There's hope for the younger generation after all!

[iowasocialist]

I want to tell you all a story that happened today in the Iowa Legislature, where I am a clerk.

We have a page who is a young man from a very conservative family in a very conservative town in Iowa.

I saw him reading in the chamber and walked up to see what the book was. It was "The Secret History of the American Empire", by John Perkins, a book he had just found by chance.

This young man said that he was just "blown away" by the book, and was amazed about this history of US foreign policy, a history that we were not supposed to know anything about. I told him that the US military did that all the time, protecting corporate power abroad.

The kicker? He is headed for a full scholarship at a university here in Iowa, through ROTC. So I told him about the US military leasder in Nicaragua at the beginning of the last century who refused to fight "a war for capitalism", and intimated that he may be in such a situation himself some day.

Now, can anyone help me remember who this man was, and where I can find a brief article about him, so I can give it to this young man?

Thanks!

This little encounter made my day!!

[Hello_Kitty]

1. Gen. Smedley Butler?

Have him read "War Is A Racket".

[conscious evolution]

2. Not sure

But tell him to google Brigider General Smedley Butler USMC

[villager]

3. Probably Smedley Butler. Another good read is "War Is the Health of the State,"

by Randolph Bourne, written around the turn of the last century:

<snip>

With the shock of war, however, the State comes into its own again. The Government, with no mandate from the people, without consultation of the people, conducts all the negotiations, the backing and filling, the menaces and explanations, which slowly bring it into collision with some other Government, and gently and irresistibly slides the country into war. For the benefit of proud and haughty citizens, it is fortified with a list of the intolerable insults which have been hurled toward us by the other nations; for the benefit of the liberal and beneficent, it has a convincing set of moral purposes which our going to war will achieve; for the ambitious and aggressive classes, it can gently whisper of a bigger role in the destiny of the world. The result is that, even in those countries where the business of declaring war is theoretically in the hands of representatives of the people, no legislature has ever been known to decline the request of an Executive, which has conducted all foreign affairs in utter privacy and irresponsibility, that it order the nation into battle.

<snip>

http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/hist_texts/warhealthstate1918.html