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258 results for “chorrell”
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Na, wo haltet ihr euch gerade auf? Offensichtlich im Social Media Forest, vermutlich mit den Füßen im Lake Coffee Break? Oder liegt ihr am Daydream Beach mit Blick auf den Mountain of Distraction? 😁🏖️
Illustration: Gemma Correlll
#GemmaCorrell -
“”Traduttore, traditore”*…
Translation is key to communication across cultures– and across time. But as the old Italian adage above suggests, transaction is difficult; indeed, translation is sure, from time to time, to fail. (C.f., e.g., here) The estimable Jonathan Bate shares a “tragic” example…
One of the most consequential misunderstandings in the history of literary criticism turns on a single Greek word. In Aristotle’s Poetics, that word is hamartia. It is usually rendered, in classrooms and handbooks, as “tragic flaw,” and on that translation an entire tradition of reading tragedy has been erected. Yet if we return to Aristotle’s Greek and trace the word’s history with some philological care, it becomes clear that this familiar formula rests on a slow but decisive mistranslation—less an error at a single moment than a long cultural drift in which a term meaning “mistake” gradually hardened into a doctrine of moral defect.
In classical Greek, hamartia belongs to the language of action rather than character. Its root sense is concrete and kinetic: to miss one’s mark, as an archer misses the target. By extension, it denotes an error, a misjudgment, a false step—often one made in ignorance of some crucial fact. Aristotle uses the term this way throughout his works, ethical and otherwise. In the Poetics, when he says that the tragic hero falls into misfortune “because of hamartia,” he is careful to exclude two alternatives. The hero does not fall because he is wicked, nor because he is exceptionally virtuous. Tragedy, for Aristotle, does not punish vice or reward goodness; it stages the vulnerability of human action to error within an intelligible but unstable world. The downfall comes about δι’ ἁμαρτίαν—because of an error, not because the hero is “flawed” in a modern psychological or ethical sense…
[Bate locates this reading in the larger corpus of Aristotle’s thinking, then traces the evolution of the reading of hamartia— and of the culture(s) that informed those understandings. He concludes…]
… the history of hamartia traces a remarkable arc: from error in action, to moral fault, to sin, to vice, to psychological flaw. Each step made sense within its own intellectual climate, yet the cumulative effect was to impose on Aristotle a conception of tragedy he would scarcely have recognized. What began as a missed mark became a stain on the soul. And with that shift, tragedy itself was subtly transformed—from a meditation on human fallibility into a lesson on personal failure…
The history of a misreading: “Aristotle and the so-called Tragic Flaw,” from @profbate.bsky.social.
* Old Italian adage: “translator, traitor” (or, “to translate is to betray”) See here and here.
###
As we tangle with tragedy, we might recall that it was on this date in 1904 that Giacomo Puccini‘s Madama Butterfly premiered at La Scala in Milan. The tragic opera (with a libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa) was based on the 1898 short story “Madame Butterfly” by John Luther Long, which in turn was based on stories told to Long by his sister Jennie Correll, and on the semi-autobiographical 1887 French novel Madame Chrysanthème by Pierre Loti. Long’s version was dramatized by David Belasco as the one-act play Madame Butterfly: A Tragedy of Japan, which, after premiering in New York in 1900, moved to London, where Puccini saw it in the summer of that year.
The premiere in Milan was a fiasco, beset by several bad staging decisions, from the lack of an intermission during the second act to the device of giving audience plants nightingale whistles to deepen the sense of sunrise in the final scene– which the audience took as a cue to make their own animal noises. Today Madama Butterfly is considered a masterpiece and is the sixth most performed opera in the world.
Original 1904 poster by Adolfo Hohenstein (source) #art #culture #DavidBeleasco #Drama #hamartia #history #LaScala #literature #MadamaButterfly #MadameButterfly #opera #Puccini #tragedy #tragicFlaw #translation -
“Traduttore, traditore”*…
Translation is key to communication across cultures– and across time. But as the old Italian adage above suggests, transaction is difficult; indeed, translation is sure, from time to time, to fail. (C.f., e.g., here) The estimable Jonathan Bate shares a “tragic” example…
One of the most consequential misunderstandings in the history of literary criticism turns on a single Greek word. In Aristotle’s Poetics, that word is hamartia. It is usually rendered, in classrooms and handbooks, as “tragic flaw,” and on that translation an entire tradition of reading tragedy has been erected. Yet if we return to Aristotle’s Greek and trace the word’s history with some philological care, it becomes clear that this familiar formula rests on a slow but decisive mistranslation—less an error at a single moment than a long cultural drift in which a term meaning “mistake” gradually hardened into a doctrine of moral defect.
In classical Greek, hamartia belongs to the language of action rather than character. Its root sense is concrete and kinetic: to miss one’s mark, as an archer misses the target. By extension, it denotes an error, a misjudgment, a false step—often one made in ignorance of some crucial fact. Aristotle uses the term this way throughout his works, ethical and otherwise. In the Poetics, when he says that the tragic hero falls into misfortune “because of hamartia,” he is careful to exclude two alternatives. The hero does not fall because he is wicked, nor because he is exceptionally virtuous. Tragedy, for Aristotle, does not punish vice or reward goodness; it stages the vulnerability of human action to error within an intelligible but unstable world. The downfall comes about δι’ ἁμαρτίαν—because of an error, not because the hero is “flawed” in a modern psychological or ethical sense…
[Bate locates this reading in the larger corpus of Aristotle’s thinking, then traces the evolution of the reading of hamartia— and of the culture(s) that informed those understandings. He concludes…]
… the history of hamartia traces a remarkable arc: from error in action, to moral fault, to sin, to vice, to psychological flaw. Each step made sense within its own intellectual climate, yet the cumulative effect was to impose on Aristotle a conception of tragedy he would scarcely have recognized. What began as a missed mark became a stain on the soul. And with that shift, tragedy itself was subtly transformed—from a meditation on human fallibility into a lesson on personal failure…
The history of a misreading: “Aristotle and the so-called Tragic Flaw,” from @profbate.bsky.social.
* Old Italian adage: “translator, traitor” (or, “to translate is to betray”) See here and here.
###
As we tangle with tragedy, we might recall that it was on this date in 1904 that Giacomo Puccini‘s Madama Butterfly premiered at La Scala in Milan. The tragic opera (with a libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa) was based on the 1898 short story “Madame Butterfly” by John Luther Long, which in turn was based on stories told to Long by his sister Jennie Correll, and on the semi-autobiographical 1887 French novel Madame Chrysanthème by Pierre Loti. Long’s version was dramatized by David Belasco as the one-act play Madame Butterfly: A Tragedy of Japan, which, after premiering in New York in 1900, moved to London, where Puccini saw it in the summer of that year.
The premiere in Milan was a fiasco, beset by several bad staging decisions, from the lack of an intermission during the second act to the device of giving audience plants nightingale whistles to deepen the sense of sunrise in the final scene– which the audience took as a cue to make their own animal noises. Today Madama Butterfly is considered a masterpiece and is the sixth most performed opera in the world.
Original 1904 poster by Adolfo Hohenstein (source) #art #culture #DavidBelasco #Drama #hamartia #history #LaScala #literature #MadamaButterfly #MadameButterfly #opera #Puccini #tragedy #tragicFlaw #translation -
“”Traduttore, traditore”*…
Translation is key to communication across cultures– and across time. But as the old Italian adage above suggests, transaction is difficult; indeed, translation is sure, from time to time, to fail. (C.f., e.g., here) The estimable Jonathan Bate shares a “tragic” example…
One of the most consequential misunderstandings in the history of literary criticism turns on a single Greek word. In Aristotle’s Poetics, that word is hamartia. It is usually rendered, in classrooms and handbooks, as “tragic flaw,” and on that translation an entire tradition of reading tragedy has been erected. Yet if we return to Aristotle’s Greek and trace the word’s history with some philological care, it becomes clear that this familiar formula rests on a slow but decisive mistranslation—less an error at a single moment than a long cultural drift in which a term meaning “mistake” gradually hardened into a doctrine of moral defect.
In classical Greek, hamartia belongs to the language of action rather than character. Its root sense is concrete and kinetic: to miss one’s mark, as an archer misses the target. By extension, it denotes an error, a misjudgment, a false step—often one made in ignorance of some crucial fact. Aristotle uses the term this way throughout his works, ethical and otherwise. In the Poetics, when he says that the tragic hero falls into misfortune “because of hamartia,” he is careful to exclude two alternatives. The hero does not fall because he is wicked, nor because he is exceptionally virtuous. Tragedy, for Aristotle, does not punish vice or reward goodness; it stages the vulnerability of human action to error within an intelligible but unstable world. The downfall comes about δι’ ἁμαρτίαν—because of an error, not because the hero is “flawed” in a modern psychological or ethical sense…
[Bate locates this reading in the larger corpus of Aristotle’s thinking, then traces the evolution of the reading of hamartia— and of the culture(s) that informed those understandings. He concludes…]
… the history of hamartia traces a remarkable arc: from error in action, to moral fault, to sin, to vice, to psychological flaw. Each step made sense within its own intellectual climate, yet the cumulative effect was to impose on Aristotle a conception of tragedy he would scarcely have recognized. What began as a missed mark became a stain on the soul. And with that shift, tragedy itself was subtly transformed—from a meditation on human fallibility into a lesson on personal failure…
The history of a misreading: “Aristotle and the so-called Tragic Flaw,” from @profbate.bsky.social.
* Old Italian adage: “translator, traitor” (or, “to translate is to betray”) See here and here.
###
As we tangle with tragedy, we might recall that it was on this date in 1904 that Giacomo Puccini‘s Madama Butterfly premiered at La Scala in Milan. The tragic opera (with a libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa) was based on the 1898 short story “Madame Butterfly” by John Luther Long, which in turn was based on stories told to Long by his sister Jennie Correll, and on the semi-autobiographical 1887 French novel Madame Chrysanthème by Pierre Loti. Long’s version was dramatized by David Belasco as the one-act play Madame Butterfly: A Tragedy of Japan, which, after premiering in New York in 1900, moved to London, where Puccini saw it in the summer of that year.
The premiere in Milan was a fiasco, beset by several bad staging decisions, from the lack of an intermission during the second act to the device of giving audience plants nightingale whistles to deepen the sense of sunrise in the final scene– which the audience took as a cue to make their own animal noises. Today Madama Butterfly is considered a masterpiece and is the sixth most performed opera in the world.
Original 1904 poster by Adolfo Hohenstein (source) #art #culture #DavidBeleasco #Drama #hamartia #history #LaScala #literature #MadamaButterfly #MadameButterfly #opera #Puccini #tragedy #tragicFlaw #translation -
“”Traduttore, traditore”*…
Translation is key to communication across cultures– and across time. But as the old Italian adage above suggests, transaction is difficult; indeed, translation is sure, from time to time, to fail. (C.f., e.g., here) The estimable Jonathan Bate shares a “tragic” example…
One of the most consequential misunderstandings in the history of literary criticism turns on a single Greek word. In Aristotle’s Poetics, that word is hamartia. It is usually rendered, in classrooms and handbooks, as “tragic flaw,” and on that translation an entire tradition of reading tragedy has been erected. Yet if we return to Aristotle’s Greek and trace the word’s history with some philological care, it becomes clear that this familiar formula rests on a slow but decisive mistranslation—less an error at a single moment than a long cultural drift in which a term meaning “mistake” gradually hardened into a doctrine of moral defect.
In classical Greek, hamartia belongs to the language of action rather than character. Its root sense is concrete and kinetic: to miss one’s mark, as an archer misses the target. By extension, it denotes an error, a misjudgment, a false step—often one made in ignorance of some crucial fact. Aristotle uses the term this way throughout his works, ethical and otherwise. In the Poetics, when he says that the tragic hero falls into misfortune “because of hamartia,” he is careful to exclude two alternatives. The hero does not fall because he is wicked, nor because he is exceptionally virtuous. Tragedy, for Aristotle, does not punish vice or reward goodness; it stages the vulnerability of human action to error within an intelligible but unstable world. The downfall comes about δι’ ἁμαρτίαν—because of an error, not because the hero is “flawed” in a modern psychological or ethical sense…
[Bate locates this reading in the larger corpus of Aristotle’s thinking, then traces the evolution of the reading of hamartia— and of the culture(s) that informed those understandings. He concludes…]
… the history of hamartia traces a remarkable arc: from error in action, to moral fault, to sin, to vice, to psychological flaw. Each step made sense within its own intellectual climate, yet the cumulative effect was to impose on Aristotle a conception of tragedy he would scarcely have recognized. What began as a missed mark became a stain on the soul. And with that shift, tragedy itself was subtly transformed—from a meditation on human fallibility into a lesson on personal failure…
The history of a misreading: “Aristotle and the so-called Tragic Flaw,” from @profbate.bsky.social.
* Old Italian adage: “translator, traitor” (or, “to translate is to betray”) See here and here.
