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War Is a Racket (1933)

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Re: War Is a Racket (1933)

#181

Post by vanniv »

krapp wrote: post #144
roenxi wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends how you measure it as there were worse people in the same era as Hitler. If I recall the stats correctly it is a much better bet to be led by someone like Hitler over Stalin or Mao. The ethnically targeted nature of the holocaust is the main claim to 'worst of the worst' status, but honestly it isn't obvious to me that a dead Jew is more horrific than a dead anyone else. They are both pretty bad.

>The ethnically targeted nature of the holocaust is the main claim to 'worst of the worst' status, but honestly it isn't obvious to me that a dead Jew is more horrific than a dead anyone else. They are both pretty bad. What made the holocaust particularly heinous, apart from the ethnic cleansing and antisemitism (the latter of which was not entirely uncommon in Western culture, unfortunately) was the industrial scale…

Alas, antisemitism is still extremely popular in the west -- and is becoming more popular by the day.

As this thread shows, antisemites feel no need to hide themselves any longer, and nobody feels troubled enough to shout them down

Re: War Is a Racket (1933)

#182

Post by vanniv »

aazaa wrote: post #17

> 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 wh…

You are an antisemite, a monster, and a true Nazi.

Re: War Is a Racket (1933)

#183

Post by runeks »

nabla9 wrote: post #9

According to CBO analysis the total cost of Afghan & Iraq wars is going to be something like $2.5 trillion for the US. Imagine if this sum would have been used mostly nonviolently for bribing and buying influence in the region. Depending how the money is distributed, it would have been: * $35k per each person in Iraq and Afghanistan. If you divide it into households maybe something like $100k - 150k per household. *…

> According to CBO analysis the total cost of Afghan & Iraq wars is going to be something like $2.5 trillion for the US.

Since the US just adds this to its national debt, there is no actual cost for the US. The cost is paid by holders of US government bonds (e.g. non-US central banks).

The US is literally paying for its wars with bonds. That’s why the US is so powerful — no other country can pay for wars using paper with stuff written on it (i.e. a bond).

Re: War Is a Racket (1933)

#184

Post by runeks »

sykick wrote: post #44
lacker wrote: post #32

His statements seem clear but upon further reflection they are not clear. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. Okay, so this was written in 1933. The obvious question to me is, would the author have supported US involvement in World War 2? I guess with Pearl Harbor, the US was attacked. But the Japanese at the time might have said that the…

I think the words are not meant to be a comprehensive list of rules for exactly when war is justified. He's giving a broad overview of when he thinks it's justified. Of course one can get bogged down into particulars and wonder where Butler would stand but I think the misses the overall point he is making. Namely, that war is rarely the answer. When it is necessary then fight it but try not to make it a racket.

> I think the words are not meant to be a comprehensive list of rules for exactly when war is justified.

I disagree. I think his words are pretty clear. From the article:

> There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.

Re: War Is a Racket (1933)

#185

Post by the_af »

SergeAx wrote: post #172
the_af wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I know, current consensus is that the Soviet Union would have defeated Nazi Germany regardless of Western intervention, it just would have taken more time (and a lot more casualties) to get to Berlin. It really is a case where the Nazis picked a fight they just couldn't win.

Current consensus where? I live in Russia, we currently have a state-induced wave of unhealthy "patriotic" hype here, mostly based on WW2 events. But even in these circumstances I rather got an opinions like "without West we wouldn't make it against Hitler" in my circles. The keyword is "lend-lease" [0]. About 5% of weapons for 1942 Soviet offensive operations, decisive for the final outcome, were US-made. And 80% of…

Consensus in the West, by historians not trying to score a political point about current world affairs.

Lend-lease, while critical help, is often overplayed in the West as a way to diminish the Soviet contribution to the war -- this is in itself the legacy of historical views shaped by the Cold War and (unsurprisingly) by ex Wehrmacht officers who collaborared with the West after WW2. There's no credible mainstream analysis that has Germany winning against the Soviet Union. In fact, it is often argued that by starting Barbarossa, Hitler effectively lost the war. Germany didn't have the manpower, logistics capabilities or equipment to take on the Soviet Union.

That's not to say it wouldn't have cost the Soviets a lot more time, effort and bloodshed to defeat the Nazi war machine without the help of the Western Allies.

I'm not Russian and I'm completely uninterested in how current Russia and Putin are spinning this, by the way.

Re: War Is a Racket (1933)

#186

Post by sykick »

runeks wrote: post #184
sykick wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the words are not meant to be a comprehensive list of rules for exactly when war is justified. He's giving a broad overview of when he thinks it's justified. Of course one can get bogged down into particulars and wonder where Butler would stand but I think the misses the overall point he is making. Namely, that war is rarely the answer. When it is necessary then fight it but try not to make it a racket.

> I think the words are not meant to be a comprehensive list of rules for exactly when war is justified. I disagree. I think his words are pretty clear. From the article: > There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.

