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Man, there has really been an upgrade to the infrastructure of the virtual space since I did my book talk with New America. We didn't have the voice of God or anything like that. So you get the nice treatment, Jonathan. How's it going everybody? I am Clint Smith. I'm a 2020 Emerson Fellow and the author of How the Word is Past. And welcome. Thank you for joining the New America Fellows Program and the Center for the Future of War for the discussion of Jonathan Katz. Gangsters of capitalism, Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the making and breaking of America's empire. Before we start, a few housekeeping notes. If you have questions during the event, please submit them through the Q&A function and we will make sure to get to them in the second half of the event. And most importantly, copies of Gangsters of Capitalism is available for purchase through our bookselling partner, Solid State Books. You can find a link to buy the book on this page. Just click buy the book at the bottom. And I say this, and I'm going to say this at the beginning because sometimes in this virtual space, people can like click on it and they'll open a tab and they'll be like, oh, I'll get to it. You've got 7,000 tabs on your computer and then your computer crashes and you never get a chance to buy the book that you're meant to. Do it right now. Click on it. Buy the book. Buy 7 of them. Buy them to stack under your computer for your zooms. Buy them for your coffee table. Buy them to show that you are a thoughtful interrogator of the larger American Imperial project and in putting it in conversation with the world around us today. But most importantly, because it's an excellent book, I'm so excited to get into this conversation with Jonathan, who if you are not familiar with, you should get familiar with Jonathan. Katz, Jonathan M Katz is a 2019 ASU Future of War Fellow at New America. He received the James Folly Medill Medal for Courage and Journalism for his reporting from Haiti. His first book, The Big Truck That Went By, was shortlisted for the Penn John Kenneth Galbraith Award for nonfiction and won the Overseas Press Long Overseas Press Club's Cornelius Ryan Award, the J. Anthony Lucas Work in Progress Award and the WOLA Duke Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America. His work appears in the New York Times, Foreign Policy, and elsewhere. Katz also received fellowship from the Logan Nonfiction Program. He lives with his wife and daughter in Charlottesville, Virginia. Jonathan, how are you doing, man? How's the virtual book tour been so far? It's been virtually great. Virtually great. That's a spot on. We're going to hop right into it these hours fly by. First of all, how did you decide to make Smedley Butler the sort of central character or protagonist around this book? Because in many ways this is a book about U.S. imperialism and you could have taken a myriad of different approaches. But you kind of used a certain person, a certain character, someone who I wasn't familiar with as our guide almost through the history of American imperialism. And I thought that that was such a fascinating and effective strategy. And I'm curious if that's how you imagined it from the beginning? Where did you kind of stumble on him? Or were you going to write a biography of Smedley Butler and then just morphed into something else? I'm curious of sort of the evolution of the process. It kind of, first of all, by the way, thank you for doing this. This is this is terrific. And I've been very excited about putting our books in conversation, because you obviously wrote an incredible one. Yes. So I mean, to a certain extent, and maybe I'm remembering it wrong, but this idea sort of like kind of almost popped out of my head fully formed at once. You know, the I first encountered Smedley Butler while I was writing my first book, The Big Truck. I had come across his name shortly after moving to Haiti, I think on Wikipedia, like an article about the banana wars. And I then after the earthquake in 2010, I was writing The Big Truck. And I knew I wanted to sort of, you know, go back into history and explain how things had gotten so precarious. And that required talking about the US occupation of Haiti. And Butler is a major character in that occupation. And for that book, you know, I was looking and maybe this is like partially an out of order answer to your question about the way that I think about my process. But like, you know, even at that moment, I was thinking like, well, if I'm going to tell the story to drive the narrative forward. And I didn't end up using any of the material that I collected on him. It was a very brief amount in the process of writing that book. But the thing about Butler that made him so I was sort of fascinated by both questions simultaneously, the question of, you know, how did how has America's imperial past been remembered by the rest of the world, but it's completely ignored. And in many cases, actively suppressed in memory hold in the United States. And who was Smedley Butler? Butler, you know, I'm not just saying this like just to sell books. I'm explaining like how I got into it. Like Butler is Butler is one of the most fascinating characters that I had ever encountered. He, you know, he was everywhere. And he was Zelek. He was in every, you know, US invasion occupation overseas war from 1898 until the eve of the Second World War. And then at the end of his life, he becomes a anti-war, anti-imperialist critic. And so part of it was just like, I was like, well, how did this guy, how did this person who was known literally as the devil and Haiti, how did he become this anti-war later in life? And then this sort of merged seamlessly as I remember it. Maybe I'm just remembering, but I'm talking about memory from the beginning with this question of, you know, and why is this person who was so famous back then and why were these wars that were such a big deal back then? Why are none of them