#politicalphilosophy — Public Fediverse posts

Gangsters of Capitalism

Title: Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire

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

Title: Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire

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

Title: Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire

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

Title: Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire

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

Title: Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire

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.

Quand la guerre fragilise l’État : bureaucratie, militarisation et fragmentation dans la Chine des Cinq Dynasties

Une étude récente (Li Li, 2024) nuance fortement la thèse classique selon laquelle la guerre fabrique automatiquement des États plus forts : dans la Chine des Cinq Dynasties et Dix Royaumes, elle a souvent nourri la fragmentation plutôt que la centralisation. #war #state #China #centralization #fragmentation #history #politicalPhilosophy L’étude examine le…

https://homohortus31.wordpress.com/2026/05/14/quand-la-guerre-fragilise-letat-bureaucratie-militarisation-et-fragmentation-dans-la-chine-des-cinq-dynasties/

Quand la guerre fragilise l’État : bureaucratie, militarisation et fragmentation dans la Chine des Cinq Dynasties

Une étude récente (Li Li, 2024) nuance fortement la thèse classique selon laquelle la guerre fabrique automatiquement des États plus forts : dans la Chine des Cinq Dynasties et Dix Royaumes, elle a souvent nourri la fragmentation plutôt que la centralisation. #war #state #China #centralization #fragmentation #history #politicalPhilosophy L’étude examine le…

https://homohortus31.wordpress.com/2026/05/14/quand-la-guerre-fragilise-letat-bureaucratie-militarisation-et-fragmentation-dans-la-chine-des-cinq-dynasties/

Quand la guerre fragilise l’État : bureaucratie, militarisation et fragmentation dans la Chine des Cinq Dynasties

Une étude récente (Li Li, 2024) nuance fortement la thèse classique selon laquelle la guerre fabrique automatiquement des États plus forts : dans la Chine des Cinq Dynasties et Dix Royaumes, elle a souvent nourri la fragmentation plutôt que la centralisation. #war #state #China #centralization #fragmentation #history #politicalPhilosophy L’étude examine le…

https://homohortus31.wordpress.com/2026/05/14/quand-la-guerre-fragilise-letat-bureaucratie-militarisation-et-fragmentation-dans-la-chine-des-cinq-dynasties/

Quand la guerre fragilise l’État : bureaucratie, militarisation et fragmentation dans la Chine des Cinq Dynasties

Une étude récente (Li Li, 2024) nuance fortement la thèse classique selon laquelle la guerre fabrique automatiquement des États plus forts : dans la Chine des Cinq Dynasties et Dix Royaumes, elle a souvent nourri la fragmentation plutôt que la centralisation. #war #state #China #centralization #fragmentation #history #politicalPhilosophy L’étude examine le…

https://homohortus31.wordpress.com/2026/05/14/quand-la-guerre-fragilise-letat-bureaucratie-militarisation-et-fragmentation-dans-la-chine-des-cinq-dynasties/

Quand la guerre fragilise l’État : bureaucratie, militarisation et fragmentation dans la Chine des Cinq Dynasties

Une étude récente (Li Li, 2024) nuance fortement la thèse classique selon laquelle la guerre fabrique automatiquement des États plus forts : dans la Chine des Cinq Dynasties et Dix Royaumes, elle a souvent nourri la fragmentation plutôt que la centralisation. #war #state #China #centralization #fragmentation #history #politicalPhilosophy L’étude examine le…

https://homohortus31.wordpress.com/2026/05/14/quand-la-guerre-fragilise-letat-bureaucratie-militarisation-et-fragmentation-dans-la-chine-des-cinq-dynasties/

War, space and state formation : Turchin (2013) et la géographie du conflit

Selon Turchin, les grands États du Vieux Monde n’émergent pas seulement par croissance interne, mais sous la pression de la guerre, de la géographie et de la concurrence entre sociétés. #war #competition #state #history #politicalPhilosophy Dans War, space, and the evolution of Old World complex societies, Peter Turchin propose une idée forte : les sociétés les plus vastes et les plus complexes…

https://homohortus31.wordpress.com/2026/05/12/war-space-and-state-formation-turchin-2013-et-la-geographie-du-conflit/

War, space and state formation : Turchin (2013) et la géographie du conflit

Selon Turchin, les grands États du Vieux Monde n’émergent pas seulement par croissance interne, mais sous la pression de la guerre, de la géographie et de la concurrence entre sociétés. #war #competition #state #history #politicalPhilosophy Dans War, space, and the evolution of Old World complex societies, Peter Turchin propose une idée forte : les sociétés les plus vastes et les plus complexes…

https://homohortus31.wordpress.com/2026/05/12/war-space-and-state-formation-turchin-2013-et-la-geographie-du-conflit/

War, space and state formation : Turchin (2013) et la géographie du conflit

Selon Turchin, les grands États du Vieux Monde n’émergent pas seulement par croissance interne, mais sous la pression de la guerre, de la géographie et de la concurrence entre sociétés. #war #competition #state #history #politicalPhilosophy Dans War, space, and the evolution of Old World complex societies, Peter Turchin propose une idée forte : les sociétés les plus vastes et les plus complexes…

https://homohortus31.wordpress.com/2026/05/12/war-space-and-state-formation-turchin-2013-et-la-geographie-du-conflit/

War, space and state formation : Turchin (2013) et la géographie du conflit

Selon Turchin, les grands États du Vieux Monde n’émergent pas seulement par croissance interne, mais sous la pression de la guerre, de la géographie et de la concurrence entre sociétés. #war #competition #state #history #politicalPhilosophy Dans War, space, and the evolution of Old World complex societies, Peter Turchin propose une idée forte : les sociétés les plus vastes et les plus complexes…

https://homohortus31.wordpress.com/2026/05/12/war-space-and-state-formation-turchin-2013-et-la-geographie-du-conflit/

War, space and state formation : Turchin (2013) et la géographie du conflit

Selon Turchin, les grands États du Vieux Monde n’émergent pas seulement par croissance interne, mais sous la pression de la guerre, de la géographie et de la concurrence entre sociétés. #war #competition #state #history #politicalPhilosophy Dans War, space, and the evolution of Old World complex societies, Peter Turchin propose une idée forte : les sociétés les plus vastes et les plus complexes…

https://homohortus31.wordpress.com/2026/05/12/war-space-and-state-formation-turchin-2013-et-la-geographie-du-conflit/

Compare and contrast

https://youtube.com/shorts/xMDxRzqpbF0?si=EPC6Z1K8Vhm8i9iA

with

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2026/04/how-some-liberals-take-ludicrous-positions-to-seem-tolerant

Strictly speaking, the one does not contradict the other, as each chiefly addresses different topics: the unhoused in public spaces on the one hand, public drug use on the other.

