did we ever extend a war, or go to war, for money and our (US) economy?
 

remember in the jfk movie when mr x was talking about how jfk wanted to pull the troops out of nam, and was killed for it, and lbj was allowed to take power because he supported big business and war profiteering, specifically the government contractors and interest groups who helped get him into position, so that when he became president he increased the troops in nam instead of decreased them, and the US businesses made a ton more money while people kept dying over there?

i am trying to find evidence for that on google and i cant think of what to search for. everything i try just turns up a bunch of unrelated stuff. i want to look into lbjs motivations for reversing the pullout actually. any help would be greatly appreciated. thanks in advance.
dan

i think ive read somewhere (dont quote me) that america got involved in world war II partially to pull itself out of the great depression.

You got to find some sources for good old fashioned objective reporting. News. I'm pretty sure if you search in google you'll get flooded by blogs and such nonsense. So first, try finding some good sources of info outside of the realm of google...

Like, American news websites may (probably not) have archives of such stories.

...what you're looking for does sound interesting though, good luck.

They thought it would, but WWII only made the depression worse.

The Spanish-American War is screaming hello.

That really was the start of all this.

By the way - going to war for economic gain or to protect "X natural resource" is Mercantilism 101.

Go to the library

Pretty much every war after 1913 was started for the profiteering of bankers and weapons producers. War is very profitable to the people who finance it. I recomend you guys read "the secrets of the federal reserve" by Eustace Mullins.

all in all i'd say war has always been waged for the profit of people who finance it

hey do you guys think that the american / indian wars were about land

i think that we invaded iraq for the prospect of oil. say i'm wrong but its my opinion.

We started fighting in WWII solely because the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and subsequently Germany declared war on us. Your statement is ludicrous. You didn’t read that somewhere, but then again there are some kook historians.

What you just said goes against what I learned in school about WWII. Please delineate exactly what you mean by this. I thought that WWII got us out of the depression by causing massive amounts of jobs. And the years after the war saw Americas greatest economic boom.

I'll say that you are wrong. Reasonable people know that we are not collecting a cent of Iraqi oil money. You have a sad spastic mendacious view of our endeavors there and you should be ashamed.

You also learned in school that the Civil War was fought over slavery (try state rights).

You also learned in school that America was neutral in World War I until 1917 (we weren't, at all).

You also learned in school that America's military involvement in World War II began at Normandy (try Northern Africa).

Your high school is shit and you should never trust what any public education system supported by any government tells you.

what

Yeah but there were no wars before 1913 you see

absolutely. just pub punch ups that got out of hand

I should have specified U.S. involvement, my apologies.

If I remember correctly JFK got us more involved in Vietnam.

And lets not forget LBJ and Lady Bird having alot invested in Brown and Root which had over 90% of the construction contracts in Vietnam. They made a hell of a killing off the war.

States rights over slavery. Jesus Christ, this is the biggest countermyth ever told about the Civil War. STATES RIGHTS STATES RIGHTS. Get a grip already, it was over slavery.

I didn't learn this, so I wonder who did.

Pearl Harbor. Uhhhh hello?

sppunk's historical knowledge is dubious and never trust what he has to say.

Also, war is profit and economical because of our military industrial complex, created sometime during World War II and extended tremendously throughout the Cold War. After the fall of the Soviets, America closed a lot of bases, but still spent fuckloads of money on new weapons and now we're using the MIC to fund a war "against terrorism," to keep our economy from bottoming out.

Pearl Harbor was an outright attack on U.S. forces; I wasn't meaning to downplay it but state our European involvement in schools is vastly misguided.

And our schools never taught us about WWI properly, ever, which is said because I find it a fascinating topic.

The slavery / states rights topic can and has been argued to death, but I firmly believe slavery was introduced to get people to fight because it was such a hotbed issue. However, at the heart of the matter was state rights.

Agreed. I think most people viewed the pragmatic (them nathunas be takin my blacks!) but that was only because the ideologues articulated states rights in the terms of slavery.

Well I find it pretty played out and over done. I actually recall that most of the history classes I took in high school got to about world war 1 and then we quit. I learned most of what I know about world war two when I was a child, like elementary and middle school.

Well, lets consider that if it wasn't about the North's attempts to abolish a way of life for the South there would have been no war. I don't think war would have broken out for anything less than slavery.

del, already said...

It is a fact that when the armies for the North and South were first formed, only a small minority of the soldiers on either side would have declared that the reason they joined the army was to fight either "for" or "against" slavery.

I suppose you could argue that Part of the cause of the civil war was over the southern economy.
But I would say the primary cause was over the confederate form of government that the south wanted to install. And it wasn’t to be installed to protect the institution of slavery primarily.
I believe that African slaves would have been freed by the end of the nineteenth century anyway.

Abraham Lincoln didn’t emancipate the slaves because he cared about them, he did it to unrest the south in a time of war.

The initial purpose of the war was not over the institution of slavery.
The southern boy from the red hills of Georgia did not march down to protect the property of the rich.
The Yankees needed justification for preserving the union after horrendous loses. THEY made the war into a Moral issue from a Political dispute. A political dispute that they where inherently wrong in. The South was Right.