Smedley Butler – The oldest crime

Smedley D. Butler published a pamphlet compiled from numerous lectures and speeches a few years after his farewell from the US Marine Corps in 1935: “War is a racket”. Racket can be translated in a variety of ways: crook, fraud, dirty business or crime. The German new publication, published by the former security advisor Angela Merkel, Erich Vad, takes over a chapter heading of the ribbon as the title for the German edition: “On hell with the war!” This script has been one of the standard works of anti -militarism and anti -imperialism in the USA for 90 years.

Butler joined the US Marines at the outbreak of the US against Spain in 1898, at that time an infantry aid group of the US Navy, from which an elite unit later became particularly explosive missions. At the age of 16 he was appointed lieutenant and first fought in Cuba against the Spanish colonial power and then against the Cubans’ independence movement. In his 34-year military career, he was involved in almost all the US military interventions. The later major general was used wherever there were burned or the conditions were brought to the burning sensation.

“War is the most profitable and malignant fraud.”

Smedley D. Butler

Kuba, China, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Mexico and the Philippines belonged to his stations in the service of the US elite, in which the entire program of modern upright uprising was passed through: jungle war, house fight, forced labor and merciless persecution of political opponents. All the more surprising that Butler later positioned himself politically on the side of the opponents of the war. Several personal events were decisive for this.

Butler retired in 1931. Before he retired in the same year, he mentioned an anecdote in Philadelphia in a speech to prevent the risk of war that a friend had given him. This good acquaintance was taken by Mussolini in Italy in a sports car. On the breakneck ride, the dictator ran over a child and committed the driver’s flight. Mussolini is said to have replied to the frightened reaction of the passenger: »It was just a life. What does a life mean for the state’s affairs? ”According to this speech, Mussolini, the US foreign minister apologized, butler was arrested and threatened with a war court proceedings, but was discontinued. In 1943, after Mussolini’s arrest, his former co -driver Cornelius Vanderbilt confirmed the entire process.

In 1933, influential financiers and industrialists planned a coup d’état (“Business Plot”) in the United States, for which they also wanted to win Butler. The finance agent Gerald Mac Guire tried several times to win him as the top commander for 500,000 ex-soldiers of the American Legion, which the capital Washington should occupy. The background was Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “New Deal”, who tried to change the social situation in favor of the economic and political elite in favor of poorer sections in the time of the economic decline of the United States.

“If you make these 500,000 soldiers advocate something that smells like fascism, I will get them 500,000 more and knock them out, and then we have a real war in our own country,” said Smedley Butler’s answer in 1934 before the US congress.

“War is a fraudulent crime. He has always been. The war may be the oldest, but certainly the most profitable and malignant fraud. (…) War is the only system in which profits in Dollars and the losses are expected in human life. (…) Only a small group of insiders knows what the war is really about. The fraud of the war is operated less at the expense of many – because with it some people make a huge fortune. ”Butler writes in the first chapter of his combat script“ Hell with the war! ”. During his death in 1940 he was the highest -decorated soldier of the US Marines. Even today, a base of the US Marine Corps in Okinawa, one of over 700 military bases in around 80 countries, is named after him.

Smedley D. Butler: On hell with the war! Fifty-Fifty-Verlag, 48 pages, € 12.