talked about today? Which then created an opportunity to like, you know, write a whole book about it. So that was that, you know, I'm sure there was maybe more conversations sort of at the beginning. But as I remember the conversation with my agent was that I want to write this book about Smedli Butler, but I don't want it to be a biography of Smedli Butler. I want it to be a history of American imperialism. And then I want it to have this modern day component where I travel to the places and use sort of my skills as a foreign correspondent to talk about the ways in which, you know, that story is reverberates today. And that it was sort of a process of me trying to convince her and then trying to convince the publisher that this kind of, you know, cockamamie idea was a good one. I mean, it's so interesting because, I mean, as you say, like he was everywhere. I mean, it's almost kind of like if you were going to write, if you were going to, if I was going to write a screenplay, you know, like making up a character, I, you know, if I read this, I'd be like, okay, but like, was this person really like every single imperial project that the United States engaged? I mean, it felt, I mean, he was in the Philippines. He was in Haiti. He was in China. He was in Mexico. He was in all these different places. And it just, I mean, it kind of, sometimes I think when you're writing nonfiction, the characters end up being better than the fictionalized version that you would have come up with. And Smedley Butler to me seems like one of those characters who just serves as, again, this like really remarkable guide through the, so many of the sort of atrocities that the US has enacted or been a part of over the past several decades. And one of the other things you do when you alluded to this is not only is it, is he serving as the, our guide, you're also serving as our guide, right? And you, there's a version of this book that could have been written from your office, right? That could have been written from the library that could have taken so much of the incredible history and archives that you delved into so many of the incredible primaries which documents you spend time with. And written, what still would have been a really great book. But I think what makes this book different and what takes it to the next level and something that I really resonate with a lot because it's very similar to how I did my book. We were talking before the webinar started about how there's a TikTok out there that says the book, how to make an empire or how to build an empire. How to hide an empire. Yeah. How to hide an empire. And then my book, how the word is passed. And it's like, if this book and this book had a baby together, it would be, and then they show this book. And after reading the book, I was like, that's so funny because we really had similar approaches where it's this idea like you have to go to the place where this history happened because it gives you a different sense of that history, right? To be on the soil, to be in the buildings, to be with the people who are the descendants of those who experience these atrocities. How did you come to decide that you wanted to travel, truly travel across the world to go to all of these different places and why did that feel important to you? So the first thing was that I was, so it was maybe a combination of motivations. One was, I'm a reporter, it's what I do. I play historian and I played historian for years while I was writing this book because I spent a lot of time in the archives. But my wife, Claire Payton, Dr. Claire Payton, she's the historian. So part of it was I can bring interpretive analyses, I can bring, I can play with different frameworks and I can sort of do some of the work that a historian does. What I really do is I'm a reporter, like I go places and I talk to people. So that was part of it. Another part was that, and this actually, as I'm remembering this, big shout out to New America, seriously, because this book was really born out of sort of my New America journey, like my New America process. The first time that I actually even said the words out loud, I think I'm going to do a book about Smedley Butler was, it's like an info session. And he's like, so what's your project? And I was like, what is my project? I was like, I've never heard of this guy, Smedley Butler, because it was a good name that is a concept that had been kicking around in my head for a while at that point. And it was in conversations, especially with a friend of mine through New America named Chris Leonard, who was a fellow and on board for a long time. We were talking about, so part of my concern was that even though this period really isn't that long ago, the period that Butler's fighting in, 1898 to 1940, it's really not that long ago. People are still alive during it. But I was worried that maybe it would feel remote that some of the terms, some of the history would maybe feel a little stodgy. And I wanted to make sure that that didn't happen. And Chris actually put me onto a book by Tony Horowitz called Blue Latitudes, which was about the journeys of Captain Cook. And in that book, Tony Horowitz, I mean, this is also a thing that Tony Horowitz does in other places, but in that book in particular, Horowitz and a friend actually go to the islands in the South Pacific in Australia, and I guess New Zealand is also in the South Pacific, where Cook went and he intersperses the entries from Cook's journals and historical research on that period with like, here I am in Tuvalu, and I'm passing a billboard and it looks like this. And part of the reason that I really wanted to do this was I was afraid that Butler, as many places as he had been, might end up being like kind of a director who would feel out of a move. Among other things, one of the only things that I knew about him at the beginning was he was a Quaker from Philadelphia, and he throughout his life wrote in his letters to his parents and his wife, he would use like, thee and thy. So