Sunday, May 31, 2009

Jewish Anti-Semitism Towards Jesus and Christianity


Jewish Anti-Semitism Towards Jesus and Christianity
Published May 10, 2009

ANTI+SEMITE

Any person with 3 functioning brain cells and paying even a microbe’s
worth of attention to the open assault on Christianity these days by
organized Jewish groups will assume it to be either a trick question or
a joke of some sorts, meaning the publication in the Jewish Forward
(considered to be the most “prestigious” of all Jewish newspapers
littering the American literary landscape these days) of Jay
Michaelson’s piece “Do Jews Have a Jesus Problem?”

–And with good reason. After all this–the heyday of highly-publicized
Jesus–bashing on the part of Jewish groups–is as rare these days as the
Jewish state’s denials of having deliberately used phosphorus against
Palestinian civilians in her recent masterpiece in Old Testament
butchery known as “Operation Cast Lead”.

Lest we forget, this is the era when nice Jewish girls like Sarah
Silverman make as part of their shtick that infamous “I hope the Jews
did kill Christ…I’d do it again. I’d f****** do it again—in a second” as
well as the recent tv production in Israel put together by her cousins
where the mother of Jesus was depicted as a woman who slept around and
pleasured herself with an assortment of sexual-gratification devices and
Jesus as an obese slob too heavy to walk on the sea of Galilee.

Nevertheless, in this day and age where Jews are “living large” in their
obvious distaste for the person of JC, the Forward’s Jay Michaelson asks
in the most serious of tones that question concerning Jewish antipathy
towards the Son of Man that to all but the truly uninformed is a
no-brainer of sorts. Of course, it is not an exploratory piece meant to
discover the yeas or nays of such a thesis, but rather as a way of
introducing the idea “Yeah, we Jews certainly do have a “Jesus problem”
and are completely justified and now you’re going to find out why and if
it offends you well then too fuckin’ bad.”

Of course Michaelson is not as brash or incautious as to use brusque
language like that. Rather than the overtly-violent approach in
violating the reader’s mind, he prefers instead that tried-and-true
date-rape drug, meaning the various methods perfected by his cohorts in
Hollywood who for generations now have dominated the business of turning
the masses into asses through opinion-molding and laboratory-tested
means of persuasion. Specifically, the author prepares the reader for
the science fiction that is to follow in the typically-Jewish fashion of
depicting the Chosenites ALWAYS as the victim (never the victimizer) and
incapable of doing an evil act that results in some form of negative
blowback. Possibly aware of the fact that people these days are growing
increasingly weary of sitting through the same nerve-grating opera of
Jewish kvetching over their eternal persecution, he lets loose the first
salvo in his assault on historical accuracy with a joke of sorts–

“You’ll have to forgive us Jews for being a little nervous. Two thousand
years of Christian love have worn down our nerves.”



Immediately obvious (or at least should be) is that this is going to be
YET ANOTHER (imagine that) discussion of how terribly treated the Jews
have been throughout history and how “isn’t it just terrible” and “who
can blame them for their feelings” and “this is why you Gentiles are
getting what you deserve” whenever Jewish interests produce YET ANOTHER
(imagine that) movie, column or documentary slandering Christian
culture. Short of the never-ending commentaries and documentaries
concerning Jesus being gay or else merely a fictional character who
never existed, there is the legalese to deal with–the banning of
Nativity scenes at Christmas time while the most racist, extremist of
Jewish elements from the Chabad Lubavitch sect light their infernal
menorah at every public location in the US, including the White House
itself. Done in such a way as to immediately put the
organically-anti-Christian nature of “Jewishness” in its typical role
(meaning all the result of–you guessed it–persecution and suffering on
the part of the eternal victims) it continues in the same vein–

“That says it all, doesn’t it? The scars of anti-Semitism and missionary
activity, the pathos-drenched sense of humor, the contempt for
Christianity — this is certainly how I regarded our local majority
religion as I was growing up. When I was a child, Christianity was like
the big, stupid bully: at once idiotic, and overwhelmingly powerful.
Couldn’t they see how ridiculous their religion was? A virgin birth?
Santa Claus? An Easter Bunny? A messiah who got killed, but actually
died for our sins? And yet, these were the people running our country,
telling us which days we get off from school and which we don’t, and
playing their insidious music every winter.”

As stated earlier, just like with all things involving the delusional,
bizarre- mundo world of Jewish thought processes, where everything is
upside down, backwards, convoluted and–pardon the French here–just plain
“effed” up, any discussion of Jewish contempt for Jesus Christ and the
religion/culture He founded must, repeat MUST be cast–not in the light
of historical accuracy and honesty, but rather in a
carefully-constructed drama Jews find most comfortable–meaning where
persecution, persecution, and even more persecution are the main
characters, along with all the other major players and themes
contributing to their history of suffering and woe–Anti-Semitism.
Bigotry. Intolerance. Them as the sacrificial lamb, having NEVER done
anything obnoxious, criminal, or offensive that might have acted as the
catalyst responsible for bringing the present situation into existence.
No examination of conscience on their part to see what THEY may have
done to contribute to the situation, nor even a consideration of the
possibility that in some way they were–dare we use the word
here–culpable and that the bed they now lie in is one of their own making.

Of course, those who remember even a smattering of what they heard in
Sunday school or who have spent even a moderate amount of time reading
through the New Testament understand full well that the entire premise
upon which the backwards piece appearing in the Forward rests is one of
pure fantasy and selective memory on the part of a person living in a
state of denial and obviously with something to hide when it comes to
the history of his people. The Jews and their “Jesus problem” did not
begin with the mean old “big, stupid bully” Christians and their
“idiotic and overwhelmingly powerful“ religion who were “running the
country” and deciding “which days” school was cancelled and their
“insidious music every winter.” To believe that Jews’ “Jesus problem”
began with the Christians meting out revenge on the Chosenites because
of Jesus’ crucifixion can take place only amongst those wearing special
3-d type glasses blocking out mountains of relevant historical fact
while allowing relatively small amounts of over-inflated fantasy to pass
through.

But then, we must take stock of the fact that this is 2009, a
continuation of the “Jewish century” (as Jewish writer Yuri Slezkine
wrote in his book of the same name), an age where reality-shapers in
media, academia, politics or wherever can create just about any illusion
they want and make it appear real. Where the murder of over a million
Iraqis in the span of just a year is swept from human consciousness as
if mere microbes of sand. Where Jewish math–no matter what the
equation–always adds up to “6 million” (and even in the face of
scientifically impossible criteria) and where Hollywood produces
blockbuster movies such as “Independence Day” the star character of
which is a Jewish nerd who invents a computer virus and with it saves
the entire human race from an apocalyptic alien invasion.

The truth is, going through the motions here and bringing some
historical sanity back into the discussion of Jewish hostility towards
Jesus is for all intents and purposes probably a big waste of time.
After all, Christians today have fully infused into their thinking the
idea that the people (and mindset) responsible for murdering JC are
still God’s favorite creatures, all their past deeds (including
genocide) notwithstanding. Today’s “Jesus Freaks” (as they are viewed by
Jews) are (obediently) more worried about Ahab the Arab then they are
about today’s great, great grandchildren of those who swore a blood oath
20 centuries ago to wipe out the new religion based on the virtues of
peace, justice, and compassion. For sure, this present concoction known
as Christian Zionist Dispensationalism is a madness that has but one
cure which we cannot deliver here, meaning death and standing
face-to-face with Jesus Himself as He explains what perfect morons His
supposed followers were for handing the keys to the kingdom over to the
barbarians at the gate.

Nevertheless, for the sake of posterity, here we go all the same.

The beginning of the Jews and their “Jesus problem” FAR predates any
such “persecutions” they claim to have suffered in succeeding centuries.
Truth be told, the sad story begins with Herod (called “King of the
Jews” in his time) who sent his personal butchers out to kill all the
little boys 2 years old and under in Bethlehem upon hearing that the
Messiah had arrived, threatening to undo the Jewish power structure at
that time. Following this late-term abortion on a mass-scale business,
some 30 years later we have Jesus announcing Himself and his intentions,
specifically to “bring freedom for the prisoners” and to “release the
oppressed.”

And what was the reaction on the part of these innocent,
pure-as-the-wind-driven-snow/righteousness-loving Jews who had such
close communication with the Almighty that they could claim in the most
chauvinistic way they were his “Chosen” people? Did they welcome Jesus
and His message of truth, justice and compassion? Did they fall on their
knees and rejoice that indeed God had made good on His word and had sent
them a savior to rescue them from their miserable, self-aggrandizing,
obnoxious, violent, haughty behavior?

Perish the thought fellow earthlings. Their response was to form a mob
and attempt to eliminate the person of Jesus by throwing Him over a
cliff to His death. So much for Jewish hospitality and open-mindedness
they are constantly crowing about.

That pretty much set the tone for the next 3 years that were to follow.
How many times had they taken up stones to kill Him? How many times had
He remained in Galilee, far to the north, knowing that the Jews in Judea
were waiting to take His life? Why is it He took only one Jew–Judas–into
his circle of trust and filled the balance with Galileans? How many
times did the Jews accuse Him of being a sorcerer and possessed by the
devil? It was a 3 year war between the Jews and Jesus that ended with
their conspiring to bring him up on false charges and have him killed.
They even plotted to have Lazarus–an innocent man Jesus rose from the
dead–murdered in the interests of undoing Jesus’ recent public relations
victory.

