‘I was a Racketeer for Capitalism’ — Maj. General Smedley Butler, USMC (1935)
‘I was a racketeer for capitalism’
Maj. General Smedley Butler, USMC (1935)
Major General Smedley Butler was a two-time winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor and (once) of the Marine Corps Brevet Medal. In 1935 the following excerpt from his speeches was published in the magazine Common Sense:
America’s Armed Forces: In Time of Peace
…In the past two years large National Guard forces have seen active service in 20 strikes in as many different states, from the Pacific Coast to New England, from Minnesota to Georgia. They have used gas, bullets, and tanks — the most lethal weapons of modern war — against striking workers. Casualty lists have been impressive. In one instance they erected barbed wire concentration camps in Georgia to “co-ordinate” striking workers with all the efficiency of the fascist repressive technique.There isn’t a trick In the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its “finger men” (to point out enemies), its “muscle men” (to destroy enemies), its “brain guys,” (to plan war preparations) and a “Big Boss,” (super-nationalistic capitalism).
I Was a “Racketeer”
It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent 33 years and 4 months In active service as a member of our country’s most agile military force — the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from a second lieutenant to Major-General. 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. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.
I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all members of the profession I never had an original thought until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of the higher-ups. This is typical of everyone in the military service.
Thus I, helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers 1909-12. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras “right” for American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.
During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotion. Looking back on it, I feel I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three city districts. We Marines operated on three continents.
Smedley Butler (wikipedia)
Major General Smedley Darlington Butler (Marine Corps History Division)
Some discussion of this piece at commongroundcommonsense.org: Insights of a Marine General, Published in a magazine called “Common Sense”
Copyright © 2007 Henry Edward Hardy
An Intimate Look at a Stumbling White House: State of Denial by Bob Woodward
An Intimate Look at a Stumbling White House
State of Denial: Bush at War part III
by Bob Woodward
Simon and Schuster, 2006
http://www.simonsays.com
by Henry Edward Hardy
State of Denial is Washington Post Assistant Editor Bob Woodward’s third book on the presidential administration of George W. Bush. Like Bush at War (2002) and Plan of Attack (2004), the book purports to be an inside look into the intimate details of executive policy making at the White House. State of Denial uses the same omniscient viewpoint as in the previous books, though Woodward does insert himself into the story this time in order to make a few parenthetical derogatory comments pertaining to the recently retired secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld.
Woodward graduated from Yale in 1965, a few years before Bush. Until 1970 he served on the staff of Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, and sometimes acted as a courier to the White House.Woodward first achieved national prominence in the early 1970’s for his coverage of the Watergate break-in. That scandal led to the resignation of Richard M. Nixon. Woodward and fellow Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein played a significant role in uncovering and reporting on the Watergate conspiracy.
Although it includes some unlikely-sounding quotes and aphorisms, even haiku, State of Denial is clearly written, well-paced and full of pithy and memorable quotes. The book includes this quote from a US Intelligence Colonel early in the Iraq occupation regarding the lack of sufficient occupation troops:
Rumsfeld is a dick
Won’t flow the forces we need
We will be too light
Woodward writes that during a Cabinet meeting on August 27, 2001, the Saudi ambassador (and Bush family friend) Prince Bandar confronted Bush and cabinet members about growing tension in the Middle East. Woodward writes that Colin Powell, then the Secretary of State, confronted Bandar after and demanded, “What the fuck do you think you’re doing? You’re putting the fear of God into everybody here. You scared the shit out of everybody.”Bandar replied, “I don’t give a damn what you feel. We are scared ourselves.”
Woodward’s tale of the tirade by Bandar and the alarmed response by Powell, two weeks before the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, makes the Saudi origins of 14 of the 19 alleged 9/11 hijackers all the more interesting.
This is only one of many blockbusters Woodward apparently withheld from publication by the Washington Post. Woodward never seems to let the interests of the Post or the United States get in the way of his own journalistic coups. He has been criticized for allowing New York Times reporter Judy Miller go to jail for contempt of court and Vice President Dick Cheney’s aide “Scooter” Libby to be charged with leaking the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame. All along Woodward knew that the information had been previously revealed to him by Assistant Secretary of State Richard Armitage.