###
As we tangle with tragedy, we might recall that it was on this date in 1904 that Giacomo Puccini‘s Madama Butterfly premiered at La Scala in Milan. The tragic opera (with a libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa) was based on the 1898 short story “Madame Butterfly” by John Luther Long, which in turn was based on stories told to Long by his sister Jennie Correll, and on the semi-autobiographical 1887 French novel Madame Chrysanthème by Pierre Loti. Long’s version was dramatized by David Belasco as the one-act play Madame Butterfly: A Tragedy of Japan, which, after premiering in New York in 1900, moved to London, where Puccini saw it in the summer of that year.
The premiere in Milan was a fiasco, beset by several bad staging decisions, from the lack of an intermission during the second act to the device of giving audience plants nightingale whistles to deepen the sense of sunrise in the final scene– which the audience took as a cue to make their own animal noises. Today Madama Butterfly is considered a masterpiece and is the sixth most performed opera in the world.
Original 1904 poster by Adolfo Hohenstein (source) #art #culture #DavidBeleasco #Drama #hamartia #history #LaScala #literature #MadamaButterfly #MadameButterfly #opera #Puccini #tragedy #tragicFlaw #translation -
“Traduttore, traditore”*…
Translation is key to communication across cultures– and across time. But as the old Italian adage above suggests, transaction is difficult; indeed, translation is sure, from time to time, to fail. (C.f., e.g., here) The estimable Jonathan Bate shares a “tragic” example…
One of the most consequential misunderstandings in the history of literary criticism turns on a single Greek word. In Aristotle’s Poetics, that word is hamartia. It is usually rendered, in classrooms and handbooks, as “tragic flaw,” and on that translation an entire tradition of reading tragedy has been erected. Yet if we return to Aristotle’s Greek and trace the word’s history with some philological care, it becomes clear that this familiar formula rests on a slow but decisive mistranslation—less an error at a single moment than a long cultural drift in which a term meaning “mistake” gradually hardened into a doctrine of moral defect.
In classical Greek, hamartia belongs to the language of action rather than character. Its root sense is concrete and kinetic: to miss one’s mark, as an archer misses the target. By extension, it denotes an error, a misjudgment, a false step—often one made in ignorance of some crucial fact. Aristotle uses the term this way throughout his works, ethical and otherwise. In the Poetics, when he says that the tragic hero falls into misfortune “because of hamartia,” he is careful to exclude two alternatives. The hero does not fall because he is wicked, nor because he is exceptionally virtuous. Tragedy, for Aristotle, does not punish vice or reward goodness; it stages the vulnerability of human action to error within an intelligible but unstable world. The downfall comes about δι’ ἁμαρτίαν—because of an error, not because the hero is “flawed” in a modern psychological or ethical sense…
[Bate locates this reading in the larger corpus of Aristotle’s thinking, then traces the evolution of the reading of hamartia— and of the culture(s) that informed those understandings. He concludes…]
… the history of hamartia traces a remarkable arc: from error in action, to moral fault, to sin, to vice, to psychological flaw. Each step made sense within its own intellectual climate, yet the cumulative effect was to impose on Aristotle a conception of tragedy he would scarcely have recognized. What began as a missed mark became a stain on the soul. And with that shift, tragedy itself was subtly transformed—from a meditation on human fallibility into a lesson on personal failure…
The history of a misreading: “Aristotle and the so-called Tragic Flaw,” from @profbate.bsky.social.
* Old Italian adage: “translator, traitor” (or, “to translate is to betray”) See here and here.
###
As we tangle with tragedy, we might recall that it was on this date in 1904 that Giacomo Puccini‘s Madama Butterfly premiered at La Scala in Milan. The tragic opera (with a libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa) was based on the 1898 short story “Madame Butterfly” by John Luther Long, which in turn was based on stories told to Long by his sister Jennie Correll, and on the semi-autobiographical 1887 French novel Madame Chrysanthème by Pierre Loti. Long’s version was dramatized by David Belasco as the one-act play Madame Butterfly: A Tragedy of Japan, which, after premiering in New York in 1900, moved to London, where Puccini saw it in the summer of that year.
The premiere in Milan was a fiasco, beset by several bad staging decisions, from the lack of an intermission during the second act to the device of giving audience plants nightingale whistles to deepen the sense of sunrise in the final scene– which the audience took as a cue to make their own animal noises. Today Madama Butterfly is considered a masterpiece and is the sixth most performed opera in the world.
Original 1904 poster by Adolfo Hohenstein (source) #art #culture #DavidBelasco #Drama #hamartia #history #LaScala #literature #MadamaButterfly #MadameButterfly #opera #Puccini #tragedy #tragicFlaw #translation -
#ConnieWillis on #trump #JDVance and the whole #uspol mess. #liberated from FB
Cheeseheads and Tariffs and Third Terms, Oh, My!
March 31, 2025
By Connie WillisI was talking to a friend this weekend and predicted that SignalGate would continue to be the main subject of political talk till Wednesday, when Trump’s tariffs will be imposed, and the stock market and it would drop to second as the effects of Trump’s tariffs would become the main topic. It seems I was off by two days:
--The stock market swung wildly today over worries about the tariffs. Foreign markets were all down, and the American market ended the worst quarter in two and a half years.
--Goldman Sachs raised their forecast for inflation and lowered it for US economic growth. They are predicting that the tariffs will result in higher prices and lower incomes. They raised the possibility of a recession from 20% to 35%.
--J.P. Morgan called it "the fastest momentum reversal in forty years."
--The CBO forecasts DOGE and AI will be massive failures; sees US debt exploding as production collapses. Reuters: "The CBO sees US deficits rising over 30 years, economic growth slowing."
--New York Times: "US faces significant risks from debt, analyst says, as Trump pursues tax agenda."
--Everyone is upset about this. One Republican mayor said, "It’s impossible to prepare." This is partly because Trump keeps announcing tariffs with no warning. With the automobile tariffs, nobody at the White House, in Congress, or in the auto industry knew it was coming. Politico is reporting that White House officials are "apoplectic" about the tariffs.
--On Fox, Larry Kudlow was saying, "Markets crash, bad inflation report, tariff confusion." Meanwhile, Sandra Smith tried to downplay the drop in the stock market. Smith: "Since Inauguration Day it’s only down 5.5%." Economic expert: "That’s a lot." Smith: "5.5% is a lot?" Expert: "Yes."
--The conservative English paper, the Telegraph: "Trump is levying the biggest tax rise in global history."
--According to the Wall Street Journal, this weekend Trump warned US automakers not to raise prices in response to tariffs. (Even though their expenses are going to go up.) Then yesterday he said, "I could care less if auto makers raise prices." (Really inspires confidence, doesn’t it?)
--Trump says he wants the tariffs to completely replace the income tax. To do that, they would have to be 100% or more. The Telegraph said, "It will crush the American economy."
--When Trump was asked if the tariffs would be permanent, Trump declared, "Absolutely, they’re permanent, sure. The world has been ripping off the United States for the last 40 years and more. And all we’re doing is being fair, and frankly, I’m being very generous." (Every word in that statement is a lie, including "and" and "the.")
--Trump was also asked if he was worried about stagflation, and he said, "I haven’t heard that term in years. I don’t know anything about it...this country is going to boom. We’re going to have boomtown. We’re going to boom."
--Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said the tariffs are "to force other nations to show Trump respect."
--GOP Senator James Lankford: "It’s like a kitchen remodel or a bathroom remodel. There’s a bit of a mess at the beginning. It’s going to be noisy for a little while."
--Peter Navarro: "Trust in Trump."
--US allies South Korea and Japan have united with China to fight the tariffs.
--Trump is doing deals with Vietnam for new hotels and golf courses in exchange for waiving tariffs. (Can you say CORRUPTION?)
In SignalGate news:
--We keep finding out new stuff. According to the Wall Street Journal, two officials say Mike Waltz "has created and hosted multiple other national security conversations on Signal with cabinet members." (And no doubt told Signal to erase the record of the chats.)
--Top GOP leaders are reportedly angry at JD Vance because during the chat he tried to block an order of the President’s and showed concerns about Trump’s decision. (Blind obedience, JD, blind obedience.)
--Jeffrey Goldberg said he thinks JD Vance’s comments showed that he believes Trump doesn’t even know what he’s doing.
--The Signal chat occurred when Hegseth and Waltz were meeting at the Palm Steakhouse, a ritzy restaurant in D.C.
--Jeffrey Goldberg, in response to Waltz’s "sucked in" explanation: "This isn’t the Matrix. Phone numbers don’t just get sucked into the phones. I don’t know what he’s talking about there. My phone number was in his phone because my phone number was in his phone. He’s telling everyone that he’s never met me or spoken to me. That’s simply not true."
--Karoline Leavitt told the press corps that the Signal chat is now "case closed." She said that they had conducted an investigation, determined what had happened, and fixed the problem so it would not happen again, but gave absolutely no details--or proof.
--There’s a theory that Jeffrey Goldberg’s name being on the Signal chat was an inside job and that it happened as the result of resistance activity inside the Pentagon, and they’re basing it partly on the leak a week before of Musk’s meeting to view war plans against China. They said the meeting was revealed at the moment when it would do the worst damage--when Musk was already there and so were the reporters and they couldn’t just quietly call it off. Ditto having the worst (in their eyes) journalist on the Signal chat. They say Hegseth is absolutely hated at the Pentagon and career military (or civilians) are trying to get rid of him.
Trump is talking again about running for a third term:
--Trump said there are "methods" that will allow him to run for a third term. A lot of people want me to do it...I’m not joking."
--Lincoln Project: "He’s not joking about the thrid term."
--Also Trump: "I have had more people ask me to have a third term which in a way is a fourth term because the other election was totally rigged."
--Ryan Wiggins: "Trump is trying to change the conversation from tariffs, the economy, and the Hegseth scandal. Any conversation about him running for a 3rd term is still 2 years away. He is trying to distract and get the media off of the headlines currently
--Steve Schmidt, standing outside Elvis Presley’s birthplace in Tupelo: "There’s only one King in America and this is his castle."
In deportation news:
--Trump lied to El Salvador. He told them he was sending them only men and then sent women.
--The ACLU filed the sworn affidavit from a Venezuelan woman on the migrant flight to El Salvador who says she heard ICE officials on the plane talking about the court order to turn the plane around. (This proves the DOJ lied in court when they claimed they had no knowledge of the order.)
--One of the men deported to El Salvador was Neri Albarado, a baker. His tattoo was an autism awareness tattoo. (Like the yellow ribbon ones only in rainbow colors.)
--Another of the men sent to that hellhole of an El Salvador prison was Andry, a gay makeup artist. The only reason the government is giving (according to official records) for deporting him is that he had a tattoo of a crown with the word "Mom" below.
--The tattoos are apparently the only evidence ICE has against any of these guys that they’re in a gang. People online are pointing out by that standard, Pete Hegseth should be immediately sent to El Salvador. He has white-supremacist and Crusader tattoos all over his body. (Interesting side note--the only mention of tattoos in the Bible is the one that says anyone who has tattoos should be put to death.)
--The prison is a nightmare. Prisoners spend 23 and a half hours a day in cells with 70 other people. They eat, bathe, and go to the bathroom in front of everyone else. They sleep on bunks 4 levels high with no sheets, no mattresses, and no pillows.
--When immigration czar Tom Homan was asked about the prison conditions, he proudly said, "We got a lot of tools in the toolbox. The El Salvador prison is one, we got Gitmo, we got other countries. I wake up every day like a kid in a candy shop getting ready to go to work." (I dare you to find a worse statement by ANY of the Nazis.)
--But even worse was the hosts on Fox discussing how undocumented immigrants should be stripped of due process: Lawrence Jones: So you have a constitutional right that is actually, they are afforded to illegals in this country? We should revisit that." Brian Kilmeade: "It’s not practical to think that we can do due process on 8 million people." Rachel Campos-Duffy: "That’s right." They also said of due process, "They don’t deserve it." (Note: the right to due process is not just enshrined in the Constitution. It is enshrined in the Magna Carta. They’re talking about getting rid of rights that people have had since 1215!)
--In good news, a federal judge ruled that a Columbia student who took part in protests against Israel’s treatment of Gaza cannot be detained as she fights orders for deportation. Yay!
--Stephen Miller, justifying the horrible treatment of immigrants: "We were invaded and occupied. Entire neighborhoods were conquered. Entire towns were subjugated. Our treasury was in the plundered (sic.) Our democracy was torn apart piece by piece."
--Mrs. Betty Bowers, who is usually hilarious--but not today: "I learned this week that you can put our troops’ lives in danger, compromise our national security, and violate the Espionage Act and the government will do nothing. But if you write an editorial for your school newspaper that Trump doesn’t like, you will be abducted on the street and disappeared."
--Holocaust survivor Elie Weisel: "There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest."
In Grand Vizier news:
--Musk is campaigning in Wisconsin and chose to wear the cheesehead hat people wear at football games at one campaign event. He said in his campaign speech, "I feel like it is one of those things that may not seem like it will affect the entire destiny of humanity, but I think it will. It will decide the future of American and Western civilization." (Not sure the cheesehead hat was the right thing to wear while saying that.)
