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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Jules Archer
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August 25 - November 3, 2020
[War] is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes. . . . How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle?
Every indication points to a second World War. . . . The nations of Europe and Asia are spending billions of dollars each year in military preparations. . . . These nations are bound to go to war because the men in charge of the governments of some of them have worked their people into a fanatical frame of mind.
Let Congress say to all foreign investors: “Come on home or let your money stay out of the country—we will not defend it.”
While Butler had become an isolationist out of disillusionment with the motives of those who had engineered armed U.S. intervention in other countries, he hated fascism as fervently as he hated war. He warned angrily that the Fascist fifth column in America was so active that one in every five hundred Americans had become “at heart a traitor to democracy.”
am doing the best I can to educate myself, but feel that no man should invite others to follow him unless he has a definite objective, and has the course marked out, day by day. I, of course, learned the above from my military life.”
The Du Ponts supplied more grist for Butler’s antiwar mill in September, when the Senate Munitions Investigating Committee revealed that the munitions industry, led by the Du Ponts, had sabotaged a League of Nations disarmament conference held at Geneva.
Butler was convinced that a continued American presence in Asia could only lead to eventual war with an aggressive Japan bent on becoming the dominant power in the Orient. He saw confirmation of his belief that war was a business racket when Washington continued to permit American corporations to sell scrap iron and oil to Tokyo for its war machine. He also knew that there were over two billion dollars in American investments in Germany, which was being goaded by British diplomacy into attacking the Soviet Union.
He wired back indignantly, “Have never spoken for the Christian Front. I am a Quaker and am preaching tolerance and am not connected nor will I have anything to do with any movement or organization advocating intolerance or the entrance of this country into any foreign war.”
His suspicions were not eased by observing industrialists and bankers entering trade cartels with America’s potential enemies, Germany, Italy, and Japan, while U.S. arms manufacturers made huge profits selling munitions to both sides and pressed Congress to spend new billions on “defense” to keep up with the “arms race” they themselves had promoted.
The general who could have had all the wealth and power he wanted as dictator of the United States died leaving an estate that totaled two thousand dollars.
The conspiracy unquestionably inspired the novel Seven Days in May, made into a successful film, which portrayed a Fascist plot by high-placed American conspirators to capture the White House and establish a military dictatorship under the pretext of saving the nation from communism. Few of the millions of Americans who read the novel or saw the film suspected that it had a solid basis in fact.
If we remember Major General Smedley Darlington Butler for nothing else, we owe him an eternal debt of gratitude for spurning the chance to become dictator of the United States—and for making damned sure no one else did either.
