![\"smedley_butler.jpg\"](\"\/blog\/wp-content\/media\/images\/smedley_butler.jpg\" "\\"smedley_butler.jpg\\"")
<\/p>\nAuthored by Danny Sjursen via TomDispatch.com<\/p>\n
A Nation Turns Its Lonely Eyes to (Someone Like) You…<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
There once lived an odd little man – five feet nine inches tall and barely 140 pounds sopping wet – who rocked the lecture circuit and the nation itself. For all but a few activist insiders and scholars, U.S. Marine Corps Major General Smedley Darlington Butler is now lost to history. Yet more than a century ago, this strange\u00a0contradiction\u00a0of a man would become a national war hero, celebrated in pulp adventure novels, and then, 30 years later, as one of this country\u2019s most prominent antiwar and anti-imperialist dissidents.<\/p>\n
Raised in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and educated in Quaker (pacifist) schools, the son of an influential congressman, he would end up serving in nearly all of America\u2019s \u201cBanana Wars\u201d from 1898 to 1931. Wounded in combat and a rare recipient of two Congressional Medals of Honor, he would retire as the youngest, most decorated major general in the Marines.<\/p>\n
A teenage officer and a certified hero during an international intervention in the Chinese\u00a0Boxer Rebellion\u00a0of 1900, he would later become a constabulary leader of the Haitian gendarme, the police chief of Philadelphia (while on an approved absence from the military), and a proponent of Marine Corps football. In more standard fashion, he would serve in battle as well as in what might today be labeled\u00a0peacekeeping,\u00a0counterinsurgency, and\u00a0advise-and-assist\u00a0missions in Cuba, China, the Philippines, Panama, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, France, and China (again). While he showed early signs of skepticism about some of those imperial campaigns or, as they were sardonically called by critics at the time, \u201cDollar Diplomacy\u201d operations — that is, military campaigns waged on behalf of U.S. corporate business interests — until he retired he remained the prototypical loyal Marine.<\/p>\n
But after retirement, Smedley Butler changed his tune. He began to blast the imperialist foreign policy and interventionist bullying in which he\u2019d only recently played such a prominent part. Eventually, in 1935 during the Great Depression, in what became a classic passage in his memoir, which he\u00a0titled\u00a0\u201cWar Is a Racket,\u201d he wrote:<\/p>\n
\u201cI spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service… And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the Bankers.\u201d<\/p>\n
Seemingly overnight, the famous war hero transformed himself into an equally acclaimed antiwar speaker and activist in a politically turbulent era. Those were, admittedly, uncommonly anti-interventionist years, in which veterans and politicians alike promoted what (for America, at least) had been fringe ideas. This was, after all, the height of what later pro-war interventionists would pejoratively label American \u201cisolationism.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nonetheless, Butler was unique (for that moment and certainly for our own) in his unapologetic amenability to left-wing domestic politics and materialist critiques of American militarism. In the last years of his life, he would face increasing criticism from his former admirer, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the military establishment, and the interventionist press. This was particularly true after Adolf Hitler\u2019s Nazi Germany invaded Poland and later France. Given the severity of the Nazi threat to mankind, hindsight undoubtedly proved Butler\u2019s virulent opposition to U.S. intervention in World War II wrong.<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, the long-term erasure of his decade of antiwar and anti-imperialist activism and the assumption that all his assertions were irrelevant has proven historically deeply misguided. In the wake of America\u2019s brief but bloody entry into the First World War, the skepticism of Butler (and a significant part of an entire generation of veterans) about intervention in a new European bloodbath should have been understandable. Above all, however, his critique of American militarism of an earlier imperial era in the Pacific and in Latin America remains prescient and all too timely today, especially coming as it did from one of the most decorated and high-ranking general officers of his time. (In the era of the never-ending war on terror, such a phenomenon is quite literally inconceivable.)<\/p>\n
Smedley Butler\u2019s Marine Corps and the military of his day was, in certain ways, a different sort of organization than today\u2019s highly professionalized armed forces. History rarely repeats itself, not in a literal sense anyway. Still, there are some disturbing similarities between the careers of Butler and today\u2019s generation of\u00a0forever-war\u00a0fighters. All of them served repeated tours of duty in (mostly) unsanctioned wars around the world. Butler\u2019s conflicts may have stretched west from Haiti across the oceans to China, whereas today\u2019s generals mostly lead missions from West Africa east to Central Asia, but both sets of conflicts seemed perpetual in their day and were motivated by barely concealed economic and imperial interests.<\/p>\n