even though he's writing letters like this in the 1930s, I was afraid that that could feel a little like out of date. Imagine my surprise when I actually got into, and I was also worried that maybe there just wouldn't be that much material on like what he actually was doing like in these battles, like what the battles looked like. I then, as I've gotten, I'm embarking on this research, and I'm sitting at the first place that I was doing archival research at Quantico through Butler's letters, and they're just wheeling out cart after cart after cart of his letters, and his letters are voluminous. He goes on and in detail and he's like bearing his heart and he's talking about his like two fakes and like what he had for breakfast and why it wasn't his preferred thing before he kills people. And I was like, and he's funny, he's complicated, he's terrible, like his racism is awful, and there's all these parts of him, and I was like, and I didn't anticipate that at the beginning. And so the way in which he ends up sort of coming alive on the page in his own tellings and his own just sort of like characterfulness. And then since I was already fully committed to doing the modern day thing, I was like, I had to, part of the writing process was trying to figure out, and this was also something that happened at New America in hence writing workshops, was trying to figure out like, how do I balance like this just character who jumps off the page in the historical material and me going places. And that was a real negotiation about turning up the levels on this and turning them down on this, and trying to make it all work together. So the very short answer is that like it was almost, it was at the beginning, I thought it was going to be born out of necessity. And then it ended up, I think, being just sort of something that added to to what was already, as you note, a great narrative on itself. Absolutely. Pivoting to the specific content of the book, one of the things that you talk about early in the book, and that was so, that was really illuminating for me. So for folks who don't know, my own book is a book about how the history of slavery is remembered or misremembered across the United States and to some extent abroad. And so I've been thinking, a lot about the founding fathers, been thinking a lot about, when to Monticello, when to Malpelio, when to Mount Vernon, think about what those places represent and who those, what the sort of way that those people, those men, and their ideas served as the foundation upon which, not only American, obviously domestic policy, but international policy will be built. And one of the things that you brought up was how Jefferson wrote a letter to Madison, suggesting that they should annex Florida, Canada, and Cuba. And he says, we should have such an empire for liberty as she has never surveyed since the creation. And I thought that that was so so illuminating. And I thought, and I'm thinking too about how, for enslavers, they wanted to annex Cuba, so that they would have a place to tip the balance of power so that they could have more control over Congress and the U.S. government. And it really demonstrates this early relationship between slavery and imperialism. And you talk about how so many of the people who were, and this is the founding fathers, but even so many of the people who were the leaders of the Confederacy, the former leaders of the Confederacy, and who were in charge of these sort of early Jim, you know, in charge of the Confederacy and the early Jim Crow governments were also the people who were going abroad and enacting the policies that were destabilizing these regions in the global south often across the world. So can you talk a little bit about the relationship between sort of domestic manifestations of oppression through slavery, through Jim Crow, through indigenous genocide, whatever the case may be, and the sort of, almost what feels like an outgrowth of those sensibilities in the way that people, some of those folks enacted and destabilized different regions across the world. Yeah, no, those are all really good points. I mean, in, you know, so as you note, like before the Civil War, you know, one of the major drivers of the quest for expansion of the United States was slavery. It was to have more slave states, more land to expand slavery to, and, you know, there's slavery, capitalism, and expansionism were kind of, you know, the two, the three legs of the stool. And yeah, and so, you know, Cuba has initially looked at, very hungrily, by Jefferson Davis, as Secretary of War, under Franklin Pierce, he is pushing to annex Cuba. Paul considers it, and at various points along the way, there are proposals to annex Cuba to annex Santa Domingo, which becomes the Dominican Republic. And those are sort of rejected by sort of like American, like white Americans' racism, like it's like the scene in The Simpsons where it's like Mr. Burns' like disease profile and all the diseases are trying to fit through the door at once, and Dr. Hibbert's like, if you remove one of them, they'll all come through, but they're all sort of keeping each other in check. It was kind of like that, because yeah, I mean like, you know, a successive president, Millard Fillmore came to this conclusion, James Paul came to this conclusion. They were like, well, we could annex Cuba, but don't speak our language, they're Catholic, and the ratio of black people to white people and slave people to Europeans was such that they were afraid that it would have these sort of other effects on American life and on the American body politic that they didn't want. And what happens in the period of the book that I'm, you know, where the action is really set, with, you know, so the book opens with the war against Spain in 1898 and Smedley Butler joining the Marines, he lies about his age, he was old, and he joins the Marines to go fight in Cuba and ends up at the first place the Americans conquer in Cuba, a little spot called Guantanamo Bay. And by that