In that time period, there were no pogroms, no holocausts, no round-ups,
no expulsions…No yellow hats, no Star-of-David patches or numbers
tattooed on people’s arms. Jewish hostility to Jesus, or, as Michaelson
put it in the Forward, the Jew’s “Jesus Problem” began with their
rejection of His council and concern for their well-being, plain and simple.

And not just Him, mind you, but His followers as well. People like
Stephen, Peter, Paul, and the rest who preferred dying as free men to
living as slaves to the Jewish mindset. Stoned to death, crucified
upside down, beheaded. Those not killed were harassed, harangued, chased
from town to town and by whatever means possible deprived of their life,
liberty and pursuit of happiness.

Any sane person must ask certain questions here, not the least of which
is “How does someone NOT like this guy, this Jesus of Nazareth?” After
all, for 3 years, He healed the sick, gave sight to the blind, fed
thousands, brought the dead back to life and gave a particularly
neurotic group of people the answers they needed to live happy,
productive lives as ordinary citizens on planet earth to be followed up
with the grand finale, meaning eternity in the afterlife. How does
someone or a group of someones react with such hostility to such a
thing? What is this allergy they possessed (and continue to possess) to
certain virtues such as humility, forgiveness, forbearance and mercy
that would drive them to such madness?

The answer really is quite simple actually–Jesus and His message was
like an anti-biotic of sorts to the highly contagious/highly
infectious/highly pathological sickness known as Jewish thinking.

Remember that the Jews were (are) products of men such as Moses, Joshua,
David, Saul, Solomon, et al who gave them more bang for their buck then
the hated carpenter from Galilee. These men were the kinds of saviors
the Jews could appreciate. Moses brought death and misery upon the
Egyptians after Pharaoh discovered the wealthy and influential
Israelites were treacherous by nature and thus forced them to do honest
work for a living rather than engaging in speculation and despoiling the
Egyptian people of their life, liberty and property as the Israelite
Joseph had previously done. The “god” preached about and promoted by
these men was the kind of deity the Jews wanted, one who would bring
them riches, power, successful wars, plagues upon their enemies, etc,
etc, etc.

And then, along comes this Jesus of Nazareth–from Galilee, of all
places, considered to be an outland where only Gentiles would want to
live and a place from which “no good could ever come“. A CARPENTER to
boot, an occupation consigned for those who were enslaved by the
Israelites in the Old Testament. Did He bring the aforementioned riches,
power, successful wars, plagues upon their enemies, etc, etc, etc?

Of course not. He brought rebuke and criticism, a complete repudiation
of this central tenet of Jewish thinking which is “We are God’s chosen
people and can do whatever the f***we want to anyone and they better not
say a f****** word about it”. He brought humility, compassion,
righteousness, honesty, and the rest –”qualities” that the Jews had no
use for, and in the end, they had been Jewed out of the messiah they
felt they deserved and killed Him because of it.

And yet, in this discussion of the Jews and their “Jesus problem”, not a
MENTION of any of this from Michaelson or any of his fellow lying,
self-deceived Chosenites. No, their feelings for Jesus and His message
is all the product of the “persecution” they received from the mean old
“big, stupid bully” Christians and their “idiotic and overwhelmingly
powerful“ religion who were “running the country” and deciding “which
days” school was cancelled and their “insidious music every winter” and
NOT the tone set by their forefathers who dealt with Jesus and His
followers like a gang of thugs and terrorists.

“But wait!” the astute interject–“How can this discussion be taking
place in the first place? After all, this is the age where discussing
Jewish antipathy towards that “hewer of wood” from Galilee and His
teachings is verboten. When such discussion does take place–as logically
it should–the hounds of hell from all the various Jewish groups such as
ADL and SPLC descend upon the offending commentator for daring to
resurrect all those “old canards” and rip him to pieces with all the
usual business of “anti-Semitism”.

Of course, the obvious answer to this no-brainer question is as obvious
as stink on sweaty armpits. In the first case, Michaelson is a Jew
writing for a Jewish publication. That’s ok–The Jews can talk about
their less-than-favorable feelings for Jesus all they want and it’s a
case of “no worries, mate”, whereas when someone from outside the
Chosenite country club does so it becomes a case of “ALL HANDS ON
DECK–IMPENDING HOLOCAUST”.

The real irony (and insanity) in all of it though is exposed when the
same Jewish logic shoved down the throats of every human being over the
course of the last 60 years is applied to the whole mix. To be against
1, count ‘em, ONE Jew for whatever reason is to be an anti-Semite.
Thinking that convicted spy Jonathon Pollard should remain in prison for
having stolen and then sold to Israel over 1 million pages of
highly-classified material that led to the execution of over 1,000 US
intelligence assets makes one an anti-Semite. Believing the Rosenbergs
got what they deserved for selling America’s nuclear secrets to the
Soviet Union makes one an anti-Semite. Being outraged that the two spies
for AIPAC having the espionage charges against them dropped makes one
anti-Semitic. Noting the religious and national loyalties of individuals
with names such as Perle, Wolfowitz, Schumer, Abrams, Emmanuel, Feith et
al and noting the prominent role they played in pushing America into an
apocalyptic war against two Muslim countries makes one anti-Semitic.

However, being decidedly anti-Christian or having a “Jesus problem” (as
the self-aggrandizing bigot Michaelson put it in his recent Forward
article) does not make one an anti-Semite. This, despite the fact that
one of the notions Jewish interests are constantly shoving down the
gullets of Christians world-wide these days is that “Jesus was a Jew”
with the end goal of making gullible Christians believe these is a
kinship existing between them and their spiritual nemesis from the
synagogue when in truth there is not.

By definition then, to be against Jesus means to be an anti-Semite, and
by extension to be against even ONE–count ‘em, ONE of His 1,000,000,000
followers around the world means to be anti-Semitic as well. And yet,
with the same perfect hypocrisy that is the calling card of the Jewish
mindset, believing Jesus’ mother Mary was a prostitute who conceived Him
while menstruating is not anti-Semitic, but rather “progressive“.
Believing He “got what he deserved” in His crucifixion, that He was a
sexual deviant and sorcerer and suffers in hell by being boiled in a
cauldron of feces and semen is not anti-Semitic, but rather a case of
“freedom of religion“. Producing movies defaming Jesus and his followers
is not Jew-hatred. Rather, it is Christians getting what they deserve
for 2,000 years of Jewish “persecution”.

Not that any of this should be anything new. Again, at the risk of
repetition, if it is one thing history has taught it is that the Jews
and their Israelite predecessors–despite the high-sounding titles of
some of their publications such as ‘The Forward”–were, are and most
likely always will be the most backwards-thinking people ever to have
walked God’s green earth.

Besides Jesus Himself, perhaps it was the prophet Jeremiah (another
“anti-Semite” stoned to death by the Jews for his refusal to see things
“their way“ ) who said it best-

‘I will pronounce my judgment on these people (the Jews) because of
their wickedness in forsaking me…

Although you wash yourself with an abundance of soap the stain of your
guilt is still before me…

As a thief is disgraced only when caught, so too is the house of Israel
disgraced…they, their kings and officials, priests and prophets have
turned their backs to me and not their faces…

In vain did I punish these people and yet they did not respond to
correction…

Your sword has devoured your prophets like a ravening lion…

Even the worst of other women can learn from your ways…

On your clothes men find the lifeblood of the innocent poor, and yet in
spite of all this you dare to say ‘I am innocent!’…

These people are fools…They do not know me. They are senseless children
and have no understanding. They are skilled in evil and know not how to
do good…

Go up and down the streets of Jerusalem…Look around and search her
squares…If you can find but one person who deals honestly and seeks the
truth I will forgive this city…

Among these people (the Jews) are wicked men who lie in wait like men
who snare birds…Their house are full of deceit, they have become rich
and powerful and have grown fat and sleek and their evil deeds have no
limit…

They defend neither the orphans nor the poor…

Should I not punish them for this? Should I not avenge myself upon a
nation such as this?

Violence and destruction resound in her and her sickness is ever before me…

And yet, their ears remain closed and the word of the Lord is offensive
to them. They find no pleasure in it…

From the least to the greatest, all are greedy for gain, prophet and
priest alike, all practice deceit…

No, they have no shame at all and do not even know how to blush…

They cling to deceit and no one repents of his wickedness, saying ‘what
have I done?’

No one speaks the truth…They have taught their tongues to lie and they
weary themselves with sinning…

Therefore I will bring upon them a disaster they cannot escape and
although they cry out to me, I will not listen to them…

Do not pray for these people nor plead for them, because I will not
listen in the time of distress…

Instead, I will destroy them with the sword, famine and plague and will
pour out on them the calamity they deserve…

You have rejected me, so I will lay hands on you and destroy you, for I
can no longer show you compassion…

Your wealth and your treasures I will give away as plunder, because of
all the sins of your country…

I am against you, Jerusalem, and will punish you as your deeds deserve
and will kindle a fire in your forests that will consume everything
around you…

Through your own fault you will lose the inheritance I gave you, for you
have kindled my anger and it will burn FOREVER…


Friday, May 29, 2009

West plots to supplant United Nations with Global NATO



West Plots To Supplant United Nations With Global NATO

Rick Rozoff

nato67666.jpg


Stop NATO

Ten years ago it first became evident to the world that moves were afoot in major Western capitals to circumvent, subvert and ultimately supplant the United Nations, as the UN could not always be counted on to act in strict accordance with the dictates of the United States and its NATO allies.