Nonetheless, whereas this country\u2019s imperial campaigns of the first third of the twentieth century generated a Smedley Butler, the hyper-interventionism of the first decades of this century hasn’t produced a single even faintly comparable figure. Not one. Zero. Zilch. Why that is matters and illustrates much about the U.S. military establishment and contemporary national culture, none of it particularly encouraging.<\/p>\n
Why No Antiwar Generals<\/strong><\/p>\n When Smedley Butler retired in 1931, he was one of three Marine Corps major generals holding a rank just below that of only the Marine commandant and the Army chief of staff. Today, with about 900 generals and admirals currently\u00a0serving\u00a0on active duty, including 24 major generals in the Marine Corps alone, and with scores of flag officers retiring annually, not a single one has offered genuine public opposition to almost 19 years worth of ill-advised, remarkably unsuccessful American wars. As for the most senior officers, the 40 four-star generals and admirals whose vocal antimilitarism might make the biggest splash, there are\u00a0more\u00a0of them today than there were even at the height of the Vietnam War, although the active military is now about half the size it was then. Adulated as many of them may be, however, not one qualifies as a public critic of today\u2019s failing wars.<\/p>\n Instead, the principal patriotic dissent against those terror wars has come from retired colonels, lieutenant colonels, and occasionally more junior officers (like me), as well as enlisted service members. Not that there are many of us to speak of either. I consider it disturbing (and so should you) that I personally know just about every one of the retired military figures who has spoken out against America\u2019s forever wars.<\/p>\n The big three are Secretary of State Colin Powell\u2019s former chief of staff, retired Colonel\u00a0Lawrence Wilkerson; Vietnam veteran and onetime West Point history instructor, retired Colonel\u00a0Andrew Bacevich; and Iraq veteran and Afghan War\u00a0whistleblower, retired Lieutenant Colonel\u00a0Danny Davis. All three have proven to be genuine public servants, poignant voices, and — on some level — cherished personal mentors. For better or worse, however, none carry the potential clout of a retired senior theater commander or prominent four-star general offering the same critiques.<\/p>\n Something must account for veteran dissenters topping out at the level of colonel. Obviously, there are personal reasons why individual officers chose early retirement or didn\u2019t make general or admiral. Still, the system for selecting flag officers should raise at least a few questions when it comes to the lack of antiwar voices among retired commanders. In fact, a selection committee of top generals and admirals is appointed each year to choose the next colonels to earn their first star. And perhaps you won\u2019t be surprised to learn that, according to numerous\u00a0reports, \u201cthe members of this board are inclined, if not explicitly motivated, to seek candidates in their own image — officers whose careers look like theirs.\u201d At a minimal level, such a system is hardly built to foster free thinkers, no less breed potential dissidents.<\/p>\n Consider it an irony of sorts that this system first received\u00a0criticism\u00a0in our era of forever wars when General David Petraeus, then commanding the highly publicized \u201csurge\u201d in Iraq, had to leave that theater of war in 2007 to serve as the chair of that selection committee. The reason: he wanted to ensure that a twice passed-over colonel, a prot\u00e9g\u00e9 of his — future Trump National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster — earned his star.<\/p>\n Mainstream national security analysts reported on this affair at the time as if it were a major scandal, since most of them were convinced that Petraeus and his vaunted counterinsurgency or \u201cCOINdinista” prot\u00e9g\u00e9s and their “new” war-fighting doctrine had the magic touch that would turn around the failing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, Petraeus tried to apply those very tactics twice — once in each country — as did acolytes of his later, and you know the\u00a0results\u00a0of that.<\/p>\n But here\u2019s the point: it took an eleventh-hour intervention by America\u2019s most acclaimed general of that moment to get new stars handed out to prominent colonels who had, until then, been stonewalled by Cold War-bred flag officers because they were promoting different (but also strangely familiar) tactics in this country\u2019s wars. Imagine, then, how likely it would be for such a leadership system to produce genuine dissenters with stars of any serious sort, no less a crew of future Smedley Butlers.<\/p>\n At the roots of this system lay the obsession of the American officer corps with \u201cprofessionalization” after the Vietnam War debacle. This first manifested itself in a decision to ditch the citizen-soldier tradition,\u00a0end\u00a0the draft, and create an \u201call-volunteer force.\u201d The elimination of conscription, as\u00a0predicted\u00a0by critics at the time,\u00a0created\u00a0an ever-growing civil-military divide, even as it increased public apathy regarding America\u2019s wars by erasing whatever \u201cskin in the game” most citizens had.