moment, you know, so the Civil War has now happened, you know, three decades before. And it is, and the Civil War just like suffuses this entire period in every respect. Both, you know, Teddy Roosevelt, and sort of the Gingos, as they're known, like the expansionists, the imperialists, desired to sort of reclaim the glory of their father's generation, missed out on, you know, they grown up hearing, you know, tales of heroism in the Civil War, and they hadn't gotten to participate in it. And then also this sort of relationship between slavery and expansionism, because at this point, obviously, slavery has, you know, the slavery has been outlawed in the United States. It's also been outlawed in Cuba finally over the course of 30 years of Independence War by the Cubans against their Spanish colonizers. And because slavery is a dead letter in the United States, the people who were themselves former enslavers or the children of former enslavers are no longer in Cuba anymore. In Cuba to, you know, tip the balance of power in Congress. That's old hat. And so for them, the only thing that's retained is this other idea that, like, you know, they speak Spanish. They're Catholic. They're not white. Their idea, like, Spanish categories of race are different than American categories of race. You know, they don't subscribe to the one drop rule. So there are some people who don't consider themselves black, who would very much be black in the United States. And they don't want it. And so you have guys like one of just the all-time great SOBs in American history, Ben Tillman, Pitchfork Ben Tillman. The one-eyed, not that having one eye makes him a bad person, but it just sort of adds the picture of this guy. The one-eyed, you know, he was a confederate. He enlisted in the Confederate Army. And he then becomes governor of South Carolina. He oversees a huge surge in lynchings. And he gives this passionate opposition to specifically the colonization of the Philippines on the floor of the Senate, where he says, you know, incorporating the Philippines in the United States would bring in. And then he lists all the different categories and subcategories of non-white people that he's worried. And he's like, he's saying, like, I don't want to be sitting next to the senator from Malay. Like, that's not my vision of myself in America. And what ends up happening at this moment is the other thing that's happening. And, you know, I draw on the work of Adrian Len Smith, who writes a great book called Freedom Struggles About This Period and Others. You know, this is this moment of reconciliation between sort of northern capital and southern capital, northern whites and southern whites. You know, we're in the redemption. I mean, 1898 is also Plessy versus Ferguson. This is also the year of the Wilmington coup. So like all of these things are sort of happening at once. And, you know, basically white people in the north are like, well, let's sort of, let's find, you know, common ground with white people in the south at the expense of both non-white black people in the United States and elsewhere. And this, you know, comes in, you know, this is lived out on the ground in these wars. And there's also, in addition to, you know, Plessy, there's a series of Supreme Court cases known as the insular case, which are still good law. They still govern life in Puerto Rico and Guam, et cetera, which say that just because the United States government runs your island and just because the flag flies over your, you know, territorial house does not mean that you have equal rights under the Constitution. And this is still in 2022. This is still the law that governs Puerto Rico. It's in Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands, et cetera. It's still the law. There's still the cases under which it is acceptable for us to have these own colonies that do not have a vote for president and do not have representation on the floor of either House of Congress. And it's that compromise that ends up mollifying people like Pitchfork Ben Tillman, where he's like, well, if they're not going to have representation in Congress and they're not going to be able to vote for president and we're not going to have to give them equal rights, I guess that's cool with me. Right. And that provided such helpful historical context for me, right? And it really made the through line clear of the sort of colonial inequity in the way that electoral agency has been stripped from these places that are ostensibly members of the sort of larger American project and, you know, making it clear that I mean, it's just so revealing because you see all these parallels between what's happening abroad and what's happening here where they're like, oh, okay, well, if black people can't vote or if black people don't have, you know, can't run for office or if black people, you know, I don't have to sit next to them in the restaurant or if I, you know, and it's a similar sort of sensibility that are animating the decisions about what the United States relationship to its colonial territories will be depending on the nature of who they are. I mean, I remember the part in your book about the Philippines where maybe it was like one of the generals or a politician and they were using some of the same, they were using like anti-black language about Filipinos because they almost like didn't have the language, like anti-Asian or anti-Pacific Islander language to use but they were like, well, they're brown and so they just started using these anti-black racial slurs to describe the Filipino folks and again, it just makes that through-line so clear and this is tied to that. One of the things I didn't know, I just learned so many facts from your book but I didn't know that the majority of people who built the Panama Canal, for example, were black people who had been brought in from the West Indies and one of the things you talk about is how the United States, both in Panama but also more broadly was like Americans were exporting restaurants and they