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Smedley butler wars democracy8/2/2023 del Río, Bernardino Guerrero, Raúl Eduardo Mahecha, Nicanor Serrano and Erasmo Coronell. The leaders of the 1928 strike that ended with the Banana Massacre, in the town of Ciénaga, Colombia, from left to right: Pedro M. imperialism there, listen to our earlier episode “ Haiti, Interrupted.” military’s first counterinsurgency operation: against Filipinos who were resisting yet another colonial power.Īmong other confessions, Butler said he came to realize he helped make Haiti “a decent place for the National City Bank Boys.” America’s 19-year occupation of that country, as well as its interventions next door in the Dominican Republic, were driven by financial interest, Edwidge Danticat writes in the New Yorker.įor more on Haiti and the legacy of U.S. In many ways, he foreshadows President Eisenhower’s concern about the rise of the “ military-industrial complex.”įollowing his duty in the Spanish-American war, Butler shipped out to the Pacific to fight in what some historians call the U.S. Drawing on a series of speeches he gave across the United States, Butler wrote that the real winners of foreign wars were the elites who profited from them. Butler published a short book called War Is a Racket. If the United States continues to send young men and women to battle for the interests of capital, it may find itself - again and again - fighting its own demons at home.Īfter exposing the Business Plot, Gen. But veterans of such forever wars are just as easily radicalized, as evidenced in the disproportional number of Jan. Many soldiers returned from Vietnam and joined the peace movement. After all, another decorated officer might have cut the other way, Katz says. The lesson in Butler’s story remains important today, as disastrous conflicts from Vietnam to Afghanistan continue to maim American ideals. Since joining the Marines at age 16 “to help free little Cuba,” Butler had cavorted across the globe, supporting military interventions and U.S.-backed coups in far-flung spots like Haiti, Central America, the Philippines and China. Photograph by Stu Jones via Īt one point in his life, Katz says, Butler might have supported a plan like the one outlined for him that day in 1934, at an abandoned cafe in Philadelphia, by bond salesman Gerald C. Earlier in life, as assistant secretary of the Navy, FDR oversaw the drafting of Haiti’s new constitution during the U.S. As president, Roosevelt saw the United States through the Great Depression and most of World War Two. Roosevelt is memorialized in Washington, D.C., alongside his dog, Fala - both cast in bronze.
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