<\/p>\n More than just helping to squelch civilian antiwar activism, though, the professionalization of the military, and of the officer corps in particular, ensured that any future Smedley Butlers would be left in the dust (or in retirement at the level of lieutenant colonel or colonel) by a system geared to producing faux warrior-monks. Typical of such figures is current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army General Mark Milley. He may speak\u00a0gruffly\u00a0and look like a man with a head of his own, but typically he\u2019s turned out to be just another\u00a0yes-man\u00a0for another\u00a0war-power-hungry president.<\/p>\n One group of generals, however,\u00a0reportedly\u00a0now does have it out for President Trump — but not because they\u2019re opposed to endless war. Rather, they reportedly think that The Donald doesn’t \u201clisten enough to military advice\u201d on, you know, how to wage war forever and a day.<\/p>\n What Would Smedley Butler Think Today?<\/strong><\/p>\n In his years of retirement, Smedley Butler regularly focused on the economic component of America\u2019s imperial war policies. He saw clearly that the conflicts he had fought in, the elections he had helped rig, the coups he had supported, and the constabularies he had formed and empowered in faraway lands had all served the interests of U.S. corporate investors. Though less overtly the case today, this still remains a reality in America\u2019s post-9\/11 conflicts, even on occasion embarrassingly so (as when the Iraqi ministry of oil was essentially the\u00a0only\u00a0public building protected by American troops as looters tore apart the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, in the post-invasion chaos of April 2003). Mostly, however, such influence plays out far more\u00a0subtly\u00a0than that, both\u00a0abroad\u00a0and here at home where those wars help maintain the record profits of the top weapons makers of the military-industrial complex.<\/p>\n That beast, first identified by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, is now on\u00a0steroids\u00a0as American commanders in retirement regularly\u00a0move directly\u00a0from the military onto the boards of the giant defense contractors, a reality which only contributes to the dearth of Butlers in the military retiree community. For all the corruption of his time, the Pentagon didn\u2019t yet exist and the path from the military to, say, United Fruit Company, Standard Oil, or other typical corporate giants of that moment had yet to be normalized for retiring generals and admirals. Imagine what Butler would have had to say about the modern phenomenon of the \u201crevolving door\u201d in Washington.<\/p>\n Of course, he served in a very different moment, one in which military funding and troop levels were still contested in Congress. As a longtime critic of capitalist excesses who wrote for leftist publications and\u00a0supported\u00a0the Socialist Party candidate in the 1936 presidential elections, Butler would have found today\u2019s\u00a0nearly\u00a0trillion-dollar annual defense budgets beyond belief. What the grizzled former Marine long ago\u00a0identified\u00a0as a treacherous nexus between warfare and capital \u201cin which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives\u201d seems to have reached its natural end point in the twenty-first century. Case in point: the record (and\u00a0still rising) \u201cdefense\u201d spending of the present moment, including — to please a president — the creation of a whole new military service aimed at the full-scale militarization of\u00a0space.<\/p>\n Sadly enough, in the age of Trump, as numerous\u00a0polls\u00a0demonstrate, the U.S. military is the only public institution Americans still truly trust. Under the circumstances, how useful it would be to have a high-ranking, highly decorated, charismatic retired general in the Butler mold galvanize an apathetic public around those forever wars of ours. Unfortunately, the likelihood of that is practically nil, given the military system of our moment.<\/p>\n Of course, Butler didn’t exactly end his life triumphantly. In late May 1940, having lost 25 pounds due to illness and exhaustion — and demonized as a leftist, isolationist crank but still maintaining a whirlwind speaking schedule — he checked himself into the Philadelphia Navy Yard Hospital for a \u201crest.\u201d He died there, probably of some sort of cancer, four weeks later. Working himself to death in his 10-year retirement and second career as a born-again antiwar activist, however, might just have constituted the very best service that the two-time Medal of Honor winner could have given the nation he loved to the very end.<\/p>\n Someone of his credibility, character, and candor is needed more than ever today. Unfortunately, this military generation is unlikely to produce such a figure. In retirement, Butler himself boldly\u00a0confessed\u00a0that, \u201clike all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical…\u201d<\/p>\n Today, generals don\u2019t seem to have a thought of their own even in retirement. And more\u2019s the pity…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Authored by Danny Sjursen via TomDispatch.com A Nation Turns Its Lonely Eyes to (Someone Like) You… There once lived an odd little man – five feet nine inches tall and barely 140 pounds sopping wet – who rocked the lecture circuit and the nation itself. 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