Yet a difference in attitude is certainly present here, as well as a difference in the understanding of freedom as a value.

I don't have a pat answer about the "correctness" of either approach. I do know that progressives should be thinking hard about these matters
and be ready for challenging discussion about public space, inclusion, and the justifiability or otherwise of paternalism with regard to housing, drug use, and mental illness.

#PublicSpace #ThirdSpaces #Unhoused #Homeless #DrugUse #Freedom #PoliticalThought #PoliticalPhilosophy #Politics #MentalIllness

Compare and contrast

https://youtube.com/shorts/xMDxRzqpbF0?si=EPC6Z1K8Vhm8i9iA

with

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2026/04/how-some-liberals-take-ludicrous-positions-to-seem-tolerant

Strictly speaking, the one does not contradict the other, as each chiefly addresses different topics: the unhoused in public spaces on the one hand, public drug use on the other.

Yet a difference in attitude is certainly present here, as well as a difference in the understanding of freedom as a value.

I don't have a pat answer about the "correctness" of either approach. I do know that progressives should be thinking hard about these matters
and be ready for challenging discussion about public space, inclusion, and the justifiability or otherwise of paternalism with regard to housing, drug use, and mental illness.

#PublicSpace #ThirdSpaces #Unhoused #Homeless #DrugUse #Freedom #PoliticalThought #PoliticalPhilosophy #Politics #MentalIllness

Compare and contrast

https://youtube.com/shorts/xMDxRzqpbF0?si=EPC6Z1K8Vhm8i9iA

with

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2026/04/how-some-liberals-take-ludicrous-positions-to-seem-tolerant

Strictly speaking, the one does not contradict the other, as each chiefly addresses different topics: the unhoused in public spaces on the one hand, public drug use on the other.

Yet a difference in attitude is certainly present here, as well as a difference in the understanding of freedom as a value.

I don't have a pat answer about the "correctness" of either approach. I do know that progressives should be thinking hard about these matters
and be ready for challenging discussion about public space, inclusion, and the justifiability or otherwise of paternalism with regard to housing, drug use, and mental illness.

#PublicSpace #ThirdSpaces #Unhoused #Homeless #DrugUse #Freedom #PoliticalThought #PoliticalPhilosophy #Politics #MentalIllness

Compare and contrast

https://youtube.com/shorts/xMDxRzqpbF0?si=EPC6Z1K8Vhm8i9iA

with

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2026/04/how-some-liberals-take-ludicrous-positions-to-seem-tolerant

Strictly speaking, the one does not contradict the other, as each chiefly addresses different topics: the unhoused in public spaces on the one hand, public drug use on the other.

Yet a difference in attitude is certainly present here, as well as a difference in the understanding of freedom as a value.

I don't have a pat answer about the "correctness" of either approach. I do know that progressives should be thinking hard about these matters
and be ready for challenging discussion about public space, inclusion, and the justifiability or otherwise of paternalism with regard to housing, drug use, and mental illness.

#PublicSpace #ThirdSpaces #Unhoused #Homeless #DrugUse #Freedom #PoliticalThought #PoliticalPhilosophy #Politics #MentalIllness

Compare and contrast

https://youtube.com/shorts/xMDxRzqpbF0?si=EPC6Z1K8Vhm8i9iA

with

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2026/04/how-some-liberals-take-ludicrous-positions-to-seem-tolerant

Strictly speaking, the one does not contradict the other, as each chiefly addresses different topics: the unhoused in public spaces on the one hand, public drug use on the other.

Yet a difference in attitude is certainly present here, as well as a difference in the understanding of freedom as a value.

I don't have a pat answer about the "correctness" of either approach. I do know that progressives should be thinking hard about these matters
and be ready for challenging discussion about public space, inclusion, and the justifiability or otherwise of paternalism with regard to housing, drug use, and mental illness.

#PublicSpace #ThirdSpaces #Unhoused #Homeless #DrugUse #Freedom #PoliticalThought #PoliticalPhilosophy #Politics #MentalIllness

Réciprocité technicisée : bifurcation ou despotisme ?

La réciprocité n'est pas spontanée : c'est un dispositif socio-politique qui exige normes, pratiques et formes matérielles continues. L'irrigation ne produit pas le despote en soi ; elle cristallise une structure de dette préexistante. Même technologie → réciprocité communautaire ou hiérarchie extractive séculaire. #politicalPhilosophy La réciprocité n'est pas un état naturel ou une simple entraide spontanée : c'est…

https://homohortus31.wordpress.com/2026/05/09/reciprocite-technicisee-bifurcation-ou-despotisme/

Réciprocité technicisée : bifurcation ou despotisme ?

La réciprocité n'est pas spontanée : c'est un dispositif socio-politique qui exige normes, pratiques et formes matérielles continues. L'irrigation ne produit pas le despote en soi ; elle cristallise une structure de dette préexistante. Même technologie → réciprocité communautaire ou hiérarchie extractive séculaire. #politicalPhilosophy La réciprocité n'est pas un état naturel ou une simple entraide spontanée : c'est…

https://homohortus31.wordpress.com/2026/05/09/reciprocite-technicisee-bifurcation-ou-despotisme/

#341: How Radical Should You Be In Your Belief?

https://youtu.be/mOoLMJQRrQY

How radical should you be in your belief? If you believe in something, shouldn’t you aim to believe in it more? So, let’s discuss.

