“A nod from a lord is a breakfast for a fool.”
War—you see in a war soldiers produce nothing, but they consume and destroy vast quantities of many things. Thus soldiers in war create a larger market—though they create nothing whatever for that market. This is fine for those capitalists whose puny souls can hope and plan for nothing higher than more markets—and thus have more opportunity to sweat more wage-earners simply in order to make more profits. Funerals look good to the coffin trust and the undertaker, and war looks good to the capitalist class.
War—PREPARATION for war on the huge scale of the present day—furnishes a market for an enormous amount of commodities for sale by the capitalist class, such as steel, clothing, leather products, lumber, food products, horses, and the like. True, these things are worse than wasted; but just as the capitalist class are willing to destroy part of the coffee crop—in Brazil, for example—in order to keep up the price for profit’s sake, so also are the capitalist class willing to fan the flames of war and urge “preparation for war,” vast and senseless “preparation for war,” in order to have a market into which to dump at a profit immense stores of commodities.
“There is money in it.”
War is a means of opening up or protecting, for modern capitalistic exploitation, new territory, such as Egypt, Algeria, Madagascar, South Africa, India, Alaska, The Philippines, Borneo, Hawaii, Cuba, Porto Rico, China, Korea.
United States Senator A. J. Beveredge puts the matter thus:[[13]]
“Every progressive nation in Europe today is seeking new lands to colonize and governments to administer.”
CITIZENS WHO ARE LED: “WE fight THE WARS”
J. H. Rose:[[14]]