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Smedley butler wars democracy8/13/2023 In China I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.īutler confesses that during his decades of service in the United States Marine Corps: It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. 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. In War Is a Racket, Butler points to a variety of examples, mostly from World War I, where industrialists, whose operations were subsidized by public funding, were able to generate substantial profits, making money from mass human suffering. A scanned copy of the original 1935 printing is available for download, in part or in whole, on the HathiTrust website, along with a detailed description of the copyrights. Thomas had written Smedley Butler's oral autobiography.Īccording to the HathiTrust online library, the book published in 1935 is in the public domain. In an introduction to the Reader's Digest version, Lowell Thomas praised Butler's "moral as well as physical courage". His work was condensed in Reader's Digest as a book supplement, which helped popularize his message. The speech was so well received that he wrote a longer version as a short book published in 1935. He had been appointed commanding officer of the Gendarmerie during the 1915–1934 United States occupation of Haiti.Īfter Butler retired from the US Marine Corps in October 1931, he made a nationwide tour in the early 1930s giving his speech "War Is a Racket". Based on his career military experience, Butler discusses how business interests commercially benefit from warfare. Butler, a retired United States Marine Corps Major General and two-time Medal of Honor recipient. War Is a Racket is a speech and a 1935 short book by Smedley D.
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