Smedley Butler, the Bush family, and January 6th: USA coups in context
There were some dramatic takeaways from last night’s 8th Congressional hearing versus the January 6th 2001 putsch attempt.
One is the fact that Pence’s security detail took a moment at one point that afternoon to individually call and message their loved ones, telling them they loved them and that they were sorry that it was going to end this way. They knew the threat to kill Pence was real and ongoing, and all they had was their pistols and an extra magazine, against thousands of protestors determined to kill Pence and anyone who got in their way.
The right-wing media, and what I will call the ‘don’t rock the boat corporate media,’ has long pretended the protesters were not carrying firearms, but we know from the court records now, that they indeed were, and that there were weapons of war stashed just outside their perimeter of activity.
Another is that so much information has been recovered, and of such significance, that there will be at least one subsequent addendum to the hearings in September.
However, my favorite moment wasn’t really a strictly necessary revelation — it reflected the fury of the survivors of that day, and also reflected the fact that the fascist Republicans refused to send serious candidates to join the committee in a bipartisan effort, which would have prevented it from going forward. It was a photograph, the famous shot of Senator Josh Hawley holding up his fist to support the rioters, along with commentary from one of the security there that s/he was shocked to see him make such a cowardly gesture, considering s/he was actively preventing the pro-Trump simians from mistakenly attacking him. Hawley was safe behind the barriers at the time he did that.
Well, and it also revealed that either he buys his suit jackets off the shelf without trying them on, or that his tailor is incompetent. But later, when the mob burst in to the Senate chambers to wreak violence, trash offices, bear zip-ties for hostages, and ferally smear poop on the walls, Hawley was sprinting in a particularly chickenshit manner, overtaking the other Senators, taking advantage of his relative youth and strength — not to defend his peers, but to get the hell out of Dodge City before the rabble hit.
Long legs don’t fail me now! He should have gone for track meets in school.
That little segment did not shine any new light on the subject of the day, i.e., the seriousness of the assault and the malignant withdrawal of Trump’s attention from the carnage he was hoping for, but it made my day. It was funny as hell. Run little Josh, run quickly away, mighty war hero Joshie poo!
Watching the proceedings also put me in mind of the several efforts, since the 20th century, to stamp out the dangerous arc of democratic reform approaching the super-rich class. Wars have been a big part of this, and presumably everyone knows about Randolph Hearst and his yellow journalism, supporting the first really big post-industrial imperialist efforts in 1898, claiming the coal fire and explosion in the battleship Maine was a Spanish attack, and setting the tone for the Spanish-American colony grab, jokingly called a “war,” actually a series of skirmishes and genocides versus Cubans and the people of the Phillippines.
The frenzy that the war developed among Americans was successful as planned, and was duly noted by our elite rulers for the first and second world wars, which were, of course, instruments for further competition and consolidation of US imperial and colonial reach. “We” secured cheap labor and oil, rubber, grains and minerals, from a vast swathe of the globe, and produced various enemies for the US citizens to hate. ( — And, fortunately, stamped out German and Japanese fascism, by and large.)
That was a big forward step for dialing back democracy in the US, as the 1947 National Security Act permanently established the Pentagon in its ruling niche.
But there were other, more direct 20th Century anti-democracy efforts, notably when Franklin Delano Roosevelt threatened the gold standard, which the rich believed was essential to them at the time — they were very wrong — and when Roosevelt provided some relief to the poor, which also terrified characters like the Bush President’s patriarch Prescott Bush. The 1933 Business Coup attempt followed, in which World War One hero Smedley Butler was approached and offered huge power and cash, to create a pseudo-Presidency under his rule. From Wikipedia:
“The Business Plot (also called the Wall Street Putsch[1] and The White House Putsch) was an alleged political conspiracy in 1933 in the United States to overthrow the government of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and install a dictator. Retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler asserted that wealthy businessmen were plotting to create a fascist veterans’ organization with Butler as its leader and use it in a coup d’état to overthrow Roosevelt. In 1934, Butler testified under oath before the United States House of Representatives Special Committee on Un-American Activities (the “McCormack–Dickstein Committee”) on these revelations. Although no one was prosecuted, the congressional committee final report said, “there is no question that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient.”
“Early in the committee’s gathering of testimony most major news media dismissed the plot, with a New York Times editorial characterizing it as a “gigantic hoax”. When the committee’s final report was released, the Times said the committee “purported to report that a two-month investigation had convinced it that General Butler’s story of a Fascist march on Washington was alarmingly true” and “… also alleged that definite proof had been found that the much publicized Fascist march on Washington, which was to have been led by Major Gen. Smedley D. Butler, retired, according to testimony at a hearing, was actually contemplated.” The individuals involved all denied the existence of a plot.
“While historians have questioned whether or not a coup was actually close to execution, most agree that some sort of “wild scheme” was contemplated and discussed.
Why is this important? — Because the unindicted conspirators never actually left the scene, and never stopped their efforts. Their plots finally culminated nearly 70 years later, under Dick Cheney, who with Rumsfeld, Bush the Greater, Bush the Lesser, Wolfowitz, Giuliani, and a cast of pseudo-elevator-repairmen, set the sequential thermite charges in World Trade Centers One, Two, and Seven, dialed in the computerized takeover of aircraft, swiped every gas-station closed-circuit monitor for miles around the Pentagon, pre-printed the Patriot act, and successfully completed their coup, installing the still-extant Homeland Security apparatus that trumps all other agencies.
And did it all by surprise.
The perpetrators were the physical and ideological descendants of the coup plotters that Smedley Butler exposed seventy years prior. The son and grandson of Prescott Bush were involved. Arguably, 9/11 was the culmination of the Business Plot. It was well-executed and quite successful, and even revealing the more obvious aspects of it today, 21 years later, generally creates a firestorm of brainwashed resentment.
Compare that with Trump’s plot, which was far less competent and came from a confused group of Trump mafia that had little or no experience in coup plotting. (The exceptions would be the Flynn brothers, one of whom is still a major hegemon in the US armed forces.) We know from the hearings and other investigations that there were clearly at least some effective Trump allies in the Secret Service and at the Pentagon, but I won’t take the time to reveal them here. The Secret Service’s deletion of texts, immediately after being asked for them by the Committee, is ominous and mutinous. So much for the impeccable integrity of the Praetorian Guard.
Those revelations aregoing to be the hardest to reveal, even though they are arguably some of the most essential. There were people at the Pentagon who were going along with Trump’s attempt to stamp out the pitiful remaining aspects of democratic rule in the USA. The details and names need to come out, because as long as those major conspirators remain in power and un-named, we live under the possibility of a sequel.
The Beer Hall Putsch had a sequel.