At that time in 1999 the NATO alliance was waging what would become a 78-day bombing war against Yugoslavia in flagrant contravention of the United Nations and of international law in general.

As two of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council – the five permanent members being the main victorious World War II allies, with the People’s Republic of China having replaced the Republic of China (Taiwan) in 1971 and with Russia as the successor state to the Soviet Union – exactly China and Russia, not being NATO members states, opposed that war and in several other instances the use of sanctions and military force against nations targeted for both by the West.

The first indication that the United Nations was marked for marginalization, selective application (and exploitation) or even de facto dissolution, however, occurred three years earlier in 1996 when the United States single-handedly browbeat the other fourteen then members of the Security Council to depose Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali and replace him with Kofi Annan, who the preceding year had been appointed UN special envoy to NATO and authorized the NATO bombing in Bosnia behind the back of Boutros-Ghali.

Boutros-Ghali was deprived of the traditional second term for not authorizing NATO’s bombing of Bosnian Serb targets in 1995 and for speaking the truth about the deadly Israeli bombing of a refugee camp in Qana, Lebanon in the following year when 106 civilians were killed and 116 injured.

As former Clinton and Bush administrations’ National Security Council counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke acknowledged:

“[Madeleine] Albright and I and a handful of others (Michael Sheehan, Jamie Rubin) had entered into a pact together in 1996 to oust Boutros-Ghali as Secretary General of the United Nations, a secret plan we had called Operation Orient Express, reflecting our hope that many nations would join us in doing in the UN head.

“In the end, the US had to do it alone (with its UN veto) and Sheehan and I had to prevent the President from giving in to pressure from world leaders and extending Boutros-Ghali’s tenure, often by our racing to the Oval Office when we were alerted that a head of state was telephoning the President. In the end Clinton was impressed that we had managed not only to oust Boutros-Ghali but to have Kofi Annan selected to replace him.” [1]

By 1999, however, even having a UN secretary general handpicked and forced upon the world by Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright wasn’t sufficient to meet NATO’s requirements as it finalized plans for its first war, the Operation Allied Force aerial assault against Yugoslavia.

The US and its Alliance allies could not be assured of gaining a majority of votes in the 15-member Security Council to authorize the war and even if successful in that regard could not be certain that Russia, China or both would not veto the resolution.

So the United Nations, whose procedures and requirements for 54 years had been observed even in the breach, was now disregarded, downgraded and severely if not mortally wounded, not yet having recuperated from the blow of ten years ago.

American and NATO subordinate Annan officiated over the debasement and humiliation of the organization he headed and never once criticized NATO’s waging war without a United Nations mandate and in open defiance of the institution.

Guarantor Of Peace Versus World’s Only Military Alliance

The Preamble to the Charter of the United Nations identifies the purpose of the UN’s founding in 1945 as being “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind” and “to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security, and to ensure, by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest.” [2]

To accentuate and complete the message that NATO had launched its post-Cold War transformation from Euro-Atlantic military bloc to self-designated and sole international arbiter of conflicts within and between nations and of the authorization of extraterritorial military force, with the concomitant usurpation of the role of the United Nations, on April 23-24 NATO held its 50th anniversary jubilee summit in Washington D.C.

Unveiling what it called its new Strategic Concept, the summit also issued a Washington Declaration which inter alia stated “We are charting NATO’s course as we enter the 21st century” and “We pledge to improve our defence capabilities to fulfill the full range of the Alliance’s 2lst century missions.” [3]

Video clips and photographs of the summit at the time revealed what 21st Century NATO was intended to become: With the US’s Bill Clinton and Britain’s Tony Blair at the center of other world leaders, the flags of nearly fifty nations – nineteen full NATO member states, 25 Partnership for Peace affiliates and others – decked the auditorium. As did the NATO flag, a facsimile of a compass with its four arms pointed to north, south, east and west.

The message could not have been more clear, more irrefutable: A new world organization, an expanded version of a Western military bloc, was replacing that which had emerged from the smoldering ruins of a war that had cost over fifty million human lives.

NATO lost no time and spared no effort in implementing its plans for the new millennium. In addition to its military deployment in Bosnia the bloc continued its occupation of the Serbian province of Kosovo.

In 2001 it inaugurated a military deployment in Macedonia, Operation Allied Harmony, after armed invasions of the nation by an extremist offshoot of the NATO-allied Kosovo Liberation Army based in Kosovo, and later in the year it participated in the American invasion and occupation of Afghanistan where NATO continues its first ground war almost eight years later.

It insinuated itself into the Darfur region of western Sudan in 2005 and thus was simultaneously engaged in operations in three continents in that year.

Or as then State Department Deputy Assistant for European Affairs and later US ambassador to NATO Kurt Volker said of 2005, NATO was “engaged in eight simultaneous operations on four continents.” [4]

In the last five years of the 20th Century and the first five of the 21st NATO had evolved from a regional alliance based in Western Europe to a global force contending with the United Nations for the number and geographical range of the missions it was conducting.

That expansion in both extent and essence was not limited to frequently overshadowing and nullifying the role of the UN, but has also been a component in undoing the entire post-World War II order of which the UN was the cornerstone.

Results Of World War II Undone: Inauguration Of Post-Post-Yalta World

In early May of 2005 US President George W. Bush paid what the State Department must have intended as a “freedom crusade” tour to the capitals of two former Soviet republics, Latvia and Georgia.

The choices were deliberately selected to antagonize Russia, which has borders with both, as Latvia has disenfranchised millions of the minority residents of the country who are 40% of the total, especially ethnic Russians and other Slavs (Europe’s only “non-citizens”), and has permitted the rehabilitation of Nazi Waffen SS veterans as “defenders of the nation,” and Georgia has been a thorn in Russia’s side since its formerly US-based head of state Mikheil Saakashvili came to power on the back of the “rose revolution” of late 2003 with the assistance of US governmental and non-governmental funds and direction. That antagonism reached a breaking point last August with the five-day war between Georgia and Russia.

Bush overtly baited Russia in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi with comments like “Before there was a purple revolution in Iraq or an orange revolution in Ukraine or a cedar revolution in Lebanon, there was a rose revolution,” [5] “In recent months, the world has marvelled at the hopeful changes taking place from Baghdad to Beirut to Bishkek [Kyrgyzstan],” [6] and that thanks to Georgia, “freedom is advancing to the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea and around the world,” [7] as an image of his face was projected onto a giant screen in the background.

Earlier in the Latvian capital of Riga Bush delivered a blunt and unprecedented attack on the Yalta Conference of 1945 and its aftermath. The historical meeting of Britain’s Winston Churchill, the US’s Franklin Roosevelt and the Soviet Union’s Josef Stalin in February of that year was denounced by Bush with such characterizations of the summit as constituting one of “the injustices of our history,” which “followed in the unjust tradition of Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact,” and that “the legacy of Yalta was finally buried, once and for all” in 1991. [8]

This animus against the post-World War II system that evolved out of the Yalta and later Potsdam conferences remained a recurring motif for Bush, who in his last appearance as US president at a NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania in 2008 denounced “the bitter legacy of Yalta” and to demonstrate what the post-post-Yalta era was intended to be added, “I spoke those words on the soil of a nation on the Baltic. Today, on the soil of a Black Sea nation, I have come to see those words fulfilled. The NATO alliance that meets here this week now stretches from the shores of Klaipeda [Lithuania] to the beaches of Neptun [Romania].

“[O]ur Alliance must also decide how to respond to requests by Georgia and Ukraine to participate in NATO’s Membership Action Plan. These two nations
inspired the world with their Rose and Orange revolutions….

“As NATO allies fight…in Iraq and Afghanistan, our Alliance is taking on other important missions across the world. In the Mediterranean, NATO forces are patrolling the high seas…as part of Operation Active Endeavor. In Kosovo, NATO forces are providing security and helping a new democracy take root in the Balkans….NATO is no longer a static alliance….It is now an expeditionary alliance that is sending its forces across the world….” [9]

To understand the nature of this abiding, visceral, monomaniacal hostility toward what with a comparable degree of venom Zbigniew Brzezinski for years has contemptuously derided as the post-Yalta world, excerpts from a column by Indian journalist Siddharth Varadarajan immediately after Bush’s Riga speech of 2005 are quoted below.

“[Bush's] attack on Yalta shows the U.S. is not interested in cooperative security.

“Historians of the Cold War will not have missed the significance of President George W. Bush choosing Riga as the venue for his speech on Saturday repudiating the 1945 Yalta Agreement.

“[W]hen Mr. Bush said in Riga that Yalta was ‘one of the greatest wrongs of history’ because it traded the freedom of small nations for the goal of stability in Europe, he was not merely echoing Cold War dogma. He was also sending out a message to the world — and particularly to Great Powers like Russia and China — that the era of collective security established at
Yalta and later, at the United Nations, is decisively over. And that if the restraints placed by this system ever come in the way of U.S. national interests, they will be brushed aside.” [10]

Varadarajan included in his piece this quote from President Franklin Roosevelt on March 1, 1945 on the meaning of Yalta as it was understood at the time:

“The Crimea Conference was a successful effort by the three leading Nations to find a common ground for peace. It ought to spell the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries — and have always failed. We propose to substitute for all these, a universal organisation in which all peace-loving nations will finally have a choice to join.” [11]

The universal organization Roosevelt referred to only 42 days before his death was the United Nations, which would come into existence formally on October 24, 1945.

