Both Sides of Every War

The oldest banking legend: fund both armies, win either way. Waterloo made it canon.

Here's a question that makes people uncomfortable, and it should. When a war breaks out and hundreds of thousands of people die — who gets paid? Because the uncomfortable, DOCUMENTED answer is: somebody always does. The harder question, the one where legend and fact start to blur, is whether the paydays are the reason the wars happen at all. Let's start with what's solidly on the record. War is enormously profitable for the businesses that supply it — that's not a conspiracy theory, it's accounting. During World War I, munitions makers, steel producers, and chemical firms saw staggering earnings. A U.S. Senate committee in the mid-1930s — the Nye Committee — spent two years investigating the arms and banking industries and popularized the phrase 'merchants of death,' concluding that arms makers and financiers had a profit interest in war, even if it stopped short of proving they'd started one. So here's where it gets genuinely strange. Some companies didn't just profit from a war — they profited from BOTH sides of it. This is DOCUMENTED, not folklore. During World War II, several American and multinational corporations had business entanglements with Nazi Germany that continued, in various forms, into the war years. Standard Oil of New Jersey had prewar patent and cartel agreements with the German chemical giant IG Farben. IBM's German subsidiary supplied tabulating machines used by the Nazi regime. Ford and General Motors both owned German subsidiaries whose plants produced for the German war effort, and after the war GM even sought — and received — U.S. compensation for wartime damage to those German factories. Congress's own Kilgore Committee and later historians documented pieces of this. These are established facts, however unsettling. But here's the part where you have to be careful, because this is exactly where the truth gets stretched into something it isn't. It's one thing to say 'companies and banks profit from war, and some cynically traded with the enemy.' That's supported. It's another thing entirely to jump to the maximalist claim: that every major war is secretly staged, start to finish, by financiers pulling strings for profit. That leap is SPECULATION — and often LEGEND. Wars have tangled causes: nationalism, ideology, fear, miscalculation, revenge. Profit is real and it distorts decisions, but 'profit is a motive' and 'profit is the hidden puppet-master of all history' are very different claims. The evidence supports the first and does not support the second. So hold both truths at once. DOCUMENTED: war is a business, and some businesses have behaved monstrously to cash in, sometimes on both sides. NOT ESTABLISHED: that this proves wars are manufactured spectacles with no other cause. The honest position lives in that tension — and refusing to collapse it is the whole point. On the map of 'It Goes Deeper,' the war profiteers are the wide dark field that Smedley Butler was pointing at when he wrote War Is a Racket. His little book is the accusation. This node is the evidence — and the limits of that evidence.