After reading “War is a Racket” by Smedley Butler, the most decorated and honoured United States Marine, a very slim book, I came to understand the indisputable profitability of war. Reading the works of Anthony C Sutton, a pariah in intellectual circles for the truth he tells, (see “The Best Enemy Money Can Buy” and others) made the lucrativity of war a confirmed fact. My father, J D Tadaferua in the mid-1960s, before I was born, became skeptical of the ideals of Western democracy after he was given a copy of “The Power Elite” by C Wright Mills by Claude Ake, famous Nigerian political economist, with particular reference to the Military Industrial Complex. I once surprised a long time sweetheart who thought I was too critical of Western foreign policy, with a job advert in her local newspaper that was advertising for hundreds of jobs for scientists and engineers in the “Department of Lethality” (creator of weapons of mass destruction) within the United Kingdoms’s Department (Ministry) of Defence – she and other people in the UK thought weapons of mass destruction were manufactured on planet Mars, not their “fair play government”.
War is good for capitalists, good for GDP, good for securing resources on the cheap from weak nations that do not comply and is good for speculators / stock markets e.g. the prices of commodities artificially go up; wheat, gold, platinum, insurance premiums, oil, gas, transportation, you name it. War is not only about the conquest of land but the “resources drain” from those lands i.e. the unsustainable extraction of resources and long earned surpluses. Countless authors and activists have campaigned and written against the horrors of “the permanent war economy”, however, the rich have to keep getting richer “at any cost necessary”, the rest is a “necessary evil”. War also teaches new leaders, say in Africa, the consequences of not complying to the “masters of war” – no need to be graphic about that.
Grimot Nane