--In another appearance in Wisconsin, Musk appeared standing in front of a gigantic American flag, just like that scene in the movie PATTON. (Delusions of grandeur much?)
--The first of his million-dollar checks that he said were going to anybody who signed a paper promising to vote (which is illegal) went to, oddly enough, the head of the College Republicans. (That kind of thing happened during the presidential election, too. When are the MAGAs going to wake up and realize this is a scam and he has no intention of giving them anything?
--They are completely defunding NPR, PBS, and Sesame Street.
--They have shut down the measurement lab that’s critical for manufacturing advanced chips and medical devices. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Sheldon Glashow: "I cannot believe that the government would be stupid enough to slash this kind of work."
--They cancelled tens of billions in HHS grants on infectious diseases, vaccines, and mental health issues. The offices got the stop-work notices Monday night. THEY CUT THE ENTIRE HHS STAFF IN LUBBOCK, TEXAS, GROUND ZERO FOR THE MEASLES EPIDEMIC.
--DOGE teenaged senior adviser "Big Balls" Coristine provided support to a cybercrime gang which trafficked in stolen data and cyberstalked an FBI agent.
--There was an article today saying that Elon drawing fire and working as a "heat shield" for Trump is no longer working and that Trump’s approval ratings are starting to suffer from what Musk and DOGE are doing.
--Vicki M: "We are getting to the point in this debacle where Trump and those around him are losing control of the narrative, which means they have no clue on how this will all play out. That is why they are jamming this scheme down our throats, because they think they are running out of time."
In Greenland news:
--The most telling thing JD Vance said in his reasons for why we have to have Greenland was "We cannot just ignore the President’s desires." markdtooley: "Citizens of a republic don’t concern themselves with the ‘desires’ of the current elected chief...he should be more concerned with ours."
--Eric Swalwell: "What the hell is JD Vance doing in Greenland? They don’t want him there. We don’t need him there. Why didn’t he go to Greensboro or Green Bay to see how much Trump’s tariff tax talk is costing people?"
--Jesse Watters on Fox, about taking Greenland: "We don’t need friends. If we have to burn a few bridges with Denmark to take Greenland, we’re big boys. We dropped A-bombs on Japan, and now they’re our ally." (So now we’re dropping A-bombs on Greenland????)
--from the Borowitz Report: "The government of Greenland revealed on Monday that it had arrested JD Vance last week after he attempted to abscond with all the island’s rare earth minerals hidden inside his parka. As he walked up the stairs to Air Force 2, metric tons of lithium, niobium, hafnium, and zircon came tumbling from his bulky outer garment...Elon Musk said that instead of replacing Vance, he would eliminate his position."
--Anthony Scaramucci says that JD Vance is being systematically sidelined because everything he does fails.
In RFK, Jr. news:
--RFK, Jr. pushed out the top vaccine scientist, Peter Marks. He was told to resign or be fired.
--RFK, Jr. has completely dismantled the department working to eliminate opioid addiction, including prevention, treatment, and recovery services, and the distribution of Nalaxone to keep people from OD’ing.
--He is laying off all workers from the Office of Infectious Disease and HIV/Aids Policy.
--There are now 483 cases of measles. The CDC buried a report stressing the importance of vaccinations.
--RFK, Jr. told the press that he has sent huge shipments of Vitamin A to Texas to help with the measles outbreak, but doctors in Texas said that they had refused shipment of the vitamins because they didn’t want them.
--The Wall Street Journal: "Our worst fears about Mr. Kennedy are coming true."
In other news:
--Mike Lee has submitted a proposal to the US Senate to get rid of the Fed.
--In Israel, two of Netanyahu’s aides were arrested as part of an investigation into Netanyahu’s involvement with Qatar. According to the Washington Post, there are increasing allegations that Netanyahu’s inner circle was involved in the transfer of money from Qatar, a key backer of Hamas.
--Trump and Lindsey Graham allegedly won another golf tournament at one of Trump’s golf courses. (They were partners.) 9-time Wimbledon winner Martina Navratilova: "Playing golf again? Donnie doesn’t play tennis because 1) he is not very good, and 2) it’s much harder to cheat in tennis than in golf."
In good news:
--2 million people demonstrated against Orban in Turkey.
--Protests are planned for all over the country--and Canada and Europe--for Saturday, April 5.
--Alex Jones is getting a divorce. (Not only will that take more of his money away from him, but embittered spouses often reveal all kinds of stuff.)
--Marine LePen was convicted of embezzling and therefore cannot run for office ever again in France. Yay!
Best rally chant of the day: "We don’t want your Nazi cars. Let’s send Elon Musk to Mars."
Best advice of the day, from Hillary Clinton on Kristi Noem: "Don’t vote for anyone you wouldn’t trust with your dog."
Best line of the day, from m. correll: "Too hard, too fast, too extreme, too illegal...this regime will not last much longer and neither will Trump. He’s fading fast and JD Vance is pissing off some of the GOP." -
Gangsters of Capitalism
Author: Jonathan M. Katz
Completed: July 2025 (Full list of books)
Overview: The story of the pacifist Quaker who joined the Marines and rose to the rank of Major General only to become one a the loudest anti-war voices in the run up to World War 2 was long and winding. I remembered many of the entanglements the US was involved in at the turn of the twentieth century in Central America and Asia but was a bit surprised that one man happened to be in almost all of them. His insight from all those battles was that much of the US fighting was based on what was best for monied/corporate interests. A century later, despite so many protests against this fact, it seems little has changed as we invade Venezuela and Iran mainly for their oil.
Highlights:
- “Imperialism,” on the other hand, is a foreign-sounding word. It brings up images, if it brings any at all, of redcoats terrorizing Boston, or perhaps British officials in linen suits sipping gin and tonics in Bombay. The idea that the United States, a country founded in rebellion against empire, could have colonized and conquered other peoples seems anathema to everything we are taught America stands for.
- “Imperialism,” on the other hand, is a foreign-sounding word. It brings up images, if it brings any at all, of redcoats terrorizing Boston, or perhaps British officials in linen suits sipping gin and tonics in Bombay. The idea that the United States, a country founded in rebellion against empire, could have colonized and conquered other peoples seems anathema to everything we are taught America stands for.
- As a candidate and then as president, Donald Trump preyed on American anxieties by combining the worst excesses of those early-twentieth-century imperial chestnuts—militarism, white supremacy, and the cult of manhood—with a newer fantasy: that Americans could reclaim our sense of safety and supremacy by disengaging from the world we made; by literally building walls along our border and making the countries we conquered pay for them.
- In 1741, the British vice admiral Edward Vernon captured the bay and renamed it Cumberland Harbour. Vernon’s crew was full of sailors from Britain’s North American colonies who wrote home encouraging their friends and relatives to rush down to the bay—“now or never for a plantation on the island of Cuba.” Disease and local resistance ended the brief occupation. But one of Vernon’s crewmen, Lawrence Washington, was so inspired by the voyage that he named his new Virginia plantation after its commander. Washington died soon after; the plantation—Mount Vernon—ended up in the hands of his half brother George.
- American society was becoming particularly obsessed with manhood. The United States was transforming from a country of manual laborers into one where people rode machines to office jobs. Electricity and plumbing would soon mean less chopping and hauling at home. The Civil War generation was retiring, taking tales of courage and honor with them. Women were campaigning for, and in a few states had already won, the right to vote. As the historian Kristin L. Hoganson has argued, male leaders feared that all these trends portended national feminization and ruin. “War, they believed, would return the nation to a political order in which strong men governed and homebound women proved their patriotism by raising heroic sons.”
- Clouds of steam were evaporating off the lights. It was like the empire in which we’d trapped ourselves and millions of others in places like that a century before: Too dangerous to turn off. Too dangerous to keep on.
- Knowing Congress was unlikely to approve a third overseas war in two years, McKinley made a fateful decision: he became the first president in U.S. history to order the full-scale invasion of a sovereign country without seeking legislative approval.10 Congress did not challenge him.
- Before going to war, Butler had dreamed of getting shot—“not too seriously, but sufficient to leave a scar.”30 He hadn’t expected it to hurt this much.
- American soldiers chasing these guerrillas were pulled ever deeper into the hinterlands. Along the way, they picked up local words. Bundók—Tagalog for “mountain”—was given an American twang and made into slang for any wild and remote place. It was only by going to the “boondocks,” the soldiers learned, that you could get the measure of a country.2
- To finance the insurgency, the soldiers on Luzon seized the supply of the islands’ most valuable export: a strong, flexible fiber harvested from a cousin of the banana plant known as abacá. Americans called it “Manila hemp,” and before synthetics came along, it drove the global economy. Shipbuilders used its fibers to weave ropes and sails. Electric companies ran abacá belts through their city-powering generators. The oil boom minting millionaires in Texas and California depended on miles of “Manila drilling cable” pulsing through the derricks. Even the people counting the money needed abacá to make their office supplies: they’re called “manila envelopes” for a reason.
- The U.S. government formally recognized Panama the next afternoon. It took longer than that for most on the isthmus to learn they were living in a new country.
- They called themselves Sandinistas, in honor of their anti-imperialist hero. The name was itself an act of rebellion, Baltodano told me, because the dictator had tried not only to bury Sandino’s body but “to make his story disappear as well.” The story of Sandino’s resistance had been rediscovered by Carlos Fonseca, a radical librarian who became a leader of the anti-Somoza uprising.
- the number ultimately needed for construction was equivalent to more than one-eighth the new republic’s entire population. That left the U.S. government to rely, as the French had, on workers from the Caribbean. Their stories are mostly absent from the better-funded museums, which focus on celebrating the technological feats and leaders involved. But in the humid basement of the Afro-Antillean Museum, at a table covered with a vinyl cloth, the librarian handed me a bound blue volume. The faded gold embossing on the cover read: Letters from Isthmian Canal Construction Workers.
- They tried to pressure the Canal Zone’s governor, Maj. Gen. Robert J. Fleming, U.S. Army, into rescinding the order. But Fleming had neither the power nor inclination to do so. He had come to resent the chauvinism of the Americans he oversaw. “They’ve been isolated so long they’ve developed a reactionary mentality,” Fleming told the Saturday Evening Post. “It’s the perfect place for the guy who’s 150 percent American and 50 percent whiskey.”
- The future president lied profligately about the history of the canal, claiming falsely that “our Navy did not intervene to bring about the secession of Panama,” that the Panamanians “knew what they were doing” when they let Bunau-Varilla give away their rights in the Zone, and implied that Americans—as opposed to Caribbean conscripts—had done the actual digging.47 (Conservative Republican Senate candidate S. I. Hayakawa said, more cheekily: “I think we should keep it. We stole it fair and square.”
- On the other side of the water stood the skyscrapers of the Panama City financial district. The banking system housed in those towers—the system first set up in Panama by financiers such as Ramón Arias and their American friends—ultimately eclipsed the value of the canal itself. The bankers who occupy those buildings have outdone Noriega, not to mention the gangs of El Chorrillo, in brazenness: much of an estimated $7.6 trillion in worldwide hidden offshore holdings—8 percent of the world’s wealth—flows across the isthmus under the cover of generous bank secrecy laws.
- In an attempt to build a stable coalition, the victorious Madero appointed some of Díaz’s technocrats to be his advisers and ordered his revolutionary army to lay down its arms. The commanders who had helped Madero oust Díaz in the name of land reform and redistribution felt betrayed. The most radical—Francisco “Pancho” Villa in the north and Emiliano Zapata in the south—declared the revolution would continue against him. But just as the rebels were preparing to move against Madero in February 1913, he was overthrown by someone else—the belligerent conservative Gen. Victoriano Huerta.
- But, as Huerta would not be the last to learn, the trouble with doing business with the United States was that, while Americans subverted democracy abroad, they still practiced a limited form of it at home.
- But concern had risen over the high numbers of opium addicts among the U.S. soldiers occupying the Philippines. Lawmakers were also looking for ways to criminalize new behaviors to feed an increasingly profitable system of underpaid prison labor, which had arisen in part to replace the free labor provided by enslaved African Americans. In that atmosphere, rumors spread freely that drugs such as cocaine would lead some, especially Black people in the South, to “disregard the barriers that society had established between different races,” as the Mexican historian Gabriela Recio has written.
- Butler would tell a radio audience around 1935. “But I feel it more to the point, in these times, to look for the oil deposits when you are trying to get at the bottom of deep international intrigue.”
- Throughout late 1914, the Navy Department drew up detailed plans for an invasion and occupation of Haiti, down to where to build the baseball fields that off-duty Marines would use and where to buy rum. Taking over foreign cities had become so old hat for the U.S. military that it was developing an actual template: some of the plans were simply repurposed from the recent invasion of Mexico, with instructions reading: “REWRITE LETTER INSERTING PORT AU PRINCE FOR VERA CRUZ, MEXICO WHEREVER IT APPEARS.”