were exporting goods and services and certain things that came to these regions and they came to Panama but they were also exporting American apartheid, right? And I think you describe it as such, you were like they were exporting the very racial hierarchy that existed in the United States and then bringing it to Panama and bringing it to places where as you've mentioned the relationship of race like what the sort of racial hierarchy looked different, right? Race doesn't look the same in Panama as it does here. Race doesn't look the same in Brazil as it does here. Race doesn't look the same in Honduras as it does here but part of what the US did was impose its own conception of what it believed the racial hierarchy should be and that animated what life in these places looked like and really shifted in some ways the dynamics of race relations and racial dynamics in these places. I think I remember in the Panama chapter you were talking about the the struggle between because these were Black, West Indians brought in to Panama who spoke English and then their relationship to the the native and indigenous communities in Panama who spoke Spanish that was contentious but all of that was happening because white people from America were the ones who were bringing in bringing in English-speaking West Indians and the whole thing it gave me such a more expansive understanding of how the US destabilized Asians. Yeah, exactly. One of the things that I wanted to make sure and it was a lens that I brought to the book was that it is not in no way in almost no areas of the book at all is it just the bad US doing things to blank slates these are people with agency themselves they have their own histories and their own complexities and racism is one of them so yeah, in Panama I spent a little bit of the book talking about and this was something that I would not have gotten just from reading. If I had read enough maybe who knows but I got it in a much more visceral way by going to Panama and spending time the ways in which race in Panama is extremely complex especially do you have and in the period that I'm talking about the Zonians who are essentially mostly white American colonizers who live in the canal zone and then you also have the indigenous Panamanians you have the Panamanians who are mestizo with mixes between European and indigenous and maybe some African and black who are the fight between the Afrocolonialis who are the descendants of the original or the older I guess I should say immigration forced immigration of enslaved Africans by the Spanish and then the West Indians the Afrointelianos who are the descendants of the mostly Barbadans, Saint Lucians Grenadians, mostly from the Tiles who the Americans brought in to dig the canal and die for us for our benefit and the way the visceral sense of this was that I you know in Panama City I went to there's a museum and I talk about it in the book called the Museo Afrointeliano the Afro West Indian Museum of Panama which contains a history that is not even reflected in the more well visited museums of the Panama canal that most tourists go to and it just so happened I mean this is the like you know this and there's a million moments like this in how the word is passed as well it's just like magic that happens like it's just there so I go to the museum I introduce myself to a woman who is on duty that day I'm the only person in the museum and I'm like I'm writing a book and she's like oh well we have a library and I'll go down and I'll introduce you and it's there that I encounter this bound volume of letters from the West Indian canal workers almost all of which are written in English some of them are in Spanish and I'm reading that it's like table like you know covered in like it's like a vinyl cover over the table cloth which is how you know you're really in like a Panamanian archive somebody's house basically and and the door opens and these women come in and it's the meeting of the friends of the museum and they're like oh well you gotta stay and so I'm in this meeting and I hang out and it's this woman Ines Celie's birthday it's I think her 80th birthday and they say her happy birthday and they have cake and ice cream and then I get to know her and actually I don't there's so many things that I did that I don't have time for the book I actually end up spending like a day with Ines she's awesome she decides like there's a Smithsonian museum in Panama like another remnant of American colonialism it's like a wildlife center that like has like they have like frogs and like sort of like native animals and it's really she's like we should go to that and so like I'm like walking around you know with Ines and she's you know looking and she's talking about her mother from St. Lucia and her father from Barbados and you know them coming to Panama and the double and triple racism that they experienced both from the lighter skin Panamanians and from the white Americans and then also from the Afrocoloniales and then I go you know I go to Cologne which is you know and I have lunch with Marcio Rodriguez who is an Afrocolonial whose grandmother told her stories of the American invasion which Smedley Butler took part in 1903 and it's and it's just you know all these are just they're all wonderful women and I would love to go back and hang out with them again honestly they're awesome especially but I you know it was just you know it's and it's exactly as you say I mean you know I talk about in the book the way that you know the Americans who build the canal zone you know within which the West Indian workers for the most part do the actual building of the canal and they bring Jim Crow like they bring they bring this system in which they divide the payroll it's the gold and silver system and you have essentially white and white Americans are on the gold roll and so they're paid at a higher rate and they they get you know better housing to get better commissary etc they have their own separate entrances and then you have the people