The Racket by Jonathan M. Katz

With Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele very much in the news, thanks to his collaboration with Donald Trump's mass deportation campaign, I'm re-upping my 2023 interview on the self-described "world's coolest dictator" with Michael Paarlberg. We talked about whether Bukele's supposed “Salvadoran miracle” was real, whether the country's gang problem had been solved (and how), and how American fascists got so into a Central American president of Palestinian descent.

Find all episodes and newsletters at TheRacket.news

Atlanta: Home of Coca-Cola, Jermaine Dupri, and the country’s most open-ended racketeering law. Two very different cases of national importance are headed to trial under Georgia’s version of the RICO Act. One of course involves Donald Trump and eighteen allies for their attempt to steal the 2020 election. The other targets more than sixty activists who tried to stop the construction of a $90 million police tactical training center in a forest outside Atlanta, a project the protesters have indelibly nicknamed “Cop City.”

As I tried to think through these very different cases — and what they say about the law and American criminal justice in general — I couldn’t think of anyone better to talk to than Josie Duffy Rice. A journalist and graduate of Harvard Law School, Duffy Rice is the host of the podcast UnReformed: The Story of the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children, and a legal commentator who has appeared everywhere from the New Yorker to The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. We talk about activism, free speech, the mob, and laws as tools for both justice and revenge. It’s a great, and I think enlightening conversation, and I hope you enjoy. (There’s also an automatically generated transcript available on the website.)

And if you do enjoy, or get something out of my work in general, please consider supporting The Racket with a paid subscription. This newsletter has become my main job, and I can’t do it without the active support of readers like you. For $6 a month or $60 a year, you’ll get every issue, access to subscriber-only podcasts and nearly 300 past issues going back over four years, not to mention the sastifaction of supporting real, independent journalism. Thanks again for reading and listening.

Last week, in its story on the latest African coup the New York Times included precisely one line of context about the United States: National Security Council spokesman John F. Kirby saying the “attempted takeover”was “deeply concerning.” What Times readers didn’t learn was that the U.S. has a direct interest in that country, Gabon, as it has been using it as a key staging ground for military operations in wars that most Americans don’t even know we’re involved in. Or that at least fifteen of the leaders of recent coups in Africa were trained by the U.S. military.

That last factoid was uncovered by investigative journalist Nick Turse, a historian and reporter who has spent the last decade reporting from inside Africa’s wars and on the hidden roles of the United States Africa Command. He graciously accepted my invitation to join me for this conversation. We get into what the U.S.—and the recently orphaned Russian mercenaries of the Wagner Group—are really up to in the Sahel; the details of that aforementioned U.S. training; and the NATO war that kicked off this wave of unrest. We also unpack the unlikely (and not uncomplicated) role of far-right Florida congressman Matt Gaetz as a lone voice on the American political front.

Paid subscribers to the Racket can listen to the audio of my conversation with Nick using the player above, or the podcast app of your choice. There’s also a transcript, edited and abridged for clarity, below. And if you aren’t a full subscriber, now’s a great time:

The Racket is 100% reader- (and listener-)supported. If you like it, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribe and read the full transcript at TheRacket.news

In his non-apology apology for his just-revealed years of genocidal racism, Richard Hanania made a brief allusion to a foreign leader few Americans have heard of, but who has become hugely popular on the far right.

Nayib Bukele has been president of El Salvador since 2019; he has announced his intention to run again in 2024, despite a constitutional ban on reelection. Just 42 years old, Bukele has been referred to as the “first millennial authoritarian”; in a Twitter bio he called himself “the coolest dictator in the world.” Bukele, so far, is most famous for two things: making Bitcoin one of El Salvador’s national currencies, and taking credit for reducing the country’s murder rate through draconian policing — or, as our good buddy Hanania called it, “the Bukele miracle.”

But is this “miracle” real? And why are America Firsters so into a Central American president of Palestinian descent?

