By Matthew Ehret
Earlier this week, former President Donald Trump announced his intention to run in the 2024 elections which is a no-brainer considering his support among potential republican contenders is 49% (compared to a 25% support for DeSantis) and no other candidate earning above 7%.
It didn’t take two days before Defense Authorization Act of 2022 (HR-4350) was passed by the House of Representatives giving the President full controls over the military in all domestic operations and which takes direct aim at all “domestic extremists” in the USA.
Obviously, the senile and politically compromised Biden’s days in power are shaky to say the least and echoes of the 1933 Reichstag fire that provided a newly elected Hitler regime the excuse it needed to impose tyrannical ‘enabling acts’ rings in the memory.
With the perfect storm of crises now converging onto our beleagured world (economic meltdown, energy crisis, food crisis, and general dangers of both civil and global wars), it is worth considering the very real possibility that the days of elections may soon be over. Despite the many talking heads yapping about the 2024 elections as if it were a football game, reality and real history paints a very different picture of bankers’-directed military coups both in the USA and abroad.
In order to best understand this danger and also gain insight into how it might be circumvented, I suggest revisiting the 1932-1934 efforts by the international deep state to impose a fascist dictatorship upon Americans and even overthrow the elected government of Franklin Roosevelt with a JP Morgan-funded military coup d’état.
The Fascist Economic Miracle Solution of 1932
1932-1934 was a period of history that saw the world torn down into a deep depression which the people of Europe and America were told by their media, could only be solved by the “economic miracle solution” of a new system of governance known as “fascism”.
This “fascist economic solution” took hold in Europe with the quick rise of Nazism, Franco and Mussolini’s Corporatism as well what later became Vichy France. In English Canada, the League for Social Reconstruction was ready to take power in 1932 and French-speaking Canada was quickly embracing the Nazi-inspired political party of Adrien Arcand. The British governing class, led by the royal family were fully backing Nazism, and Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists was rising faster than ever. All of these movements came in different flavors but were united under a cold utilitarian philosophy of government, a devout love for eugenics (the racist “science” of population control) and addiction to City of London/Wall Street money.
In the United States however, things weren’t going as smoothly.
The Rise of Franklin Roosevelt
Even though the financial elite of Wall Street had pulled the plug on the system four years earlier, the population had still not been broken sufficiently to accept fascism as the solution which Time magazine told them it was. Instead, the people voted for one of the few anti-fascist presidential candidates available in 1932 when Franklin Roosevelt was elected under the theme of taking the money lenders out of power and restoring the constitution.
In his March 4, 1933 inaugural address FDR stated: “Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men. True they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish. The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.”
During FDR’s famous 100 Days, an all-out war was declared on the “economic royalists” that had taken over the nation. Audits and investigations were conducted on the banks in the form of the Pecora Commission, and the biggest financial houses which had spent billions on fascist parties of Europe were broken up while speculation was reined in under Glass-Steagall. Meanwhile a new form of banking was unveiled more in alignment with America’s constitutional traditions in the form of productive credit and long term public works which created real jobs and increased the national productive powers of labor.
Many people remain totally ignorant that even before his March 4, 1933 inauguration, Franklin Roosevelt narrowly avoided an assassination attempt in Florida which saw 5 people struck by bullets and the mayor of Chicago dying of his wounds 3 weeks later. Within days of the mayor’s death, the assassin Giuseppe Zingara was speedily labelled a “lone gunman” and executed without any serious investigation into his freemasonic connections. This however was just a pre-cursor for an even greater battle which Wall Street financiers would launch in order to overthrow the presidency later that year. This effort would only be stopped by the courageous intervention of a patriotic marine named Smedley Darlington Butler.
Who was General Butler?
Born in 1881 to a family of patriotic Quakers, Smedley Butler quickly rose through the ranks of the military becoming the most decorated military figure of U.S. History- a record he holds to this day with multiple medals of honor, an Army distinguished service medal and Marine Corps Bruvet medal (to name just a few).
By the end of the British-orchestrated meat grinder known as WWI, the General had become an activist patriot giving speeches across America in denunciation of the private financiers steering America’s war-driven economy. Speaking to veterans in August 1933, the general said:
“I have spent 33 years being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism… I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City [Bank] boys to collect revenue in. I helped rape half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street… In China, I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested… I had a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, and promotions. I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was operate a racket in three cities. The Marines operated on three continents…”
In spite of his outspoken criticism of crony capitalism, Wall Street’s elite simply presumed all men had their price, and Butler was probably just indignant because he was never given a big enough piece of pie.