All of us have our ideas that we prefer over others. All of us may have our political, religious, cultural preferences. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s what we do. That’s what makes us human.

If we believe deeply that something is correct, that something is good, should we not think also that more of that is better? It’s a seductive idea and it seems logical initially. If you are X, if you believe in X, shouldn’t you believe in it more so? That seems to be the case because otherwise why would you believe in it? Is your belief really that weak that you can’t strengthen it?

So that’s the idea. And if you for some reason don’t want to fully commit, maybe you really never believed it completely. Maybe you’re not really a true believer. That’s the other part of the idea.

However, I would say this ignores certain facts about ideas, because every idea — whether it’s a religion, a philosophy, a cultural preference — typically has safeguards. When you look at all the big religions, they have some sort of clause, some sort of warning against taking it too far. Because that’s what the very idea of divinity is. That’s what the very idea of God is: that which we as human beings cannot completely understand. God is that which we cannot even approach so much that we can be certain of what God is. Because if we could, wouldn’t that mean in some way that we could become God? And that’s the very warning that most religions promote.

Believe, but don’t assume for a moment that you have all the answers.

There’s this joke that camels always look at humans in a specific way. The joke is that God has 100 names. We know 99 of them. But the camel knows all 100. And that’s why the camel looks so superior.

But that is the idea of religion. The idea of religion is a combination — as strange as this may sound — of belief and humility. We are not God. We are not everything in the universe. We are not all-knowing. We are not omnipotent. And we will never get there. So whatever you think of as God — whether you think that’s a religious idea, whether you think that’s nature, whether you think that’s the universe, whether you think that’s just the ultimate good — this idea is clear: do not pretend to be all-knowing yourself. Have some sense of humility.

Now that also goes for philosophy. You may say, I follow philosopher so-and-so. But philosophy is an ongoing conversation about wisdom — the love of wisdom; that’s what philosophia means. Each idea in philosophy lives in interaction with other ideas. Philosophy is more than just footnotes to Plato. Plato can be footnotes to Plato — if you look at the Laws and the Republic, there are two very different ideas there, and more than two.

Philosophers are typically smarter than those who follow a specific philosophy. Because every philosopher knows that in order to put out the strongest version of their idea, they have to leave some of the complications out. But there are always complications. And philosophy X always lives in some form of exchange with philosophy Y or Z or however many there are. Every idea lives in an ecosystem of ideas. It lives in relation with others.

Philosophy X may be good or better in certain respects than philosophy Y. Maybe philosophy Y is good in other aspects. But the truth emerges in the interaction between the two.

So you may believe that the individual is the source of all morality. But how far do you want to take this? Do you believe this to the complete abdication of responsibility for others? Do you believe this to the complete rejection of the state? Similarly, if you believe the state is the authority over everything else, at which point does this have to stop? At which point does the state have to even question itself as to how far it should go?

Everything costs money. Does this mean that everything should be judged by its price tag? Even though price is not a static thing — it depends on a lot of factors. Is the price tag always the value of something, or is it just our momentary expression of our social and cultural priorities? Of course there’s supply and demand which regulate that. But is that still everything? Aren’t there things where we should find some difficulty putting a price on? Aren’t there some things that we can’t really measure very well? So isn’t there a limit to this kind of positivist, materialist way of looking at things?

Equally, if we say the materialistic world doesn’t matter and we need to live in a more spiritual, contemplative state of mind — that may be true to a point, but eventually bills will have to be paid. You do live in some form of reality, and that reality means that resources typically are limited and there needs to be a prioritizing. How do you organize that?

The material and the spiritual belong together. They will always have friction between each other, but they will always complement each other. If you’re too materialistic — if you believe that only that which can be measured, only that which can be owned, only that which can have a price tag matters — you should maybe think about some more spiritual components of life. If you’re too spiritual, maybe you need to be rooted more in the fact that there’s also a materialist component of life.

If X drowns out Y, sides of X may appear that make it wrong, because you need that balance. And there are more than just two — X and Y is easier, but you could say XYZ or whatever.

So in fact the saying may be true that too much of a good thing is indeed not good. It distorts what it is.

This is why you see me frequently call for moderation. You could argue that too much moderation is also wrong — you need some passion and some intensity and some belief. Well, yes. But moderation can also be just a middle ground between these different poles. All these different ideas around us lead us to negotiate our space within them. Moderation does not mean you don’t have convictions. It means that you question at which point your convictions turn into such a radicality, into such an extreme version, that they become wrong — that they are undermined by their own conviction.

Is radicality the truest expression of an idea? No. It may be the most flamboyant, the most interesting. But it can’t survive well. If you turn too radical, too extremist, your idea may be more attractive to people who really think like you. But then look at history. Every time an idea became too radical, it fails. It has failed. No matter what the idea — because in its radicality, in its extremism, it loses its power of conviction towards those who don’t agree with you. And the number of people in the world who agree with you is always going to be punctuated by the number of people who disagree with you.

If you want to build a successful movement, if you want to build a successful approach to politics, to religion, to whatever your cultural or social idea may be, you need to convince others. You need to find ways of integrating aspects of the other into your own.

Which is why this very familiar symbol of yin and yang — masculine, feminine, black, white, dark, light — shows you these two parts, but there’s always something of the other in the bigger part. You know the symbol.

If we don’t find a way to integrate that with which we disagree — as some sense of doubt, as some sense of humility within our convictions — then our convictions will be nothing but arrogance, nothing but self-congratulatory pose, and turn out to be nothing else than solipsism: centering on yourself and that which you think defines you as the only thing that matters.

