War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it. –George Orwell
The late United States Marine Corps Major GeneralSmedley D. Butler is perhaps most famous for his post-retirement speech titled “War is a Racket.” In the early 1930s, Butler presented the speech on a nationwide tour. It was so popular that he wrote a longer version as a small book that was published in 1935.
Butler points to a variety of examples, mostly from World War I, where industrialists whose operations were subsidized by public funding were able to generate substantial profits essentially from mass human suffering.
The work is divided into five chapters: