https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2024/01/omni-merchants-of-death-war-crimes.html

Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace, Justice, and Ecology

See also anthologies on International Tribunal on US Imperialism, Military Industrial Complex, Culture of War, Militarism, Individual US Wars, and more

CONTENTS

Brad Wolf.  “War for Profit”: From WWI to WWII to War Crimes Tribunal 2023

Kathy Kelly, Nick Mottern, Brad Wolf.  “Come War Profiteers, Give Account.”   November 10-13, 2023

Col. Wilkerson, “Next Evidentiary Video.”

Tribunal’s investigation of the U.S. war on Afghanistan

TEXTS

From WWI to WWII to War Crimes Tribunal 2023

MAY 9, 2023

“”War for Profit: A Short History.”

BY BRAD WOLF

The first page of the edition of the Domenica del Corriere, an Italian paper, with a drawing by Achille Beltrame depicting Gavrilo Princip killing Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo. – Public Domain

The senseless slaughter of World War I began with the murder of a single man, a Crown Prince of a European empire whose name no one was particularly familiar with at the time. Archduke Franz Ferdinand Carl Ludwig Joseph Maria was the presumptive heir to the Austrian-Hungarian empire in June of 1914.

His assassin was a young Bosnian Serb student and the murder of the Crown Prince set off a cataclysmic series of events resulting in the deaths of over 20 million people, half of whom were civilians. An additional 20 million people were wounded.

Entire generations of young men from England, France, Russia, Austria, and Germany were lost. National economies were ruined. In economic terms, World War I caused the greatest global depression of the 20th century. Debts by all the major countries (except the USA) haunted the post-war economic world. Unemployment soared. Inflation increased, most dramatically in Germany where hyperinflation meant that a loaf of bread costs 200 million marks.

World War I ended a period of economic success. Twenty years of fiscal insecurity and suffering followed. It is thought that veterans returning home from World War I brought with them the Spanish Flu, which killed almost one million Americans. The war also laid the groundwork for World War II.

Was it simply the murder of the Crown Prince that caused a world war or were other factors at work? Why did the United States get involved in a European conflict, particularly when an overwhelming number of Americans were against the United States being involved?

Despite major public opposition to the war, Congress voted overwhelmingly in favor of it: 373 to 50 in the House of Representatives, 82 to six in the Senate. The politicians defied the wishes of the people they were supposed to represent. What happened? Was something else driving their votes?

J.P. Morgan and Company was one of the largest investment banking firms in the world. J.P. Morgan himself was the official business agent in the United States for the British government and the main contact for Allied loans during the war. Similarly, E.I. du Pont Company was the largest chemical firm in America. These two phenomenally wealthy and powerful companies along with other US manufacturers, including US weapons manufacturers, were closely aligned with President Woodrow Wilson.

When World War I began, JP Morgan had extensive loans to Europe which would be lost if the allies were defeated. Du Pont and other US weapons manufacturers stood to make astronomical profits if the United States entered the war. Historian Alan Brugar wrote that for every soldier who died in battle, the international bankers made a profit of $10,000.  As J.P. Morgan wrote to Wilson in 1914, “The war should be a tremendous opportunity for America.”

When the war concluded and the dead and wounded were counted, suspicions grew in the United States that nefarious business interests had propelled US involvement into the great slaughter. Investigative reporting and congressional hearings were initiated.

In 1934 a book written by Helmuth Engelbrecht called The Merchants of Death became a best seller. The book exposed the unethical business practices of weapons manufacturers and analyzed their enormous profits during World War I. The author concluded that “the rise and development of the arms merchants reveals them as a growing menace to World Peace.” While not the only reason for the US entering the war, it became clear the Merchants of Death lobbied both Congress and the President for war.

The American public was incensed. In 1934 almost 100,000 Americans signed a petition opposing increased armament production. Veterans paraded through Washington DC in 1935 in a march for peace. And Marine Major General Smedley Butler, two-time Medal of Honor winner, published his book War is a Racket, claiming he had been “a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer; a gangster for capitalism.” His book too became a bestseller.

The growing wave of public outrage led Senator Gerald Nye to initiate congressional hearings investigating whether US corporations, including weapons manufacturers, had led the United States into World War I. In two years, the Nye committee held 93 hearings and called more than 200 witnesses to testify, including JP Morgan and Pierre S. DuPont.

The committee conducted an extensive investigation searching the records of weapons manufacturers. They uncovered criminal and unethical actions including bribery of foreign officials, lobbying the United States government to obtain foreign sales, selling weapons to both sides of international disputes, and the covert undermining of disarmament conferences.

 “The committee listened daily to men striving to defend acts which found them nothing more than international racketeers, bent upon gaining profit through a game of arming the world to fight itself,” Senator Nye declared in an October 1934 radio address.

The Senate Nye Committee recommended price controls, the transfer of Navy shipyards out of private hands, and increased industrial taxes. Senator Nye suggested that upon a declaration of war by Congress, taxes on annual income under $10,000 should automatically be doubled and higher incomes should be taxed at 98%. A journalist wrote at the time, “If such policies were enacted, businessmen would become our leading pacifists.”

The American public was outraged at the committee’s findings and so created some of the largest peace organizations the country had ever known. Committed to staying out of all future European wars, American college campuses in the 1930s had thousands of students taking oathsswearing they would never fight in a foreign war.

Farmers, laborers, intellectuals, ministers, people from all walks of life declared they would never again participate in a war fought to increase the profits of corporations.

And then, business fought back. They lobbied those in Congress to cut off funding for the Nye committee, which they soon did.  A smear campaign was orchestrated against Senator Nye. The committees’ days were numbered.

In the end, the Nye Committee demonstrated that “these businesses were at the heart and center of a system that made going to war inevitable. They paved and greased the road to war.”  With World War II, the Military Industrial Complex would explode and come to dominate American economic and political life.

Today, the Merchants of Death thrive behind a veil of duplicity and slick media campaigns. They have assimilated mainstream media and academia into their conglomerate. But their crimes are clear, and the evidence is overwhelming. Wherever they go, suffering and death, war crimes and atrocities, profits and stock buybacks follow.

Ninety years after the original Merchants of Death hearings, the 2023 Merchants Death War Crimes Tribunal will hold United States weapons manufacturers accountable for aiding and abetting the United States government in the commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity. This Tribunal will shine a light on those who profit from war and will seek to end their bloody franchise. Let this time be the last time. We may not have another chance.

Brad Wolf is a former prosecutor, professor, and college dean.  He is the Executive Director of Peace Action Network of Lancaster and writes for numerous publications.

Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal

“Come War Profiteers, Give Account”

November 10-13, 2023

We render you, corporations obsessed with war profiteering, accountable; answerable!

– Cornel West, Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal Member.  The Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal will hold accountable — through testimony of witnesses — U.S. weapons manufacturers who knowingly produce and sell products which attack and kill not only combatants but non-combatants as well. These manufacturers may have committed Crimes Against Humanity as well as violated U.S. Federal criminal laws. The Tribunal will hear the evidence and render a verdict.

About the Tribunal

The Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal (November 10-13, 2023) will hold accountable — through testimony of witnesses — U.S. weapons manufacturers who knowingly produce and sell products which attack and kill not only combatants but non-combatants as well. These manufacturers may have committed Crimes Against Humanity as well as violated U.S. Federal criminal laws. The Tribunal will hear the evidence and render a verdict.

To reach the largest possible audience and to maximize international participation, the testimonies of the witnesses for the Tribunal will be video-recorded throughout the upcoming year as investigative teams identify witnesses and elicit their testimony. This will include testimonies from the victims of war, military and weapons analysts, lawyers, journalists, and moral philosophers and theologians.

These recorded testimonies will then be presented to the Tribunal and a world-wide audience (via the internet) during the weekend of November 11, 2023. The opening session with the Tribunal members will be live (and livestreamed) providing an opportunity to introduce each Tribunal member, review the purpose of the Tribunal, the charges at issue, and the naming of the defendants. Similarly, the final session of the weekend will be live with Tribunal members discussing the evidence and offering their opinions and recommendations.

Teams of college and university students led by their professors and lawyers will conduct many of the aforementioned video interviews around the world. We will ask corporate directors of weapons manufacturers to sit for recorded interviews. A video library of these testimonies will be assembled over the course of the next year. The video testimonies will then be reviewed by lawyers and analysts to select those that are most pertinent.

By presenting prerecorded videos of the witnesses rather than live testimonies, we will create a structured and unique presentation of the evidence to the Tribunal. Technical interruptions and other delays during the Tribunal will be minimized. Additionally, the gathering of video evidence can begin soon.