- Butler’s insights became the key to securing America’s imperial foothold in Haiti. Though Butler did not realize it at the time, he was helping invent a new approach to warfare. It would eventually be dubbed counterinsurgency: the combination of military, political, and psychological methods employed by an occupying power with the goal of holistically defeating an armed resistance.
- Most of the carnival-goers were understandably not happy to see the invaders. Someone offered them food; another warned, too late, that the bread had been poisoned. Over the next few days, as Marines fell ill, the flying column temporarily decamped to the nearby plantation of the American-owned Central Ansonia Sugar Company. All recovered. But for the rest of the trip, Butler wrote, “my stomach was absolutely no use to me.”
- The border on Hispaniola is proof of the political philosopher Frantz Fanon’s dictum that “the colonial world is a compartmentalized world.”36 It was drawn at the behest of an imperial power, formalized in the interests of foreigners, and consecrated in blood by a dictator empowered and trained by the Marines. Those officials knew, as do their successors today, that for capital and elites to flow freely, subject peoples cannot. Fears of uncontrolled movement are why, a century after Butler complained about the lack of a clear border on Hispaniola, the U.S. government still helps fund, train, and equip border patrols across the world, from Jordan to Kenya to Peru.
- covering his tracks, Butler ensured there would be no accountability for the occupation’s actions from either the Haitian or American publics, and that the story would be pushed to the margin of both countries’ histories for generations to come. With the legislature now abolished, the U.S.-written constitution was placed before a popular plebiscite in the summer of 1918. Polling places were overseen by Butler’s rifle-toting Gendarmes, who were encouraged to actively campaign for the constitution’s passage.27 Less than 5 percent of Haiti’s population voted. It passed overwhelmingly. In addition to the key clause permitting foreigners to own land, the final draft vested the legislative powers of the dissolved parliament in a “Council of State” appointed by the puppet president. It also contained a special article declaring: “All the acts of the Government of the United States during its military occupation of Haiti are ratified and legal.”
- But in 1990, the first free election since the occupation was held. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, an anti-Duvalierist Catholic priest who promised land and economic redistribution, won—only to be overthrown by the army nine months later. Several of the putschists had been on the CIA’s payroll. At least two of the coup’s leaders were trained by the U.S. Army.
- Butler could not see the irony: that the imperialism he had helped foster was a direct catalyst of the World War.4 The conflict erupted in 1914 as a fight between empires: Germany and Austria-Hungary on one side; Britain, France, and Russia on the other. All had spent decades in a complex global struggle for colonies, resources, and prestige—a struggle that the Americans (and Butler personally) had been parties to. The older empires, especially the British, were filled with anxiety over new competitors to their global supremacy. The Germans, as the United States’ fellow latecomers to global expansion, were reading Alfred Thayer Mahan’s tracts on sea power and empire when they declared: “We demand a place for ourselves in the sun.”
- The brass was so pleased with Butler’s administrative skill that they awarded him both the Army and Navy Distinguished Service Medals—the former pinned on him personally by General Pershing.
- Philadelphia’s police department was founded in 1854, making it one of the oldest in the United States. Until then, the streets of William Penn’s city, like most in the North, had been patrolled by ad hoc committees of night watchmen and private guards, charged at first with keeping Native Americans from venturing into town. (In the South the first organized law enforcement patrols were built on similarly racist grounds: hunters tracking Black people trying to escape slavery.)
- As residents of MOVE’s new middle-class neighborhood accused the group of harassing and beating them, the mayor called the commune “terrorists” and promised to take action.43 A renewed standoff ensued. On the late afternoon of May 13, 1985, Police Lt. Frank Powell dropped a bomb of C-4 plastic explosive and Tovex out of a helicopter. It exploded on impact, igniting drums of gasoline the commune stored on the roof. Police commissioner Gregore J. Sambor—a former Army Reserve major who had risen to power under Rizzo—gave the order: “Let the bunker burn.” Veterans compared the inferno to scenes they had witnessed in Korea and Vietnam. By morning, two city blocks were destroyed. Six adults and five children were found charred to death in the wreckage of the home.
- Furious and betrayed, Sun wrote an open letter in which he asked the question that had reverberated through Havana and Manila decades before: “When we first started our revolution … the United States was our model and inspiration. Now we wonder … has the nation of Washington and Lincoln abandoned the ideal of liberty and regressed from a liberator to an oppressor?”
- As the months wore on, the U.S. envoy in Beijing, MacMurray, insisted the Marines be ready to fight their way in and evacuate his staff if the old imperial capital fell to the Nationalists. Butler publicly demurred. “I shall consider our expedition to have been entirely successful only if we finally withdraw from China without the spilling of any blood, either American or Chinese,” he told a New York Times correspondent. “This country belongs to the Chinese, and I tolerate no clashes between my men and the Chinese people. If a man so much as slaps a rickshaw coolie or lays a hand upon a servant, he gets a general court-martial.”
- The lack of action left his younger Marines confused. “We didn’t know what the mission was,” David M. Shoup, a future Marine commandant, later recalled thinking as a twenty-three-year-old lieutenant in China. “But we landed at the Standard Oil docks and lived in Standard Oil compounds and were ready to protect Standard Oil’s investment. I wondered at the time if our government would put all these Marines in a position of danger, where they might sacrifice their lives in defense of Standard Oil. Later I discovered that of course it would, and did.
- Why do we expend so much time and money preserving the memory of the short-duration wars in which European powers were involved; and so little, relatively speaking, remembering the kind of wars Butler fought—protracted, decades-long conflicts in the Americas, Asia, and Africa that have been the most common mode of warfare throughout U.S. history? And why does America celebrate its generals who oversaw death and destruction on a massive scale, while forgeting the exceptional few who spent their later years trying to stop them?
- The story he told was essentially a parable: the bankers and the industrialists were among the racketeers. The American people—the “lads in the trenches,” the loved ones worried sick at home—were the dupes and victims. The racket could only be smashed, Butler concluded, “by taking the profit out of war.”
- A year later, in 1941, Franklin Roosevelt imposed an oil embargo on the Japanese in retaliation for their invasion of the French colonies in Indochina. That gave Emperor Hirohito two choices: give up on his dreams of becoming the dominant empire in East Asia and the Pacific, or seize the oil reserves in the Dutch East Indies, risking war with the United States and Britain. His war cabinet decided to strike first, simultaneously bombing Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, Guam, Wake Island, and the British garrisons in Malaya, Hong Kong, and Singapore on December 7 and 8, 1941.
-
Gangsters of Capitalism
Author: Jonathan M. Katz
Completed: July 2025 (Full list of books)
Overview: The story of the pacifist Quaker who joined the Marines and rose to the rank of Major General only to become one a the loudest anti-war voices in the run up to World War 2 was long and winding. I remembered many of the entanglements the US was involved in at the turn of the twentieth century in Central America and Asia but was a bit surprised that one man happened to be in almost all of them. His insight from all those battles was that much of the US fighting was based on what was best for monied/corporate interests. A century later, despite so many protests against this fact, it seems little has changed as we invade Venezuela and Iran mainly for their oil.
Highlights:
- “Imperialism,” on the other hand, is a foreign-sounding word. It brings up images, if it brings any at all, of redcoats terrorizing Boston, or perhaps British officials in linen suits sipping gin and tonics in Bombay. The idea that the United States, a country founded in rebellion against empire, could have colonized and conquered other peoples seems anathema to everything we are taught America stands for.
- “Imperialism,” on the other hand, is a foreign-sounding word. It brings up images, if it brings any at all, of redcoats terrorizing Boston, or perhaps British officials in linen suits sipping gin and tonics in Bombay. The idea that the United States, a country founded in rebellion against empire, could have colonized and conquered other peoples seems anathema to everything we are taught America stands for.
- As a candidate and then as president, Donald Trump preyed on American anxieties by combining the worst excesses of those early-twentieth-century imperial chestnuts—militarism, white supremacy, and the cult of manhood—with a newer fantasy: that Americans could reclaim our sense of safety and supremacy by disengaging from the world we made; by literally building walls along our border and making the countries we conquered pay for them.
- In 1741, the British vice admiral Edward Vernon captured the bay and renamed it Cumberland Harbour. Vernon’s crew was full of sailors from Britain’s North American colonies who wrote home encouraging their friends and relatives to rush down to the bay—“now or never for a plantation on the island of Cuba.” Disease and local resistance ended the brief occupation. But one of Vernon’s crewmen, Lawrence Washington, was so inspired by the voyage that he named his new Virginia plantation after its commander. Washington died soon after; the plantation—Mount Vernon—ended up in the hands of his half brother George.
- American society was becoming particularly obsessed with manhood. The United States was transforming from a country of manual laborers into one where people rode machines to office jobs. Electricity and plumbing would soon mean less chopping and hauling at home. The Civil War generation was retiring, taking tales of courage and honor with them. Women were campaigning for, and in a few states had already won, the right to vote. As the historian Kristin L. Hoganson has argued, male leaders feared that all these trends portended national feminization and ruin. “War, they believed, would return the nation to a political order in which strong men governed and homebound women proved their patriotism by raising heroic sons.”
- Clouds of steam were evaporating off the lights. It was like the empire in which we’d trapped ourselves and millions of others in places like that a century before: Too dangerous to turn off. Too dangerous to keep on.
- Knowing Congress was unlikely to approve a third overseas war in two years, McKinley made a fateful decision: he became the first president in U.S. history to order the full-scale invasion of a sovereign country without seeking legislative approval.10 Congress did not challenge him.
- Before going to war, Butler had dreamed of getting shot—“not too seriously, but sufficient to leave a scar.”30 He hadn’t expected it to hurt this much.
- American soldiers chasing these guerrillas were pulled ever deeper into the hinterlands. Along the way, they picked up local words. Bundók—Tagalog for “mountain”—was given an American twang and made into slang for any wild and remote place. It was only by going to the “boondocks,” the soldiers learned, that you could get the measure of a country.2
- To finance the insurgency, the soldiers on Luzon seized the supply of the islands’ most valuable export: a strong, flexible fiber harvested from a cousin of the banana plant known as abacá. Americans called it “Manila hemp,” and before synthetics came along, it drove the global economy. Shipbuilders used its fibers to weave ropes and sails. Electric companies ran abacá belts through their city-powering generators. The oil boom minting millionaires in Texas and California depended on miles of “Manila drilling cable” pulsing through the derricks. Even the people counting the money needed abacá to make their office supplies: they’re called “manila envelopes” for a reason.
- The U.S. government formally recognized Panama the next afternoon. It took longer than that for most on the isthmus to learn they were living in a new country.
- They called themselves Sandinistas, in honor of their anti-imperialist hero. The name was itself an act of rebellion, Baltodano told me, because the dictator had tried not only to bury Sandino’s body but “to make his story disappear as well.” The story of Sandino’s resistance had been rediscovered by Carlos Fonseca, a radical librarian who became a leader of the anti-Somoza uprising.
- the number ultimately needed for construction was equivalent to more than one-eighth the new republic’s entire population. That left the U.S. government to rely, as the French had, on workers from the Caribbean. Their stories are mostly absent from the better-funded museums, which focus on celebrating the technological feats and leaders involved. But in the humid basement of the Afro-Antillean Museum, at a table covered with a vinyl cloth, the librarian handed me a bound blue volume. The faded gold embossing on the cover read: Letters from Isthmian Canal Construction Workers.
- They tried to pressure the Canal Zone’s governor, Maj. Gen. Robert J. Fleming, U.S. Army, into rescinding the order. But Fleming had neither the power nor inclination to do so. He had come to resent the chauvinism of the Americans he oversaw. “They’ve been isolated so long they’ve developed a reactionary mentality,” Fleming told the Saturday Evening Post. “It’s the perfect place for the guy who’s 150 percent American and 50 percent whiskey.”
- The future president lied profligately about the history of the canal, claiming falsely that “our Navy did not intervene to bring about the secession of Panama,” that the Panamanians “knew what they were doing” when they let Bunau-Varilla give away their rights in the Zone, and implied that Americans—as opposed to Caribbean conscripts—had done the actual digging.47 (Conservative Republican Senate candidate S. I. Hayakawa said, more cheekily: “I think we should keep it. We stole it fair and square.”
- On the other side of the water stood the skyscrapers of the Panama City financial district. The banking system housed in those towers—the system first set up in Panama by financiers such as Ramón Arias and their American friends—ultimately eclipsed the value of the canal itself. The bankers who occupy those buildings have outdone Noriega, not to mention the gangs of El Chorrillo, in brazenness: much of an estimated $7.6 trillion in worldwide hidden offshore holdings—8 percent of the world’s wealth—flows across the isthmus under the cover of generous bank secrecy laws.
- In an attempt to build a stable coalition, the victorious Madero appointed some of Díaz’s technocrats to be his advisers and ordered his revolutionary army to lay down its arms. The commanders who had helped Madero oust Díaz in the name of land reform and redistribution felt betrayed. The most radical—Francisco “Pancho” Villa in the north and Emiliano Zapata in the south—declared the revolution would continue against him. But just as the rebels were preparing to move against Madero in February 1913, he was overthrown by someone else—the belligerent conservative Gen. Victoriano Huerta.
