Retired major general, Smedley D. Butler, of the marine corps of the navy of the United states, publishes “War is a Racket”:

       For a great many years, as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it.  Now that I see the international war clouds gathering, as they are today, I must face it and speak out.

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       [V]isit the American cemeteries on the battlefields abroad.  Or visit any of the veteran’s hospitals in the United States.  On a tour of the country, in the midst of which I am at the time of this writing, I have visited eighteen government hospitals for veterans.  In them are a total of about 50,000 destroyed men — men who were the pick of the nation eighteen years ago.  The very able chief surgeon at the government hospital; at Milwaukee, where there are 3,800 of the living dead, told me that mortality among veterans is three times as great as among those who stayed at home.

       Boys with a normal viewpoint were taken out of the fields and offices and factories and classrooms and put into the ranks.  There they were remolded; they were made over; they were made to “about face”; to regard murder as the order of the day.  They were put shoulder to shoulder and, through mass psychology, they were entirely changed.  We used them for a couple of years and trained them to think nothing at all of killing or of being killed.

       Then, suddenly, we discharged them and told them to make another “about face” ! This time they had to do their own readjustment, sans [without] mass psychology, sans officers’ aid and advice and sans nation-wide propaganda.  We didn’t need them any more.  So we scattered them about without any “three-minute” or “Liberty Loan” speeches or parades.  Many, too many, of these fine young boys are eventually destroyed, mentally, because they could not make that final “about face” alone.

       So vicious was this war propaganda that even God was brought into it.  With few exceptions our clergymen joined in the clamor to kill, kill, kill.  To kill the Germans.  God is on our side . . . it is His will that the Germans be killed.

       And in Germany, the good pastors called upon the Germans to kill the allies . . . to please the same God.  That was a part of the general propaganda, built up to make people war conscious and murder conscious.

       [added 7/12/2022] >>>NOTE<<< The exact date for this event is not known.  This approximate assignment was made for sorting purposes.  If you determine the correct date and notify Tom Caldwell at tacaldwelljr@yahoo.com—with a verifiable reference—you will get credit for clarifying history.