[This was originally posted to YouTube as a video. This post is a slightly abbreviated transcript, preserving the oral style of the video.]

#341: How Radical Should You Be In Your Belief?

https://youtu.be/mOoLMJQRrQY

How radical should you be in your belief? If you believe in something, shouldn’t you aim to believe in it more? So, let’s discuss.

All of us have our ideas that we prefer over others. All of us may have our political, religious, cultural preferences. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s what we do. That’s what makes us human.

If we believe deeply that something is correct, that something is good, should we not think also that more of that is better? It’s a seductive idea and it seems logical initially. If you are X, if you believe in X, shouldn’t you believe in it more so? That seems to be the case because otherwise why would you believe in it? Is your belief really that weak that you can’t strengthen it?

So that’s the idea. And if you for some reason don’t want to fully commit, maybe you really never believed it completely. Maybe you’re not really a true believer. That’s the other part of the idea.

However, I would say this ignores certain facts about ideas, because every idea — whether it’s a religion, a philosophy, a cultural preference — typically has safeguards. When you look at all the big religions, they have some sort of clause, some sort of warning against taking it too far. Because that’s what the very idea of divinity is. That’s what the very idea of God is: that which we as human beings cannot completely understand. God is that which we cannot even approach so much that we can be certain of what God is. Because if we could, wouldn’t that mean in some way that we could become God? And that’s the very warning that most religions promote.

Believe, but don’t assume for a moment that you have all the answers.

There’s this joke that camels always look at humans in a specific way. The joke is that God has 100 names. We know 99 of them. But the camel knows all 100. And that’s why the camel looks so superior.

But that is the idea of religion. The idea of religion is a combination — as strange as this may sound — of belief and humility. We are not God. We are not everything in the universe. We are not all-knowing. We are not omnipotent. And we will never get there. So whatever you think of as God — whether you think that’s a religious idea, whether you think that’s nature, whether you think that’s the universe, whether you think that’s just the ultimate good — this idea is clear: do not pretend to be all-knowing yourself. Have some sense of humility.

Now that also goes for philosophy. You may say, I follow philosopher so-and-so. But philosophy is an ongoing conversation about wisdom — the love of wisdom; that’s what philosophia means. Each idea in philosophy lives in interaction with other ideas. Philosophy is more than just footnotes to Plato. Plato can be footnotes to Plato — if you look at the Laws and the Republic, there are two very different ideas there, and more than two.

Philosophers are typically smarter than those who follow a specific philosophy. Because every philosopher knows that in order to put out the strongest version of their idea, they have to leave some of the complications out. But there are always complications. And philosophy X always lives in some form of exchange with philosophy Y or Z or however many there are. Every idea lives in an ecosystem of ideas. It lives in relation with others.

Philosophy X may be good or better in certain respects than philosophy Y. Maybe philosophy Y is good in other aspects. But the truth emerges in the interaction between the two.

So you may believe that the individual is the source of all morality. But how far do you want to take this? Do you believe this to the complete abdication of responsibility for others? Do you believe this to the complete rejection of the state? Similarly, if you believe the state is the authority over everything else, at which point does this have to stop? At which point does the state have to even question itself as to how far it should go?

Everything costs money. Does this mean that everything should be judged by its price tag? Even though price is not a static thing — it depends on a lot of factors. Is the price tag always the value of something, or is it just our momentary expression of our social and cultural priorities? Of course there’s supply and demand which regulate that. But is that still everything? Aren’t there things where we should find some difficulty putting a price on? Aren’t there some things that we can’t really measure very well? So isn’t there a limit to this kind of positivist, materialist way of looking at things?

Equally, if we say the materialistic world doesn’t matter and we need to live in a more spiritual, contemplative state of mind — that may be true to a point, but eventually bills will have to be paid. You do live in some form of reality, and that reality means that resources typically are limited and there needs to be a prioritizing. How do you organize that?

The material and the spiritual belong together. They will always have friction between each other, but they will always complement each other. If you’re too materialistic — if you believe that only that which can be measured, only that which can be owned, only that which can have a price tag matters — you should maybe think about some more spiritual components of life. If you’re too spiritual, maybe you need to be rooted more in the fact that there’s also a materialist component of life.

If X drowns out Y, sides of X may appear that make it wrong, because you need that balance. And there are more than just two — X and Y is easier, but you could say XYZ or whatever.

So in fact the saying may be true that too much of a good thing is indeed not good. It distorts what it is.

This is why you see me frequently call for moderation. You could argue that too much moderation is also wrong — you need some passion and some intensity and some belief. Well, yes. But moderation can also be just a middle ground between these different poles. All these different ideas around us lead us to negotiate our space within them. Moderation does not mean you don’t have convictions. It means that you question at which point your convictions turn into such a radicality, into such an extreme version, that they become wrong — that they are undermined by their own conviction.

Is radicality the truest expression of an idea? No. It may be the most flamboyant, the most interesting. But it can’t survive well. If you turn too radical, too extremist, your idea may be more attractive to people who really think like you. But then look at history. Every time an idea became too radical, it fails. It has failed. No matter what the idea — because in its radicality, in its extremism, it loses its power of conviction towards those who don’t agree with you. And the number of people in the world who agree with you is always going to be punctuated by the number of people who disagree with you.

If you want to build a successful movement, if you want to build a successful approach to politics, to religion, to whatever your cultural or social idea may be, you need to convince others. You need to find ways of integrating aspects of the other into your own.

Which is why this very familiar symbol of yin and yang — masculine, feminine, black, white, dark, light — shows you these two parts, but there’s always something of the other in the bigger part. You know the symbol.

If we don’t find a way to integrate that with which we disagree — as some sense of doubt, as some sense of humility within our convictions — then our convictions will be nothing but arrogance, nothing but self-congratulatory pose, and turn out to be nothing else than solipsism: centering on yourself and that which you think defines you as the only thing that matters.