On the very day that Bush traduced Yalta and its legacy in Latvia, his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin said on the same topic, “I am deeply convinced that the essence of the 1945 Yalta accords was as follows: The anti-Hitler coalition’s leaders strove to build a new international system that would prevent the revival of nazism, and that would shield the world from destructive global conflicts,” explicitly mentioning the United Nations Organization and its Charter. [12]

Bush’s statement in Riga, “the significance of the venue” having been pointed out above, was calculatingly delivered in the capital of a country that has witnessed a disturbing revival of Nazi revisionism, apologetics, nostalgia and rehabilitation in recent years. Animosity toward the Yalta principles, including their most enduring institutional embodiment, the United Nations, means preferring in some manner what preceded the Yalta conference to what came after it. That either means the state of affairs in Europe before World War II or – that during the war years of 1939-1945.

Von Sponeck’s Warning: Subverting The United Nations From Within

This past February Hans von Sponeck, former UN Assistant Secretary General and UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq, wrote a probing indictment called The United Nations and NATO for a Swiss Journal.

It it he warned that “The world of the 192 UN member states has come to a fork in the road. One way leads to a world focused on the well being of society, conflict resolution and peace, i.e. to a life of dignity and human security with social and economic progress for all, wherever they may be as stated in the United Nations Charter. Down the other road is where the nineteenth century ‘Great Game’ for power will be further played out, a course which, in the twenty-first century, will become more extensive and dangerously more aggressive than ever.

“This road supposedly leads to democracy, but in truth it is all about power, control and exploitation.” [13]

Contrasting explicitly what the above excerpt had done tacitly, he remarked of his former employer and its would-be replacement:

“A comparison of the mandates of the United Nations and of NATO shows clearly how opposed the purposes of these two institutions are. In the 63 years of its existence, the United Nations mandate has remained the same.

“The United Nations was created to promote and maintain worldwide peace. NATO exists to assure the self-interest of a group of 26 UN member countries.” [14]

In a section of his article titled “21st century NATO incompatible with UN Charter,” von Sponeck added, “In 1999, NATO acknowledged that it was seeking to orient itself according to a new fundamental strategic concept. From a narrow military defense alliance it was to become a broad based alliance for the protection of the vital resources” needs of its members. Besides the defense of member states’ borders, it set itself new purposes such as assured access to energy sources and the right to intervene in ‘movements of large numbers of persons’ and in conflicts far from the boarders of NATO countries. The readiness of the new alliance to include other countries, particularly those that had previously been part of the Soviet Union, shows how the character of this military alliance has altered.”

“[T]he United Nations monopoly of the use of force, especially as specified in Article 51 of the Charter, was no longer accepted according to the 1999 NATO doctrine.

“NATO’s territorial scope, until then limited to the Euro-Atlantic region, was expanded by its member to encompass the whole world in keeping with a strategic context that was global in its sweep.” [15]

In a following section named “UN-NATO-accord: incompatible with UN Charter,” he exposed a clandestine accord signed between the secretaries general of NATO and the United Nations, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer and Ban Ki-moon, respectively, on September 23, 2008, which “took place without any reference to the United Nations Security Council.

“In the generally accepted agreement of stated purposes, one reads of a
‘broader council’ and ‘operative cooperation, for example in ‘peace
keeping in the Balkans and in Afghanistan. Both secretaries general committed themselves to acting in common to meet threats and challenges.

“The UN/NATO accord is anything but neutral and will thus not remain without serious consequences.” [16]

Shortly after the unauthorized pact signed behind the backs of the UN Security Council, in addition to the General Assembly, by NATO chief Scheffer and Ban, who has proven to be as obsequious toward and obedient to the interests of the West as his predecessor had been, the Russian press reported:

“Russia’s representative to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, said that in the document there is not a single word on the UN’s leading role in ensuring stability in the world.

“NATO and the United Nations have signed a new cooperation accord on prerogatives for UN member states – but have angered Russia by not telling them about it in advance.” [17]

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was similarly caught off guard and indignant alike, stating “”We knew that the UN and NATO secretariats were
drawing up an agreement. And we assumed that before the signing, its draft should be shown to the member states. But it never happened,” accusing Scheffer and Ban of operating secretly and in violation of UN norms.

“The Russian minister said that he discussed the problem with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. ‘I did not hear any reasonable explanations. It surprised me,’ said Lavrov….’We asked the leadership of the two secretariats what it might mean. We’re awaiting answers.’” [18]

Another Russian report added, “Russia has recently vented its displeasure over what it called the ‘furtive signature’ of a cooperation agreement between the secretariats of the United Nations and NATO, which took place late last month. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov complained that this country, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, was not even consulted on the matter.

“Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said recently that Moscow and other UN members had not been consulted on the essence of the UN-NATO cooperation agreement, although, he said, the document contained clauses that concern the prerogatives of UN member states.” [19]

A third source referred to Russian Foreign Minister spokesman Andrei Nesterenko who, in stressing that the surreptitious pact was “riding roughshod over Moscow’s interests,” affirmed that “a big question mark currently hangs over the professional skills of some UN officials, who try to involve the UN Secretary-General in covert activities.” [20]

An Azerbaijani news source added, “If the agreement, signed in September, is only confirming the status quo, it can be surprising why the information about it was not published on the NATO website, which even has a special section called ‘NATO’s relations with the United Nations.’ This fact perpetuates Russia’s perception of NATO as a hostile bloc.” [21]

In a news dispatch titled “UN and NATO team up behind Russia’s back,” Russian envoy to NATO Dmitry Rogozin – who was himself not informed of the backroom deal – said “NATO should fully acknowledge the UN’s universal role and not try to substitute UN functions.” [22]

In the article discussed earlier, Hans von Sponeck asked “Is the United Nations accord with NATO – a military alliance with nuclear weapons – in contradiction with Article 2 of the United Nations Charter, which requires that conflicts be resolved by peaceful means? Can UN and NATO actions be distinguished when three of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council are also NATO members? How can future violations of international law by NATO be legally prosecuted? Is an institution like NATO, which in 1999, without a UN mandate, unlawfully bombed Serbia and Kosovo, a suitable partner for the United Nations?” [23]

And in a section entitled “UN mandate makes NATO obsolete,” he finished with “Any evaluation of the UN/NATO pact must take into account that NATO is a relic of the Cold War; that NATO, as a Western alliance, is regarded with considerable mistrust by the other 166 United Nations member states; that a primary NATO aim is to assert, by military means, its energy and power interests in opposition to other United Nations member states and that the United States, a founding member of the NATO community, in the most unscrupulous ways, has disparaged the United Nations and broken international law.

“It is urgent that one or several member states petition the International Court of Justice to rule on the interpretation of the UN/NATO pact of 23 September 2008, in conformity with the Courts statutes.

“The people of the world have a right to request such a ruling and a right to expect an answer.” [24]

Think Tank Origins: NATO Undermining The UN From Inside And Out

The current US permanent representative (ambassador) to NATO is Netherlands-born Ivo Daalder, who like so many others of his type cut his foreign policy teeth in the Balkans in the 1990s. In fact he was the director for European Affairs on the National Security Council under President Bill Clinton, where he was in charge of Bosnia policy. Although a Clinton appointee Daalder criticized his chief during the 1999 war against Yugoslavia, calling for a ground invasion of the country in addition to the devastating air war.

The day after President Barack Obama announced the selection of Daalder for the NATO post, a news account from his homeland described him as a “liberal hawk” who was “a signatory to the January 2005 Project for a New American Century letter to Congress urging an increase in the number of troops in Iraq. The Project for a New American Century is a neoconservative think-tank linked to the American Enterprise Institute, where much of the foreign policy of the Bush administration originated.

“He often wrote about the right (or duty) of the international community to use military and humanitarian action to intervene in countries that fail to meet their responsibilities.” [25]

At the time of his nomination Daalder was a Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at The Brookings Institution. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

The day after the Dutch feature appeared, the print edition of Russia Today
television had this to say:

“Barack Obama’s administration sees NATO as the nucleus for a global
organization of democracies that will eventually replace the United Nations, believes an influential Russian newspaper [Kommersant].

“Washington wants NATO to expand by inviting counties like Australia, Japan, Brazil and South Africa and become a global organization tackling not only security issues but also epidemics and human rights….The next US Ambassador to NATO Ivo H. Daalder is a great supporter of this idea.

“Daalder, an expert at the Brookings Institution and a foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama during the election campaign, is a strong proponent of the so-called Concert of Democracies.

“The idea, coined by the think-tank Princeton Project on National Security, is that the United Nations is outdated….” [26]

The source added that “Daalder believes that NATO is a prototype of the proposed concert, being an alliance of democracies with a long success record, and can be extended to the new global organization” and that “a source in the White House [says] that Vice President Joe Biden is among the supporters of the Concert of Democracies.” [27]

As the American magazine Newsweek reported late last year under the headline Fighting Wars of Peace, “Vice President-elect Joe Biden called during the campaign for imposing a no-fly zone in Darfur and, a year earlier, advocated committing ‘U.S. troops on the ground’ if necessary. And Hillary Clinton, the incoming secretary of state, was a forceful advocate of the interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo during her husband’s administration.