- But, as Huerta would not be the last to learn, the trouble with doing business with the United States was that, while Americans subverted democracy abroad, they still practiced a limited form of it at home.
- But concern had risen over the high numbers of opium addicts among the U.S. soldiers occupying the Philippines. Lawmakers were also looking for ways to criminalize new behaviors to feed an increasingly profitable system of underpaid prison labor, which had arisen in part to replace the free labor provided by enslaved African Americans. In that atmosphere, rumors spread freely that drugs such as cocaine would lead some, especially Black people in the South, to “disregard the barriers that society had established between different races,” as the Mexican historian Gabriela Recio has written.
- Butler would tell a radio audience around 1935. “But I feel it more to the point, in these times, to look for the oil deposits when you are trying to get at the bottom of deep international intrigue.”
- Throughout late 1914, the Navy Department drew up detailed plans for an invasion and occupation of Haiti, down to where to build the baseball fields that off-duty Marines would use and where to buy rum. Taking over foreign cities had become so old hat for the U.S. military that it was developing an actual template: some of the plans were simply repurposed from the recent invasion of Mexico, with instructions reading: “REWRITE LETTER INSERTING PORT AU PRINCE FOR VERA CRUZ, MEXICO WHEREVER IT APPEARS.”
- Butler’s insights became the key to securing America’s imperial foothold in Haiti. Though Butler did not realize it at the time, he was helping invent a new approach to warfare. It would eventually be dubbed counterinsurgency: the combination of military, political, and psychological methods employed by an occupying power with the goal of holistically defeating an armed resistance.
- Most of the carnival-goers were understandably not happy to see the invaders. Someone offered them food; another warned, too late, that the bread had been poisoned. Over the next few days, as Marines fell ill, the flying column temporarily decamped to the nearby plantation of the American-owned Central Ansonia Sugar Company. All recovered. But for the rest of the trip, Butler wrote, “my stomach was absolutely no use to me.”
- The border on Hispaniola is proof of the political philosopher Frantz Fanon’s dictum that “the colonial world is a compartmentalized world.”36 It was drawn at the behest of an imperial power, formalized in the interests of foreigners, and consecrated in blood by a dictator empowered and trained by the Marines. Those officials knew, as do their successors today, that for capital and elites to flow freely, subject peoples cannot. Fears of uncontrolled movement are why, a century after Butler complained about the lack of a clear border on Hispaniola, the U.S. government still helps fund, train, and equip border patrols across the world, from Jordan to Kenya to Peru.
- covering his tracks, Butler ensured there would be no accountability for the occupation’s actions from either the Haitian or American publics, and that the story would be pushed to the margin of both countries’ histories for generations to come. With the legislature now abolished, the U.S.-written constitution was placed before a popular plebiscite in the summer of 1918. Polling places were overseen by Butler’s rifle-toting Gendarmes, who were encouraged to actively campaign for the constitution’s passage.27 Less than 5 percent of Haiti’s population voted. It passed overwhelmingly. In addition to the key clause permitting foreigners to own land, the final draft vested the legislative powers of the dissolved parliament in a “Council of State” appointed by the puppet president. It also contained a special article declaring: “All the acts of the Government of the United States during its military occupation of Haiti are ratified and legal.”
- But in 1990, the first free election since the occupation was held. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, an anti-Duvalierist Catholic priest who promised land and economic redistribution, won—only to be overthrown by the army nine months later. Several of the putschists had been on the CIA’s payroll. At least two of the coup’s leaders were trained by the U.S. Army.
- Butler could not see the irony: that the imperialism he had helped foster was a direct catalyst of the World War.4 The conflict erupted in 1914 as a fight between empires: Germany and Austria-Hungary on one side; Britain, France, and Russia on the other. All had spent decades in a complex global struggle for colonies, resources, and prestige—a struggle that the Americans (and Butler personally) had been parties to. The older empires, especially the British, were filled with anxiety over new competitors to their global supremacy. The Germans, as the United States’ fellow latecomers to global expansion, were reading Alfred Thayer Mahan’s tracts on sea power and empire when they declared: “We demand a place for ourselves in the sun.”
- The brass was so pleased with Butler’s administrative skill that they awarded him both the Army and Navy Distinguished Service Medals—the former pinned on him personally by General Pershing.
- Philadelphia’s police department was founded in 1854, making it one of the oldest in the United States. Until then, the streets of William Penn’s city, like most in the North, had been patrolled by ad hoc committees of night watchmen and private guards, charged at first with keeping Native Americans from venturing into town. (In the South the first organized law enforcement patrols were built on similarly racist grounds: hunters tracking Black people trying to escape slavery.)
- As residents of MOVE’s new middle-class neighborhood accused the group of harassing and beating them, the mayor called the commune “terrorists” and promised to take action.43 A renewed standoff ensued. On the late afternoon of May 13, 1985, Police Lt. Frank Powell dropped a bomb of C-4 plastic explosive and Tovex out of a helicopter. It exploded on impact, igniting drums of gasoline the commune stored on the roof. Police commissioner Gregore J. Sambor—a former Army Reserve major who had risen to power under Rizzo—gave the order: “Let the bunker burn.” Veterans compared the inferno to scenes they had witnessed in Korea and Vietnam. By morning, two city blocks were destroyed. Six adults and five children were found charred to death in the wreckage of the home.
- Furious and betrayed, Sun wrote an open letter in which he asked the question that had reverberated through Havana and Manila decades before: “When we first started our revolution … the United States was our model and inspiration. Now we wonder … has the nation of Washington and Lincoln abandoned the ideal of liberty and regressed from a liberator to an oppressor?”
- As the months wore on, the U.S. envoy in Beijing, MacMurray, insisted the Marines be ready to fight their way in and evacuate his staff if the old imperial capital fell to the Nationalists. Butler publicly demurred. “I shall consider our expedition to have been entirely successful only if we finally withdraw from China without the spilling of any blood, either American or Chinese,” he told a New York Times correspondent. “This country belongs to the Chinese, and I tolerate no clashes between my men and the Chinese people. If a man so much as slaps a rickshaw coolie or lays a hand upon a servant, he gets a general court-martial.”
- The lack of action left his younger Marines confused. “We didn’t know what the mission was,” David M. Shoup, a future Marine commandant, later recalled thinking as a twenty-three-year-old lieutenant in China. “But we landed at the Standard Oil docks and lived in Standard Oil compounds and were ready to protect Standard Oil’s investment. I wondered at the time if our government would put all these Marines in a position of danger, where they might sacrifice their lives in defense of Standard Oil. Later I discovered that of course it would, and did.
- Why do we expend so much time and money preserving the memory of the short-duration wars in which European powers were involved; and so little, relatively speaking, remembering the kind of wars Butler fought—protracted, decades-long conflicts in the Americas, Asia, and Africa that have been the most common mode of warfare throughout U.S. history? And why does America celebrate its generals who oversaw death and destruction on a massive scale, while forgeting the exceptional few who spent their later years trying to stop them?
- The story he told was essentially a parable: the bankers and the industrialists were among the racketeers. The American people—the “lads in the trenches,” the loved ones worried sick at home—were the dupes and victims. The racket could only be smashed, Butler concluded, “by taking the profit out of war.”
- A year later, in 1941, Franklin Roosevelt imposed an oil embargo on the Japanese in retaliation for their invasion of the French colonies in Indochina. That gave Emperor Hirohito two choices: give up on his dreams of becoming the dominant empire in East Asia and the Pacific, or seize the oil reserves in the Dutch East Indies, risking war with the United States and Britain. His war cabinet decided to strike first, simultaneously bombing Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, Guam, Wake Island, and the British garrisons in Malaya, Hong Kong, and Singapore on December 7 and 8, 1941.
-
Gangsters of Capitalism
Author: Jonathan M. Katz
Completed: July 2025 (Full list of books)
Overview: The story of the pacifist Quaker who joined the Marines and rose to the rank of Major General only to become one a the loudest anti-war voices in the run up to World War 2 was long and winding. I remembered many of the entanglements the US was involved in at the turn of the twentieth century in Central America and Asia but was a bit surprised that one man happened to be in almost all of them. His insight from all those battles was that much of the US fighting was based on what was best for monied/corporate interests. A century later, despite so many protests against this fact, it seems little has changed as we invade Venezuela and Iran mainly for their oil.
Highlights:
- “Imperialism,” on the other hand, is a foreign-sounding word. It brings up images, if it brings any at all, of redcoats terrorizing Boston, or perhaps British officials in linen suits sipping gin and tonics in Bombay. The idea that the United States, a country founded in rebellion against empire, could have colonized and conquered other peoples seems anathema to everything we are taught America stands for.
- “Imperialism,” on the other hand, is a foreign-sounding word. It brings up images, if it brings any at all, of redcoats terrorizing Boston, or perhaps British officials in linen suits sipping gin and tonics in Bombay. The idea that the United States, a country founded in rebellion against empire, could have colonized and conquered other peoples seems anathema to everything we are taught America stands for.
- As a candidate and then as president, Donald Trump preyed on American anxieties by combining the worst excesses of those early-twentieth-century imperial chestnuts—militarism, white supremacy, and the cult of manhood—with a newer fantasy: that Americans could reclaim our sense of safety and supremacy by disengaging from the world we made; by literally building walls along our border and making the countries we conquered pay for them.
- In 1741, the British vice admiral Edward Vernon captured the bay and renamed it Cumberland Harbour. Vernon’s crew was full of sailors from Britain’s North American colonies who wrote home encouraging their friends and relatives to rush down to the bay—“now or never for a plantation on the island of Cuba.” Disease and local resistance ended the brief occupation. But one of Vernon’s crewmen, Lawrence Washington, was so inspired by the voyage that he named his new Virginia plantation after its commander. Washington died soon after; the plantation—Mount Vernon—ended up in the hands of his half brother George.
- American society was becoming particularly obsessed with manhood. The United States was transforming from a country of manual laborers into one where people rode machines to office jobs. Electricity and plumbing would soon mean less chopping and hauling at home. The Civil War generation was retiring, taking tales of courage and honor with them. Women were campaigning for, and in a few states had already won, the right to vote. As the historian Kristin L. Hoganson has argued, male leaders feared that all these trends portended national feminization and ruin. “War, they believed, would return the nation to a political order in which strong men governed and homebound women proved their patriotism by raising heroic sons.”
- Clouds of steam were evaporating off the lights. It was like the empire in which we’d trapped ourselves and millions of others in places like that a century before: Too dangerous to turn off. Too dangerous to keep on.
- Knowing Congress was unlikely to approve a third overseas war in two years, McKinley made a fateful decision: he became the first president in U.S. history to order the full-scale invasion of a sovereign country without seeking legislative approval.10 Congress did not challenge him.
- Before going to war, Butler had dreamed of getting shot—“not too seriously, but sufficient to leave a scar.”30 He hadn’t expected it to hurt this much.
- American soldiers chasing these guerrillas were pulled ever deeper into the hinterlands. Along the way, they picked up local words. Bundók—Tagalog for “mountain”—was given an American twang and made into slang for any wild and remote place. It was only by going to the “boondocks,” the soldiers learned, that you could get the measure of a country.2
- To finance the insurgency, the soldiers on Luzon seized the supply of the islands’ most valuable export: a strong, flexible fiber harvested from a cousin of the banana plant known as abacá. Americans called it “Manila hemp,” and before synthetics came along, it drove the global economy. Shipbuilders used its fibers to weave ropes and sails. Electric companies ran abacá belts through their city-powering generators. The oil boom minting millionaires in Texas and California depended on miles of “Manila drilling cable” pulsing through the derricks. Even the people counting the money needed abacá to make their office supplies: they’re called “manila envelopes” for a reason.
- The U.S. government formally recognized Panama the next afternoon. It took longer than that for most on the isthmus to learn they were living in a new country.
- They called themselves Sandinistas, in honor of their anti-imperialist hero. The name was itself an act of rebellion, Baltodano told me, because the dictator had tried not only to bury Sandino’s body but “to make his story disappear as well.” The story of Sandino’s resistance had been rediscovered by Carlos Fonseca, a radical librarian who became a leader of the anti-Somoza uprising.
- the number ultimately needed for construction was equivalent to more than one-eighth the new republic’s entire population. That left the U.S. government to rely, as the French had, on workers from the Caribbean. Their stories are mostly absent from the better-funded museums, which focus on celebrating the technological feats and leaders involved. But in the humid basement of the Afro-Antillean Museum, at a table covered with a vinyl cloth, the librarian handed me a bound blue volume. The faded gold embossing on the cover read: Letters from Isthmian Canal Construction Workers.
- They tried to pressure the Canal Zone’s governor, Maj. Gen. Robert J. Fleming, U.S. Army, into rescinding the order. But Fleming had neither the power nor inclination to do so. He had come to resent the chauvinism of the Americans he oversaw. “They’ve been isolated so long they’ve developed a reactionary mentality,” Fleming told the Saturday Evening Post. “It’s the perfect place for the guy who’s 150 percent American and 50 percent whiskey.”