[This was originally posted to YouTube as a video. This post is a slightly abbreviated transcript, preserving the oral style of the video.]

#341: How Radical Should You Be In Your Belief?

https://youtu.be/mOoLMJQRrQY

How radical should you be in your belief? If you believe in something, shouldn’t you aim to believe in it more? So, let’s discuss.

All of us have our ideas that we prefer over others. All of us may have our political, religious, cultural preferences. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s what we do. That’s what makes us human.

If we believe deeply that something is correct, that something is good, should we not think also that more of that is better? It’s a seductive idea and it seems logical initially. If you are X, if you believe in X, shouldn’t you believe in it more so? That seems to be the case because otherwise why would you believe in it? Is your belief really that weak that you can’t strengthen it?

So that’s the idea. And if you for some reason don’t want to fully commit, maybe you really never believed it completely. Maybe you’re not really a true believer. That’s the other part of the idea.

However, I would say this ignores certain facts about ideas, because every idea — whether it’s a religion, a philosophy, a cultural preference — typically has safeguards. When you look at all the big religions, they have some sort of clause, some sort of warning against taking it too far. Because that’s what the very idea of divinity is. That’s what the very idea of God is: that which we as human beings cannot completely understand. God is that which we cannot even approach so much that we can be certain of what God is. Because if we could, wouldn’t that mean in some way that we could become God? And that’s the very warning that most religions promote.

Believe, but don’t assume for a moment that you have all the answers.

There’s this joke that camels always look at humans in a specific way. The joke is that God has 100 names. We know 99 of them. But the camel knows all 100. And that’s why the camel looks so superior.

But that is the idea of religion. The idea of religion is a combination — as strange as this may sound — of belief and humility. We are not God. We are not everything in the universe. We are not all-knowing. We are not omnipotent. And we will never get there. So whatever you think of as God — whether you think that’s a religious idea, whether you think that’s nature, whether you think that’s the universe, whether you think that’s just the ultimate good — this idea is clear: do not pretend to be all-knowing yourself. Have some sense of humility.

Now that also goes for philosophy. You may say, I follow philosopher so-and-so. But philosophy is an ongoing conversation about wisdom — the love of wisdom; that’s what philosophia means. Each idea in philosophy lives in interaction with other ideas. Philosophy is more than just footnotes to Plato. Plato can be footnotes to Plato — if you look at the Laws and the Republic, there are two very different ideas there, and more than two.

Philosophers are typically smarter than those who follow a specific philosophy. Because every philosopher knows that in order to put out the strongest version of their idea, they have to leave some of the complications out. But there are always complications. And philosophy X always lives in some form of exchange with philosophy Y or Z or however many there are. Every idea lives in an ecosystem of ideas. It lives in relation with others.

Philosophy X may be good or better in certain respects than philosophy Y. Maybe philosophy Y is good in other aspects. But the truth emerges in the interaction between the two.

So you may believe that the individual is the source of all morality. But how far do you want to take this? Do you believe this to the complete abdication of responsibility for others? Do you believe this to the complete rejection of the state? Similarly, if you believe the state is the authority over everything else, at which point does this have to stop? At which point does the state have to even question itself as to how far it should go?

Everything costs money. Does this mean that everything should be judged by its price tag? Even though price is not a static thing — it depends on a lot of factors. Is the price tag always the value of something, or is it just our momentary expression of our social and cultural priorities? Of course there’s supply and demand which regulate that. But is that still everything? Aren’t there things where we should find some difficulty putting a price on? Aren’t there some things that we can’t really measure very well? So isn’t there a limit to this kind of positivist, materialist way of looking at things?

Equally, if we say the materialistic world doesn’t matter and we need to live in a more spiritual, contemplative state of mind — that may be true to a point, but eventually bills will have to be paid. You do live in some form of reality, and that reality means that resources typically are limited and there needs to be a prioritizing. How do you organize that?

The material and the spiritual belong together. They will always have friction between each other, but they will always complement each other. If you’re too materialistic — if you believe that only that which can be measured, only that which can be owned, only that which can have a price tag matters — you should maybe think about some more spiritual components of life. If you’re too spiritual, maybe you need to be rooted more in the fact that there’s also a materialist component of life.

If X drowns out Y, sides of X may appear that make it wrong, because you need that balance. And there are more than just two — X and Y is easier, but you could say XYZ or whatever.

So in fact the saying may be true that too much of a good thing is indeed not good. It distorts what it is.

This is why you see me frequently call for moderation. You could argue that too much moderation is also wrong — you need some passion and some intensity and some belief. Well, yes. But moderation can also be just a middle ground between these different poles. All these different ideas around us lead us to negotiate our space within them. Moderation does not mean you don’t have convictions. It means that you question at which point your convictions turn into such a radicality, into such an extreme version, that they become wrong — that they are undermined by their own conviction.

Is radicality the truest expression of an idea? No. It may be the most flamboyant, the most interesting. But it can’t survive well. If you turn too radical, too extremist, your idea may be more attractive to people who really think like you. But then look at history. Every time an idea became too radical, it fails. It has failed. No matter what the idea — because in its radicality, in its extremism, it loses its power of conviction towards those who don’t agree with you. And the number of people in the world who agree with you is always going to be punctuated by the number of people who disagree with you.

If you want to build a successful movement, if you want to build a successful approach to politics, to religion, to whatever your cultural or social idea may be, you need to convince others. You need to find ways of integrating aspects of the other into your own.

Which is why this very familiar symbol of yin and yang — masculine, feminine, black, white, dark, light — shows you these two parts, but there’s always something of the other in the bigger part. You know the symbol.

If we don’t find a way to integrate that with which we disagree — as some sense of doubt, as some sense of humility within our convictions — then our convictions will be nothing but arrogance, nothing but self-congratulatory pose, and turn out to be nothing else than solipsism: centering on yourself and that which you think defines you as the only thing that matters.