“[A]s Ivo Daalder, [a] prominent Obama adviser, and Robert Kagan have pointed out, between 1989 and 2001 America dispatched significant military force to foreign hot spots so often — once every 18 months — that intervention became something of a standard weapon of U.S. foreign policy, and one with bipartisan support.” [28]

The genesis of the “war for peace” Concert of Democracies concept under NATO auspices and in opposition to the UN, at least as far as Daalder is concerned, may have been in a “guest” column in the Washington Post over five years ago called An Alliance of Democracies and co-authored by Daalder and James Lindsay, then vice president and director of studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

In the article Daalder and his colleague leave no doubt as to which institution global NATO stands in opposition to:

“An immediate problem is that the United Nations lacks the capability to make a difference. Its blue-helmeted troops can help keep the peace when warring parties choose not to fight. But as we learned in the Balkans, they cannot make peace where none exists. And as we saw in the 12 years preceding the Iraq war, the United Nations cannot enforce its most important resolutions. The deeper problem is that these reform proposals do not go to the heart of what ails the organization: It treats its members as sovereign equals regardless of the character of their governments.

“The idea of sovereign equality reflected a conscious decision governments made 60 years ago that they would be better off if they repudiated the right to meddle in the internal affairs of others. That choice no longer makes sense.

“Today respect for state sovereignty should be conditional on how states behave at home, not just abroad.

“We need an Alliance of Democratic States. This organization would unite nations with entrenched democratic traditions, such as the United States and Canada; the European Union countries; Japan, South Korea, New Zealand and Australia; India and Israel; Botswana and Costa Rica.” [29]

Analogous demands have been voiced over the past few years by former Spanish prime minister Jose Aznar, NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer and spokesman James Appathurai and US Republican Party candidates in last year’s presidential election Rudolph Giuliani and John McCain, alternately identified as an alliance, a concert or a league of democracies. In 2007 the now deceased US congressman Tom Lantos, at the time chairman of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, said that “NATO should seriously consider expanding into a global alliance including democratic countries such as Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and Israel,” and posed the rhetorical query “Would it not make the (NATO) Supreme Allied Commander feel more comfortable about upcoming global crises if he would have a NATO of a global reach?” To which the commander identified, Gen. Bantz John Craddock, replied: “From a best military advice perspective, it would indeed
be enormously helpful to have more democratic, peace-loving nations as part of the alliance.” [30]

The advocates of the ultimate “coalition of the willing” call for expanding NATO from its current 28 full members, 22 Partnership for Peace states in Europe, the South Caucasus and Central Asia, seven Middle Eastern and North African nations in the Mediterranean Dialogue, six Persian Gulf countries covered under the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative and several individual Contact Countries – in total over a third of the nations in the world – into a comprehensive, worldwide political-economic-military bloc with members in six of the world’s seven continents and with its eye set on the remaining one, Antarctica.

The nations targeted for the NATO-led Alliance of Democracies include Australia, Botswana, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, India, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, South Africa and South Korea inter alia.

From Design To Execution: Ivo Daalder

Daalder would follow up on this initiative two and a half years later, this time in a forum generously provided him by the International Herald Tribune, sister publication of the New York Times, the other main pillar of the American “free press,” and co-written by the Council on Foreign Relations’ James Goldgeier.

The piece in question, “For global security, expand the alliance,” states:

“NATO must become larger and more global by admitting any democratic state that is willing and able to contribute to the fulfillment of the alliance’s new responsibilities.

“Other democratic countries share NATO’s values and many common interests – including Australia, Brazil, Japan, India, New Zealand, South Africa and South Korea – and all of them can greatly contribute to NATO’s efforts by providing additional military forces or logistical support….”

The contribution is urgent because “NATO militaries are stretched thin by the many new missions they are called on to perform in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in the Sudan, Congo and other parts of Africa.”

The column raised the stakes to a degree that is deeply unsettling, fraught as they are with the threat of nothing less than world war.

“Collective defense, enshrined in Article 5’s dictum that an attack on one member is an attack on all, must remain at the core of an expanded alliance as it has in the past. For the United States, such commitments
elsewhere would not be novel, as it already guarantees, either formally or informally, the security of countries such as Australia, Israel, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea.

“[A]ll NATO members contributed to the grand coalition that reversed Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, which is not even a democracy. If Australia or Japan were attacked, would the European democracies simply shrug their shoulders?” [31]

Far more is involved than the deployment of troops, warships and warplanes to all parts of the globe on the arbitrary decision of the major NATO partners, as unparalleled a danger to the world as that is.

In speaking of Washington’s ongoing global missile shield program – one that could neutralize the potential for nations, Russia and China come immediately to mind, to maintain a deterrent or retaliation capacity and thus serve as an invitation for a first strike – in March of 2007 US Assistant Secretary of State John Rood asserted that planned interceptor missile sites in Poland and the Czech Republic “would be integrated with existing radar sites in the United Kingdom and Greenland as well as missile defense interceptors in California and Alaska,” adding that at the time some fourteen nations were already involved in the plans, including “Australia, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Israel, India, Japan, the Netherlands and Ukraine. Taiwan is also participating….

“[There] is a cooperative understanding among the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Australia, Israel, Italy and Denmark to conduct government-to-government and industry-to-industry missile defense cooperation.” [32]

The correlation between the non-NATO nations mentioned as members of a concert or alliance of democracies under NATO leadership and those being integrated into the global interceptor missile system is striking.

While still US State Department Deputy Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs and before being appointed Ivo Daalder’s predecessor as ambassador to NATO, Kurt Volker said:

“[A]s NATO is active in places like Afghanistan or Iraq or Darfur, we are working together with countries that share NATO’s values and that are capable of contributing to security, such as Australia or New Zealand or South Korea or Japan, and we would like to find ways to cooperate with these countries….

“Some countries which, from a geographic standpoint, see themselves as front line states, have a high interest in theater missile defense, and other countries say it’s something we ought to do….For the U.S. there is no such thing as theater missile defense because we look at missile defense in a global scale….” [33]

The complement to the above, popularly referred to as Star Wars or Son of Star Wars, is an even more dangerous threat: Space war.

Last November Russia, as it has routinely done for years at UN General Assembly meetings, urged “UN member-states to join the moratorium on the deployment of weapons in outer space.”

The nation’s ambassador to the UN, Vitaly Churkin, pointed out that “it is on Russia’s initiative that the UN General Assembly has been adopting resolutions, for many years now, aimed at the prevention of an arms race in space.

“The only one who objected to the adoption of this resolution was the United States – this was earlier this year.” [34]

Another report revealed that “Washington does plan to deploy its ABM system
elements in near-Earth orbits, and it is only Russia that can counter such plans.

“In the United Nations 166 countries have voted for the Russia-proposed resolution on measures to ensure transparency and build up confidence in space activities.” [35]

As with questions of war and peace, the United Nations is used by the US and its allies solely to punish weaker nations and if the UN would ever begin to function as it was designed to – including attempting to prevent the militarization of space – it will be bypassed and rendered powerless by a NATO-led “Alliance of Democratic States.”

As recently as a few days ago Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, on the sidelines of the foreign ministers meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference in Damascus, Syria, “express[ed] his country’s worries over giving NATO an international mission where it will be able to interfere anywhere in the world without permission from the Security Council, affirming that this is very negative and can undermine the basis of international law and the UN Charter.” [36]

NATO No Alternative To United Nations

Conceived during the waning days of the world’s most destructive and deadly war and born two months after the only use to date of nuclear weapons, the United Nation’s still bears its birth marks. 74 years later the five chief victors of World War II remain the only permanent members of the Security Council and alone have veto power. Three of them are founding members of NATO and all five are nuclear powers, hardly representative of the world community.

Not a single nation in Africa, South (indeed all of Latin) America and Oceania have such status.

Also, the 192-member General Assembly has largely been shunted aside in favor of the five permanent and ten rotating members of the Security Council, not to mention events of major world importance being conducted by the secretary general and other officials behind the backs of even permanent members of the Security Council as with last September’s agreement with NATO.

The General Assembly represents humanity not only on a day-to-day basis but in a more substantive and legitimate manner than ten of its 192 members on the Security Council at any given time. It must play a larger role in all deliberations.

A revived, robust, empowered and democratized UN must shift focus from a disproportionate emphasis on negotiating trade, treaty and other agreements in service to world commerce and in ceding vast tracts of the earth to interested parties under suspicious circumstances, as with the oil-rich Bakassi Peninsula to Cameroon and 2.2 million square kilometers of the resource-rich Antarctic Ocean to Australia recently, to what needs to be its main objective: Exerting all efforts to eliminate forever the scourge of war.

The record of the past thirteen years under the stewardship of Kofi Annan and Ban Ki-moon has been abysmal. Three major wars have been conducted by the United States and its NATO allies, the first against a founding member of the UN, Yugoslavia, while the organization made no meaningful efforts to prevent or halt them once started and has even legitimized them after the fact with assorted resolutions. Even UN resolutions following unauthorized wars are trampled on, as with the recognition by most NATO members of the illegal secession of Kosovo from Serbia last February, flagrantly contradicting UN Resolution 1244 which commits the UN to “Reaffirming the commitment of all Member States to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the other States of the region, as set out in the Helsinki Final Act….”

However, even with its manifold problems, the United Nations was intended to prevent the replication of the horrors of World War II which ended only two months before its creation. The world would hardly gain by having it further weakened, sidelined and in effect reduced to a hollow shell by an expanding military bloc that has already waged wars on two continents and set its sights on penetrating and dominating the entire world.

Thursday, May 28, 2009

WAR IS A RACKET


About the Author

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/document/document_20070723.shtml

CHAPTER ONE

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.

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.

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.

How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?

Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few – the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.

And what is this bill?

This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.

For a great many years, as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it. Now that I see the international war clouds gathering, as they are today, I must face it and speak out.

Again they are choosing sides. France and Russia met and agreed to stand side by side. Italy and Austria hurried to make a similar agreement. Poland and Germany cast sheep’s eyes at each other, forgetting for the nonce [one unique occasion], their dispute over the Polish Corridor.

The assassination of King Alexander of Jugoslavia [Yugoslavia] complicated matters. Jugoslavia and Hungary, long bitter enemies, were almost at each other’s throats. Italy was ready to jump in. But France was waiting. So was Czechoslovakia. All of them are looking ahead to war. Not the people – not those who fight and pay and die – only those who foment wars and remain safely at home to profit.

There are 40,000,000 men under arms in the world today, and our statesmen and diplomats have the temerity to say that war is not in the making.

Hell’s bells! Are these 40,000,000 men being trained to be dancers?

Not in Italy, to be sure. Premier Mussolini knows what they are being trained for. He, at least, is frank enough to speak out. Only the other day, Il Duce in “International Conciliation,” the publication of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said:

“And above all, Fascism, the more it considers and observes the future and the development of humanity quite apart from political considerations of the moment, believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace… War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the people who have the courage to meet it.”

Undoubtedly Mussolini means exactly what he says. His well-trained army, his great fleet of planes, and even his navy are ready for war – anxious for it, apparently. His recent stand at the side of Hungary in the latter’s dispute with Jugoslavia showed that. And the hurried mobilization of his troops on the Austrian border after the assassination of Dollfuss showed it too. There are others in Europe too whose sabre rattling presages war, sooner or later.

Herr Hitler, with his rearming Germany and his constant demands for more and more arms, is an equal if not greater menace to peace. France only recently increased the term of military service for its youth from a year to eighteen months.

Yes, all over, nations are camping in their arms. The mad dogs of Europe are on the loose. In the Orient the maneuvering is more adroit. Back in 1904, when Russia and Japan fought, we kicked out our old friends the Russians and backed Japan. Then our very generous international bankers were financing Japan. Now the trend is to poison us against the Japanese. What does the “open door” policy to China mean to us? Our trade with China is about $90,000,000 a year. Or the Philippine Islands? We have spent about $600,000,000 in the Philippines in thirty-five years and we (our bankers and industrialists and speculators) have private investments there of less than $200,000,000.

Then, to save that China trade of about $90,000,000, or to protect these private investments of less than $200,000,000 in the Philippines, we would be all stirred up to hate Japan and go to war – a war that might well cost us tens of billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of lives of Americans, and many more hundreds of thousands of physically maimed and mentally unbalanced men.

Of course, for this loss, there would be a compensating profit – fortunes would be made. Millions and billions of dollars would be piled up. By a few. Munitions makers. Bankers. Ship builders. Manufacturers. Meat packers. Speculators. They would fare well.

Yes, they are getting ready for another war. Why shouldn’t they? It pays high dividends.

But what does it profit the men who are killed? What does it profit their mothers and sisters, their wives and their sweethearts? What does it profit their children?

What does it profit anyone except the very few to whom war means huge profits?

Yes, and what does it profit the nation?

Take our own case. Until 1898 we didn’t own a bit of territory outside the mainland of North America. At that time our national debt was a little more than $1,000,000,000. Then we became “internationally minded.” We forgot, or shunted aside, the advice of the Father of our country. We forgot George Washington’s warning about “entangling alliances.” We went to war. We acquired outside territory. At the end of the World War period, as a direct result of our fiddling in international affairs, our national debt had jumped to over $25,000,000,000. Our total favorable trade balance during the twenty-five-year period was about $24,000,000,000. Therefore, on a purely bookkeeping basis, we ran a little behind year for year, and that foreign trade might well have been ours without the wars.

It would have been far cheaper (not to say safer) for the average American who pays the bills to stay out of foreign entanglements. For a very few this racket, like bootlegging and other underworld rackets, brings fancy profits, but the cost of operations is always transferred to the people – who do not profit.

CHAPTER TWO

WHO MAKES THE PROFITS?

The World War, rather our brief participation in it, has cost the United States some $52,000,000,000. Figure it out. That means $400 to every American man, woman, and child. And we haven’t paid the debt yet. We are paying it, our children will pay it, and our children’s children probably still will be paying the cost of that war.

The normal profits of a business concern in the United States are six, eight, ten, and sometimes twelve percent. But war-time profits – ah! that is another matter – twenty, sixty, one hundred, three hundred, and even eighteen hundred per cent – the sky is the limit. All that traffic will bear. Uncle Sam has the money. Let’s get it.

Of course, it isn’t put that crudely in war time. It is dressed into speeches about patriotism, love of country, and “we must all put our shoulders to the wheel,” but the profits jump and leap and skyrocket – and are safely pocketed. Let’s just take a few examples:

Take our friends the du Ponts, the powder people – didn’t one of them testify before a Senate committee recently that their powder won the war? Or saved the world for democracy? Or something? How did they do in the war? They were a patriotic corporation. Well, the average earnings of the du Ponts for the period 1910 to 1914 were $6,000,000 a year. It wasn’t much, but the du Ponts managed to get along on it. Now let’s look at their average yearly profit during the war years, 1914 to 1918. Fifty-eight million dollars a year profit we find! Nearly ten times that of normal times, and the profits of normal times were pretty good. An increase in profits of more than 950 per cent.

Take one of our little steel companies that patriotically shunted aside the making of rails and girders and bridges to manufacture war materials. Well, their 1910-1914 yearly earnings averaged $6,000,000. Then came the war. And, like loyal citizens, Bethlehem Steel promptly turned to munitions making. Did their profits jump – or did they let Uncle Sam in for a bargain? Well, their 1914-1918 average was $49,000,000 a year!

Or, let’s take United States Steel. The normal earnings during the five-year period prior to the war were $105,000,000 a year. Not bad. Then along came the war and up went the profits. The average yearly profit for the period 1914-1918 was $240,000,000. Not bad.

There you have some of the steel and powder earnings. Let’s look at something else. A little copper, perhaps. That always does well in war times.

Anaconda, for instance. Average yearly earnings during the pre-war years 1910-1914 of $10,000,000. During the war years 1914-1918 profits leaped to $34,000,000 per year.

Or Utah Copper. Average of $5,000,000 per year during the 1910-1914 period. Jumped to an average of $21,000,000 yearly profits for the war period.

Let’s group these five, with three smaller companies. The total yearly average profits of the pre-war period 1910-1914 were $137,480,000. Then along came the war. The average yearly profits for this group skyrocketed to $408,300,000.

A little increase in profits of approximately 200 per cent.

Does war pay? It paid them. But they aren’t the only ones. There are still others. Let’s take leather.

For the three-year period before the war the total profits of Central Leather Company were $3,500,000. That was approximately $1,167,000 a year. Well, in 1916 Central Leather returned a profit of $15,000,000, a small increase of 1,100 per cent. That’s all. The General Chemical Company averaged a profit for the three years before the war of a little over $800,000 a year. Came the war, and the profits jumped to $12,000,000. a leap of 1,400 per cent.

International Nickel Company – and you can’t have a war without nickel – showed an increase in profits from a mere average of $4,000,000 a year to $73,000,000 yearly. Not bad? An increase of more than 1,700 per cent.

American Sugar Refining Company averaged $2,000,000 a year for the three years before the war. In 1916 a profit of $6,000,000 was recorded.

Listen to Senate Document No. 259. The Sixty-Fifth Congress, reporting on corporate earnings and government revenues. Considering the profits of 122 meat packers, 153 cotton manufacturers, 299 garment makers, 49 steel plants, and 340 coal producers during the war. Profits under 25 per cent were exceptional. For instance the coal companies made between 100 per cent and 7,856 per cent on their capital stock during the war. The Chicago packers doubled and tripled their earnings.

And let us not forget the bankers who financed the great war. If anyone had the cream of the profits it was the bankers. Being partnerships rather than incorporated organizations, they do not have to report to stockholders. And their profits were as secret as they were immense. How the bankers made their millions and their billions I do not know, because those little secrets never become public – even before a Senate investigatory body.

But here’s how some of the other patriotic industrialists and speculators chiseled their way into war profits.

Take the shoe people. They like war. It brings business with abnormal profits. They made huge profits on sales abroad to our allies. Perhaps, like the munitions manufacturers and armament makers, they also sold to the enemy. For a dollar is a dollar whether it comes from Germany or from France. But they did well by Uncle Sam too. For instance, they sold Uncle Sam 35,000,000 pairs of hobnailed service shoes. There were 4,000,000 soldiers. Eight pairs, and more, to a soldier. My regiment during the war had only one pair to a soldier. Some of these shoes probably are still in existence. They were good shoes. But when the war was over Uncle Sam has a matter of 25,000,000 pairs left over. Bought – and paid for. Profits recorded and pocketed.

There was still lots of leather left. So the leather people sold your Uncle Sam hundreds of thousands of McClellan saddles for the cavalry. But there wasn’t any American cavalry overseas! Somebody had to get rid of this leather, however. Somebody had to make a profit in it – so we had a lot of McClellan saddles. And we probably have those yet.

Also somebody had a lot of mosquito netting. They sold your Uncle Sam 20,000,000 mosquito nets for the use of the soldiers overseas. I suppose the boys were expected to put it over them as they tried to sleep in muddy trenches – one hand scratching cooties on their backs and the other making passes at scurrying rats. Well, not one of these mosquito nets ever got to France!

