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Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America's Empire
Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America's Empire | Jonathan M Katz
2 posts | 3 read | 1 reading | 1 to read
A groundbreaking journey tracing America's forgotten path to global power--and how its legacies shape our world today--told through the extraordinary life of a complicated Marine. Smedley Butler was the most celebrated warfighter of his time. Bestselling books were written about him. Hollywood adored him. Wherever the flag went, "The Fighting Quaker" went--serving in nearly every major overseas conflict from the Spanish War of 1898 until the eve of World War II. From his first days as a 16-year-old recruit at the newly seized Guantánamo Bay, he blazed a path for empire: helping annex the Philippines and the land for the Panama Canal, leading troops in China (twice), and helping invade and occupy Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, Haiti, Mexico, and more. Yet in retirement, Butler turned into a warrior against war, imperialism, and big business, declaring: "I was a racketeer for capitalism. Award-winning author Jonathan Myerson Katz traveled across the world--from China to Guantánamo, the mountains of Haiti to the Panama Canal--and pored over the personal letters of Butler, his fellow Marines, and his Quaker family on Philadelphia's Main Line. Along the way, Katz shows how the consequences of the Marines' actions are still very much alive: talking politics with a Sandinista commander in Nicaragua, getting a martial arts lesson from a devotee of the Boxer Rebellion in China, and getting cast as a P.O.W. extra in a Filipino movie about their American War. Tracing a path from the first wave of U.S. overseas expansionism to the rise of fascism in the 1930s to the crises of democracy in our own time, Gangsters of Capitalism tells an urgent story about a formative era most Americans have never learned about, but that the rest of the world cannot forget.
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Panpan

The author is all over the place. I thought I was reading a book about Smedley Butler in the early 1900s but the author spent more time talking about identity politics in 2020.

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iread2much
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Mehso-so

I mostly found this book fascinating, but in the interview that the author gave that caused me to buy this book, he sold it as a history of a man who stoped a coup against FDR- that covers less than a chapter. The rest is the about the horrors of war and colonialism. Which is good to read and learn about, but I wanted more about the coup and Butler‘s anti-war activities. 3/5 stars read for a history of the USA‘s colonial wars.

bookishbitch I hate bait and switch reader fishing. 2y
iread2much @bookishbitch it‘s very irritating! 2y
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