“Gangsters of Capitalism” is an eye opener. It is especially pertinent because Haiti features in current news. “Haiti: The mayor of a town near Port-au-Prince vowed to stay after it was overrun by gang violence. His death is a symbol of how the state has effectively collapsed.” (NYTimes) Haitian refugees have flooded the USA and have suffered scorn “for eating cats,” a complete falsehood, The turmoil can be traced back to Butler’s military occupation.
After reading the book, one may conclude that, in a sense, Haiti never was a State in the true sense of the word. It was always a cow to be milked.
The foreign policy of every nation seems to be mostly about greed.
Gangsters of Capitalism is a biography of Major General Smedley D. Butler, a Marine who served in Central America, the Caribbean, and China. In the mid-1920s, he took a leave from the Marine Corps to serve as Philadelphia’s director of public safety, where he cracked down on bootleggers and organized crime. He was a brutal man, nicknamed “The Devil” by Haitians.
Butler commanded the Haitian Gendarmerie during the U.S. occupation of Haiti (1915–1934), where the nominal government consisted of a series of U.S.-backed presidents. Reflecting on his 33 years in the Marines, Butler later described his career as that of “a high-class muscle man for Big Business” and a “gangster for capitalism,” stating that he had primarily served as a hired enforcer for Wall Street, big business, and bankers.
He wrote a book at the end of his career, “War Is a Racket (1935)” in which he captures the destructive unfairness of war through a metaphor drawn from his time fighting the underworld in Philadelphia: “For a very few, this racket, like bootlegging and other underworld rackets, brings fancy profits, but the cost of the operations is always transferred to the people—who do not profit.” He looked back on his 33 years in the Marines and called himself a “gangster for capitalism.”
Butler added that Al Capone had never operated outside three city districts, whereas his own “racket” had spanned continents.
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