Sheldon Richman on Smedley Butler and the Racket That’s War

From 1898
to 1931, Smedley Darlington Butler was a member of the U.S. Marine
Corps. By the time he retired he had achieved what was then the
corps’s highest rank, major general, and by the time he died in
1940, at 58, he had more decorations, including two medals of
honor, than any other Marine. During his years in the corps he was
sent to the Philippines (at the time of the uprising against the
American occupation), China, France (during World War I), Mexico,
Central America, and Haiti. In light of this record Butler
presumably shocked a good many people when in 1935 — as a
 second world war was looming — he wrote that most of his
service was spent “as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for
Wall Street and the bankers.”  That same year he published a
short book with the now-famous title War Is a Racket,
for which he is best known today. It’s a cliche of course to say,
“The more things change, the more they stay the same,” but on
reading Butler today, writes Sheldon Richman, who can resist
thinking it? As we watch Barack Obama unilaterally and illegally
reinsert the U.S. military into the Iraqi disaster it helped cause
and sink deeper into the violence in Syria, we might all join in
the declaration with which Butler closes his book:

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