This Memorial Day, like all that came before, is an apt time to revisit the great 1933 War Is A Racket speech (and later book) by Major General Smedley Butler, two-time Congressional Medal of Honor recipient and the most decorated Marine in U.S. history, on war as profit. It ends, "To Hell with war."

"WAR is a racket. It always has been. 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."