War is a Racket by Smedley Butler – Still ringing true 80 years on.
Smedley Butler was a United States Marine Corps Major General – the highest rank authorised during his day – who fought in the so-called Banana Wars in the Caribbean, operations in China, the Philippines and Central America, as well as commanding Camp Pontanezen in France during World War I.
After a failed Senate campaign in 1932 and a stint as hardball Director of Public Safety in the extraordinarily corrupt city of Philadelphia in his post-war career, Butler began to seriously question the military endeavours he had offered his life for on many occasions and became a notoriously outspoken critic of the banking interests that controlled the United States and exploited the ‘sucker class’.