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Many, most recently Sarah Palin, have worried America is moving closer to civil war. Even leftists are beginng to wake up. The good news is the nation is not about to enter a civil war. The bad news is we have been engaged in one for decades. Civil war and coups (attempted and plotted) and not unknown in the American political landscape. American coups are hardly new and all too frequent.
Let’s review:
Confederate sympathizers Lewis Powell, David Herold, George Atzerodt, and Mary Surratt, co-conspirators in the plot to assassinate Lincoln and decapitate his cabinet, hung for their sedition in 1865. Four more were sentenced to life imprisonment for their failed coup.
1933 coup plotters against FDR failed to successfully launch.
Lee Harvey Oswald did not kill JFK in 1963, that was a coup.
RFK Jr. knowswho shot his father in 1968 — it was not Sirhan. RFK’s assassination prevented him from achieving the presidency and exacting retribution against his brother’s killers.
Some of the same interests behind the JFK affair were behind the 1974 silent coup against Nixon 11 years later.
It remains unclear the extent to which the 2008 election was manipulated — not if, but to what extent.
The 2020 election represented a not-so-silent coup.
Lewis Powell in custody — April 27, 1865. The original Antifa role model, he turned 21 five days earlier.
July 7, 1865, 10 weeks later. Mary Surratt is on the far left, Powell is second from left. The four were convicted by a military tribunal. A civilian DC court was ruled out. Even then, with the city’s Southern sympathies, the concern was a DC jury would not provide justice.
Coups often have little direct and immediate impact upon the majority of Americans. It is not until long afterward that their negative repercussions are felt, after the conspirators chart a new course for the nation. Then the populace suffers when our military is required to fight and die in adventurous wars and the rest of us are sent the bill (e.g., Vietnam or Ukraine); or by such things as eliminating our democratic ability to select our leaders. The purpose of American coups is to divert national policy in a direction counter to that able to be supported through a democratic process. Thus you, and your right to vote, are the primary target of any coup. Often many of a coup’s victims remain oblivious to the attack directed at them. In the long run, as Lincoln accurately predicted, the same folks who bring us coups also lead to the inevitable destruction of the Republic. A coup differs from an overt civil war in the number of active participants and the covert nature of its existence. In practical terms, the objectives of both are of a similar nature.
Along the way, from the Republic’s birth to the present, a cabal of oligarchs and their political functionaries came to consolidate immense power and wealth. This is nothing new. Such has been the case for generations. The two parties serve as the public face of a uniparty which does not reflect your interests. Murray Rothbard offers the example of how Jimmy Carter was elevated to the presidency in 1976 through Rockefeller machinations.
Marine General Smedley Butler (double Congressional Medal of Honor recipient) spent much of his military career spanning the globe on behalf of American oligarchs:
I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer; a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oilwent on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.
Before the CIA was established in 1947, there had been no need for a formal entity to roam abroad, colonizing the world on behalf of American corporate interests. That role had been informally performed by the military. It is Butler’s testimony to a House investigation which is relevant to our subject. Butler described a plot by bankers to make FDR a figurehead and seize control over the government. He had unsuccessfully been recruited to lead the festivities. There is no extant record of the complete testimony heard before the committee because large sections were redacted to protect the high-level bankers implicated in driving the planned coup, which came to be known as the Business Plot.
It is necessary to remember that this was a time of great economic turmoil, both of the organic sort and due to FDR’s interventions in what had been a much freer market economy. From its September 1929 peak the stock market crashed over 90% to its August 1932 bottom, less than three years later. The 1932 Bonus Army march on Washington was comprised of disgruntled WWI veterans (along with a significant cohort of communist infiltrators). Wholesale bank failures led to the 1933 bank holiday. FDR’s April 1933 gold confiscation, and attempt to pack the Supreme Court, were additional components of that tumultuous era. It was in this context that the conspirators approached Butler in mid 1933, America’s most respected military figure. Their principal desire was for a return to the gold standard.
FDR’s principal economic move upon taking office was to take the nation off the gold standard, a gross overreaction to the ongoing deflation and an unconstitutional act. In retrospect, considering the wholesale rot introduced into American economic and political affairs in the subsequent century due to the hyperinflation caused by a fiat currency, the conspirators were on the right track in that sense. Abandoment of the gold standard paved the way for all that followed and has led to Lincoln’s feared destruction of the Republic. Little did the 1933 bankers know that a fiat currency would prove to be their path to concentrating their wealth.
The conspirators attempted to convince Butler to lead a coup, commanding a force of veterans to install Butler as the de facto leader, while intimidating FDR into becoming a figurehead. Butler could not be bought, and strung along the plotters before eventually exposing the plot. He went on to alert J. Edgar Hoover and eventually a House committee took testimony over five days during closed-door sessions. The hearings did not go well for the conspirators. At the start, General Butler addressed the co-chair, Congressman John McCormack (who would go on to serve as Speaker): “May I preface my remarks by saying, sir, that I have one interest in all of this, and that is to try to do my best to see that a democracy is maintained in this country?” McCormack: “Nobody who has either read about or known about General Butler would have anything but that understanding.” The committee’s conclusion:
Evidence was obtained showing that certain persons had made an attempt to establish a fascist organization in this country. 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.
From the 1934 report of the Special Committee on Un-American Activities of the House of Representatives:
As the result of information which has been in possession of this committee for some time, it was decided to hear the story of Maj. Gen. Smedley D. Butler and such others as might have knowledge germane to the issue. In the course of his sworn testimony. General Butler testified that about July 1,1933, a telephone call from Washington to his home in Newton Square, Pa., near Philadelphia, asked for an interview with two unnamed Legionnaires. Later that same day he was visited by one Gerald C. MacGuire, of New York, and William Doyle, of Boston, Mass., and as Butler testified, the latter prominent in Legion affairs of that State.
Gerald C. MacGuire
According to Butler's testimony, MacGuire and Doyle suggested to him that he