on the silver roll who are almost entirely black there are these interesting marginal cases where like like white workers from Spain are like fighting and they're trying to figure out like which role do they go on but and and yeah and this was this was promoted by the Americans who are overseeing this as a mark of modernity they sell this as a public health innovation where they're like we're bringing this great American innovation of segregation which is going to somehow keep people from getting malaria it makes no sense but like they build this as a mark of progress and the fact that Panamanians had their own ideas about you know racial categorization and their own ways of living within what becomes the canal zone which by the way that's another thing that I didn't realize I mean I had heard about the building of the Panama canal but guess was that this was an area that was depopulated this was an area that people lived like there were tens of thousands of people who were evicted from their homes forcibly by the Americans for the purpose of building a canal and one of the ways in which you know Dr. Gorgas one of the ways in which the Americans who are are overseeing this ethnic cleansing essentially we're just forced total you know population removal from the canal zone is they're saying like well look how backward these people are like they weren't even segregated like they weren't even like there were light-skinned and dark-skinned people like living next to each other like these people clearly don't know how to create a society we're doing them a favor and that was the way that was one of the ways in which Americans in that period told themselves that everything that they were doing was okay man it's just it's always wild to think about the way the systems of white supremacy and oppressions more broadly attempt to justify themselves I'm curious from your end also I should say as we are getting closer toward the end we're about two-thirds through if you have any questions feel free to put them in the Q&A function I will certainly incorporate your questions as we finish our conversation so feel free to throw those in there and if you have not purchased this book button press it now do it now don't wait another minute I'm curious for you I mean you went to all these different places I mean I just again I could this whole thing could just be me like going through my list of all the things that I learned from your book like that U.S. imperialism in Honduras and its relationship to banana exports and then you talk about how that is one of the ways that the term banana republic came to exist and it was one of those moments I think I was like eating a dull banana and I was like oh snap I was like oh my and I was like what am I doing you're eating a banana by the former standard fruit company on whose behalf Smelly Butler and the Marines intervened in Honduras in 1903 and I have a question about that but I'm gonna do a closer toward the end but one thing I'm just curious just generally for you like which place that you went was most I don't know if the word surprising but like the place that you that has stayed with you that was the most you know maybe it's that was most surprising that was most you know that resonated the most that the devastated you the most that you learn the most like what is the you know if you can pick I know it's like picking your kids it's hard to like which one is the one that you are like this is this I couldn't have written the book and not included this chapter so I want to stipulate first off Haiti you know I lived in Haiti you know for three and a half years a lot of my heart is is still there and Haiti is Haiti is also the height of Smelly Butler's career and you know so you know there's two chapters on Haiti there's one on the Dominican Republic which also deals with sort of the Dominican Republic's relationship with Haiti I also lived in the Dominican Republic before I lived in Haiti so there's you know the three Hispaniola chapters sort of geographically they're the center of they're literally the center of the book and they really are sort of at the heart of how I how I came to this story and the lens through which I view it I mean you know one of the I talk about him in the prologue to the book and the prologue is broadly about a you know Smelly Butler blowing the whistle on this you know fascist coup in the 1930s which I could and often do find myself spending all day talking about but but I also am talking about and I quote the great Haitian scholar Michelle Roth Trouillot you know his book Silencing the Past was one of sort of my load stars and also by the way the epigraph to this book is a Haitian proverb by Kublié the one who the one who gives the blow it was my translation deals I was trying to be a little bit cute with gangsters of capitalism the one who deals the blow forgets the one who bears the scar remembers you know what I'll just say that because I guess I just throw cleared myself into just making that my answer I mean you know I go I you know I knew that I was going to have to go back to Haiti to write this book I went back at a period of extreme unrest Haiti is now in yet another one and you know I go with my dear friend Evan Sanon if anybody here has read the big truck that went by will know Evans very well he was my fixer and he's my he's my friend he's the guy who I go through the earthquake with and he's throughout the big truck and he does make an extended cameo in the Haiti chapter of this book because I go and I meet Evans in the north and then we go into the mountains to look for the place where Smedli Butler won his second of two medals of honor in the massacre at Fort Rivier and I go up this mountain looking for him and end up in a voodoo temple et cetera you know but Haiti is Haiti it will surprise nobody to say Haiti just comes through and another part of the book that was ultimately one of the first parts that I reported was on another trip to Haiti I visit this industrial park that