WAR IS A RACKET - Smedley Butler
I wouldn't call it brainwashing....
I would be more inclined to call it warped.
But I grew up playing in bomb craters, where I recycled the remains of dead people's lives into fantasy dolls houses.
Where the soil that I scrabbled around in was contaminated with all sorts of ancient diseases and where the smell of stagnation and rot was more familiar to me than perfume.
Youngsters nowadays could never understand the significance of staring at half a child's bedroom, dangling, with tattered curtains still flapping in the wind.
Still less will they understand that children growing up in such a scenario think of it as totally normal and that they presume, when their mother says "It was a World War, darling!", that the squalid scene that they live in is the same all over the entire planet.
War is not just a racket, it is a creator of warriors.
Warriors who would rather die defending against it than see it happen to any other child again.
The book "War is a Racket" is only 13 pages long and is here in pdf form:
https://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html
I'll have to read this, thanks for sharing! Now, never having heard of the Major, I'll have to Google to see if he's fact or fiction.
By now I hope you know that not only was he real but he was right!
Yes, I quite quickly learned that he was real and shared a few of his on-line quotes on FB. I haven't had time to read the pdf link you shared yet but I will come back and do that. I had to search because I've see other posts similar, assumed the person was real and then dicovered the poster was just developing a character and novel. Again, thanks for sharing.