The Wall Street Putsch is Launched
These financiers needed someone like Butler to channel the rage of the striking veterans of WWI across America who had been fighting for the bonus pay promised them years earlier but which didn’t exist due to the 1929 collapse. A force of hundreds of thousands of disgruntled seasoned soldiers was exactly what was needed to overthrow Roosevelt, but leadership was sorely lacking, and General Butler was their man for the job. He was a war hero who was seen as honest and loved by the veterans. He was perfect.
Under the guiding hand of JP Morgan’s Grayson Prevost Murphy, two representatives of the American Legion (Commander Bill Doyle and bond salesman Gerald MacGuire) approached Butler in July 1933 for the job of rallying the Legion’s veterans and began dropping hints of a larger coup plot. Butler became suspicious, but continued playing along with the plan to see how far this went up the ladder of power (1).
Over the course of the next several months, Butler discovered that America’s financial elite centered around John Pierpont Morgan Jr., the Harrimans, the Melons, Warburgs, Rockefellers and Duponts were at the heart of the plot. These men used their agents such as Gerald MacGuire a Morgan-affiliated bond salesman, Democratic Party controllers John W. Davis and Thomas Lamont (both occupying directorships in the House of Morgan), Robert Sterling Clark (heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune), Grayson Prevost Murphy and Harriman Family investment banker Prescott Bush. All of these characters had become well known “investors” in European fascism, owned the biggest media platforms including Fortune and Time Magazine (both of which promoted Mussolini extensively for years), and controlled the levers of industry.
Luckily, the 1932-1934 Pecora Commission exposed these forces publicly as the architects of the great depression, making their ability to acquire popular support and sympathy more than a little difficult.
Outlining his Committee’s findings Pecora had written publicly: “Undoubtedly, this small group of highly placed financiers, controlling the very springs of economic activity, holds more real power than any similar group in the U.S.A.”
Butler Blows the Whistle
When the time was right, Butler blew the whistle by approaching the Special Committee on Un-American Activities (the McCormack-Dickstein Committee) which began an investigation on November 20, 1934. Unlike the Committee on Un-American Activities which made its reputation destroying patriotic lives under the communist witch hunt of McCarthyism, this earlier version was aligned to FDR and dedicated solely to identifying Nazi activity in America.
At first sceptical of the general’s claims, the committee soon substantiated everything over the course of a month long investigation and made their findings public to FDR and congress on December 29, 1934. An invaluable part of the hearings were the testimonies of journalist Paul Comly French whom Butler recruited to act as the general’s intermediary with the bankers.
Butler told the committee that MacGuire stated it “wouldn’t take any constitutional change to authorize another cabinet official, somebody to take over the details of the office—to take them off the President’s shoulders” and that “we’d do with him what Mussolini did to the King of Italy”.
When French asked MacGuire how the coup would help solve unemployment, MacGuire responded: “We need a fascist government to save the nation from the Communists… It was the plan that Hitler had used in putting all of the unemployed in labor camps or barracks—enforced labor. That would solve it overnight.”
Although the full transcripts were not made public, Butler did get the message to the population by giving his story to as many journalists as possible and recorded a message to the people in 1935 which should be listened to in full.
The Aftermath of the Exposure
This exposure, alongside the Pecora Commission findings, and earlier failed assassination attempt gave FDR the ammunition he needed to force America’s deep state into submission (at least for a while). As I outlined in my recent paper, FDR’s fight to stop a central bankers’ dictatorship started from the earliest days of his presidency to his dying breath on April 14, 1945.
Incredibly, after the sanitized and redacted 1934 report was published, the committee was disbanded (to be reformed later under a fascist mandate), and the thousands of pages of transcripts were buried for years- only officially made public in the 21st century- the contents of which can be found here with censored testimony in red.
The coup plotters lost no time forming a new organization on August 22, 1934 called the American Liberty League which spent the next decade sabotaging FDR’s New Deal. This group made every effort to promote an American alliance with Axis powers (until 1941’s Pearl Harbor attack), widely financed eugenics, and after FDR died, acted as the driving force behind the McCarthyite police state in America during the Cold War. Without understanding this fascist deep state operation within the heart of the American establishment, it were impossible to make sense of the manichean Cold War dualism that destroyed FDR’s vision for a world of cooperating sovereign nation states.
