Volume I
Peace Racket
An argument for peace, from inside the long tradition that named the racket
Paperback · Hardcover · Kindle
Buy Volume I
Publishes Armistice Day · November 11, 2026
Peace Racket · Volume IIThe Line of Witness
On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, 1918, the Great War ended. The wars have not.
Volume I showed how the racket was sold. Volume II shows how a citizenry builds the spine to stop it: nine witnesses across 209 years, from Adam Smith in 1759 to Martin Luther King Jr. at Riverside Church, and one claim. Peace is not the absence of war. It is the disciplined, generation-long maintenance of the conditions under which the apparatus does not predominate.
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The argument
If war is a racket, then peace needs to make a little more noise.
Peace Racket riffs on Major General Smedley D. Butler's 1935 pamphlet War Is a Racket — one of the most searing indictments of the machinery of American war ever written by a man who spent thirty-three years inside it. The pamphlet is still in print.
The apparatus Butler named is still running.
This project traces a line of witness across 209 years: from Adam Smith in 1759 through John Newton, Robert Burns, Frederick Douglass, Katharine Lee Bates, Smedley Butler, George C. Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower, and Martin Luther King Jr. Each witness named the racket from inside the apparatus that produced it. Volume I published on Memorial Day. Volume II carries the line forward on Armistice Day.
Peace is a working condition. It requires deliberate maintenance. The invitation is to notice the water we are already swimming in — and to help keep it clean.
The Volumes
Three Books, One Argument
Start anywhere. The Essential Edition reads in an evening; Volume I builds the case; Volume II names the people who held the line.
Volume II
The Line of Witness
Nine witnesses, 1759–1968
Kindle pre-order · Paperback Nov. 11
Pre-order Volume II
The Essential Edition
Peace Racket
The argument and the poem, in a single sitting
Paperback · Kindle
Read in an EveningFrom the Substack
Recent Missives
Leading up to release day, the Substack is running The War That Didn't End War , a short series running up to Armistice Day. Each week we bring back a witness, name a racket, or hand a citizen a word.
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Meet Us Elsewhere
Where Peace Racket Lives
The website is the flagship. Every satellite platform pulls readers back to the argument and the books.