Who was General Butler?

[silkworm]

A Page from history - something about General Butler.

Who was General Butler?

After he retired from US Army, General Butler some time in reflecting on his career before he concluded: “Like all members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orfer of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service”.

His first book was entitled War as a Racket. Its thesis was simple. He was no longer infavour of offensive wars. He would defend his country, but he would never again ecome a “racketeer for capitalism”. ‘War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe. As something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the very few at the expense of the masses’.

In a speech in 1933, General Butler expounded his “anti-American” or proto-Occidentalist views with remarkable clarity, spelling out the nature of US imperialism in Latin America:

There isn’t a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its ‘finger man’ to point out enemies, its ‘muscle men’ to destroy enemies, its ‘brain men’ to plan war preparation and a ‘Big Boss’ super-nationalistic-capitalism.

It may seem odd for me, a military man, to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty-three years and four-months in active military service as a member of this country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corpse. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being 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.

I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it.

I helped make Honduras ‘right’ for American fruit companies in 1903. I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American Oil interest in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long.


I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China, I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents. [Page #: 285-286]


* Note from SW: This excerpt is taken from a book called “The Clash of Fundamentalisms” by Tariq Ali, published in United Kingdom 2002 and 2003 by Verso Books, London.

[Guest]

Old hat... been here many times... worth repeating nonetheless. Thanks... it's good this gets turned over and not buried 100 pages ago.