Peace Racket: The Essential Edition: A condensed edition of Peace Racket, Volume I($6.95Value)

Description

"War is a racket." — Major General Smedley D. Butler, USMC, 1935 He was right. And he was not the first. The United States Congress last declared war in 1942. The wars never stopped. Every one since was sold to a citizenry that was not asked — by the same mechanisms an emperor, a friar, a philosopher, and a twice-decorated Marine have been naming for twenty-three centuries. Peace Racket: The Essential Edition is the short, single-sitting gateway to a longer book — Peace Racket, Volume I — and it is built in homage to the pamphlet that gave the project its name. Butler's War Is a Racket was fifty-one pages, cheap enough that any Marine could afford a copy and short enough to read in one evening. This edition keeps that spirit. A unique blend of anti-war nonfiction and political poetry, it distills the spine of the larger argument into six brisk chapters, then sets it beside the poem the whole project grew from — walked through, part by part, in a way Volume I never had room to do. The argument is the head of the thing. The poem is its heart. Section One: The Argument Traces the history of peace movements and the unbroken "Line of Witness": the Quaker general who came home and named the racket; the long witness from Ashoka through Erasmus and Las Casas. It exposes exactly how propaganda works, walking the mechanics of media manipulation and public opinion from Edward Bernays forward. It details the manufactured consent and mass persuasion that sells conflicts, and the political economy of the military industrial complex that pays the engineers and sends the bill to the future. Finally, it reveals the invisible hand of peace, which operates quietly until it stops; and the citizenry that could yet refuse the racket and reclaim the country it lives in. Section Two: The Poem — Peace Racket — set in the old ballad meter of Robert Burns and the hymn-stanza of Amazing Grace, with a reading that opens it part by part. This is not "give peace a chance." Peace has asked politely for twenty-three centuries; the answer has not changed. Peace Racket does not ask. It insists. Who profits? (cui bono) Read this book in an evening. Then decide what kind of citizen you intend to be.