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Quote by Smedley D. Butler

“Victory or defeat will be determined by the skill and ingenuity of our scientists. If we put them to work making poison gas and more and more fiendish mechanical and explosive instruments of destruction, they will have no time for the constructive job of creating greater prosperity for all peoples.”

Quote by Smedley D. Butler

Book:War Is a Racket
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War Is a Racket

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Smedley D. Butler

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“When foreign military spending [bombing Korea and Vietnam] forced the U.S. balance of payments into deficit and drove the United States off gold in 1971, central banks were left without the traditional asset used to settle payments imbalances. The alternative by default was to invest their subsequent payments inflows in U.S. Treasury bonds, as if these still were “as good as gold.” Central banks have been holding some $4 trillion of these bonds in their international reserves for the past few years — and these loans have financed most of the U.S. Government’s domestic budget deficits for over three decades. Given the fact that about half of U.S. Government discretionary spending is for military operations — including more than 750 foreign military bases and increasingly expensive operations in the oil-producing and transporting countries — the international financial system is organized in a way that finances the Pentagon, along with U.S. buyouts of foreign assets expected to yield much more than the Treasury bonds that foreign central banks hold.”

Military Industrial ComplexEmpireSuper ImperialismTreasury BondsDollar Imperialism
Book:The Bubble and Beyond
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“In actual fact it would seem that during the Cold War, if not during World War II, this country has become frankly a warfare state built on affluence, a power structure in which the interests of big business, the obsessions of the military, and the phobias of political extremists both dominate and dictate our national policy. It also seems that the people of the country are by and large reduced to passivity, confusion, resentment, frustration, thoughtlessness and ignorance, so that they blindly follow any line that is unraveled for them by the mass media.”

WarBig BusinessAffluenceMass MediaMilitary Industrial ComplexPolitical Extremism
Book:Cold War Letters
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“These days about the worst job you can have is be a US military man. It's so shameful. You're so expensive, yet so completely useless. You know you can't fuck with Russia because they'll just start blowing nukes up for shits and giggles. And you can fuck with China because they probably have a shitton of biological weapons stashed in every Chinatown to take out most US population very, very quickly. At least that’s what I would do, and THEY are a lot smarter than I am. So you keep busy and pretend to be useful by killing Arabs in caves and shit, cuz that seems like a pretty low risk adventure. but... even that's gonna come back and bite you in the Ass eventually... these things usually do...”

StrategyMilitary Industrial ComplexUs MilitaryGod Bless AmericaCatch 22Thought Experiments
Author:Dmitry Dyatlov
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“Te US's outsized military exists not only to ensure the US's quite unjust share of the world's riches, but to also ensure that those riches are not shared with the poor huddled masses in this country through annoying things such as social programs and works projects. Instead, a disproportionate amount of tax revenue (about 54% of the US's discretionary budget) is sucked right back into the military-industrial complex, a form of welfare for the rich, while the working class and poor are left on their own to suffer. One commentator correctly described this as "Redistributive Militarism"- that is, the process by which income is redistributed from bottom to top through the escalation of military spending.”

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Book:The Plot to Scapegoat Russia: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Russia
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“every time a bomb exploded, every anti-personnel weapon that sent its hundreds of particles tearing through the sift tissues of soft bodies, every helicopter that was shot down with its crew, every plane hit with a missile: brrrring, brrrring, on the great cash register in the homeland bank. It was all profit. It would have to be replaced. It was the perfect form of fantastically expensive and forced consumption, paid for by taxes.”

Military Industrial Complex
Book:Dance the Eagle to Sleep
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“Another painful irony is that, in exile, many refugees strive to stay alive, while watching an absurd show of fraud politicians, experts, pundits, academics, and journalists on the empire’s payroll fighting about them merely to serve their own careers and fortunes. Some promise to imprison refugees, some promise to build walls to stop their influx, some promise to deny them any human rights, others promise to publicly shame and attack them. Many ask refugees to ‘fuck off and go back to their countries,’ forgetting that their empire left nothing to go back to. Yet, conveniently, nobody promises to stop waging wars against refugees. Nobody promises to stop destroying and economically exploiting the places from which refugees escaped. They discuss everything except the actual solution to the refugee crisis, which is simple: stop waging wars of any sort against other people! Everyone loves hearing themselves talking about the refugee crisis, but almost never talking with refugees in meaningful and honest ways. If they talk with them, it is only to depict them as victims or villains in the unjust courts of the empire’s arrogance. They defend them or hate them, depending on the direction in which they wish to advance their fortunes and careers. It all depends on what they need to put on their CVs at any given time or in any given situation. The last piece of this absurd game is that the careers of every self-appointed mouthpiece for refugees are almost always dependent on paychecks paid by those who directly or indirectly run the military-industrial-complex, the biggest producer of refugees. This last piece is precisely what makes breaking the vicious cycle almost impossible. And such continues the game, all while refugees are sitting and watching in bitter silence.”

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Author:Louis Yako
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“A speech that I heard Hugo Chavez give at a meeting in Caracas in July of 2010 comes to mind. He said something that seemed quite profound to me and which has stuck with me ever since: that the 20th Century was not "The American Century" at all as the US claims, but it was indeed the Century of Revolutions- for example, the Mexican, Russian, Chinese, Cuban, Vietnamese and Nicaraguan Revolutions- and the US violently opposed every single one of these. I would soon come to realize that the Cold War, at least from the vantage point of the US, had little to do with fighting "Communism," and more to do with making the world safe corporate plunder.”

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Book:The Plot to Scapegoat Russia: How the CIA and the Deep State Have Conspired to Vilify Russia
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“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 not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

United StatesMilitary Industrial ComplexU S History
Author:Eisenhower
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