War is a racket. It always has been.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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. . .<\/p>\n
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. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.<\/p>\n
\u2014Written in 1935 by Major General Smedley Butler (1881-1940)<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
A few years after General Butler exposed, in great detail, how war is \u201cconducted for the benefit of the very few,\u201d Pablo Picasso created his monumental painting Guernica<\/em> in response to the aerial bombing of a town by the same name in the Basque region of Spain. The bombing took place on April 26, 1937, during the Spanish Civil War. General Francisco Franco, with the aid of Hitler and Mussolini, bombed Guernica\u2014a stronghold of the Republican resistance to his fascist regime\u2014 into rubble. 1600 residents died and one of the most ancient towns in the region lay in complete ruin. It was to be a model for inflicting carnage by aerial bombing: Dresden, Hiroshima, Fallujah.<\/a><\/p>\n
Within days, the democratically elected Spanish Republican government commissioned Picasso to create a large mural for the Spanish display at the Paris International Exposition for the 1937 World\u2019s Fair in Paris. By mid-June, Guernica\u2014a huge grey, black and white painting, 11 feet tall by 25.6 feet wide\u2014was completed and on display. By September 1937, it appeared (free to the public) at the San Francisco Museum of Art, and in 1939 at the Museum of Modern Art, helping to bring the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War to the world\u2019s attention.<\/p>\n
General Butler exposed the lies and economic motivations behind all wars, however noble they may sound. Pablo Picasso exposed the truth about the inhumane and unspeakable atrocities of war\u2014the violence that often claims more innocent men, women and children than those in uniform. Today, the media sanitizes and hides the reality of war. Picasso\u2019s painting transcends the specifics of Guernica and the Spanish Revolution and becomes an iconic, universal statement about the horrors of all wars.\u00a0When I saw the painting in person in Madrid, I had to hold back my tears. And I was not alone. There were twenty or so people in the room, and we all viewed the huge painting in complete silence. Its message is powerful, visceral and devastating.<\/p>\n
The figures in the painting are symbolic and timeless\u2014only a single electric light bulb suggests a modern world. A woman screaming, her child\u2019s neck most likely broken, recalls a horrific version of the Madonna and Child. A dead soldier lays under the panicked, screaming people, clutching his broken sword, a useless weapon under the impersonal, technological assault from the air.\u00a0 As we look at Guernica, we could easily be looking at an American drone attack anywhere in the Middle East, or the video showing a U.S. attack on civilians released by Wikileaks.<\/p>\n