An outline of the presentation is as follows:

• Opening comments by the Tribunal.
• Session 1 – Testimonies of victims of war harmed by United States weapons.
• Session 2 – Testimonies from experts regarding the types and destructive power of weapons that have caused the harm described by the witnesses in Session 1. This will include, where possible, video of tests of these weapons showing their destructive power.
• Session 3 – Testimonies from experts on the specific manufacturers of the weapons used, the amount of weapons produced and sold to the United States and abroad, the cost of such weapons and the profits resulting.
• Session 4 – Testimonies from experts regarding lobbying practices, advertising and other methods used by weapons manufacturers to influence Congress and the public, not only in the purchase of weapons but also to influence United States warmaking policy.
• Session 5 – Testimonies from philosophers, theologians and others regarding the morality of weapons manufacturers engaged in the conduct presented and the impact of their conduct within the United States and globally.

These five sessions will be followed by discussion and recommendations by Tribunal members.

Meet the Organizers

Kathy Kelly

Kathy Kelly, a peace activist and author, made over two dozen trips to Afghanistan from 2010 – 2019, living with young Afghan Peace Volunteers in a working class neighborhood in Kabul. She learned about conditions in Afghanistan through encounters with mothers and children, many of whom were directly affected by war. With Voices in the Wilderness companions, from 1996 – 2003, she traveled 27 times to Iraq, defying the economic sanctions and remaining in Iraq throughout the Shock and Awe bombing and the initial weeks of the invasion. Kathy has been an educator for most of her life, but she believes children of war and those who are victims of violence have been her most important teachers. She is board president of World BEYOND War and a co-coordinator of the Ban Killer Drones campaign. (www.bankillerdrones.org)

Nick Mottern

Nick Mottern is Co-coordinator with Kathy Kelly of BanKillerDrones.org and is an organizer of the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal, which will be holding hearings in November 2023. He is a member of the national board of Veterans For Peace. He is also a reporter, whose work has appeared on Truthout, Common Dreams, Counterpunch and on other websites, and he is a researcher and organizer who has worked for the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, Bread for the World and Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers. While with Maryknoll he coordinated, with Jerry Herman, of the American Friends Service Committee, the Africa Peace Tour, an educational tour that brought Africans to the U.S. to speak about apartheid and U.S. military involvement in Africa.

Brad Wolf

Brad Wolf is a lawyer, former prosecutor, professor, and community college dean. He is cofounder of Peace Action Network of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, an affiliate of Peace Action and a partner of World BEYOND War. Brad is a full-time activist for peace and justice and his writings have been published in The Progressive, Common Dreams, Counterpunch, Antiwar.com, Consortium News, and Dappled Things. He recently authored a book on Philip Berrigan’s collected writings entitled “A Ministry of Risk.”

Upcoming Events & Ways to Take Action

1) Deliver the Subpoena to the Top Weapons Manufacturers

Take action locally by printing the subpoena and contempt citation, and delivering them to any of the four corporations (Boeing, Raytheon, General Atomics, and Lockheed Martin) that may have offices in your area. Take pictures of your nonviolent action delivering the subpoena/contempt citation and email them to us to post.

2) Subpoena Your Local Congressperson or Senator to Testify as a Witness before the Tribunal

Download the subpoena, which compels a witness to testify, and serve it on your local congressman or senator. Type in the name of your local congressmember or senator on the blank line, and deliver it. Plus, don’t forget to take pictures of your nonviolent action delivering the subpoena and email them to us.

Hello Dick,
The new video episode of the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal concludes the Tribunal’s investigation of the U.S. war on Afghanistan with a focus on the last attempts by U.S. Presidents to bomb the Afghans into submission. It is a tragic story of a military empire using massive weapons in a doomed attempt to force its will upon an indigenous people.

The link for this video evidence is here: https://rumble.com/v48fjpk-the-final-bombing-campaign-of-afghanistan.html    Please share this video link with friends and colleagues. Form discussion groups around all video evidence of the Tribunal.

The link for previous video episodes of the Tribunal is here: https://rumble.com/user/merchantsofdeath 
Encourage friends to sign up to receive future video segments of evidence here: https://actionnetwork.org/forms/sign-up-for-emails-from-the-merchants-of-death-war-crimes-tribunal?clear_id=true

In solidarity, Brad Wolf, Kathy Kelly, and Nick Mottern
Organizers, Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal

The Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal will hold accountable — through testimony of witnesses — U.S. Weapons manufacturers who knowingly produce and sell products which attack and kill non-combatants. These manufacturers may have committed Crimes Against Humanity as well as violated U.S. Federal criminal laws. The Tribunal will hear the evidence and render a verdict.
Donate to support the Tribunal.

    

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