Friday, July 22, 2005

General Smedley Butler

I would love to see someone like John Sayles do a movie about this guy. I heard about Smedley Butler years ago when David Emory did a radio series on WBAI called , "Uncle Sam and the Swastika." You can now hear Emory on WFMU. Another good source about Butler and the little known story about the plot to overthrow Roosevelt can be found in George Seldes' book, Facts and Fascism. Here's a short bio of Butler:
"Major-General Smedley Darlington Butler (1881-1940), a 33-year veteran of the Marine Corps who was twice decorated with the Medal of Honor, blew the whistle on the fascist plot to oust FDR. He also confessed to having been a “high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.”
In his book War is a Racket, 1935, Butler opens with these lines:"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.... [and] the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described 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.For a great many years, as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it.... I must face it and speak out."
here's a site with more information on the attempted overthrow

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey, I think I should make that movie?

Oliver Stone

David Ballela said...

You don't deserve to, especially after you announced that 9-11
big issue avoider you are making