Brigadier General Smedley Butler, 1927
(Image by Archives Branch, USMC History Division from flickr) Details DMCA
Smedley Butler won't be around next year to save us.
The former Marine Corps general was offered a ton of money in 1933 to murder newly-elected president Franklin Roosevelt and stage a fascist coup.
Armed with the then-huge sum of $3 million, infamous billionaires funded a "Banker's Plot" with 500,000 armed thugs set to erect a corporate dictatorship atop FDR's grave.
Butler had led US troops throughout Latin America during the "Dollar Diplomacy" 1920s. He crushed grassroots uprisings and installed brutal dictators. America's richest barons now wanted him to do the same thing here.
But they chose the wrong guy. In shocking Congressional hearings, Butler blew the whistle on (until then) US history's best-funded attempted coup . "War," he warned, "is a racket."
The super-rich plotters hotly denied Butler's account. None of them went to prison.
Butler won't be around next year to expose the Trump coup attempt, already in progress. He won't have to. It's already visible for all to see.
But can we stop it?
FDR was the landslide successor to the failed Herbert Hoover. He took power just as Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany.
FDR, with his legendary progressive wife Eleanor, promised "Happy Days." Hitler preached hate. He was backed in Deutschland by many of the same corporatists then plotting Butler's would-be coup here in the US.
Donald Trump has spent a lifetime preaching hate. In 2021, he'll have limitless money at his disposal, much of it from actual descendants of the 1933 Banker Plotters. His armed fascist militias are already in the streets, murdering peaceful protestors (see: Kenosha), threatening Governors (see: Gretchen Whitmer), promising to kill even Republican doubters (see: Gabriel Sterling)
Hitler spent years preaching the "Dolchstosslegende," the "stab in the back." Germany could never be a "loser," he screamed, and did not lose World War I. Victory was "stolen" by radicals, socialists, communists... not to mention Jews, Roma (gypsies), gays, Jehovah Witnesses, "genetically inferior" Slavs.
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