essentially the Clintons build in response to the earthquake an industrial park which unbeknownst to the Clintons and unbeknownst to the builders of the park was a forced labor camp overseen by the marines including Smedli Butler in which not so Smedli Butler among other things that he does in Haiti a country founded famously in a national revolt by enslaved people against their enslavers against France from 1791 to 1804 Smedli Butler then reimposes slavery in Haiti for the purpose of building roads for the occupation and this is one of the forced labor camps and at this forced labor camp a great Haitian hero of the resistance against the Americans Charlemagne Perrault he's killed by the marines he is and he is buried in this place where the Americans in the mid-20th 10s building a garment factory complex and I go there and I meet I'm on a tour of this factory I kind of escaped the tour and then I speak Creole so I'm just asking people I was like where is Charlemagne Perrault where was he buried because I know his grave had been moved by that point and I go there and I'm at this grave site and I'm talking to a guy I think his name is Anise Jean and I'm explaining to him in Creole I'm writing this book about Charlemagne Perrault and this period in American history because Americans don't know about it and he becomes incredulous he's like I don't believe you how could Americans not know about this that's impossible and so that my answer was going to be the Philippines but I ended up clearing myself into Haiti as often happens but Haiti makes a lot of sense somebody's one asking and you alluded to this a little bit but maybe you can go into more detail is there anything that you left on the cutting room floor that you wish you had been able to include oh man so much there's so many things I think this afternoon and it contains a little bit of material from Haiti from a joint attack by the Marines and the gendarmes which were the client militia that Butler creates which becomes the model for a whole lineage of client armies that include the army of the Republic of Vietnam for people who remember the Vietnam War up through the Afghan National Security Forces and so that was a piece that it's basically a piece of writing from essentially 1919 that could get ripped out of a story about a drone strike today but I found a home for that in this op-ed that's going to be coming out in a couple hours but there's so many things I wish I could have included that trip to the Frog Museum with Nina Sealy as anyone who's written a book like I wrote I don't know how many books I wrote that I had to cut out there's just so many incredible moments and Butler is just this he's this fascinating character and there were some things I was able to sort of work in a little bit of I have a scene it's kind of a partial scene where during Butler's anti-war phase in 1935 he appears at an event in Cleveland and it's sort of thrown the event is kind of put on by like the Communist Party but like they're not all Communists who are involved in it and it's a protest against war and against fascism and it's Butler an important anti-fag from Cleveland Langston Hughes all appear on this stage together along with other people and there's other people who I'm like leaving out of this brief telling just like what so and there's a Marine spy who comes to this meeting and reports back to the commandant what's happening at this meeting and he's there to sort of inform on Butler but he writes about he writes all this stuff about Langston Hughes and he and one of the things that he says is that this Hughes guy must be a Communist spy because he speaks far too eloquently to have written these things on his own so they must have been written for him by CBUSA clearly and then I was able to sort of go down this rabbit hole and figure out a little bit there's some interaction between Butler and Langston Hughes which obviously it doesn't need to be said but puts the light on that particular insult anyway so like but there was just there were so many things this book was five years in the making I could write I could write a whole series honestly I don't think I will but I could I hope that there are more of these op-eds that are coming I know the feeling of the cutting room floor and looking down at it and being like damn that's like three other books so I feel you on that one of the things that I kept thinking about as I was reading and this might be the last question is like what is it what does it mean to live ethically as an American given this history like if we look around us our you know I was kind of making light of it earlier but like our fruit, our clothes our houses you know the material that makes our cars our you know all this stuff to varying degrees are material manifestations of a history of violence and oppression and imperialism you know whether it's the things that you know the people who were killed you know essentially killed to make the Panama canal that so much of our stuff comes through whether it's the bananas and Honduras whether it's the you know the beef in you know whatever the case may be what do you think about what like what do you know just what are the how do we live ethically given this history and the ways that all of us even when we try ostensibly benefit from the material resources that have been extracted as a result of this past yeah I mean and it's all done because we're an empire it's all done with sort of a flick of the wrist another moment that I remember that I remember from my travels that I couldn't include was at the fancier museum the museum of the Panama canal in Panama City I had to get sort of a special escort in order to be able to like take photos from my notes and while I was going around this museum the guy who's escorting me like asks like you know so what do Americans think about the fact that the Panama canal was given back to us in 1999 you know are they still mad about it and I was like I don't know how to tell you this most Americans don't even