[This was originally posted to YouTube as a video. This post is a slightly abbreviated transcript, preserving the oral style of the video.]

#341: How Radical Should You Be In Your Belief?

https://youtu.be/mOoLMJQRrQY

How radical should you be in your belief? If you believe in something, shouldn’t you aim to believe in it more? So, let’s discuss.

All of us have our ideas that we prefer over others. All of us may have our political, religious, cultural preferences. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s what we do. That’s what makes us human.

If we believe deeply that something is correct, that something is good, should we not think also that more of that is better? It’s a seductive idea and it seems logical initially. If you are X, if you believe in X, shouldn’t you believe in it more so? That seems to be the case because otherwise why would you believe in it? Is your belief really that weak that you can’t strengthen it?

So that’s the idea. And if you for some reason don’t want to fully commit, maybe you really never believed it completely. Maybe you’re not really a true believer. That’s the other part of the idea.

However, I would say this ignores certain facts about ideas, because every idea — whether it’s a religion, a philosophy, a cultural preference — typically has safeguards. When you look at all the big religions, they have some sort of clause, some sort of warning against taking it too far. Because that’s what the very idea of divinity is. That’s what the very idea of God is: that which we as human beings cannot completely understand. God is that which we cannot even approach so much that we can be certain of what God is. Because if we could, wouldn’t that mean in some way that we could become God? And that’s the very warning that most religions promote.

Believe, but don’t assume for a moment that you have all the answers.

There’s this joke that camels always look at humans in a specific way. The joke is that God has 100 names. We know 99 of them. But the camel knows all 100. And that’s why the camel looks so superior.

But that is the idea of religion. The idea of religion is a combination — as strange as this may sound — of belief and humility. We are not God. We are not everything in the universe. We are not all-knowing. We are not omnipotent. And we will never get there. So whatever you think of as God — whether you think that’s a religious idea, whether you think that’s nature, whether you think that’s the universe, whether you think that’s just the ultimate good — this idea is clear: do not pretend to be all-knowing yourself. Have some sense of humility.

Now that also goes for philosophy. You may say, I follow philosopher so-and-so. But philosophy is an ongoing conversation about wisdom — the love of wisdom; that’s what philosophia means. Each idea in philosophy lives in interaction with other ideas. Philosophy is more than just footnotes to Plato. Plato can be footnotes to Plato — if you look at the Laws and the Republic, there are two very different ideas there, and more than two.

Philosophers are typically smarter than those who follow a specific philosophy. Because every philosopher knows that in order to put out the strongest version of their idea, they have to leave some of the complications out. But there are always complications. And philosophy X always lives in some form of exchange with philosophy Y or Z or however many there are. Every idea lives in an ecosystem of ideas. It lives in relation with others.

Philosophy X may be good or better in certain respects than philosophy Y. Maybe philosophy Y is good in other aspects. But the truth emerges in the interaction between the two.

So you may believe that the individual is the source of all morality. But how far do you want to take this? Do you believe this to the complete abdication of responsibility for others? Do you believe this to the complete rejection of the state? Similarly, if you believe the state is the authority over everything else, at which point does this have to stop? At which point does the state have to even question itself as to how far it should go?

Everything costs money. Does this mean that everything should be judged by its price tag? Even though price is not a static thing — it depends on a lot of factors. Is the price tag always the value of something, or is it just our momentary expression of our social and cultural priorities? Of course there’s supply and demand which regulate that. But is that still everything? Aren’t there things where we should find some difficulty putting a price on? Aren’t there some things that we can’t really measure very well? So isn’t there a limit to this kind of positivist, materialist way of looking at things?

Equally, if we say the materialistic world doesn’t matter and we need to live in a more spiritual, contemplative state of mind — that may be true to a point, but eventually bills will have to be paid. You do live in some form of reality, and that reality means that resources typically are limited and there needs to be a prioritizing. How do you organize that?

The material and the spiritual belong together. They will always have friction between each other, but they will always complement each other. If you’re too materialistic — if you believe that only that which can be measured, only that which can be owned, only that which can have a price tag matters — you should maybe think about some more spiritual components of life. If you’re too spiritual, maybe you need to be rooted more in the fact that there’s also a materialist component of life.

If X drowns out Y, sides of X may appear that make it wrong, because you need that balance. And there are more than just two — X and Y is easier, but you could say XYZ or whatever.

So in fact the saying may be true that too much of a good thing is indeed not good. It distorts what it is.

This is why you see me frequently call for moderation. You could argue that too much moderation is also wrong — you need some passion and some intensity and some belief. Well, yes. But moderation can also be just a middle ground between these different poles. All these different ideas around us lead us to negotiate our space within them. Moderation does not mean you don’t have convictions. It means that you question at which point your convictions turn into such a radicality, into such an extreme version, that they become wrong — that they are undermined by their own conviction.

Is radicality the truest expression of an idea? No. It may be the most flamboyant, the most interesting. But it can’t survive well. If you turn too radical, too extremist, your idea may be more attractive to people who really think like you. But then look at history. Every time an idea became too radical, it fails. It has failed. No matter what the idea — because in its radicality, in its extremism, it loses its power of conviction towards those who don’t agree with you. And the number of people in the world who agree with you is always going to be punctuated by the number of people who disagree with you.

If you want to build a successful movement, if you want to build a successful approach to politics, to religion, to whatever your cultural or social idea may be, you need to convince others. You need to find ways of integrating aspects of the other into your own.

Which is why this very familiar symbol of yin and yang — masculine, feminine, black, white, dark, light — shows you these two parts, but there’s always something of the other in the bigger part. You know the symbol.

If we don’t find a way to integrate that with which we disagree — as some sense of doubt, as some sense of humility within our convictions — then our convictions will be nothing but arrogance, nothing but self-congratulatory pose, and turn out to be nothing else than solipsism: centering on yourself and that which you think defines you as the only thing that matters.