This organization also gave birth to such think tanks as the American Enterprise Association, Heritage Foundation and CATO institute which incrementally made Austrian school economics a part of the American right. Anyone wishing to understand what created the Frankenstein Monster called “neo-conservativism” during the last 60 years would not get very far without understanding the role of the American Liberty League and its hell spawn.
Today, a new systemic meltdown of a $1.5 quadrillion derivatives bubble has similarities to the 1929 crash and other similarities to the 1923 hyperinflation of Weimar. While the coronavirus may or may not be used to trigger this new blowout, one thing is certain: a new fascist coup and general war should be taken more seriously than ever.
Footnote
(1) The Legion was a very different beast from the benign organization of old veterans it is known as today, as it was originally founded with Wall Street capital in 1919 and was run early on as a fascist machine. Legion Commander Alvin Owsley made this explicit in 1921 when he said: “If need be the American Legion is ready to protect the institutions of this country and its ideals, in the same way as the Fascists have treated the destructive forces threatening Italy. Don’t forget that the Fascists are for today’s Italy what the American Legion is for the United States.”
Matthew Ehret the Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Patriot Review , and Senior Fellow at the American University in Moscow. He is author of the ‘Untold History of Canada’ book series and Clash of the Two Americas trilogy. In 2019 he co-founded the Montreal-based Rising Tide Foundation .
Quite an awesome essay, and some stuff I did not previously realize, like any “average American.” This is not taught in “America,” who FDR was; nor is it acknowledged that FDR had an almost identical reign to Hitler himself. The “Hollywood Movie” about the plot(s) to kill FDR would be “Oscar”-leading, except that those Movie scripts have always been rejected. Alex Cox would be a good person to get in touch with here, as his “review” of Alan Pacula’s The Parallax View (1974) pretty much puts paid on where “Hollywood” is at. Hollywood is quite clearly an operating arm of the CIA, with “hookers” and other folks on the payroll of Ideology. FDR is not a “Saint” in my book, but clearly he had some “good ideas” going forward–Japanese internment camps in California not being one of the “good.” Thank you for writing this excellent piece, and doing the “deep dive” into the “material.” Smedley Butler is someone I’ve come across in recent years, yet it is so obvious how his prominence has been suppressed since the National Security State rule after 1949. Hopefully not “false hope,” the leading line of Virgil’s Aeneid at the end of Book 6, whenever Virgil penned that “Book,” the one that he wanted “Burned!”–Todd
Awesome essay. Smedley Butler’s not really taught in “American History.” The fact that FDR was so many times almost assassinated is of course not taught. We have a small problem with Japanese internment camps based upon the Pearl Harbor nonsense, as this was a bit of an FDR generated “problem.” Of course, FDR was not involved in the biggest WMD strikes in known History, as he died within days of Hitler’s own demise, and those two share a bit of coincidental history, as in 1933-1946. This all is well or less known, but the dates are quite clear, in case of historical confusion. I am more on the FDR-side than the Hitler-cide, just to be clear. You’ve done some amazing work here clarifying the “historical record.” Lots of Folks literally have “no idea,” including those with fancy Ivy League degrees. Unfortunately, these Ivy League-trained nitwits are leading the Show these days, which pretty much explains the deep degree of “Doggie-Doo” we are all in. Give an Ivy Leaguer a “pooper-scooper” and they are probably going to flip the shit into their own face, but pretend that “their own face” is that of the Masses, or anyone “without” an Ivy League “education.” Thank you again for writing a genuine piece that folks who read will understand. By the way, Alex Christoforou is “back” on YouTube after his “suspension.” Take care and be well, Todd
Matt, what is your problem with the ‘Generalísimo” Franco? You cannot put Franco (and maybe neither Pinochet) in the same basket as Hitler and Mussolini. Those ones were selfless Christian patriots who loved their fellow citizens, whereas these ones (Hitler and Mussolini) were unhinged blood-thirsty misanthropes and psychopaths. You ignore the history of the Spanish Revolution or you’re just plainly seeing it through the Bolsheviks’s glasses. In 1936, the Spanish Republicans massacred thousands of priests, nuns, and laymen and torch their churches at the command of the USSR. The Spanish Republic plundered all the gold available in the country and send it by train to Russia, where it is currently kept.