Smedley "War is a Racket" Butler: Now there was a veteran!

[JackRiddler]

The most decorated marine in history, the most fiercely admired veteran of his time, looked back on the life of killing for imperialism that he had led and saw it was wrong. He then wrote "War Is A Racket."

(In 1934 he also exposed an attempt at a fascist coup against FDR by American bankers and industrialists, but we'll save that for another thread.)

Here is what should be the required reading today:

WAR IS A RACKET

by Two-Time Congressional Medal of Honor Recipient

Major General Smedley D. Butler - USMC Retired

CHAPTER ONE

WAR IS A RACKET

WAR is a racket. It always has been.

It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

In the World War a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.

How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?

(snip)

http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm

[Jack Bone]

1. K&R for Gen. Butler...Semper Fi !!

:patriot:

[no_hypocrisy]

2. K & R and a salute to General Smedley Darlington Butler!

A true American hero.

P.S. General Butler went to the FBI and Congress and prevented corporatists WHICH INCLUDED *'s GRANDFATHER, PRESCOTT BUSH, from a coup d'etat and overthrowing FDR and installing Butler as a puppet leader.

[annabanana]

3. A Great American Hero.. The most famous guy you never heard of.

He sure as hell wasn't in any of my Social Studies books while I was growing up. He surely should have been.

[Arctic Dave]

5. "the most famous guy you never heard of"

If his story was actually taught in school how many teenagers would sign up for the military? The recruiters pray on the young for a reason. If I would have known about him before I joined, I would have never signed my name on the line.

[Posteritatis]

14. I wonder if some might enlist to follow that same kind of path

If someone joined the military for a paycheck, or to blow shit up, or because they drank the presidential kool-aid, that's one thing. If someone joined so that the armed forces would have at least one more person who acts like someone wearing the uniform bloody well should be acting, I can respect that.

[bean fidhleir]

6. "never heard of" indeed. I've always thought it significant that he

got only a ratty little post named for him, while other Marines, much less worthy but more politically correct, got the big ones named for them, e.g. Lejeune, Pendleton, etc.

[90-percent]

4. Bush's appeasement comment

Bush's recent Nazi appeasement comments opened the door for investigation into his families relationship to the members of this anti-Roosevelt attempted coup.

I read recently, thanks to the great DU links informed posters share here, that this conspiracy enlisted Gen. Smedley to be part of their plot. He signed up with them, gained their confidence, and then ratted them out when the time was right. One of the conspirators was Prescott Bush!

And patriotic Prescott was doing business with the Nazi's until about 1943! This was found out and also hushed up.

GWB has merely dusted off Prescott's War profiteering and treason playbook and catapults it from the White House.

The Nazi-Bush connections in fact and in spirit are gut wrenching. Where is our modern day Smedley Butler?

Perhaps it's Vincent Bugliosi?

-90% Jimmy

[jmowreader]

7. Except for the part about the "most decorated Marine," you're right

General Butler was the most highly decorated Marine at the time of his death, but General "Chesty" Puller has surpassed him.

General Butler was the last man to earn two Medals of Honor, and the only man to win his Medals in different wars. Puller never earned the Medal, but he did earn five Navy Crosses--the only Marine to do so.

This doesn't take away from the essential fact: Smedley Butler is a great American.

On edit: changed "General Butler" in the second paragraph to "General Puller." Then changed it back when I realized it was right in the first place. Oops.

[cascadiance]

10. I think Butler actually won three medals of honor, but they took one of his away...

... with their efforts to cover up the coup attempt.

Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman (through his mom and his brother Kevin) may go down in the same category of "manipulated" heroes of this country as Mr. Butler was, and heroes not so much necessarily for what they did in the field of battle but for how their dedication to the true principles of this country ultimately helps save it by not allowing themselves to echo the governments' lies about their service.

[JackRiddler]

11. Actually, the modern-day Smedley Butler is Scott Ritter. nt

[cascadiance]

17. Scott Ritter is a good man. He went to the same HS I did overseas...

If I'd stayed there to my graduation year, I probably would have known him there then as a senior.

[JackRiddler]

21. Thanks for that interesting information by PM!

;)

[bean fidhleir]

24. No, he qualified for a 3rd one, but they weren't giving them to officers at the time

So he got the Brevet Medal instead (and a promo, I think)

[uberllama42]

8. There is a plaque at City Hall here in Philadelphia

commemorating Gen. Butler's time as commissioner of public safety here. It says of Butler that "he proved incorruptible."