In a 1996 article in the New York Review of Books, Joan Didion accused Woodward of “curious passivity” in his uncritical retelling of the stories of each of his protagonists. In a wide-ranging attack on his work, methods, and credibility, she accused him of creating “political pornography”. But whereas the previous two books show Bush as a confident and decisive commander, the current work depicts him as vacillating, detached and ill-informed from the outset of his presidency. One would like to see some explanation from Woodward for his extraordinary change of perspective. One almost feels sorry for the thoroughly unlikable Rumsfeld as he is savaged by Woodward’s portrayal of him as a manipulative, vain, overbearing tyrant. Although he evidently granted Woodward several in-depth interviews, Rumsfeld does not come in for the kid-gloves treatment proffered to most of his other apparent sources. So now Bob Woodward has the scalp of Rumsfeld to add to that of Nixon.
This is a fun book, a weighty book, and a political tour-de-force. But it isn’t journalism. Instead it lies somewhere between an historical novel such as Burr by Gore Vidal, and books such as Rise of the Vulcans by James Mann or Imperial Hubris by Michael Scheuer. State of Denial has had great influence among the chattering classes in Washington and I believe influenced the recent congressional elections and led to the downfall of Rumsfeld. This book is highly recommended.
State of Denial (Metacritic)
State of Denial (wikipedia)
The Deferential Spirit (Joan Didion in the New York Review of Books )
A version of this article appeared previously in Current Magazine and on Electric Current
Copyright © 2006, 2007 Henry Edward Hardy
Looking Down on Lee Miller: Carolyn Burke’s Lee Miller: A Life
Looking Down on Lee Miller
Carolyn Burke’s Lee Miller: A Life
by Henry Edward Hardy
Lady Elizabeth Lee Miller was ahead of her time — and in many ways ahead of our time too. Model, actress, surrealist, freethinker and war photographer, Lee Miller was a lifelong champion and exemplar of absolute freedom and self-determination.
Unfortunately Carlyn Burke misses the mark. Her book is ponderous and self-important, with cloying third person references to “the biographer.” Her fundamental idea about Lee Miller seems to be that she was a victim, first of her childhood experiences and then of war trauma. In particular, Burke seems to focus on a supposed rape when Miller was seven. Although she admits “the details of what happened were unclear,” she bases much of her pseudo-psychological analysis of Miller’s adult life on this premise.
Lee’s father made a number of photos of Miller nude, including some very fetching, but not per se erotic, 3-D stereograms of her as a teenager. Certainly by the time she was an adult Miller was accustomed to being photographed naked. Her father worked for a Swedish company and frequently visited Stockholm, where he was influenced by the liberal attitudes there toward nudity and self-expression.
In 1929 Miller saw the surrealist photographer and artist Man Ray in a Paris cafe. Burke quotes Miller’s accounts of their meeting: “I told him boldly that I was his new student. He said he didn’t take students, and anyway he was leaving Paris on a holiday. I said I know, I’m going with you … and I did.” Miller said of Man Ray, “We lived together for three years, and I learned a lot about photography.”
After she refused to continue to live with Man Ray as an obedient “wife, married or not,” as he put it, Lee returned to New York in 1932. With her command of Man Ray techniques which she had improved, or invented, such as “solarization,” — later popularized by Andy Warhol– Miller became a much sought-after photographer in New York City.
In 1934, Miller married Egyptian businessman Aziz Eloui Bey. Bey was tolerant of Miller and her willful ways. Her images from Egypt are stark and magical, very beautiful but desolate.
Miller’s great years as a photographer and the period for which she will most be remembered by future generations, began with Miller’s move from Egypt to England in 1938. Moving in with her lover, the surrealist (and later, second husband and Commander of the British Empire Sir) Roland Algernon Penrose, Miller joined Penrose’s other ‘houseguest’, Man Ray.
As a photographer and correspondent for Conde Naste (who published Vogue), Miller became one of the first accredited female war correspondents of World War II. Her war photos combine tragedy, beauty, irony, a wicked humor and a sense of mystery. The idea of surrealist war correspondent may seem contradictory, but in fact Lee Miller was at her best in the middle of this war and chaos. Her photo of a duck on a battlefield, her pictures of Dachau, and David Scherman’s portrait of her nude in Hitler’s bathtub during a wild party at Hitler’s former house, her combat boots and army uniform beside her, rank as unique works both as war documentary and as art.
