
Gangsters of Capitalism
Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America's Empire
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Narrated by:
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Adam Barr
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By:
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Jonathan M. Katz
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. Best-selling 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 POW extra in a Filipino movie about their American War. Tracing a path from the first wave of US 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.
©2022 Jonathan M. Katz (P)2022 Macmillan AudioListeners also enjoyed...




















Critic reviews
"Lively, deeply researched ... Katz’s engaging style brings history alive."—Associated Press
"Like Butler himself, Katz’s book is singular and hard to pin down ... an exhilarating hybrid of studious history and adventuresome travelogue."—Jacobin
"Katz’s realism may shock many readers, but they would be well served to join him in pulling back the curtain, tipping over the jugs of institutional Kool-Aid, and taking a long, cold hard look in the proverbial mirror. Like watching a train wreck in slow motion, this is a raw historical perspective that will both fascinate and unsettle."—Task and Purpose
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Excellent book
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Brilliant
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But as he serves the more he sustained how the US military was not used to defend the United States but for political-business reasons. For invading, coercing and manipulating other weaker nations.
He loved his country and democracy and believed his mission was to protect both, but instead he was used for the interest of American big business.
The author traveled to all the places the general fought and relates the situations to later times of US history to even the present.
It is a worthy and valuable biography to read. If you dare leave your political and world history closet.
Remarkable and Revealing
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Skewed left some
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So much to absorb
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How we got here
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A Great journey though the past and pressant.
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historical tour of the crimes of American Empire
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an eye-opening revelation of America's past imperialism and its effect on today's fragile democracy.
a man's journey to self-realization and awareness.
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Exceptional read
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