Anyhow, these thoughtful manufacturers wanted to make sure that no soldier would be without his mosquito net, so 40,000,000 additional yards of mosquito netting were sold to Uncle Sam.

There were pretty good profits in mosquito netting in those days, even if there were no mosquitoes in France. I suppose, if the war had lasted just a little longer, the enterprising mosquito netting manufacturers would have sold your Uncle Sam a couple of consignments of mosquitoes to plant in France so that more mosquito netting would be in order.

Airplane and engine manufacturers felt they, too, should get their just profits out of this war. Why not? Everybody else was getting theirs. So $1,000,000,000 – count them if you live long enough – was spent by Uncle Sam in building airplane engines that never left the ground! Not one plane, or motor, out of the billion dollars worth ordered, ever got into a battle in France. Just the same the manufacturers made their little profit of 30, 100, or perhaps 300 per cent.

Undershirts for soldiers cost 14� [cents] to make and uncle Sam paid 30� to 40� each for them – a nice little profit for the undershirt manufacturer. And the stocking manufacturer and the uniform manufacturers and the cap manufacturers and the steel helmet manufacturers – all got theirs.

Why, when the war was over some 4,000,000 sets of equipment – knapsacks and the things that go to fill them – crammed warehouses on this side. Now they are being scrapped because the regulations have changed the contents. But the manufacturers collected their wartime profits on them – and they will do it all over again the next time.

There were lots of brilliant ideas for profit making during the war.

One very versatile patriot sold Uncle Sam twelve dozen 48-inch wrenches. Oh, they were very nice wrenches. The only trouble was that there was only one nut ever made that was large enough for these wrenches. That is the one that holds the turbines at Niagara Falls. Well, after Uncle Sam had bought them and the manufacturer had pocketed the profit, the wrenches were put on freight cars and shunted all around the United States in an effort to find a use for them. When the Armistice was signed it was indeed a sad blow to the wrench manufacturer. He was just about to make some nuts to fit the wrenches. Then he planned to sell these, too, to your Uncle Sam.

Still another had the brilliant idea that colonels shouldn’t ride in automobiles, nor should they even ride on horseback. One has probably seen a picture of Andy Jackson riding in a buckboard. Well, some 6,000 buckboards were sold to Uncle Sam for the use of colonels! Not one of them was used. But the buckboard manufacturer got his war profit.

The shipbuilders felt they should come in on some of it, too. They built a lot of ships that made a lot of profit. More than $3,000,000,000 worth. Some of the ships were all right. But $635,000,000 worth of them were made of wood and wouldn’t float! The seams opened up – and they sank. We paid for them, though. And somebody pocketed the profits.

It has been estimated by statisticians and economists and researchers that the war cost your Uncle Sam $52,000,000,000. Of this sum, $39,000,000,000 was expended in the actual war itself. This expenditure yielded $16,000,000,000 in profits. That is how the 21,000 billionaires and millionaires got that way. This $16,000,000,000 profits is not to be sneezed at. It is quite a tidy sum. And it went to a very few.

The Senate (Nye) committee probe of the munitions industry and its wartime profits, despite its sensational disclosures, hardly has scratched the surface.

Even so, it has had some effect. The State Department has been studying “for some time” methods of keeping out of war. The War Department suddenly decides it has a wonderful plan to spring. The Administration names a committee – with the War and Navy Departments ably represented under the chairmanship of a Wall Street speculator – to limit profits in war time. To what extent isn’t suggested. Hmmm. Possibly the profits of 300 and 600 and 1,600 per cent of those who turned blood into gold in the World War would be limited to some smaller figure.

Apparently, however, the plan does not call for any limitation of losses – that is, the losses of those who fight the war. As far as I have been able to ascertain there is nothing in the scheme to limit a soldier to the loss of but one eye, or one arm, or to limit his wounds to one or two or three. Or to limit the loss of life.

There is nothing in this scheme, apparently, that says not more than 12 per cent of a regiment shall be wounded in battle, or that not more than 7 per cent in a division shall be killed.

Of course, the committee cannot be bothered with such trifling matters.

CHAPTER THREE

WHO PAYS THE BILLS?

Who provides the profits – these nice little profits of 20, 100, 300, 1,500 and 1,800 per cent? We all pay them – in taxation. We paid the bankers their profits when we bought Liberty Bonds at $100.00 and sold them back at $84 or $86 to the bankers. These bankers collected $100 plus. It was a simple manipulation. The bankers control the security marts. It was easy for them to depress the price of these bonds. Then all of us – the people – got frightened and sold the bonds at $84 or $86. The bankers bought them. Then these same bankers stimulated a boom and government bonds went to par – and above. Then the bankers collected their profits.

But the soldier pays the biggest part of the bill.

If you don’t believe this, visit the American cemeteries on the battlefields abroad. Or visit any of the veteran’s hospitals in the United States. On a tour of the country, in the midst of which I am at the time of this writing, I have visited eighteen government hospitals for veterans. In them are a total of about 50,000 destroyed men – men who were the pick of the nation eighteen years ago. The very able chief surgeon at the government hospital; at Milwaukee, where there are 3,800 of the living dead, told me that mortality among veterans is three times as great as among those who stayed at home.

Boys with a normal viewpoint were taken out of the fields and offices and factories and classrooms and put into the ranks. There they were remolded; they were made over; they were made to “about face”; to regard murder as the order of the day. They were put shoulder to shoulder and, through mass psychology, they were entirely changed. We used them for a couple of years and trained them to think nothing at all of killing or of being killed.

Then, suddenly, we discharged them and told them to make another “about face” ! This time they had to do their own readjustment, sans [without] mass psychology, sans officers’ aid and advice and sans nation-wide propaganda. We didn’t need them any more. So we scattered them about without any “three-minute” or “Liberty Loan” speeches or parades. Many, too many, of these fine young boys are eventually destroyed, mentally, because they could not make that final “about face” alone.

In the government hospital in Marion, Indiana, 1,800 of these boys are in pens! Five hundred of them in a barracks with steel bars and wires all around outside the buildings and on the porches. These already have been mentally destroyed. These boys don’t even look like human beings. Oh, the looks on their faces! Physically, they are in good shape; mentally, they are gone.

There are thousands and thousands of these cases, and more and more are coming in all the time. The tremendous excitement of the war, the sudden cutting off of that excitement – the young boys couldn’t stand it.

That’s a part of the bill. So much for the dead – they have paid their part of the war profits. So much for the mentally and physically wounded – they are paying now their share of the war profits. But the others paid, too – they paid with heartbreaks when they tore themselves away from their firesides and their families to don the uniform of Uncle Sam – on which a profit had been made. They paid another part in the training camps where they were regimented and drilled while others took their jobs and their places in the lives of their communities. The paid for it in the trenches where they shot and were shot; where they were hungry for days at a time; where they slept in the mud and the cold and in the rain – with the moans and shrieks of the dying for a horrible lullaby.

But don’t forget – the soldier paid part of the dollars and cents bill too.

Up to and including the Spanish-American War, we had a prize system, and soldiers and sailors fought for money. During the Civil War they were paid bonuses, in many instances, before they went into service. The government, or states, paid as high as $1,200 for an enlistment. In the Spanish-American War they gave prize money. When we captured any vessels, the soldiers all got their share – at least, they were supposed to. Then it was found that we could reduce the cost of wars by taking all the prize money and keeping it, but conscripting [drafting] the soldier anyway. Then soldiers couldn’t bargain for their labor, Everyone else could bargain, but the soldier couldn’t.

Napoleon once said,

“All men are enamored of decorations…they positively hunger for them.”

So by developing the Napoleonic system – the medal business – the government learned it could get soldiers for less money, because the boys liked to be decorated. Until the Civil War there were no medals. Then the Congressional Medal of Honor was handed out. It made enlistments easier. After the Civil War no new medals were issued until the Spanish-American War.

In the World War, we used propaganda to make the boys accept conscription. They were made to feel ashamed if they didn’t join the army.

So vicious was this war propaganda that even God was brought into it. With few exceptions our clergymen joined in the clamor to kill, kill, kill. To kill the Germans. God is on our side…it is His will that the Germans be killed.

And in Germany, the good pastors called upon the Germans to kill the allies…to please the same God. That was a part of the general propaganda, built up to make people war conscious and murder conscious.

Beautiful ideals were painted for our boys who were sent out to die. This was the “war to end all wars.” This was the “war to make the world safe for democracy.” No one mentioned to them, as they marched away, that their going and their dying would mean huge war profits. No one told these American soldiers that they might be shot down by bullets made by their own brothers here. No one told them that the ships on which they were going to cross might be torpedoed by submarines built with United States patents. They were just told it was to be a “glorious adventure.”

Thus, having stuffed patriotism down their throats, it was decided to make them help pay for the war, too. So, we gave them the large salary of $30 a month.

All they had to do for this munificent sum was to leave their dear ones behind, give up their jobs, lie in swampy trenches, eat canned willy (when they could get it) and kill and kill and kill…and be killed.

But wait!

Half of that wage (just a little more than a riveter in a shipyard or a laborer in a munitions factory safe at home made in a day) was promptly taken from him to support his dependents, so that they would not become a charge upon his community. Then we made him pay what amounted to accident insurance – something the employer pays for in an enlightened state – and that cost him $6 a month. He had less than $9 a month left.