[This was originally posted to YouTube as a video. This post is a slightly abbreviated transcript, preserving the oral style of the video.]

#341: How Radical Should You Be In Your Belief?

https://youtu.be/mOoLMJQRrQY

How radical should you be in your belief? If you believe in something, shouldn’t you aim to believe in it more? So, let’s discuss.

All of us have our ideas that we prefer over others. All of us may have our political, religious, cultural preferences. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s what we do. That’s what makes us human.

If we believe deeply that something is correct, that something is good, should we not think also that more of that is better? It’s a seductive idea and it seems logical initially. If you are X, if you believe in X, shouldn’t you believe in it more so? That seems to be the case because otherwise why would you believe in it? Is your belief really that weak that you can’t strengthen it?

So that’s the idea. And if you for some reason don’t want to fully commit, maybe you really never believed it completely. Maybe you’re not really a true believer. That’s the other part of the idea.

However, I would say this ignores certain facts about ideas, because every idea — whether it’s a religion, a philosophy, a cultural preference — typically has safeguards. When you look at all the big religions, they have some sort of clause, some sort of warning against taking it too far. Because that’s what the very idea of divinity is. That’s what the very idea of God is: that which we as human beings cannot completely understand. God is that which we cannot even approach so much that we can be certain of what God is. Because if we could, wouldn’t that mean in some way that we could become God? And that’s the very warning that most religions promote.

Believe, but don’t assume for a moment that you have all the answers.

There’s this joke that camels always look at humans in a specific way. The joke is that God has 100 names. We know 99 of them. But the camel knows all 100. And that’s why the camel looks so superior.

But that is the idea of religion. The idea of religion is a combination — as strange as this may sound — of belief and humility. We are not God. We are not everything in the universe. We are not all-knowing. We are not omnipotent. And we will never get there. So whatever you think of as God — whether you think that’s a religious idea, whether you think that’s nature, whether you think that’s the universe, whether you think that’s just the ultimate good — this idea is clear: do not pretend to be all-knowing yourself. Have some sense of humility.

Now that also goes for philosophy. You may say, I follow philosopher so-and-so. But philosophy is an ongoing conversation about wisdom — the love of wisdom; that’s what philosophia means. Each idea in philosophy lives in interaction with other ideas. Philosophy is more than just footnotes to Plato. Plato can be footnotes to Plato — if you look at the Laws and the Republic, there are two very different ideas there, and more than two.

Philosophers are typically smarter than those who follow a specific philosophy. Because every philosopher knows that in order to put out the strongest version of their idea, they have to leave some of the complications out. But there are always complications. And philosophy X always lives in some form of exchange with philosophy Y or Z or however many there are. Every idea lives in an ecosystem of ideas. It lives in relation with others.

Philosophy X may be good or better in certain respects than philosophy Y. Maybe philosophy Y is good in other aspects. But the truth emerges in the interaction between the two.

So you may believe that the individual is the source of all morality. But how far do you want to take this? Do you believe this to the complete abdication of responsibility for others? Do you believe this to the complete rejection of the state? Similarly, if you believe the state is the authority over everything else, at which point does this have to stop? At which point does the state have to even question itself as to how far it should go?

Everything costs money. Does this mean that everything should be judged by its price tag? Even though price is not a static thing — it depends on a lot of factors. Is the price tag always the value of something, or is it just our momentary expression of our social and cultural priorities? Of course there’s supply and demand which regulate that. But is that still everything? Aren’t there things where we should find some difficulty putting a price on? Aren’t there some things that we can’t really measure very well? So isn’t there a limit to this kind of positivist, materialist way of looking at things?

Equally, if we say the materialistic world doesn’t matter and we need to live in a more spiritual, contemplative state of mind — that may be true to a point, but eventually bills will have to be paid. You do live in some form of reality, and that reality means that resources typically are limited and there needs to be a prioritizing. How do you organize that?

The material and the spiritual belong together. They will always have friction between each other, but they will always complement each other. If you’re too materialistic — if you believe that only that which can be measured, only that which can be owned, only that which can have a price tag matters — you should maybe think about some more spiritual components of life. If you’re too spiritual, maybe you need to be rooted more in the fact that there’s also a materialist component of life.

If X drowns out Y, sides of X may appear that make it wrong, because you need that balance. And there are more than just two — X and Y is easier, but you could say XYZ or whatever.

So in fact the saying may be true that too much of a good thing is indeed not good. It distorts what it is.

This is why you see me frequently call for moderation. You could argue that too much moderation is also wrong — you need some passion and some intensity and some belief. Well, yes. But moderation can also be just a middle ground between these different poles. All these different ideas around us lead us to negotiate our space within them. Moderation does not mean you don’t have convictions. It means that you question at which point your convictions turn into such a radicality, into such an extreme version, that they become wrong — that they are undermined by their own conviction.

Is radicality the truest expression of an idea? No. It may be the most flamboyant, the most interesting. But it can’t survive well. If you turn too radical, too extremist, your idea may be more attractive to people who really think like you. But then look at history. Every time an idea became too radical, it fails. It has failed. No matter what the idea — because in its radicality, in its extremism, it loses its power of conviction towards those who don’t agree with you. And the number of people in the world who agree with you is always going to be punctuated by the number of people who disagree with you.

If you want to build a successful movement, if you want to build a successful approach to politics, to religion, to whatever your cultural or social idea may be, you need to convince others. You need to find ways of integrating aspects of the other into your own.

Which is why this very familiar symbol of yin and yang — masculine, feminine, black, white, dark, light — shows you these two parts, but there’s always something of the other in the bigger part. You know the symbol.

If we don’t find a way to integrate that with which we disagree — as some sense of doubt, as some sense of humility within our convictions — then our convictions will be nothing but arrogance, nothing but self-congratulatory pose, and turn out to be nothing else than solipsism: centering on yourself and that which you think defines you as the only thing that matters.