- The future president lied profligately about the history of the canal, claiming falsely that “our Navy did not intervene to bring about the secession of Panama,” that the Panamanians “knew what they were doing” when they let Bunau-Varilla give away their rights in the Zone, and implied that Americans—as opposed to Caribbean conscripts—had done the actual digging.47 (Conservative Republican Senate candidate S. I. Hayakawa said, more cheekily: “I think we should keep it. We stole it fair and square.”
- On the other side of the water stood the skyscrapers of the Panama City financial district. The banking system housed in those towers—the system first set up in Panama by financiers such as Ramón Arias and their American friends—ultimately eclipsed the value of the canal itself. The bankers who occupy those buildings have outdone Noriega, not to mention the gangs of El Chorrillo, in brazenness: much of an estimated $7.6 trillion in worldwide hidden offshore holdings—8 percent of the world’s wealth—flows across the isthmus under the cover of generous bank secrecy laws.
- In an attempt to build a stable coalition, the victorious Madero appointed some of Díaz’s technocrats to be his advisers and ordered his revolutionary army to lay down its arms. The commanders who had helped Madero oust Díaz in the name of land reform and redistribution felt betrayed. The most radical—Francisco “Pancho” Villa in the north and Emiliano Zapata in the south—declared the revolution would continue against him. But just as the rebels were preparing to move against Madero in February 1913, he was overthrown by someone else—the belligerent conservative Gen. Victoriano Huerta.
- But, as Huerta would not be the last to learn, the trouble with doing business with the United States was that, while Americans subverted democracy abroad, they still practiced a limited form of it at home.
- But concern had risen over the high numbers of opium addicts among the U.S. soldiers occupying the Philippines. Lawmakers were also looking for ways to criminalize new behaviors to feed an increasingly profitable system of underpaid prison labor, which had arisen in part to replace the free labor provided by enslaved African Americans. In that atmosphere, rumors spread freely that drugs such as cocaine would lead some, especially Black people in the South, to “disregard the barriers that society had established between different races,” as the Mexican historian Gabriela Recio has written.
- Butler would tell a radio audience around 1935. “But I feel it more to the point, in these times, to look for the oil deposits when you are trying to get at the bottom of deep international intrigue.”
- Throughout late 1914, the Navy Department drew up detailed plans for an invasion and occupation of Haiti, down to where to build the baseball fields that off-duty Marines would use and where to buy rum. Taking over foreign cities had become so old hat for the U.S. military that it was developing an actual template: some of the plans were simply repurposed from the recent invasion of Mexico, with instructions reading: “REWRITE LETTER INSERTING PORT AU PRINCE FOR VERA CRUZ, MEXICO WHEREVER IT APPEARS.”
- Butler’s insights became the key to securing America’s imperial foothold in Haiti. Though Butler did not realize it at the time, he was helping invent a new approach to warfare. It would eventually be dubbed counterinsurgency: the combination of military, political, and psychological methods employed by an occupying power with the goal of holistically defeating an armed resistance.
- Most of the carnival-goers were understandably not happy to see the invaders. Someone offered them food; another warned, too late, that the bread had been poisoned. Over the next few days, as Marines fell ill, the flying column temporarily decamped to the nearby plantation of the American-owned Central Ansonia Sugar Company. All recovered. But for the rest of the trip, Butler wrote, “my stomach was absolutely no use to me.”
- The border on Hispaniola is proof of the political philosopher Frantz Fanon’s dictum that “the colonial world is a compartmentalized world.”36 It was drawn at the behest of an imperial power, formalized in the interests of foreigners, and consecrated in blood by a dictator empowered and trained by the Marines. Those officials knew, as do their successors today, that for capital and elites to flow freely, subject peoples cannot. Fears of uncontrolled movement are why, a century after Butler complained about the lack of a clear border on Hispaniola, the U.S. government still helps fund, train, and equip border patrols across the world, from Jordan to Kenya to Peru.
- covering his tracks, Butler ensured there would be no accountability for the occupation’s actions from either the Haitian or American publics, and that the story would be pushed to the margin of both countries’ histories for generations to come. With the legislature now abolished, the U.S.-written constitution was placed before a popular plebiscite in the summer of 1918. Polling places were overseen by Butler’s rifle-toting Gendarmes, who were encouraged to actively campaign for the constitution’s passage.27 Less than 5 percent of Haiti’s population voted. It passed overwhelmingly. In addition to the key clause permitting foreigners to own land, the final draft vested the legislative powers of the dissolved parliament in a “Council of State” appointed by the puppet president. It also contained a special article declaring: “All the acts of the Government of the United States during its military occupation of Haiti are ratified and legal.”
- But in 1990, the first free election since the occupation was held. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, an anti-Duvalierist Catholic priest who promised land and economic redistribution, won—only to be overthrown by the army nine months later. Several of the putschists had been on the CIA’s payroll. At least two of the coup’s leaders were trained by the U.S. Army.
- Butler could not see the irony: that the imperialism he had helped foster was a direct catalyst of the World War.4 The conflict erupted in 1914 as a fight between empires: Germany and Austria-Hungary on one side; Britain, France, and Russia on the other. All had spent decades in a complex global struggle for colonies, resources, and prestige—a struggle that the Americans (and Butler personally) had been parties to. The older empires, especially the British, were filled with anxiety over new competitors to their global supremacy. The Germans, as the United States’ fellow latecomers to global expansion, were reading Alfred Thayer Mahan’s tracts on sea power and empire when they declared: “We demand a place for ourselves in the sun.”
- The brass was so pleased with Butler’s administrative skill that they awarded him both the Army and Navy Distinguished Service Medals—the former pinned on him personally by General Pershing.
- Philadelphia’s police department was founded in 1854, making it one of the oldest in the United States. Until then, the streets of William Penn’s city, like most in the North, had been patrolled by ad hoc committees of night watchmen and private guards, charged at first with keeping Native Americans from venturing into town. (In the South the first organized law enforcement patrols were built on similarly racist grounds: hunters tracking Black people trying to escape slavery.)
- As residents of MOVE’s new middle-class neighborhood accused the group of harassing and beating them, the mayor called the commune “terrorists” and promised to take action.43 A renewed standoff ensued. On the late afternoon of May 13, 1985, Police Lt. Frank Powell dropped a bomb of C-4 plastic explosive and Tovex out of a helicopter. It exploded on impact, igniting drums of gasoline the commune stored on the roof. Police commissioner Gregore J. Sambor—a former Army Reserve major who had risen to power under Rizzo—gave the order: “Let the bunker burn.” Veterans compared the inferno to scenes they had witnessed in Korea and Vietnam. By morning, two city blocks were destroyed. Six adults and five children were found charred to death in the wreckage of the home.
- Furious and betrayed, Sun wrote an open letter in which he asked the question that had reverberated through Havana and Manila decades before: “When we first started our revolution … the United States was our model and inspiration. Now we wonder … has the nation of Washington and Lincoln abandoned the ideal of liberty and regressed from a liberator to an oppressor?”
- As the months wore on, the U.S. envoy in Beijing, MacMurray, insisted the Marines be ready to fight their way in and evacuate his staff if the old imperial capital fell to the Nationalists. Butler publicly demurred. “I shall consider our expedition to have been entirely successful only if we finally withdraw from China without the spilling of any blood, either American or Chinese,” he told a New York Times correspondent. “This country belongs to the Chinese, and I tolerate no clashes between my men and the Chinese people. If a man so much as slaps a rickshaw coolie or lays a hand upon a servant, he gets a general court-martial.”
- The lack of action left his younger Marines confused. “We didn’t know what the mission was,” David M. Shoup, a future Marine commandant, later recalled thinking as a twenty-three-year-old lieutenant in China. “But we landed at the Standard Oil docks and lived in Standard Oil compounds and were ready to protect Standard Oil’s investment. I wondered at the time if our government would put all these Marines in a position of danger, where they might sacrifice their lives in defense of Standard Oil. Later I discovered that of course it would, and did.
- Why do we expend so much time and money preserving the memory of the short-duration wars in which European powers were involved; and so little, relatively speaking, remembering the kind of wars Butler fought—protracted, decades-long conflicts in the Americas, Asia, and Africa that have been the most common mode of warfare throughout U.S. history? And why does America celebrate its generals who oversaw death and destruction on a massive scale, while forgeting the exceptional few who spent their later years trying to stop them?
- The story he told was essentially a parable: the bankers and the industrialists were among the racketeers. The American people—the “lads in the trenches,” the loved ones worried sick at home—were the dupes and victims. The racket could only be smashed, Butler concluded, “by taking the profit out of war.”
- A year later, in 1941, Franklin Roosevelt imposed an oil embargo on the Japanese in retaliation for their invasion of the French colonies in Indochina. That gave Emperor Hirohito two choices: give up on his dreams of becoming the dominant empire in East Asia and the Pacific, or seize the oil reserves in the Dutch East Indies, risking war with the United States and Britain. His war cabinet decided to strike first, simultaneously bombing Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, Guam, Wake Island, and the British garrisons in Malaya, Hong Kong, and Singapore on December 7 and 8, 1941.
-
Gangsters of Capitalism
Author: Jonathan M. Katz
Completed: July 2025 (Full list of books)
Overview: The story of the pacifist Quaker who joined the Marines and rose to the rank of Major General only to become one a the loudest anti-war voices in the run up to World War 2 was long and winding. I remembered many of the entanglements the US was involved in at the turn of the twentieth century in Central America and Asia but was a bit surprised that one man happened to be in almost all of them. His insight from all those battles was that much of the US fighting was based on what was best for monied/corporate interests. A century later, despite so many protests against this fact, it seems little has changed as we invade Venezuela and Iran mainly for their oil.
Highlights:
- “Imperialism,” on the other hand, is a foreign-sounding word. It brings up images, if it brings any at all, of redcoats terrorizing Boston, or perhaps British officials in linen suits sipping gin and tonics in Bombay. The idea that the United States, a country founded in rebellion against empire, could have colonized and conquered other peoples seems anathema to everything we are taught America stands for.
- “Imperialism,” on the other hand, is a foreign-sounding word. It brings up images, if it brings any at all, of redcoats terrorizing Boston, or perhaps British officials in linen suits sipping gin and tonics in Bombay. The idea that the United States, a country founded in rebellion against empire, could have colonized and conquered other peoples seems anathema to everything we are taught America stands for.
- As a candidate and then as president, Donald Trump preyed on American anxieties by combining the worst excesses of those early-twentieth-century imperial chestnuts—militarism, white supremacy, and the cult of manhood—with a newer fantasy: that Americans could reclaim our sense of safety and supremacy by disengaging from the world we made; by literally building walls along our border and making the countries we conquered pay for them.
- In 1741, the British vice admiral Edward Vernon captured the bay and renamed it Cumberland Harbour. Vernon’s crew was full of sailors from Britain’s North American colonies who wrote home encouraging their friends and relatives to rush down to the bay—“now or never for a plantation on the island of Cuba.” Disease and local resistance ended the brief occupation. But one of Vernon’s crewmen, Lawrence Washington, was so inspired by the voyage that he named his new Virginia plantation after its commander. Washington died soon after; the plantation—Mount Vernon—ended up in the hands of his half brother George.
- American society was becoming particularly obsessed with manhood. The United States was transforming from a country of manual laborers into one where people rode machines to office jobs. Electricity and plumbing would soon mean less chopping and hauling at home. The Civil War generation was retiring, taking tales of courage and honor with them. Women were campaigning for, and in a few states had already won, the right to vote. As the historian Kristin L. Hoganson has argued, male leaders feared that all these trends portended national feminization and ruin. “War, they believed, would return the nation to a political order in which strong men governed and homebound women proved their patriotism by raising heroic sons.”
- Clouds of steam were evaporating off the lights. It was like the empire in which we’d trapped ourselves and millions of others in places like that a century before: Too dangerous to turn off. Too dangerous to keep on.
- Knowing Congress was unlikely to approve a third overseas war in two years, McKinley made a fateful decision: he became the first president in U.S. history to order the full-scale invasion of a sovereign country without seeking legislative approval.10 Congress did not challenge him.
- Before going to war, Butler had dreamed of getting shot—“not too seriously, but sufficient to leave a scar.”30 He hadn’t expected it to hurt this much.
- American soldiers chasing these guerrillas were pulled ever deeper into the hinterlands. Along the way, they picked up local words. Bundók—Tagalog for “mountain”—was given an American twang and made into slang for any wild and remote place. It was only by going to the “boondocks,” the soldiers learned, that you could get the measure of a country.2
- To finance the insurgency, the soldiers on Luzon seized the supply of the islands’ most valuable export: a strong, flexible fiber harvested from a cousin of the banana plant known as abacá. Americans called it “Manila hemp,” and before synthetics came along, it drove the global economy. Shipbuilders used its fibers to weave ropes and sails. Electric companies ran abacá belts through their city-powering generators. The oil boom minting millionaires in Texas and California depended on miles of “Manila drilling cable” pulsing through the derricks. Even the people counting the money needed abacá to make their office supplies: they’re called “manila envelopes” for a reason.
