A review by jake
War is a Racket: The Antiwar Classic by America's Most Decorated Soldier by Adam Parfrey, Smedley D. Butler

3.0

Butler's work is a short and persuasive account of how US corporations benefitted from WWI while ordinary Americans--especially soldiers, their families, and holders of Liberty Bonds--suffered. He spends a lot of time comparing pre-war corporate profits to wartime corporate profits in order to demonstrate his claim that companies benefitted from war. He makes this point very convincingly. Butler also has a lot of experience in the US's imperial wars of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I had hoped that this book would examine the ways in which capitalist interests interacted with foreign policy in those wars, but it focused solely on WWI. Butler's arguments are also hampered by his inability to articulate the ways in which banking interests profited from the war. Perhaps that is beyond the scope of his short treatise and outside of his realm of expertise, but it leaves his accusations against the banks somewhat vague.