"WAR IS A RACKET" by General Smedley Darlington Butler

[no_hypocrisy]

http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html

Reminder: Butler was defending the veterans in 1933 during the Bonus March. McArthur, Patton, and Eisenhower attacked the veterans of World War I.

[whistle]

1. I loved this book and wish we could have people with the guts...

...like General Smedley Butler today in these troubled times to tell the people the truth about what is happening to the country and the world.

[bettys boy]

4. You have several...

...beginning with Wesley Kanne Clark, Gen USA (ret.).

The purists in our party rejected him.

[aquart]

2. That name is real? Yeeks.

[rndmprsn]

3. dupe...how random is that?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=2635258&mesg_id=2635258

[no_hypocrisy]

5. A great coincidence and a true meeting of the minds.

I was so fired up that I didn't look at any recent posts. Your post fleshes out the one I put up.

[rndmprsn]

6. it is frightening isnt it...some things just dont change.

[whistle]

7. Yes, and Dwight Eisenhouer warned of the Military/Industrial complex...

...in his fairwell speech to America at the end of his last term as president, but all through his eight years in office, he fed and nourished that complex as he did when Smedley was making his talks across the country. Now George Bush has become the poster child for the American war machine which sports visions of world empire and American Hegemony wherever America can benefit.

[rndmprsn]

8. another great Eisenhower quote...where are the republicans like this now?

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children... This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."

Dwight D. Eisenhower
PRESIDENTIAL address, April 16, 1953

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

9. The treatment of WWI vets was a national disgrace

A fact that's not well known in Bush's America. Hopefully our vets of the war on Iraq, especially the disabled ones, won't go through the same.

[Spider Jerusalem]

10. Well, Eisenhower was MacArthur's aide...

And Patton was a cavalry officer stationed at Fort Myer, Virginia. Patton and Eisenhower were following orders, so they don't really own any blame for the way the situation was handled. That rests with Douglas MacArthur and either Hoover or the Secretary of War.

I remember my grandfather's brother (a lifelong resident of DC, who would've been about 20 when the Bonus March happened) telling me about seeing MacArthur, on horseback with a drawn sabre, personally leading the detachment that dispersed the bonus marchers. Seems more than a little heavy-handed to me.