- The U.S. government formally recognized Panama the next afternoon. It took longer than that for most on the isthmus to learn they were living in a new country.
- They called themselves Sandinistas, in honor of their anti-imperialist hero. The name was itself an act of rebellion, Baltodano told me, because the dictator had tried not only to bury Sandino’s body but “to make his story disappear as well.” The story of Sandino’s resistance had been rediscovered by Carlos Fonseca, a radical librarian who became a leader of the anti-Somoza uprising.
- the number ultimately needed for construction was equivalent to more than one-eighth the new republic’s entire population. That left the U.S. government to rely, as the French had, on workers from the Caribbean. Their stories are mostly absent from the better-funded museums, which focus on celebrating the technological feats and leaders involved. But in the humid basement of the Afro-Antillean Museum, at a table covered with a vinyl cloth, the librarian handed me a bound blue volume. The faded gold embossing on the cover read: Letters from Isthmian Canal Construction Workers.
- They tried to pressure the Canal Zone’s governor, Maj. Gen. Robert J. Fleming, U.S. Army, into rescinding the order. But Fleming had neither the power nor inclination to do so. He had come to resent the chauvinism of the Americans he oversaw. “They’ve been isolated so long they’ve developed a reactionary mentality,” Fleming told the Saturday Evening Post. “It’s the perfect place for the guy who’s 150 percent American and 50 percent whiskey.”
- The future president lied profligately about the history of the canal, claiming falsely that “our Navy did not intervene to bring about the secession of Panama,” that the Panamanians “knew what they were doing” when they let Bunau-Varilla give away their rights in the Zone, and implied that Americans—as opposed to Caribbean conscripts—had done the actual digging.47 (Conservative Republican Senate candidate S. I. Hayakawa said, more cheekily: “I think we should keep it. We stole it fair and square.”
- On the other side of the water stood the skyscrapers of the Panama City financial district. The banking system housed in those towers—the system first set up in Panama by financiers such as Ramón Arias and their American friends—ultimately eclipsed the value of the canal itself. The bankers who occupy those buildings have outdone Noriega, not to mention the gangs of El Chorrillo, in brazenness: much of an estimated $7.6 trillion in worldwide hidden offshore holdings—8 percent of the world’s wealth—flows across the isthmus under the cover of generous bank secrecy laws.
- In an attempt to build a stable coalition, the victorious Madero appointed some of Díaz’s technocrats to be his advisers and ordered his revolutionary army to lay down its arms. The commanders who had helped Madero oust Díaz in the name of land reform and redistribution felt betrayed. The most radical—Francisco “Pancho” Villa in the north and Emiliano Zapata in the south—declared the revolution would continue against him. But just as the rebels were preparing to move against Madero in February 1913, he was overthrown by someone else—the belligerent conservative Gen. Victoriano Huerta.
- But, as Huerta would not be the last to learn, the trouble with doing business with the United States was that, while Americans subverted democracy abroad, they still practiced a limited form of it at home.
- But concern had risen over the high numbers of opium addicts among the U.S. soldiers occupying the Philippines. Lawmakers were also looking for ways to criminalize new behaviors to feed an increasingly profitable system of underpaid prison labor, which had arisen in part to replace the free labor provided by enslaved African Americans. In that atmosphere, rumors spread freely that drugs such as cocaine would lead some, especially Black people in the South, to “disregard the barriers that society had established between different races,” as the Mexican historian Gabriela Recio has written.
- Butler would tell a radio audience around 1935. “But I feel it more to the point, in these times, to look for the oil deposits when you are trying to get at the bottom of deep international intrigue.”
- Throughout late 1914, the Navy Department drew up detailed plans for an invasion and occupation of Haiti, down to where to build the baseball fields that off-duty Marines would use and where to buy rum. Taking over foreign cities had become so old hat for the U.S. military that it was developing an actual template: some of the plans were simply repurposed from the recent invasion of Mexico, with instructions reading: “REWRITE LETTER INSERTING PORT AU PRINCE FOR VERA CRUZ, MEXICO WHEREVER IT APPEARS.”
- Butler’s insights became the key to securing America’s imperial foothold in Haiti. Though Butler did not realize it at the time, he was helping invent a new approach to warfare. It would eventually be dubbed counterinsurgency: the combination of military, political, and psychological methods employed by an occupying power with the goal of holistically defeating an armed resistance.
- Most of the carnival-goers were understandably not happy to see the invaders. Someone offered them food; another warned, too late, that the bread had been poisoned. Over the next few days, as Marines fell ill, the flying column temporarily decamped to the nearby plantation of the American-owned Central Ansonia Sugar Company. All recovered. But for the rest of the trip, Butler wrote, “my stomach was absolutely no use to me.”
- The border on Hispaniola is proof of the political philosopher Frantz Fanon’s dictum that “the colonial world is a compartmentalized world.”36 It was drawn at the behest of an imperial power, formalized in the interests of foreigners, and consecrated in blood by a dictator empowered and trained by the Marines. Those officials knew, as do their successors today, that for capital and elites to flow freely, subject peoples cannot. Fears of uncontrolled movement are why, a century after Butler complained about the lack of a clear border on Hispaniola, the U.S. government still helps fund, train, and equip border patrols across the world, from Jordan to Kenya to Peru.
- covering his tracks, Butler ensured there would be no accountability for the occupation’s actions from either the Haitian or American publics, and that the story would be pushed to the margin of both countries’ histories for generations to come. With the legislature now abolished, the U.S.-written constitution was placed before a popular plebiscite in the summer of 1918. Polling places were overseen by Butler’s rifle-toting Gendarmes, who were encouraged to actively campaign for the constitution’s passage.27 Less than 5 percent of Haiti’s population voted. It passed overwhelmingly. In addition to the key clause permitting foreigners to own land, the final draft vested the legislative powers of the dissolved parliament in a “Council of State” appointed by the puppet president. It also contained a special article declaring: “All the acts of the Government of the United States during its military occupation of Haiti are ratified and legal.”
- But in 1990, the first free election since the occupation was held. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, an anti-Duvalierist Catholic priest who promised land and economic redistribution, won—only to be overthrown by the army nine months later. Several of the putschists had been on the CIA’s payroll. At least two of the coup’s leaders were trained by the U.S. Army.
- Butler could not see the irony: that the imperialism he had helped foster was a direct catalyst of the World War.4 The conflict erupted in 1914 as a fight between empires: Germany and Austria-Hungary on one side; Britain, France, and Russia on the other. All had spent decades in a complex global struggle for colonies, resources, and prestige—a struggle that the Americans (and Butler personally) had been parties to. The older empires, especially the British, were filled with anxiety over new competitors to their global supremacy. The Germans, as the United States’ fellow latecomers to global expansion, were reading Alfred Thayer Mahan’s tracts on sea power and empire when they declared: “We demand a place for ourselves in the sun.”
- The brass was so pleased with Butler’s administrative skill that they awarded him both the Army and Navy Distinguished Service Medals—the former pinned on him personally by General Pershing.
- Philadelphia’s police department was founded in 1854, making it one of the oldest in the United States. Until then, the streets of William Penn’s city, like most in the North, had been patrolled by ad hoc committees of night watchmen and private guards, charged at first with keeping Native Americans from venturing into town. (In the South the first organized law enforcement patrols were built on similarly racist grounds: hunters tracking Black people trying to escape slavery.)
- As residents of MOVE’s new middle-class neighborhood accused the group of harassing and beating them, the mayor called the commune “terrorists” and promised to take action.43 A renewed standoff ensued. On the late afternoon of May 13, 1985, Police Lt. Frank Powell dropped a bomb of C-4 plastic explosive and Tovex out of a helicopter. It exploded on impact, igniting drums of gasoline the commune stored on the roof. Police commissioner Gregore J. Sambor—a former Army Reserve major who had risen to power under Rizzo—gave the order: “Let the bunker burn.” Veterans compared the inferno to scenes they had witnessed in Korea and Vietnam. By morning, two city blocks were destroyed. Six adults and five children were found charred to death in the wreckage of the home.
- Furious and betrayed, Sun wrote an open letter in which he asked the question that had reverberated through Havana and Manila decades before: “When we first started our revolution … the United States was our model and inspiration. Now we wonder … has the nation of Washington and Lincoln abandoned the ideal of liberty and regressed from a liberator to an oppressor?”
- As the months wore on, the U.S. envoy in Beijing, MacMurray, insisted the Marines be ready to fight their way in and evacuate his staff if the old imperial capital fell to the Nationalists. Butler publicly demurred. “I shall consider our expedition to have been entirely successful only if we finally withdraw from China without the spilling of any blood, either American or Chinese,” he told a New York Times correspondent. “This country belongs to the Chinese, and I tolerate no clashes between my men and the Chinese people. If a man so much as slaps a rickshaw coolie or lays a hand upon a servant, he gets a general court-martial.”
- The lack of action left his younger Marines confused. “We didn’t know what the mission was,” David M. Shoup, a future Marine commandant, later recalled thinking as a twenty-three-year-old lieutenant in China. “But we landed at the Standard Oil docks and lived in Standard Oil compounds and were ready to protect Standard Oil’s investment. I wondered at the time if our government would put all these Marines in a position of danger, where they might sacrifice their lives in defense of Standard Oil. Later I discovered that of course it would, and did.
- Why do we expend so much time and money preserving the memory of the short-duration wars in which European powers were involved; and so little, relatively speaking, remembering the kind of wars Butler fought—protracted, decades-long conflicts in the Americas, Asia, and Africa that have been the most common mode of warfare throughout U.S. history? And why does America celebrate its generals who oversaw death and destruction on a massive scale, while forgeting the exceptional few who spent their later years trying to stop them?
- The story he told was essentially a parable: the bankers and the industrialists were among the racketeers. The American people—the “lads in the trenches,” the loved ones worried sick at home—were the dupes and victims. The racket could only be smashed, Butler concluded, “by taking the profit out of war.”
- A year later, in 1941, Franklin Roosevelt imposed an oil embargo on the Japanese in retaliation for their invasion of the French colonies in Indochina. That gave Emperor Hirohito two choices: give up on his dreams of becoming the dominant empire in East Asia and the Pacific, or seize the oil reserves in the Dutch East Indies, risking war with the United States and Britain. His war cabinet decided to strike first, simultaneously bombing Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, Guam, Wake Island, and the British garrisons in Malaya, Hong Kong, and Singapore on December 7 and 8, 1941.
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Gangsters of Capitalism
Author: Jonathan M. Katz
Completed: July 2025 (Full list of books)
Overview: The story of the pacifist Quaker who joined the Marines and rose to the rank of Major General only to become one a the loudest anti-war voices in the run up to World War 2 was long and winding. I remembered many of the entanglements the US was involved in at the turn of the twentieth century in Central America and Asia but was a bit surprised that one man happened to be in almost all of them. His insight from all those battles was that much of the US fighting was based on what was best for monied/corporate interests. A century later, despite so many protests against this fact, it seems little has changed as we invade Venezuela and Iran mainly for their oil.
Highlights:
- “Imperialism,” on the other hand, is a foreign-sounding word. It brings up images, if it brings any at all, of redcoats terrorizing Boston, or perhaps British officials in linen suits sipping gin and tonics in Bombay. The idea that the United States, a country founded in rebellion against empire, could have colonized and conquered other peoples seems anathema to everything we are taught America stands for.
- “Imperialism,” on the other hand, is a foreign-sounding word. It brings up images, if it brings any at all, of redcoats terrorizing Boston, or perhaps British officials in linen suits sipping gin and tonics in Bombay. The idea that the United States, a country founded in rebellion against empire, could have colonized and conquered other peoples seems anathema to everything we are taught America stands for.
- As a candidate and then as president, Donald Trump preyed on American anxieties by combining the worst excesses of those early-twentieth-century imperial chestnuts—militarism, white supremacy, and the cult of manhood—with a newer fantasy: that Americans could reclaim our sense of safety and supremacy by disengaging from the world we made; by literally building walls along our border and making the countries we conquered pay for them.
- In 1741, the British vice admiral Edward Vernon captured the bay and renamed it Cumberland Harbour. Vernon’s crew was full of sailors from Britain’s North American colonies who wrote home encouraging their friends and relatives to rush down to the bay—“now or never for a plantation on the island of Cuba.” Disease and local resistance ended the brief occupation. But one of Vernon’s crewmen, Lawrence Washington, was so inspired by the voyage that he named his new Virginia plantation after its commander. Washington died soon after; the plantation—Mount Vernon—ended up in the hands of his half brother George.
- American society was becoming particularly obsessed with manhood. The United States was transforming from a country of manual laborers into one where people rode machines to office jobs. Electricity and plumbing would soon mean less chopping and hauling at home. The Civil War generation was retiring, taking tales of courage and honor with them. Women were campaigning for, and in a few states had already won, the right to vote. As the historian Kristin L. Hoganson has argued, male leaders feared that all these trends portended national feminization and ruin. “War, they believed, would return the nation to a political order in which strong men governed and homebound women proved their patriotism by raising heroic sons.”
