We are approaching the 100th anniversary of the
most bloody World War I, a holocaust in which 16 million died and 20 million
were wounded, ranking as the second-most gruesome capitalist conflict in
history. It was second only to the 60
million total deaths in World War II – a war Butler could smell on the horizon when he
wrote this book.
Butler’s ideas were formed
after his participation in the disaster of World War I, and in U.S. imperialist forays into Haiti, China,
Cuba, the Philippines and Nicaragua – ironically many of them countries
the U.S.
later continued to invade or attempt to control. He himself was the son of a Quaker lawyer and
politician. There will be much coverage
of this anniversary, much of it trying to rehabilitate this war in the eyes of
history. This has already started in Britain where Wilson’s ‘war to end all wars’ is now being
portrayed as necessary by bourgeois commentators. Much as Vietnam has been buried by either a
layer of youthful forgetfulness or of nobility, World War I is the next
candidate for prettification.
As a dialectical response to the bourgeois butchery of World
War I, the working classes responded with the success of the Bolshevik
revolution, and the near success of the German and Hungarian revolutions. World War II ushered in the Chinese, Korean
and later the Vietnamese revolutions. In
both, capitalist classes in various countries vied for colonial and/or imperial
control of various colonies and economies, and while some succeeded generally, they
lost control of large chunks of the world for a time.
Unlike the creepy heroes of official U.S. militarism like Patton and McArthur, who
shot down unemployed soldier bonus marchers in 1932, Butler sided with the soldiers who had been
stiffed of their war bonuses by the government.
This booklet also describes an extraordinary 1935 plot by the American
Legion, (ex-WWI soldiers and officers), the American Liberty League, and
various Wall Street capitalists and military figures to seize control of the U.S. government, and remove Roosevelt.
Many were sympathizers of Mussolini or
Hitler. Butler was asked to participate in this plot,
and instead blew the whistle on it in testimony before the U.S. Congress. This plot has been hushed up in official U.S. histories.
Butler was one of the first -
and perhaps only - active U.S.
generals who decided to oppose aggressive wars on principle. He was an isolationist, but his isolationism
made him actually take seriously the name of the Department of “Defense.” He proposed rules not allowing planes, ships
or men from being deployed outside of the near boundaries of the U.S.
mainland. In these essays he defines why
the military should only be used in defense of an invasion. He also carefully delineates why an invasion
of the U.S.
mainland would have been logistically impossible – and probably still is. Unlike pacifists or liberals who oppose wars
because they are ‘violent’ or because they will not succeed, Butler
carefully shows the profits made by U.S. firms during World War I were
key.
Butler indicates that, had
the U.S. not joined Britain and France
and guaranteed victory, the debts of those countries to U.S. war
material manufacturers might not have been paid back. Hence the U.S.
had to join Britain and France in order
to insure their profits. Butler itemizes the war
profits for various industries that made between 25%-300% more profits during
that war than in the prior period of peace.
As Butler
understands, war is good for business – because of the vast volume of product
needed, much of it destroyed; because of the waste, excessive markups and lax government
supervision. All of this was
re-confirmed during the Iraq Wars, yet no hue and cry over ‘war profiteers’
ever arose on a mass scale during those wars, unlike the discussion after World
War I. This is an example of how our
political discourse has degraded since then.
Butler
said:
“I spent 33 years in the Marines, most of my time being a
high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for Capitalism.”
Can you imagine a general now saying those same words? It is only a measure of how the distance
between society and the generalissimos of the U.S. military has increased. While many retired generals opposed the Iraq
War because of its adventurist nature, none that I know of has ever drawn a consistent
connection between the economic system and the war system as did Butler.
And I bought it at May Day Books!
Red Frog
January 5, 2014
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