Gangsters of Capitalism Quotes

“I thought about the work of the great Haitian scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot, who wrote that “any historical narrative is a particular bundle of silences”—of events downplayed or forgotten, of perspectives excluded from the archives. “One ‘silences’ a fact or an individual,” Trouillot wrote, “as a silencer silences a gun.”
― Jonathan M. Katz, Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America's Empire

“Despite an upwelling of sympathy from millions of Americans, those in business and government ended up channeling their energies into the worst of our historical patterns, treating Haiti’s disaster as an opportunity to make profits and execute political schemes, treating Haitian lives and priorities as largely irrelevant.”
― Jonathan M. Katz, Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America's Empire

“As long as the United States seemed eternally ascendant, it was easy to tell ourselves as Americans that the global dominance of U.S. capital and the unparalleled reach of the U.S. military had been coincidences, or fate; that America’s rise as a cultural and economic superpower was just natural—a galaxy of individual choices, freely made, by a planet hungry for an endless supply of Marvel superheroes and the perfect salty crunch of McDonald’s fries.”
― Jonathan M. Katz, Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America's Empire

“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 forgetting the exceptional few who spent their later years trying to stop them?”
― Jonathan M. Katz, Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America's Empire