Regrettably, Burke’s biography is at times condescending, judgmental and moralizing. She presumes to speak for the reader, which is presumptuous to say the least. Regarding Lee Miller’s father, Theodore Miller’s nude stereograms of her, Burke says, “To us, Theodore’s ‘art studies’ are disturbing … We wonder why a father would take such pictures, why a mother would not intervene, and what long-term effects such sessions would have…” To see Lee Miller as a victim as Burke does is just as dehumanizing as to see her as an object, as many of her surrealist compatriots such as Jean Cocteau, Man Ray and Picasso seem to have done.
Burke’s fawning and yet hostile attitude toward Miller perhaps has influenced her selection of photos — she seems to have selected the frumpiest, most out of focus, and least appealing pictures of Miller for the book. Although Miller doesn’t look bad in Burke’s selection, it is quite difficult from this meager ration of images to discern the outstanding beauty who was a “vision so lovely … one forgot the purpose of one’s visit.”
Similarly, the selection of Miller’s own work is curiously lacking. Given Burke’s access to the Lee Miller Archives and the gracious cooperation of Miller’s and Roland Penrose’s son Antony Penrose, one wonders at the paucity of Miller’s best, and best-known work as a model and as a photographer.
Burke’s book rates as not a bad biography of a remarkable intellect and freethinker. But the interested reader would do far better to consult her son Antony Penrose’s book, The Lives of Lee Miller (Thames and Hudson, 1988), which is both more objective and more sympathetic.
Google image results for ‘Lee Miller’
Lee Miller Archive
Lee Miller (wikipedia)
The real surrealist (Guardian)
Beauty and the Beasts (Washington Post)
A version of this article appeared previously in Current Magazine and on Electric Current
Copyright © 2006, 2007 Henry Edward Hardy
American Splendor: Harvey Pekar and the Splendor that was Cleveland
American Splendor
Harvey Pekar and the Splendor that was Cleveland
by Henry Edward Hardy
American Splendor is the story of Harvey Pekar, a file clerk and down-market intellectual from the east side of Cleveland, Ohio. He is also the schlubby hero of his own comic, and the multifarious protagonist of his own movie. Directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, American Splendor (2003) is a sweet, funny film about a cynical, good-hearted loser and his idiosyncratic friends and family.
I had read that this film involved a combination of the real Harvey Pekar, dramatizations of the comic and still frames by various artists. I expected the movie to be incoherent, pretentious, arty and boring. Having lived in Cleveland Heights, Ohio in the ’60s and ’70s, I anticipated the depiction of Cleveland would be a phony, cheap satire.
Surprisingly, American Splendor is brilliant. The transitions between cartoon frames, the understated acting of Paul Giamatti, and the real Pekar, work wonderfully. The result is like a moving Kandinsky montage, a collision of disparate elements that nonetheless combine with the spaces between them to make a harmonious whole. The location shots are true to life and the gritty urban scenes made me downright homesick for Cleveland in the ’70s. And any movie that makes you homesick for Cleveland in the ’70s is a brilliant film.
Pekar worked as a hospital file clerk and as a music critic on the side. The music of American Splendor underlines Pekar’s love of jazz and his massive jazz record collection. Harvey Pekar is the loveable, acerbic, intellectual, grouchy yet well-meaning lower-white-collar guy that Woody Allen always wanted to be.
American Splendor is also a love story. It is a story about Pekar’s affair and somewhat functional marriage with his third wife, Joyce Brabner. American Splendor is about making a life among the urban decay of post-industrial Cleveland. The film celebrates all the people who don’t fit in, the misfits, artists and non-conformists. It is an uplifting story about a miserable, gloomy guy who has no life as we know it. Pekar is a modern Mark Twain or Ambrose Bierce, an apostle for the common man.
If your life sucks, if you are a nerd or quasi-autistic, if you have bad luck or no luck at all — or if you have a sense of humor that always carries you through, see American Splendor.