It does not mention that he was ejected from the job almost immediately because he cracked down on political corruption in the city.

Butler is one of the few men whom I admire without reservation.

[pnorman]

9. Here's an on-line video about Smedley Butler:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article13844.htm

The book on which this History Channel video was based on, had been long out of print, but is also online on that same website. Fortunately, it's been republished, and can be ordered from Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Plot-Seize-White-House-Conspiracy/dp/1602390363/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211832997&sr=1-2

pnorman
ON edit: Here are a couple of relevant Wiki sites:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smedley_Butler
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot

[JackRiddler]

12. The modern day Smedley Butler is...

Scott Ritter. A highly decorated Marine who oversaw the complete destruction of the Iraqi WMD and WMD industries, he played the most crucial role in speaking truth against the lies prior to the invasion of Iraq.

[lonestarnot]

13. Major General Smedley D. Butler - USMC Retired

:patriot:

[tom_paine]

15. K&R for American Hero Gen. Smedley Butler, who turned in the Bushies when they tried to coup FDR and

ally us with those dear Bushie Friends, Hitler and the Nazis.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/document/document_20070723.shtml

[LucyParsons]

16. afuckingmen nt

[Bigmack]

18. Don't forget..

"I believe that if we had and would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar-soaked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own -- and if unfortunately their revolution must be of the violent type because the "haves" refuse to share with the "have-nots" by any peaceful method, at least what they get will be their own, and not the American style, which they don't want and above all don't want crammed down their throats by Americans."

General David M. Shoup, May 14, 1966
Commandant of the Marine Corps 1960-63,
and winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor

[Uncle Joe]

23. Semper Fi, General Shoup!

:patriot:

Thanks for the post, Bigmack.

[wildbilln864]

19. damn right!

:patriot:

[JackRiddler]

20. a yup

[Uncle Joe]

22. Semper Fi, General Butler!

:patriot:

Thanks for the thread, JackRiddler.

[JackRiddler]

25. Article today:

http://counterpunch.org/mckenna05282008.html

Why I Want to Teach Anthropology at the Army War College
What Would Smedley Butler Do?

By BRIAN McKENNA

"To wage war, become an anthropologist." That's the opening line from a 2007 article in the U.S. Army War College journal "Parameters." The feature, by Oxford educated historian Patrick Porter, says, "from the academy to the Pentagon, fresh attention is being focused on knowing the enemy."

Today anthropologists are busy at work for the CIA and Pentagon. The CIA recently funded an effort - the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program - to train up to 150 analysts in anthropology, each of whom receive a $25,000 a year stipend, tuition support, loan paybacks and other benefits with the proviso that they work for an intelligence agency for 1 ½ times the period covered by financial support. These are secret scholar-spies circulating in our anthropology departments. They cannot reveal their funding source. Then there are the Cultural Operations Research Human Terrain Teams in which the military actively recruits anthropologists to provide counterinsurgency data for its occupying armies. As private contractors anthropologists can make up to $300,000 a year for their service.

That's not fair! As an anthropologist, I want equal time in the War College....

I agree with the idea that "to wage war, become an anthropologist." The trouble is that it turns out that we are on different sides of the war. "Human Terrain" anthropologists are with imperialism. I'm with Gramsci. You remember Gramsci, that Italian Communist revolutionary who wrote spellbinding theories of culture in his "Prison Notebooks," while rotting away in Mussolini's jail. Importantly Gramsci spoke of two wars. The "war of position" generally referred to a tactic of informal penetration (a passive revolution, a war of education) that was necessary when open warfare or a "war of maneuver" (armies across borders) is not advised or possible.

Gramsci's enemies were capitalists and fascists. Who are the enemies of the U.S. Army War College? According to Porter it's "Marxist revolutionaries, Palestinian nationalists, and Hezbollah net-warriors" (Porter: 57). That wide net would include Gramsci. In short, the CIA/Human Terrain military anthropologists have aligned themselves with a national security state apparatus in wars of position and maneuver against critical anthropologists and indigenous peoples.

(snip)

Only a fourth of my students, on average, can even identify Iraq on a map. With such widespread ignorance it is easy to see how Reverend Jeremiah Wright can be demonized for his claims that 911 represented an occasion when the chickens came home to roost. The public knows little about the chickens.