War is a Racket
This is outrageous. The grotesque corruption and fraud tied to military spending deserves a unified shout of outrage by conservative Christians; but you can bet your last devalued dollar they won't make a peep. The very fact that the most noteworthy Reformed ministries have said NOTHING for the last seven years about unjust war, government lying, torture, the growing police state, and the racketeering and theft within the military-industrial complex is beyond deplorable. I better not hear a word out of them when a "Democrat" gets in office and does the very same things. They are Pavlovian-controlled by the psychological manipulation of thinking only within the categories of "Right vs. Left" and "Conservative vs. Liberal."
I'll make this easy for them: every bit of corruption by our present administration is a blatant violation of the Ten Commandments. Your job as a minister of the gospel is to speak out against it so as to awaken your constituency to the criminality.
Gen. Smedley Butler was the first military leader to go public with sheer racketeering of corporate and military control. As the following clip demonstrates, what's transpiring today is nothing new:
In his book, War is a Racket, Gen. Smedley Butler begins with this succinct statement of why we go to war:
I'll make this easy for them: every bit of corruption by our present administration is a blatant violation of the Ten Commandments. Your job as a minister of the gospel is to speak out against it so as to awaken your constituency to the criminality.
Gen. Smedley Butler was the first military leader to go public with sheer racketeering of corporate and military control. As the following clip demonstrates, what's transpiring today is nothing new:
In his book, War is a Racket, Gen. Smedley Butler begins with this succinct statement of why we go to war:
WAR is a racket. It always has been.Try telling that to a conservative Christian. They'll denounce you outright and shove Romans 13 up your nose. How dare you say anything about our military, Republican-led administration, and righteous crusade against Islam! How dare you imply "free market" corporations are criminal! This is Pelagian to the core, i.e., everyone sins but Americans.
It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.