Then, the most crowning insolence of all – he was virtually blackjacked into paying for his own ammunition, clothing, and food by being made to buy Liberty Bonds. Most soldiers got no money at all on pay days.

We made them buy Liberty Bonds at $100 and then we bought them back – when they came back from the war and couldn’t find work – at $84 and $86. And the soldiers bought about $2,000,000,000 worth of these bonds!

Yes, the soldier pays the greater part of the bill. His family pays too. They pay it in the same heart-break that he does. As he suffers, they suffer. At nights, as he lay in the trenches and watched shrapnel burst about him, they lay home in their beds and tossed sleeplessly – his father, his mother, his wife, his sisters, his brothers, his sons, and his daughters.

When he returned home minus an eye, or minus a leg or with his mind broken, they suffered too – as much as and even sometimes more than he. Yes, and they, too, contributed their dollars to the profits of the munitions makers and bankers and shipbuilders and the manufacturers and the speculators made. They, too, bought Liberty Bonds and contributed to the profit of the bankers after the Armistice in the hocus-pocus of manipulated Liberty Bond prices.

And even now the families of the wounded men and of the mentally broken and those who never were able to readjust themselves are still suffering and still paying.

CHAPTER FOUR

HOW TO SMASH THIS RACKET!

WELL, it’s a racket, all right.

A few profit – and the many pay. But there is a way to stop it. You can’t end it by disarmament conferences. You can’t eliminate it by peace parleys at Geneva. Well-meaning but impractical groups can’t wipe it out by resolutions. It can be smashed effectively only by taking the profit out of war.

The only way to smash this racket is to conscript capital and industry and labor before the nations manhood can be conscripted. One month before the Government can conscript the young men of the nation – it must conscript capital and industry and labor. Let the officers and the directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories and our munitions makers and our shipbuilders and our airplane builders and the manufacturers of all the other things that provide profit in war time as well as the bankers and the speculators, be conscripted – to get $30 a month, the same wage as the lads in the trenches get.

Let the workers in these plants get the same wages – all the workers, all presidents, all executives, all directors, all managers, all bankers –

yes, and all generals and all admirals and all officers and all politicians and all government office holders – everyone in the nation be restricted to a total monthly income not to exceed that paid to the soldier in the trenches!

Let all these kings and tycoons and masters of business and all those workers in industry and all our senators and governors and majors pay half of their monthly $30 wage to their families and pay war risk insurance and buy Liberty Bonds.

Why shouldn’t they?

They aren’t running any risk of being killed or of having their bodies mangled or their minds shattered. They aren’t sleeping in muddy trenches. They aren’t hungry. The soldiers are!

Give capital and industry and labor thirty days to think it over and you will find, by that time, there will be no war. That will smash the war racket – that and nothing else.

Maybe I am a little too optimistic. Capital still has some say. So capital won’t permit the taking of the profit out of war until the people – those who do the suffering and still pay the price – make up their minds that those they elect to office shall do their bidding, and not that of the profiteers.

Another step necessary in this fight to smash the war racket is the limited plebiscite to determine whether a war should be declared. A plebiscite not of all the voters but merely of those who would be called upon to do the fighting and dying. There wouldn’t be very much sense in having a 76-year-old president of a munitions factory or the flat-footed head of an international banking firm or the cross-eyed manager of a uniform manufacturing plant – all of whom see visions of tremendous profits in the event of war – voting on whether the nation should go to war or not. They never would be called upon to shoulder arms – to sleep in a trench and to be shot. Only those who would be called upon to risk their lives for their country should have the privilege of voting to determine whether the nation should go to war.

There is ample precedent for restricting the voting to those affected. Many of our states have restrictions on those permitted to vote. In most, it is necessary to be able to read and write before you may vote. In some, you must own property. It would be a simple matter each year for the men coming of military age to register in their communities as they did in the draft during the World War and be examined physically. Those who could pass and who would therefore be called upon to bear arms in the event of war would be eligible to vote in a limited plebiscite. They should be the ones to have the power to decide – and not a Congress few of whose members are within the age limit and fewer still of whom are in physical condition to bear arms. Only those who must suffer should have the right to vote.

A third step in this business of smashing the war racket is to make certain that our military forces are truly forces for defense only.

At each session of Congress the question of further naval appropriations comes up. The swivel-chair admirals of Washington (and there are always a lot of them) are very adroit lobbyists. And they are smart. They don’t shout that “We need a lot of battleships to war on this nation or that nation.” Oh no. First of all, they let it be known that America is menaced by a great naval power. Almost any day, these admirals will tell you, the great fleet of this supposed enemy will strike suddenly and annihilate 125,000,000 people. Just like that. Then they begin to cry for a larger navy. For what? To fight the enemy? Oh my, no. Oh, no. For defense purposes only.

Then, incidentally, they announce maneuvers in the Pacific. For defense. Uh, huh.

The Pacific is a great big ocean. We have a tremendous coastline on the Pacific. Will the maneuvers be off the coast, two or three hundred miles? Oh, no. The maneuvers will be two thousand, yes, perhaps even thirty-five hundred miles, off the coast.

The Japanese, a proud people, of course will be pleased beyond expression to see the united States fleet so close to Nippon’s shores. Even as pleased as would be the residents of California were they to dimly discern through the morning mist, the Japanese fleet playing at war games off Los Angeles.

The ships of our navy, it can be seen, should be specifically limited, by law, to within 200 miles of our coastline. Had that been the law in 1898 the Maine would never have gone to Havana Harbor. She never would have been blown up. There would have been no war with Spain with its attendant loss of life. Two hundred miles is ample, in the opinion of experts, for defense purposes. Our nation cannot start an offensive war if its ships can’t go further than 200 miles from the coastline. Planes might be permitted to go as far as 500 miles from the coast for purposes of reconnaissance. And the army should never leave the territorial limits of our nation.

To summarize: Three steps must be taken to smash the war racket.

We must take the profit out of war.

We must permit the youth of the land who would bear arms to decide whether or not there should be war.

We must limit our military forces to home defense purposes.

CHAPTER FIVE

TO HELL WITH WAR!

I am not a fool as to believe that war is a thing of the past. I know the people do not want war, but there is no use in saying we cannot be pushed into another war.

Looking back, Woodrow Wilson was re-elected president in 1916 on a platform that he had “kept us out of war” and on the implied promise that he would “keep us out of war.” Yet, five months later he asked Congress to declare war on Germany.

In that five-month interval the people had not been asked whether they had changed their minds. The 4,000,000 young men who put on uniforms and marched or sailed away were not asked whether they wanted to go forth to suffer and die.

Then what caused our government to change its mind so suddenly?

Money.

An allied commission, it may be recalled, came over shortly before the war declaration and called on the President. The President summoned a group of advisers. The head of the commission spoke. Stripped of its diplomatic language, this is what he told the President and his group:

“There is no use kidding ourselves any longer. The cause of the allies is lost. We now owe you (American bankers, American munitions makers, American manufacturers, American speculators, American exporters) five or six billion dollars.

If we lose (and without the help of the United States we must lose) we, England, France and Italy, cannot pay back this money…and Germany won’t.

So…”

Had secrecy been outlawed as far as war negotiations were concerned, and had the press been invited to be present at that conference, or had radio been available to broadcast the proceedings, America never would have entered the World War. But this conference, like all war discussions, was shrouded in utmost secrecy. When our boys were sent off to war they were told it was a “war to make the world safe for democracy” and a “war to end all wars.”

Well, eighteen years after, the world has less of democracy than it had then. Besides, what business is it of ours whether Russia or Germany or England or France or Italy or Austria live under democracies or monarchies? Whether they are Fascists or Communists? Our problem is to preserve our own democracy.

And very little, if anything, has been accomplished to assure us that the World War was really the war to end all wars.

Yes, we have had disarmament conferences and limitations of arms conferences. They don’t mean a thing. One has just failed; the results of another have been nullified. We send our professional soldiers and our sailors and our politicians and our diplomats to these conferences. And what happens?

The professional soldiers and sailors don’t want to disarm. No admiral wants to be without a ship. No general wants to be without a command. Both mean men without jobs. They are not for disarmament. They cannot be for limitations of arms. And at all these conferences, lurking in the background but all-powerful, just the same, are the sinister agents of those who profit by war. They see to it that these conferences do not disarm or seriously limit armaments.

The chief aim of any power at any of these conferences has not been to achieve disarmament to prevent war but rather to get more armament for itself and less for any potential foe.

There is only one way to disarm with any semblance of practicability. That is for all nations to get together and scrap every ship, every gun, every rifle, every tank, every war plane. Even this, if it were possible, would not be enough.

The next war, according to experts, will be fought not with battleships, not by artillery, not with rifles and not with machine guns. It will be fought with deadly chemicals and gases.

Secretly each nation is studying and perfecting newer and ghastlier means of annihilating its foes wholesale. Yes, ships will continue to be built, for the shipbuilders must make their profits. And guns still will be manufactured and powder and rifles will be made, for the munitions makers must make their huge profits. And the soldiers, of course, must wear uniforms, for the manufacturer must make their war profits too.

But victory or defeat will be determined by the skill and ingenuity of our scientists.

If we put them to work making poison gas and more and more fiendish mechanical and explosive instruments of destruction, they will have no time for the constructive job of building greater prosperity for all peoples. By putting them to this useful job, we can all make more money out of peace than we can out of war – even the munitions makers.

So…I say,

TO HELL WITH WAR!