If you’ve ever done a bit of peace activism in the United States, you likely know all about Smedley Butler, or think you do. Navy not hold its war rehearsals near California instead of near Japan? Today, just knowing that he asked that could make someone look upon NATO war rehearsals in Ukraine slightly differently.īut Smedley is not left out of peace activist history. Why, he demanded to know, for at least five years until his death in 1940, did the U.S. financial interests in China, the support for Nazis and Fascists in Europe.

The most inconvenient thing about old Smedley, however, I believe, is the years he spent denouncing the slow and steady buildup toward World War II, the arms race and provocations of Japan, the anti-Japanese propaganda driven by U.S. I’ll wait.Īlso, here are the books in many of which I quote Butler and which I would like to have banned as prominently as possible. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.” It is the only one international in scope. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious.

(And then your history book would be swiftly banned.) Here’s a bit, in case I’m right: If you name Butler’s most famous piece of writing (“ War Is a Racket“), you almost have to quote a bit of it - and then a fair number of people might become hooked on reading one of the most eloquent denunciations of U.S. government in the way that those of us who’ve heard of him do Smedley Butler, even though Vanderbilt turned against oligarchs as Butler turned against warmakers. For some reason we never celebrate Vanderbilt as the savior of the U.S. Interestingly, it was Cornelius Vanderbilt IV, who had been in the car with Mussolini and who had told his friend Smedley Butler about it, who later recounted in his autobiography a second Wall Street coup plot that he said he had exposed to Eleanor Roosevelt and thereby her husband, and successfully put a stop to. government’s friendly relations with Mussolini. If you mention the scandal that erupted when he recounted how Mussolini had run over a little girl with his car, it’s hard to leave out the U.S. If you bring up a guy who prevented a Wall Street coup against FDR, you do real damage to the tale of peaceful respect for government from the beginning of time up through January 6, 2021. Smedley Butler is generally left out of U.S.

Smedley butler katz