General Smedley D. Butler was born in West Chester, Pa., in 1881. Educated at Haverford School he went on to become a Major General in the United States Marine Corps and was awarded two Congressional Medals of Honour. He received a Distinguished Service Medal in 1919 and retired from the army in 1931, after which he became the director of the Department of Safety and Republican Candidate for Senate, whilst working as a lecturer. He died in 1940.
"There is little likelihood one will encounter a putdown and
discounting of armed service, while questioning the reason for it,
by a top experienced commander, anywhere within a light year of
Marine General Smedley D. Butler's WAR IS A RACKET. And there is
utterly nothing comparable to the grim anthology of photographs
devoted to the unspeakable hideousness of the bloody gore of modern
- since Napoleonic times - warfare, THE HORROR OF IT. The American
public recoiled from these two works when they were published, in
close sequence, two generations ago... We can hope that this dual
masterpiece at hand, in quite a different context, does a better
job of reducing the level of ignorance."
-- James J. Martin "Butler is scathing in his description of how
the U.S. government wasted the lives of those soldiers who died but
also of those who survived... A stunning condemnation of U.S.
militarism and it ends with a demand that rings true down to today
- 'To hell with war.'"
-- Ashley Smith, Socialist Worker"America had seen its own attempt
at a Fascist coup. Why, then, is this incident in U.S. history not
better known? Why don't children learn in school about the plot to
seize the United States government?... The time has obviously come
for Smedley Butler to have his moment in the sun. Butler's attack
on the military-industrial complex does more than expose war for
the racket it is: It also gives the antiwar movement unmatched
credibility."-- Ken Mondschein, corporatemofo.com
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