- Clouds of steam were evaporating off the lights. It was like the empire in which we’d trapped ourselves and millions of others in places like that a century before: Too dangerous to turn off. Too dangerous to keep on.
- Knowing Congress was unlikely to approve a third overseas war in two years, McKinley made a fateful decision: he became the first president in U.S. history to order the full-scale invasion of a sovereign country without seeking legislative approval.10 Congress did not challenge him.
- Before going to war, Butler had dreamed of getting shot—“not too seriously, but sufficient to leave a scar.”30 He hadn’t expected it to hurt this much.
- American soldiers chasing these guerrillas were pulled ever deeper into the hinterlands. Along the way, they picked up local words. Bundók—Tagalog for “mountain”—was given an American twang and made into slang for any wild and remote place. It was only by going to the “boondocks,” the soldiers learned, that you could get the measure of a country.2
- To finance the insurgency, the soldiers on Luzon seized the supply of the islands’ most valuable export: a strong, flexible fiber harvested from a cousin of the banana plant known as abacá. Americans called it “Manila hemp,” and before synthetics came along, it drove the global economy. Shipbuilders used its fibers to weave ropes and sails. Electric companies ran abacá belts through their city-powering generators. The oil boom minting millionaires in Texas and California depended on miles of “Manila drilling cable” pulsing through the derricks. Even the people counting the money needed abacá to make their office supplies: they’re called “manila envelopes” for a reason.
- The U.S. government formally recognized Panama the next afternoon. It took longer than that for most on the isthmus to learn they were living in a new country.
- They called themselves Sandinistas, in honor of their anti-imperialist hero. The name was itself an act of rebellion, Baltodano told me, because the dictator had tried not only to bury Sandino’s body but “to make his story disappear as well.” The story of Sandino’s resistance had been rediscovered by Carlos Fonseca, a radical librarian who became a leader of the anti-Somoza uprising.
- the number ultimately needed for construction was equivalent to more than one-eighth the new republic’s entire population. That left the U.S. government to rely, as the French had, on workers from the Caribbean. Their stories are mostly absent from the better-funded museums, which focus on celebrating the technological feats and leaders involved. But in the humid basement of the Afro-Antillean Museum, at a table covered with a vinyl cloth, the librarian handed me a bound blue volume. The faded gold embossing on the cover read: Letters from Isthmian Canal Construction Workers.
- They tried to pressure the Canal Zone’s governor, Maj. Gen. Robert J. Fleming, U.S. Army, into rescinding the order. But Fleming had neither the power nor inclination to do so. He had come to resent the chauvinism of the Americans he oversaw. “They’ve been isolated so long they’ve developed a reactionary mentality,” Fleming told the Saturday Evening Post. “It’s the perfect place for the guy who’s 150 percent American and 50 percent whiskey.”
- The future president lied profligately about the history of the canal, claiming falsely that “our Navy did not intervene to bring about the secession of Panama,” that the Panamanians “knew what they were doing” when they let Bunau-Varilla give away their rights in the Zone, and implied that Americans—as opposed to Caribbean conscripts—had done the actual digging.47 (Conservative Republican Senate candidate S. I. Hayakawa said, more cheekily: “I think we should keep it. We stole it fair and square.”
- On the other side of the water stood the skyscrapers of the Panama City financial district. The banking system housed in those towers—the system first set up in Panama by financiers such as Ramón Arias and their American friends—ultimately eclipsed the value of the canal itself. The bankers who occupy those buildings have outdone Noriega, not to mention the gangs of El Chorrillo, in brazenness: much of an estimated $7.6 trillion in worldwide hidden offshore holdings—8 percent of the world’s wealth—flows across the isthmus under the cover of generous bank secrecy laws.
- In an attempt to build a stable coalition, the victorious Madero appointed some of Díaz’s technocrats to be his advisers and ordered his revolutionary army to lay down its arms. The commanders who had helped Madero oust Díaz in the name of land reform and redistribution felt betrayed. The most radical—Francisco “Pancho” Villa in the north and Emiliano Zapata in the south—declared the revolution would continue against him. But just as the rebels were preparing to move against Madero in February 1913, he was overthrown by someone else—the belligerent conservative Gen. Victoriano Huerta.
- But, as Huerta would not be the last to learn, the trouble with doing business with the United States was that, while Americans subverted democracy abroad, they still practiced a limited form of it at home.
- But concern had risen over the high numbers of opium addicts among the U.S. soldiers occupying the Philippines. Lawmakers were also looking for ways to criminalize new behaviors to feed an increasingly profitable system of underpaid prison labor, which had arisen in part to replace the free labor provided by enslaved African Americans. In that atmosphere, rumors spread freely that drugs such as cocaine would lead some, especially Black people in the South, to “disregard the barriers that society had established between different races,” as the Mexican historian Gabriela Recio has written.
- Butler would tell a radio audience around 1935. “But I feel it more to the point, in these times, to look for the oil deposits when you are trying to get at the bottom of deep international intrigue.”
- Throughout late 1914, the Navy Department drew up detailed plans for an invasion and occupation of Haiti, down to where to build the baseball fields that off-duty Marines would use and where to buy rum. Taking over foreign cities had become so old hat for the U.S. military that it was developing an actual template: some of the plans were simply repurposed from the recent invasion of Mexico, with instructions reading: “REWRITE LETTER INSERTING PORT AU PRINCE FOR VERA CRUZ, MEXICO WHEREVER IT APPEARS.”
- Butler’s insights became the key to securing America’s imperial foothold in Haiti. Though Butler did not realize it at the time, he was helping invent a new approach to warfare. It would eventually be dubbed counterinsurgency: the combination of military, political, and psychological methods employed by an occupying power with the goal of holistically defeating an armed resistance.
- Most of the carnival-goers were understandably not happy to see the invaders. Someone offered them food; another warned, too late, that the bread had been poisoned. Over the next few days, as Marines fell ill, the flying column temporarily decamped to the nearby plantation of the American-owned Central Ansonia Sugar Company. All recovered. But for the rest of the trip, Butler wrote, “my stomach was absolutely no use to me.”
- The border on Hispaniola is proof of the political philosopher Frantz Fanon’s dictum that “the colonial world is a compartmentalized world.”36 It was drawn at the behest of an imperial power, formalized in the interests of foreigners, and consecrated in blood by a dictator empowered and trained by the Marines. Those officials knew, as do their successors today, that for capital and elites to flow freely, subject peoples cannot. Fears of uncontrolled movement are why, a century after Butler complained about the lack of a clear border on Hispaniola, the U.S. government still helps fund, train, and equip border patrols across the world, from Jordan to Kenya to Peru.
- covering his tracks, Butler ensured there would be no accountability for the occupation’s actions from either the Haitian or American publics, and that the story would be pushed to the margin of both countries’ histories for generations to come. With the legislature now abolished, the U.S.-written constitution was placed before a popular plebiscite in the summer of 1918. Polling places were overseen by Butler’s rifle-toting Gendarmes, who were encouraged to actively campaign for the constitution’s passage.27 Less than 5 percent of Haiti’s population voted. It passed overwhelmingly. In addition to the key clause permitting foreigners to own land, the final draft vested the legislative powers of the dissolved parliament in a “Council of State” appointed by the puppet president. It also contained a special article declaring: “All the acts of the Government of the United States during its military occupation of Haiti are ratified and legal.”
- But in 1990, the first free election since the occupation was held. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, an anti-Duvalierist Catholic priest who promised land and economic redistribution, won—only to be overthrown by the army nine months later. Several of the putschists had been on the CIA’s payroll. At least two of the coup’s leaders were trained by the U.S. Army.
- Butler could not see the irony: that the imperialism he had helped foster was a direct catalyst of the World War.4 The conflict erupted in 1914 as a fight between empires: Germany and Austria-Hungary on one side; Britain, France, and Russia on the other. All had spent decades in a complex global struggle for colonies, resources, and prestige—a struggle that the Americans (and Butler personally) had been parties to. The older empires, especially the British, were filled with anxiety over new competitors to their global supremacy. The Germans, as the United States’ fellow latecomers to global expansion, were reading Alfred Thayer Mahan’s tracts on sea power and empire when they declared: “We demand a place for ourselves in the sun.”
- The brass was so pleased with Butler’s administrative skill that they awarded him both the Army and Navy Distinguished Service Medals—the former pinned on him personally by General Pershing.
- Philadelphia’s police department was founded in 1854, making it one of the oldest in the United States. Until then, the streets of William Penn’s city, like most in the North, had been patrolled by ad hoc committees of night watchmen and private guards, charged at first with keeping Native Americans from venturing into town. (In the South the first organized law enforcement patrols were built on similarly racist grounds: hunters tracking Black people trying to escape slavery.)
- As residents of MOVE’s new middle-class neighborhood accused the group of harassing and beating them, the mayor called the commune “terrorists” and promised to take action.43 A renewed standoff ensued. On the late afternoon of May 13, 1985, Police Lt. Frank Powell dropped a bomb of C-4 plastic explosive and Tovex out of a helicopter. It exploded on impact, igniting drums of gasoline the commune stored on the roof. Police commissioner Gregore J. Sambor—a former Army Reserve major who had risen to power under Rizzo—gave the order: “Let the bunker burn.” Veterans compared the inferno to scenes they had witnessed in Korea and Vietnam. By morning, two city blocks were destroyed. Six adults and five children were found charred to death in the wreckage of the home.
- Furious and betrayed, Sun wrote an open letter in which he asked the question that had reverberated through Havana and Manila decades before: “When we first started our revolution … the United States was our model and inspiration. Now we wonder … has the nation of Washington and Lincoln abandoned the ideal of liberty and regressed from a liberator to an oppressor?”
- As the months wore on, the U.S. envoy in Beijing, MacMurray, insisted the Marines be ready to fight their way in and evacuate his staff if the old imperial capital fell to the Nationalists. Butler publicly demurred. “I shall consider our expedition to have been entirely successful only if we finally withdraw from China without the spilling of any blood, either American or Chinese,” he told a New York Times correspondent. “This country belongs to the Chinese, and I tolerate no clashes between my men and the Chinese people. If a man so much as slaps a rickshaw coolie or lays a hand upon a servant, he gets a general court-martial.”
- The lack of action left his younger Marines confused. “We didn’t know what the mission was,” David M. Shoup, a future Marine commandant, later recalled thinking as a twenty-three-year-old lieutenant in China. “But we landed at the Standard Oil docks and lived in Standard Oil compounds and were ready to protect Standard Oil’s investment. I wondered at the time if our government would put all these Marines in a position of danger, where they might sacrifice their lives in defense of Standard Oil. Later I discovered that of course it would, and did.
- Why do we expend so much time and money preserving the memory of the short-duration wars in which European powers were involved; and so little, relatively speaking, remembering the kind of wars Butler fought—protracted, decades-long conflicts in the Americas, Asia, and Africa that have been the most common mode of warfare throughout U.S. history? And why does America celebrate its generals who oversaw death and destruction on a massive scale, while forgeting the exceptional few who spent their later years trying to stop them?
- The story he told was essentially a parable: the bankers and the industrialists were among the racketeers. The American people—the “lads in the trenches,” the loved ones worried sick at home—were the dupes and victims. The racket could only be smashed, Butler concluded, “by taking the profit out of war.”
- A year later, in 1941, Franklin Roosevelt imposed an oil embargo on the Japanese in retaliation for their invasion of the French colonies in Indochina. That gave Emperor Hirohito two choices: give up on his dreams of becoming the dominant empire in East Asia and the Pacific, or seize the oil reserves in the Dutch East Indies, risking war with the United States and Britain. His war cabinet decided to strike first, simultaneously bombing Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, Guam, Wake Island, and the British garrisons in Malaya, Hong Kong, and Singapore on December 7 and 8, 1941.
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El opaco rastro de las renuncias a fondos europeos: 1.400 millones devueltos por entidades públicas y empresas entre el tapón burocrático y el silencio de varios Ministerios
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El opaco rastro de las renuncias a fondos europeos: 1.400 millones devueltos por entidades públicas y empresas entre el tapón burocrático y el silencio de varios Ministerios
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El opaco rastro de las renuncias a fondos europeos: 1.400 millones devueltos por entidades públicas y empresas entre el tapón burocrático y el silencio de varios Ministerios
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El opaco rastro de las renuncias a fondos europeos: 1.400 millones devueltos por entidades públicas y empresas entre el tapón burocrático y el silencio de varios Ministerios
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El opaco rastro de las renuncias a fondos europeos: 1.400 millones devueltos por entidades públicas y empresas entre el tapón burocrático y el silencio de varios Ministerios
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The Midwich Cuckoos review: a supernatural horror series
The Midwich Cuckoos tells a familiar supernatural horror story as a 7 episode series. Keeley Hawes and Max Beesley lead a cast filled to the brim with spooky children. […]https://oldaintdead.com/the-midwich-cuckoos-review-a-supernatural-horror-series/