American Spendor (IMDB)
American Spendor (wikipedia)
American Spendor (Rotten Tomatoes)
A version of this article appeared previously in Current Magazine and on Electric Current
Copyright © 2006, 2007 Henry Edward Hardy
James Risen’s compelling book, State of War
James Risen’s Compelling
State of War,
The Secret History Of The C.I.A. And The Bush Administration
by Henry Edward Hardy
State of War, (Free Press, 2006) is the bestselling expose of the Bush administration’s manipulations of the U.S. intelligence community. In State of War, New York Times national security reporter James Risen accuses the George W. Bush administration of massaging intelligence to support their post-9/11 political agenda.
Risen has written one-ninth of a blockbuster book about the CIA and the Bush administration. That is to say, one of the nine chapters has spawned a continuing national controversy and talk of impeaching George W. Bush. Curiously, the no-less explosive material in the rest of the book has been met with resounding silence by the mainstream American media.
Risen’s most resounding charge is that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has engaged in widespread and systematic surveillance within the United States in contravention of the law.
According to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978:
“A person is guilty of an offense if he intentionally —
(1) engages in electronic surveillance under color of law except as authorized by statute; or
(2) discloses or uses information obtained under color of law by electronic surveillance, knowing or having reason to know that the information was obtained through electronic surveillance not authorized by statute.”
The imminent publication of Risen’s book caused The New York Times to reveal that it had known of, and suppressed, news of warrantless National Security Agency surveillance of Americans for a year. In a Times story on Dec. 16, 2005 titled, “Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts,” Risen and co-author Eric Lichtblau revealed that the NSA, under direction from the Bush administration, had engaged in widespread violations of the FISA law by engaging in warrantless surveillance of Americans.
The reason The New York Times waited so long to run the NSA eavesdropping story remains murky. In a New Year’s Day column titled, “Behind the Eavesdropping Story, a Loud Silence,” the Times Public Editor, Brian Calame wrote, “For the first time since I became public editor, the executive editor and the publisher have declined to respond to my requests for information about news-related decision-making,” leaving both Mr. Calame and the public to wonder what machinations underlay the year-long hold on the story and the subsequent decision to publish.
The NSA program was fueled by concern that foreign calls routed through the U.S. were not being monitored because of the probable cause stipulation under FISA. But once the “back door” capability was in place at the major telecommunications hubs, the program expanded to include calls in which one, and sometimes both callers were physically within the U.S. In the absence of any congressional or judicial oversight, there must be tremendous temptation to listen first, and seek a warrant later if at all. The implications of such widespread illegality raises a number of questions. Have we seen the beginnings of an electronic police state such as was envisaged in George Orwell’s 1984 or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World ?
Risen recounts a fascinating story of 30 relatives of people who were known to have had a role in Iraq’s pre-1991 nuclear bomb effort. Recruited by the CIA before the Iraq war to investigate their relatives’ knowledge of alleged WMDs, all 30, according to Risen, returned from Iraq with the same message: the programs had been shut down and the personnel mothballed.
What Risen does not provide is evidence. Much of the book has the odor of sour grapes from CIA, FBI and State Department lifers who have been run over or shunted aside by the gun-happy Vice President Dick Cheney. For more in this vein the curious reader might consult Imperial Hubris by Anonymous, as well as former Bush counter-terror czar Richard Clarke’s Against All Enemies.
The allegations in State of War deserve a full public inquiry. If true, then the republic stands at a crisis, having fallen into the hands of fools and/or traitors. On the other hand, if false, then these accusations deserve to be discredited and laid to rest. Either way, one should read this book in order to gain a clearer perspective on what these charges against the administration are and how much or how little evidence there is to support them.
A version of this review was previously published in Current Magazine and at eCurrent.com.
State of War (Metacritic)
James Risen (wikipedia)
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Federation of American Scientists)
Behind the Eavesdropping Story, a Loud Silence. New York Times, January 1, 2006.
Copyright © 2006, 2007 Henry Edward Hardy
About Scanlyze
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Scanlyze is an online magazine of essays, commentary, satire, and analysis. Were we half as clever, for inspiration we would take Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Swift, Montaigne, or Seneca.
“The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the Nation’s greatness, but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable, especially when that questioning is disinterested, for they determine whether we use power or power uses us.”
John F. Kennedy, October 26, 1963
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