Quotes on War

SMEDLEY BUTLER: USMC BRIGADIER GENERAL, AMERICA’S MOST DECORATED SOLDIER:

______________________________________________________________________________________

PRESIDENT/GENERAL DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER:

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

Farewell address, 1961

We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend more on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations… This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is a new in the American experience… We must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of society.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children

The people of the world genuinely want peace. Some day the leaders of the world are going to have to give in and give it to them…. (and) beware of the military-industrial complex.

President Dwight Eisenhower, on leaving office

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.

President/General Dwight D. Eisenhower

____________________________________________________________________________________

All warfare is based on deception.

Sun Tzu Wu

Truth is the first casualty of war.

General Hiram Johnson, WWI

War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.

Thomas Jefferson, 3rd U.S. President (1801-1809)

That there are men in all countries who get their living by war, and by keeping the quarrels of nations is as shocking as it is true; but when those who are concerned in the government of a country, make it their study to sow discord, and cultivate prejudices between nations, it becomes the more unpardonable.

Thomas Paine, 1792

You have got to understand that this weapon (the atom bomb) isn’t a military weapon. It is used to wipe out women and children and unarmed people, and it’s not for military uses.

Harry S. Truman, 33rd President U.S.

On the domestic front, the Cold war…. gave the U.S. a way to compel its population to subsidize high-tech industry (GE and Boeing, etc., through the Pentagon system). It isn’t easy to sell all that to the domestic populations. The technique used was the old stand-by- fear of a great enemy.

Noam Chomsky, What Uncle Sam Really Wants

Why of course the people don’t want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don’t want war, neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

Hermann Goering at the Nuremburg Trials (Commander of the Luftwaffe, President of the Reichstag, Prime Minister of Police Gestapo and Marshal of the German Empirre, Hitler’s #2 man in the Third Reich).

It would be some time before I fully realized that the United States sees little need for diplomacy. Power is enough. Only the weak rely on diplomacy… The Roman Empire had no need for diplomacy. Nor does the United States.

Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Former UN Secretary General

I believe that if we had and would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar-soaked fingers out of the business of these (Third World) nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own… And if unfortunately their revolution must be of the violent type because the “haves” refuse to share with the “have-nots” by any peaceful method, at least what they get will be their own, and not the American style, which they don’t want and above all don’t want crammed down their throats by Americans.”

David Shard, US Marine Commandant General, 1966

ON IRAQ

I no longer have any sense of what the “containment” of Iraq is all about… We just fly missions (no-fly zone patrols) and drop bombs from time to time because we’ve been doing it for 10 years and no one can stop us from doing so.

Col. Andrew Bacevich, 2000

War with Iraq offers a rare opportunity to move toward an historic period of cooperation. Out of these troubled times… A New World Order can emerge.

George Bush I, Speech to Congress, Sept. 11, 1990

The policy of the US is regime change (for Iraq), with or without (weapons) inpsectors.

White House Spokesman, Ari Fleisher

We don’t have an opinion on inter-Arab disputes such as your border dispute with Kuwait, and we have directed our official spokesman to reiterate this stand, and I have a directive from the President, personally, that I should work to expand and deepen relations with Iraq.

April Glaspie, US Ambassador to Iraq, transcript of meeting with Iraqi leadership weeks before Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

____________________________________________________________________________________

Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all their rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. I am Ceasar.

Anonymous

The illegal we do immediately, the Unconstitutional takes a little longer.

Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, on the U.S. sellout of Kurds in Iraq, 1975

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is: I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.

Albert Einstein

To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but it is morally treasonable to the American public.

Theodore Roosevelt, 26th President

The potential for private profit in U.S. war making has become almost impossible to exaggerate.

Chalmers Johnson, from “The War Business: Squeezing a Profit

from the Wreckage in Iraq” Harpers, 2003

Laws are like cobwebs, strong enough to detain only the weak, and too weak to hold the strong.

Anarcharis, 500 B.C.

ALAN B. JONES:

The first central bank, the Bank of England, … was formed to finance a war, and … central banks since then have utilized and promoted wars for their own profit, starting with the Rothschild involvement with the Napoleanoic wars, and the continuing up to the present day the use of that same “Rothschild Formula”….. This “Rothschild Formula”.. motivates these financiers “to propel governments into war for the profits they yield”. To drive a country to go into debt because of war or the threat of war, the strategy is to assure that the country has enemies with credible military might. If only weak enemies exist, give them money to strengthen their military; if no enemy exists, create one. Don’t let any one nation stay predominant since that may bring on peace and a reduction of debt…. (These bankers arranged the Bolshevik coup in Russia in 1917 and financed Adolf Hitler in his rise to power during the 1930s).

And how does continuous war (in Orwell’s 1984) act to keep the Lows (poor) “stupefied by poverty” and thereby assure the maintenance of the social structure? The goal of the wars is to enable the economy to kept going for the benefit of the Highs (rich), its military, and its bureaucracy and control personnnel (the Thought Police, etc.) but at the same time to assure that any excess production capacity is prevented from producing consumer goods for the lower classes. That excess capacity is instead directed to producing excess military goods which will ultimately rust away or be destroyed in warfare; that is, the excess capacity is deliberately wasted in order to turn it away from the production of goods which would result in added leisure or well-being for the lower classes.

(In his forward to The Report From Iron Mountain – a secret report sponsored by a governmental entity- Lewin notes that poverty is both necessary and desirable, that the return of slavery as an institution may be desirable and that budgeting the optimal number of deaths to occur annually in warfare was a proper function of government. War, we are told, is even more critically needed for maintaining social stability than it is for providing economic stability. It is fully capable of doing so because a state’s war powers constitute “the basic authority of a modern state over its people.” In our modern industrial societies, war has served “as the last great safeguard against the elimination of necessary social classes.” … Unless a substitute can be found, the institution of war must be continued “to preserve whatever quality and ? of poverty a society requires as an incentive as well as to maintain the stability of is internal organization of power.”

…. The final nonmilitary function of war… is the loss of life which it produces. This comes under the euphemism of ecological control, aimed at maintaining the world’s population at that reduced level at which it may successfully sustain itself within the constraints of the world’s agricultural capacity.

The permanent possibility of war is the foundation for stable government, it supplies the basis for general acceptance of political authority. It has enabled societies to maintain necessary class distinctions, and it has ensured the subordination of the citizen to the state…

Report From Iron Mountain, 1966

Henry Kissinger’s National Security Council Study Memorandum 200 recommends that a program of population reduction be aimed at a list of 13 countries that produce raw materials that the U.S. needs. (These include Brazil, India, Egypt, Mexico, Ethiopia, Columbia and others)… The elites wish to reduce the targeted Third World populations to a bare subsistence in order to reduce to a minimum the costs of producing the raw materials on the lands which the elites are presently trying to wrest from those target countries in the name of world environmentalism.

GEORGE ORWELL:

If leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance.

George Orwell, 1984

The New World Order

We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and nations will accept the New World Order.

David Rockefeller

If this were a dictatorship, it’d be a heck of a lot easier… just as long as I’m the Dictator.

George W. Bush, 2000

George Bush, Sr.’s terms for the average American: OFU- “one fodder unit” And “useless eaters”.