Volume I
Peace Racket
An argument from inside the tradition
Available in paperback, hardcover, and Kindle
Read Volume INaming the Racket · Making Some Noise for Peace
Peace Racket
If war is a racket, then peace needs to make a little more noise.
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 three centuries: from Adam Smith in 1759 through Robert Burns, John Newton, Katharine Lee Bates, Frederick Douglass, Smedley Butler, Thurgood Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower, and Martin Luther King Jr. Each witness named the racket from inside the apparatus that produced it. The volume the newsletter accompanies carries the line forward.
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
Two Books, One Argument
Volume II
being
written now
being
written now
Volume II
The Line of Witness
Nine witnesses across three centuries
Publication December 10, 2026
ISBN 979-8-9964532-3-8 (paperback)
From the Substack
Recent Missives
Peace Racket publishes ongoing missives — the argument delivered in the register of the daily and the anniversary. 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.