ww2 were Indian, while India was suffering British induced famines due to redirection of supplies and scorched earth policy of the British in the south east Asian theatre. Do you think it's fair to them to not acknowledge this fact and teach it in history?

We were talking about WW2. It absolutely was black and white. Trying to deny that is itself a despicable act, in the same spirit as Holocaust denial. Pointing to other acts of evil alters that not one whit.

I explicitly said the Nazis were evil. But please do not underplay the suffering of the colonial subjects of the allied powers. That is a despicable act.

I think it's complicated. I don't think Butler believed that every single war was unjustified. When reading 'War is a Racket', you have to look at the context of war in which we lived. He was too young to fight in the American Civil War. So his consistent experiences of war were those fought in America's most blatantly Imperial phase. Even compared to Vietnam, Iraq, etc, the wars of the turn of the century were cravenly driven by capital and imperial ambitions.

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.

There are always at least two parties involved in a war, an aggressor and a defendant. 'War is a Racket' is always true or war unjustified in case of the aggressor. Defendant usually doesn't have much choice in it.

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 always at least two parties involved in a war, an aggressor and a defendant.

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.

"told you so" — WWII was one of the best things to happen to the US from an economic standpoint. Before joining the war effort the US was selling weapons to the allies and making piles of money doing so. Post WWII the US had the largest economic boom in history.

It was also one of the worst things to happen to Europe, the Soviet Union, and Japan.

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.

This is one of the main reasons for our economic prosperity post WW II. You have room for a lot of excess in your economy when your global competition are all living in smoldering piles of rubble.

> WWII was one of the best things to happen to the US from an economic standpoint

Sadly, that is true.

> the US was selling weapons to the allies and making piles of money doing so

Indeed.

War Is a Racket.

Maybe "We may have been fighting the wrong enemy all along." - https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/36062/did-gen-p...