Do you believe that such a simple statement can possibly constitute a comprehensive list of rules for exactly when war is justified? By way of comparison consider the fact that just about everyone believes that murder is wrong and the legal definitions of the various types of “murder” is quite long. Even so the definitions are murky enough to require judges, lawyers, and juries to settle matters in some individual cases.

It’s hard to argue that Smedley’s single sentence can possibly constitute a comprehensive set of rules when “defense of our homes” is so vague and can reasonably be interpreted to encompass so much.

Re: War Is a Racket (1933)

#187

Post by Gibbon1 »

kazen44 wrote: post #178
Gibbon1 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other thing that happened was the Weimar Republic under Heinrich Bruning responded to the onset of the great depression with austerity measures. Just like the US did with similar results; deflation, industrial collapse, massive unemployment, and civil unrest. The difference was the US got FDR instead of Hitler. Modern Economists hate talking about this and have managed to drop it down the memory hole.

Also, the weimar republic was a very young democracy in a country with very little democratic traditions. Many germans simply didn't believe democracy was the form of goverment required to battle the great depression and return germany to it's former glory. Both on the left side aswell as the right side of the political spectrum. The nearly endless turmoil during the 20's was a result of that.

Always seems to me that political culture is long lived and difficult to change. Seems really common that revolutionaries once they take over find it impossible to govern without mimicking the previous government. AKA how the Soviet Union ended up looking a lot like the Czarist Russia. Ditto a bunch of former states. And how China seems to be slipping back into rule by mandarins under an figurative emperor.

Re: War Is a Racket (1933)

#188

Post by lostcolony »

abraxas wrote: post #168
lostcolony wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So WWII as being necessary to stop Hitler, I can see withstanding the test of time. The things that caused WWII, Hitler's rise to power, and the systems that enabled and, frankly, bent him and the Nazis towards the evils they committed, I think we were culpable for, for how Germany was positioned on the world stage post WWI. Germany was ripe for a demagogue, and people needed the sense of security mindlessly followin…

This is the kind of whitewashing bullshit proliferating in the west that drives me mad. Hitler wasn’t the fruit of Great Depression suffering. Most of the world was suffering the consequences of the Great Depression. Hell, many countries had autocrat leaders at the same time. None have committed anywhere near the level of atrocity that Hitler has. Because Hitler was a product of German people’s fanatical antisemitism…

Everyone had huge anti-semitism at the time. The US had extremely common "No Jew" rules for clubs and such. We didn't end up gassing jews.

I was not referring to the Great Depression. I'm talking about the War Guilt clause of the Treaty of Versailles. It left Germany with a huge financial burden to other countries, and did nothing to actually address any of the issues that had caused WWI.

Yeah, the Jews were a convenient "other" to blame. The playbook is pretty straightforward - blame the status quo, the economic pressures (fair or not) that the poorest are facing (which only works if those feeling they're poor are sufficient in number), while doing nothing that would actually benefit them, and blame some 'other'. You've seen it repeat time and again.

The point I was making is that the status quo in Germany at that time -was- onerous. Being economically liable for the entire cost of a war, both the damages inflicted on both sides, AND the financial cost incurred in waging it for both sides, is going to be felt. And people are going to chafe; after all, the country probably had a reason for going to war in the first place, even if it was just public sentiment. And forcing such a treaty on Germany was the decision of the Allies.

Re: War Is a Racket (1933)

#189

Post by yourapostasy »

nostromo wrote: post #7

This is mostly about the WWI era, and WWI was indeed a racket, fought for elites at the expense of everyone else. I'm curious if he would write the same article after WWII.

The article and comments about Hitler's plan to (or not to) attack America [1] are interesting. Wa-a-a-y down at the end of the comments, there are a series of interesting threads with bibliographies on the possibility Stalin had an outsized covert influence upon American foreign policy. And lots of other interesting threads; software isn't the only endeavor where it gets fractally more complex the closer you examine it.

[1] https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/32084

Re: War Is a Racket (1933)

#190

Post by socialdemocrat »

the_af wrote: post #95
socialdemocrat wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know it is not a popular view but I think WWII was a major mistake. We could of course not have stopped Hitler's initial actions, but it was the West's choice to wage war against Hitler. I think that was a mistake. The rational was to keep Poland and the Czech republic free. However at the end of the war neither country was free. They had fallen under the Soviet sphere of influence. The goals they set hence failed.…

Note that while this wasn't widely known in the West at the time and therefore cannot be their justification for going to war against Hitler, Nazi Germany's "Generalplan Ost" [0] (their "General Plan for the East", a plan of global genocide so vast it defies belief) called for the almost total extermination of the populations of most Slavic countries, Russia and Poland included. If I remember correctly, the quota for…

Except I doubt it would ever have happened. Germany would have struggled mightily with Russia. Likely Germany and Russia would have fought each other to some sort of standstill. They would have bled each other out and which point allied forces could have moved in and beaten both Germany and Russia. We could have avoided the whole cold war and east block.
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