On 8 May, former UNSCOM weapons inspector Scott Ritter wrote: “America did not become a nation of racketeers under Trump. It always was one!”

But there was a time when a man’s word meant something.
When a handshake was as good as a signature on a piece of paper.
When a reputation mattered.
Those days, unfortunately, are long gone.
Arrogance and insolence have long been traits attributable to the United States of America and the American people.

But these normally repulsive character flaws were always wrapped in the cloak of well-meaning innocence, to be forgiven because those possessed of such traits carried themselves with a smile on their face and the perceived intent of wanting to do the right thing.

Just so, except that I suspect the “American people” have no influence over US policy, domestic or foreign.

Ritter is one of the founding members of VIPS, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. I find him somewhat alarming: He seems dauntingly intense and angry,but I’m sure he has reason to be! One possible reason being something another founding VIPS member, Larry Johnson, wrote about just yesterday on Sonar21:

Since 2001, the United States has lost more than 140,000 veterans to suicide — more than the total American combat deaths in every war since Vietnam combined. Between 6,000 and 6,700 veterans have died by suicide every single year since the War on Terror began, and the VA’s most recent annual report documents an average of 17.6 veteran deaths by suicide every day. [VA is the Department of Veteran Affairs.]

Some researchers believe even that devastating figure is understated: America’s Warrior Partnership estimates the true number may be closer to 24 veterans per day when accounting for underreporting, with an additional 20 dying daily from “self-injury mortality” such as overdoses — a combined total roughly 2.4 times higher than the VA’s official count.

Why am I going on about Scott Ritter? Because I am deeply grateful to him for directing me to a remarkable 12-page booklet you can actually download: War is a Racket, authored by Major General Smedley D. Butler. There is also a public domain audiobook.

In 1935, this extraordinary retired major general smelled a new global war on its way. He did not like it one bit.

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.

I chose this quote to highlight why Scott Ritter may be angry, and why Larry Johnson is grieving over his friend, a veteran who killed himself last week. But it is far from the most striking part of the little tract.

The entire piece is quite simply brilliant and would have deserved not only a Nobel peace prize, if said prize had not been so demeaned as to represent an insult to whoever receives it, but also a Nobel prize in literature. No wonder the American public was reluctant to join WWII.

Now, I am of the opinion that German Nazism in WWII represented such a hideous threat that it had to be stopped, at all cost. But Smedley D. Butler could not have foreseen that in 1935. And that was not the case, I believe, in 1914 when WWI started. For years, certain forces in several countries had been hankering to cut each other’s throats. (Cf. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, ch. 11: The growth of international tensions 1871-1914)

The factors currently leading us into a new global war resemble those leading up to WWI. Certain forces in certain countries, notably the US and in Europe are positively itching for an excuse to create bedlam and see some action. For instance, even at the best of times, there are, in Washington, in both parties, those who manipulate the incumbent president into starting a war. Reading War is a Racket you will be in no doubt as to why that is.

With such a tool as Trump in their hands, they may even decide to go all out in support of Israeli Übermensch calls to exterminate enemy civilisations and promote acquisition of “lebensraum“. After all, by piggy-backing the Israelis, they hope to help themselves to new chunks of Asia and thus to weaken China.

At any rate, the difference between the global war we are sleepwalking into and the previous one is that this time, we, in the political West are not the good guys.

As for Europe, EU leaders are patently acting, not for the good of their countries, but on behalf of what we recently have learnt to recognise as the Epstein Class.

Finally a quote to remind us that some things never change. The prescient major general wrote in 1935:

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.