[This was originally posted to YouTube as a video. This post is a slightly abbreviated transcript, preserving the oral style of the video.]

#PoliticalPhilosophy 101: Promise to do everything your opponent will not do and any pick is guaranteed to be half evil. Why not vote for runner-ups? #BinaryIsStupid #QuantumIsFuture

Justice, Faith, and Brotherhood: Reflections on Rawls, Christianity, Freemasonry, and Modern Politics

https://polymathchristian.wordpress.com/2026/04/26/justice-faith-and-brotherhood-reflections-on-rawls-christianity-freemasonry-and-modern-politics/

Justice, Faith, and Brotherhood: Reflections on Rawls, Christianity, Freemasonry, and Modern Politics

https://polymathchristian.wordpress.com/2026/04/26/justice-faith-and-brotherhood-reflections-on-rawls-christianity-freemasonry-and-modern-politics/

Justice, Faith, and Brotherhood: Reflections on Rawls, Christianity, Freemasonry, and Modern Politics

https://polymathchristian.wordpress.com/2026/04/26/justice-faith-and-brotherhood-reflections-on-rawls-christianity-freemasonry-and-modern-politics/

Justice, Faith, and Brotherhood: Reflections on Rawls, Christianity, Freemasonry, and Modern Politics

https://polymathchristian.wordpress.com/2026/04/26/justice-faith-and-brotherhood-reflections-on-rawls-christianity-freemasonry-and-modern-politics/

Justice, Faith, and Brotherhood: Reflections on Rawls, Christianity, Freemasonry, and Modern Politics

https://polymathchristian.wordpress.com/2026/04/26/justice-faith-and-brotherhood-reflections-on-rawls-christianity-freemasonry-and-modern-politics/

I've argued that property rights are immoral. Now, I've shared a pair of posts that argue at a deeper level. This is the first:

https://brywillis634737.substack.com/p/the-fence-before-the-field

#Philosophy #substack #blog #podcast #language #ontology #criticaltheory #anarchism #politicalphilosophy #politicaleconomy #economics #locke #rousseau #propertyrights #property #privateproperty

I've argued that property rights are immoral. Now, I've shared a pair of posts that argue at a deeper level. This is the first:

https://brywillis634737.substack.com/p/the-fence-before-the-field

#Philosophy #substack #blog #podcast #language #ontology #criticaltheory #anarchism #politicalphilosophy #politicaleconomy #economics #locke #rousseau #propertyrights #property #privateproperty

I've argued that property rights are immoral. Now, I've shared a pair of posts that argue at a deeper level. This is the first:

https://brywillis634737.substack.com/p/the-fence-before-the-field

#Philosophy #substack #blog #podcast #language #ontology #criticaltheory #anarchism #politicalphilosophy #politicaleconomy #economics #locke #rousseau #propertyrights #property #privateproperty

I've argued that property rights are immoral. Now, I've shared a pair of posts that argue at a deeper level. This is the first:

https://brywillis634737.substack.com/p/the-fence-before-the-field

#Philosophy #substack #blog #podcast #language #ontology #criticaltheory #anarchism #politicalphilosophy #politicaleconomy #economics #locke #rousseau #propertyrights #property #privateproperty

I've argued that property rights are immoral. Now, I've shared a pair of posts that argue at a deeper level. This is the first:

https://brywillis634737.substack.com/p/the-fence-before-the-field

#Philosophy #substack #blog #podcast #language #ontology #criticaltheory #anarchism #politicalphilosophy #politicaleconomy #economics #locke #rousseau #propertyrights #property #privateproperty

Despotism or self-management. #philosophy #politics #politicalphilosophy

Despotism or self-management. #philosophy #politics #politicalphilosophy

Despotism or self-management. #philosophy #politics #politicalphilosophy

Despotism or self-management. #philosophy #politics #politicalphilosophy

Despotism or self-management. #philosophy #politics #politicalphilosophy

Multipolarity: Competition or Partition?
#globalpolitics #government #geopolitics #politicalphilosophy

https://medium.com/@leg.sorn/multipolarity-competition-or-partition-3282208ff688

Multipolarity: Competition or Partition?
#globalpolitics #government #geopolitics #politicalphilosophy

https://medium.com/@leg.sorn/multipolarity-competition-or-partition-3282208ff688

Multipolarity: Competition or Partition?
#globalpolitics #government #geopolitics #politicalphilosophy

https://medium.com/@leg.sorn/multipolarity-competition-or-partition-3282208ff688

Multipolarity: Competition or Partition?
#globalpolitics #government #geopolitics #politicalphilosophy

https://medium.com/@leg.sorn/multipolarity-competition-or-partition-3282208ff688

Multipolarity: Competition or Partition?
#globalpolitics #government #geopolitics #politicalphilosophy

https://medium.com/@leg.sorn/multipolarity-competition-or-partition-3282208ff688

✍️ Gaia Giuliani and Farah Polato, editors of the special issue of the journal 'From the European South' on the theme “On Catastrophe: Visual Reflections and Practices”, are inviting abstract submissions for articles, essays, visual essays and conversations until 15 April.

👉 https://ihc.fcsh.unl.pt/en/call-fromeuropeansouth-2026/

#Histodons #CFP #Arts #Cinema #PoliticalEcology #EnvHist #PoliticalPhilosophy #CulturalStudies #GenderStudies #QueerStudies #CriticalRaceStudies

✍️ Gaia Giuliani and Farah Polato, editors of the special issue of the journal 'From the European South' on the theme “On Catastrophe: Visual Reflections and Practices”, are inviting abstract submissions for articles, essays, visual essays and conversations until 15 April.

👉 https://ihc.fcsh.unl.pt/en/call-fromeuropeansouth-2026/

#Histodons #CFP #Arts #Cinema #PoliticalEcology #EnvHist #PoliticalPhilosophy #CulturalStudies #GenderStudies #QueerStudies #CriticalRaceStudies