You Thought They Were Heroes?

1998

Published in:

Technocracy Digest, 3rd quarter 1998, No. 329

People of the world have been fed lies for years about the brave exploits of many of the generals who led the U.S. forces into wars. You wonder how many people died needlessly during war when you hear what they did in peacetime.

Listen to this:

We quote from a book published by Crown Publishers of New York, in 1990, called Don't Know Much About History, by Kenneth C. Davis.

"In the midst of the Depression, buglers called President Hoover and the First Lady to seven-course dinners, served by a small army of white-gloved servants. President Hoover thought that keeping up regal trappings and spiffy appearances was good for national morale. Outside, Americans were fighting for scraps from garbage cans. But some `rugged individuals' were going to give Hoover an unpleasant close look at life on the other side of the Depression fence.

"In the summer of 1932, The Depression's worst year, 25,000 former `doughboys' -- World War I infantrymen, many of whom were combat veterans -- walked, hitch-hiked, or `rode the rods' to Washington, D.C. Organizing themselves into a penniless, vagrant army, they squatted, with their families, in abandoned buildings, along Pennsylvania Avenue, and pitched an encampment of crude shacks and tents on the banks of the Anacostia River. They had come to ask Congress to pay them a `Bonus', promised to veterans in 1924, and scheduled to be paid in 1925. Starving and desperate men, they had families going hungry, no jobs, and no prospects of finding one. They needed that bonus to survive. Calling themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force (BEF), they were better known as the `Bonus Army.'

"Their pleas for relief fell on deaf ears. To Hoover, Congress, lawmen, and the newspapers, these weren't `veterans', but `Red Agitators.' (Hoover's own Veterans' Administration surveyed the Bonus Army and found that 95 percent of them were, indeed, veterans.)

Instead of meeting the BEF's leader, Hoover called out the troops, commanded by General Douglas MacArthur, with his young aide, Dwight Eisenhower. The assault was led by the Third Cavalry, sabers ready, under the command of Major George Patton. Behind the horses, the U.S. Army rolled out to meet the ragged bunch of men, women, and children with tear-gas, tanks, and bayonets.

"Patton's cavalry first charged the Bonus Marchers, now mixed with curious civilians who were getting off from work on this hot July afternoon. Following the cavalry charge, came the tear-gas attack, routing the Bonus Army from Pennsylvania Avenue and across the Eleventh Street Bridge. Disregarding orders -- a common thread running through his career -- MacArthur decided to finish the job by destroying the Bonus Army entirely. After nightfall, the tanks and cavalry leveled the jumbled camp of tents and packing-crate shacks. It was all put to the torch. There were more than one hundred casualties in the aftermath of the battle, including two babies, suffocated by the gas attack.

"Pushed out of the Nation's capital, the Bonus Army dissipated, joining the other two million Americans `on the road'. Some States, like California, posted guards to turn back the poor. The violence in Washington, D.C. was the largest but not the only demonstration of a growing anger and unrest in America. During 1931 and 1932 there had been a number of riots and protests, mostly by the unemployed and hungry, sometimes by children, that were put down with harsh police action."

Well, well! Generals MacArthur, Eisenhower (after whom Canada re-named Castle Mountain, one of the Canadian Rockies, much to the disgust of many Canadians) and Patton -- brave, brave heroes, gaining prestige by running down veterans of the First World War!

This book also recounts many sickening events like this, about which the general public still knows little.

Canada had its share of demonstrations too; the largest and the most well-known one was when a large number of unemployed men left Vancouver on a train, picking up more unemployed at each train stop, without interruption from any police -- until they reached the headquarters of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, at Regina, Saskatchewan -- where they were met with a violent attack by the police, and were turned back from their trek to Ottawa.

There have been a few higher-up Commandants and Generals who were sickened by the politically motivated actions of their peers, and have exposed them in books they have written.

One of them was Major General Smedley Butler, who, in 1931, retired, and eventually became a spokesman for The League Against War & Fascism. "Take the dollar sign off the battle flags," became the motto he used as he fought to expose and eliminate the "racist undertones of Yankee imperialism." In 1935, he wrote a book entitled, "War is a Racket." In a speech he made, in 1933, he is quoted as saying: "A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.

"I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns six percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.

"I wouldn't go to war again as I have done, to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things that we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket."

Of course, you probably all remember that, in the middle of World War II, all the bankers of the world met in Switzerland to discuss world-wide banking deals. No war for them!

Perhaps you are not aware of these following treacherous incidents, either:

In 1931, Japan invaded Manchuria. The Japanese were never capable of waging a global war, yet, American, French and British business continued to deal with the Japanese until 1941 when the United States entered the war (that's two years after World War II started, involving the French, the British, Canada, Australia, et al.)

In 1934, Germany, under the Nazis, announced to all the world that its program was a return to conditions preceding the Versailles Treaty, Anshluss with Austria, and a crusade against Bolshevism. Yet American, French and British business continued to deal with the Germans, selling them airplane engines, planes and petroleum, far in excess of their normal, peacetime requirements, knowing equally well that such dealings might result in war.

Just why are wars fought? The following is a quote from the Congressional Record, Senate, April 15, 1947: "Realistically, all wars have been for economic reasons. To make them politically and socially palatable, ideological issues have always been invoked."

Another quote, from a book by Lawrence Dens: "Wars have become bigger in cost and deadlier in consequences; ...a war in the middle of the 20th century is serving a purpose of performing social functions such as maintaining full employment with continuous economic expansion..."

Much of the information in this article was researched and printed in his THREE'S NEWS, by John Taube, a Technocracy member in San Francisco, plus other research by Technocracy member L. W. Nicholson, of South Carolina.

In answer to questions about Technocracy which Taube received on his E-mail, he wrote that: "Human behavior is dictated by the environment. History is nothing but wars, wars, and more wars. Can truth, love, harmony and other imponderables alter the course of humankind?

"The answer to the question above is: "No." What can? A technological society with a social structure that is compatible with modern times -- a scientific technological age -- can. Why? Because, in such an arrangement, where there is enough for all to live luxuriously, there can be truth, love, harmony, etc.

For instance, in Alaska, people can all live in truth, love and harmony in regard to water, but the reverse from our truth, love and harmony may occur for people in the Sahara Desert, with a shortage of water, where they might kill each other.

"The environment dictates behavior.

"So what the heck do us little people do about this? Little people can study and understand human behavior, act accordingly, and all of a sudden, we have a lot of big people."