7/28/2023 0 Comments Smedley butler wars democracyTo his parents during his military efforts to overthrow the home-grown Nicaraguan government, he wrote: “What makes me mad is that the whole revolution is financed by Americans who have wildcat investments down here and want to make them good by putting in a government which will declare a monopoly in their favor.” At the Forefront of Dollar Diplomacyīutler was also beginning to register an uncomfortable awareness that he was not aiding his country but Wall Street. Butler dissolved the Haitian parliament and reinstated slavery for the building of roads. It was during his work as a military occupier and head of the police of Haiti from 1915 to 1934 that Butler’s imperialistic tendencies went into high gear. Twelve years later, Butler was a spy in Mexico, aiding the U.S. Katz begins the narrative with the teenage Butler, caught up in the war fever of the 1898 Spanish-American War, enlisting in the fight.īy the early 20th century, Butler was part of the occupying force in the Philippines, which Katz pithily dubs America’s “first Asian quagmire.” By 1902, he was part of the military protection of the Panama Canal. Katz skillfully shows that in American imperialist ventures, Butler, always the marine, was front and center. global supremacy from the beginning.” Butler’s Beginnings Smedley Butler, experienced the same late-age crisis of conscience, regretting, from the closeness of death, what he had nourished.īutler, a two-time Medal of Honor winner (one of only five men to receive it twice), is used by Katz to fill in the “blank space” that is Americans’ understanding of their country’s imperialism “in the Caribbean or Latin America or Asia.” From this he attempts to connect the dots to the Donald Trump presidency and the movement that the former president supposedly spawned - a movement Katz declares is “firmly rooted in America’s past” and a “product of the greed, bigotry, and denialism that was woven into the structure of U.S. Katz’s immensely readable “Gangsters of Capitalism,” Marine Maj.
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