know that we had it at this point like it's not because we got it because we wrung everything out of it and at the cost of all these lives and all these things in Panama and they're still very much living today in the canal but you know with all these legacies of American imperialism and you know like I don't think like the fact that I had that conversation with him like makes me like an inherently ethical person you know I think it's a really really hard question to answer and honestly I think it's a question that Smetley Butler was dealing with in his life one of the reasons why I one of the reasons why he is such a fascinating character that you know that I've spent in the last seven years essentially like living in my head with is because at the end of his life he recants his imperial past he writes this series of articles he writes the series of articles in a socialist magazine where he says you know I participated in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics I made China safer standard oil I made Haiti and Cuba a good place for the city bank boys city bank still exists to collect revenues in looking back on it I could have given Al Capone a few hints the best he did was operate in three city districts we Marie in three continents and the ultimate tragedy of his life and maybe this is the ultimate tragedy of our lives is that he ultimately belatedly sees this imperfectly he never really deals with his racism he never really deals with his intersections of masculinity and white supremacy but he does see to a far greater extent than almost any other marine does at his time or most any other person does really he sees the way in which these things that he did that brought him so much honor and fame and glory have you know these these destructive effects not only on the rest of the world but on ourselves here at home you know on these ways in which as Aimee Césaire says you know that one of the ultimate consequences of colonialism is the brutalization of the colonizer which then comes back home in the form of fascism and brutality at home you know ultimately Butler he's a great success as an imperialist he's really a failure at any kind of attempted anti-war or anti-colonialism he spends his last stores of energy trying to prevent what worked to from happening and trying to prevent the United States from getting involved in it and to convince Americans to decolonize our holdings especially in the pacific and it's only with World War II that the Philippines which three chapters of this book that Butler you know spend so much time in that the Philippines are finally granted their belated independence after we have bombed them to death to a certain extent for Douglas MacArthur's ego so that he can so that he can make good on his promise you know I shall return and then return to Manila which becomes the second worst destroyed city in the world after Warsaw in in World War II and Butler's trying to prevent that from happening and he fails and to a great extent he has failed to do so because he was such an active participant in creating this empire and creating these imperial structures and and really I think this is the thing that you deal with in your because well like ultimately this kind of individuals versus structures you know how much of an impact can any one person have versus these larger historical and social structures and the answer is it depends on where that individual is placed an individual president can have much more influence than an unhoused person you know who's just watching all these things go by to a certain extent it has to do with the ways you know the extent to which we are participating in sort of the goals of these structures in making things worse you can have much much more effect than if you are trying to make a war happen with Russia right now you're going to be much more successful then then if you then if you you know if you try to fight against it unless you're one of the people who might have influence on this who can stop you know the war machine as it goes into overdrive and so you know maybe the answer is you know maybe the answer is that it is impossible to be to ultimately be truly ethical and still be you know inside you know just until the man using the master's tools right you know maybe that's the answer it is it is more ethical to try it is more ethical to try to shine a light on these things and uplift the people who are trying to point out these crimes and to prevent further ones from happening people like Osmoc Khan Ali who has done just incredible work and in the op-ed that I have I'm tying sort of Butler and to her work actually but but you know at the same time it's like my daughter needs bananas you know and yeah it's really hard and maybe the answer I feel like this is the Jewish it's the argument it's the struggle it's being in the fight where it's as much as you can do but it's also you know in which looking at the ways in which you're perpetuating the empire and the ways in which you're trying to dismantle it and trying to make the best choices you can yeah I think that's absolutely right and I think that so much the point of educating yourself and struggling with it and reflecting on it and you know books like yours that teach us so much about it are so that we don't do the same thing in the future right and I think that that is that makes the struggle meaningful so Jonathan it's an excellent book congratulations I know virtual tours and virtuals the situation can be weird I hope you get a chance to do some in person stuff at least a few sometime soon but hope your daughter and your family are doing well hope she's loving those bananas as much as my kids are she does and thank you all for your lunch break or if you're on the west coast appreciate you coming through again buy this book you won't regret it it's really really excellent and if you're into audio books give the audio book whatever your thing is Jonathan thank you New America thank you and I think they're gonna close this out