It was as if a scene from Haiti or the Philippines had come to the shadow of the Capitol. A baby choked on the gas and died shortly after. The soldiers fired chemical weapons at the veterans and their families and burned their makeshift shacks to the ground. Butler’s fellow general, Douglas MacArthur. Instead of sending help, President Herbert Hoover sent the Army under the command of Mr. His first wake-up call came in 1932, when thousands of World War I veterans and their families converged on Washington to demand long-promised payments they needed to weather the Depression. But it was only after returning to the United States and retiring in 1931 that he began to understand how imperial impunity abroad breeds authoritarianism at home. General Butler eventually became disillusioned by the horrors he participated in, and his realization that the greatest beneficiaries of them were the banks and corporate interests who always seemed to follow his Marines ashore. The cows moo, panic-stricken, the women scream, the men empty the plaza with their machetes and guns … We then advance toward the camp, finish off the wounded and count the corpses.” It turns around again, aims at another group and resumes its hellish noise. It drops bombs and goes straight back up. “It descends, spins, its motor screaming. Khan’s reporting, except the attack involved a biplane instead of a drone: It was near the end of his life, however, that he realized the last casualty of such wars could be American democracy itself.Ī description of a Marine-led attack on a Haitian village circa 1919 could be ripped from Ms. colonization of the Philippines, the Boxer Rebellion in China, and the invasions and occupations of many Latin American countries, including Nicaragua and Haiti.
SMEDLEY BUTLER FREE
After joining the Marines as an idealistic teenager to, in his words, “help free little Cuba” from the Spanish Empire in 1898, he rode a wave of largely forgotten conflicts that presaged our modern “forever wars”: the U.S. One of the first Americans to recognize this pattern was Maj. Not for the first time, the violence, unaccountability and dehumanization the United States has long employed overseas is being brought home as a strategy for securing political power. But the faltering of our democracy is directly connected to the impunity with which we wage wars. democracy posed by an increasingly authoritarian right.
6 committee - each a further reminder of the rising threat to U.S. Other stories concerned the demise of the voting rights bill in the Senate and Donald Trump’s attempt to stonewall the Jan. The article was co-written by Azmat Khan, an investigative journalist who has revealed “a pattern of impunity” in America’s air wars and the deaths of thousands of foreign noncombatants. One was about the release of video from America’s last, pointless drone strike in Afghanistan before the American troops withdrew - a strike which killed only civilians, seven of whom were children. Recently, several troubling stories have appeared on the front page of The Times.
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