To find out, I called Michael Paarlberg, a professor of political science at Virginia Commonwealth University, associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, and former senior Latin America policy adviser for Bernie Sanders’ 2020 campaign who has spent years researching in and writing about El Salvador. We talk about Salvadoran history and politics, Hanania’s alleged “small-l liberalism,” and the outsized role of U.S. imperialism—and the LAPD!—in the gang situation in that country.

You can listen to the subscriber-only conversation by clicking the play button above, or read the transcript below.

And before you do, just a word of thanks to everyone who’s read, shared, and above all subscribed to The Racket, whether for the last four days or the last four years. It’s great to see this newsletter getting cited in and inspiring further coverage and inquiry from the Huffington Post to the New York Times. As a friend of mine put it, we set the agenda on the Hanania story, and there’s more like that to come.

But I can’t keep doing this work without your support. If you aren’t a paid subscriber yet, now’s the perfect time.

A break from the war to go back in time, and beyond the grave. That’s right, it’s time for another Gangsters Movie Night — our irregular series where I and a guest talk about a movie about a place or theme I explore in Gangsters of Capitalism.

This week we go to a place that’s very close to my heart — Haiti — through the 1932 horror cult classic White Zombie. Starring Bela Lugosi as the mysterious sorcerer “Murder Legendre,” and set during the U.S. Occupation, this was the film that introduced the Haitian zonbi to the American masses. Contained within are all the deep-seated racism and contradictions that infuse zombie movies and literature to this day.

To talk about it, I’m joined by Kaiama Glover, a professor at Barnard College and scholar of Haitian and Francophone literature par excellence. At the end of the episode, Kaiama also talks about her new book, A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being.

You can listen by clicking on the play button above or at Apple, Google, Downcast, Sticher, or wherever you do your listening. While you’re there, be sure to subscribe. And if you haven’t yet, make sure you don’t miss an issue of The Racket by signing up below. A transcript of the episode can be found by scrolling down.

The Racket is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Things to read:

Claire Schwartz talks to Parisian anti-colonialists about the French election

Andrew Liu on the lab-leak theory and racism

John Ganz on Putin’s counter-revolution

Episode transcript (may contain transcription errors)

Kaiama L. Glover: But then if you think about the fact that scene is happening in a movie that is saying zombification is real. There's something really weird about that I've always thought. The fact that there's this strange ambivalence in giving credence to the phenomenon that's supposed to be ridiculous. The ambivalence around whether or not it's "real".

Jonathan M. Katz: Sak ap fet, kijan nou ye. You are listening to The Racket, the podcast on foreign policy, racket of war and more. I am Jonathan M. Katz and this is another episode of our Gangsters Movie Night Series, which we feature a film that explores a theme or a place from my book, Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America's Empire.

This week, we are going to a place that is very close to my heart, Haiti, via 1932s, White Zombie, directed by Victor Halperin and starring the one and only Bela Lugosi. This was the very first feature length zombie film in Hollywood, the movie that introduced American audience to the idea of zombies, a concept that up until that point had been confined to Haitian religion and folk belief. So if you're a fan of The Walking Dead, Night of the Living Dead, Army of the Dead, pretty much anything with dead in the title you have this movie to thank for it. Also both Rob Zombie and his band White Zombie took their names from this film. So it has a very important role in culture. Not an amazing film on its own, but I have an incredible guest to talk about it with me, Dr. Kaiama L. Glover.

Kaiama is the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of French & Africana Studies at Barnard College in the city of New York. She is also the faculty director of the Digital Humanity Center. The editor of Archipelagos Journal, a New York Public Library Cullman Center Fellow and the author of a new book, A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being. Kaiama, welcome to The Racket.

Kaiama: Thank you, Jonathan. I take exception at you saying this is not a good movie. I thoroughly enjoyed watching and re-watching it for today.

Jonathan: Excellent. I'm glad to hear it.

Kaiama: Good in that nerdy sense, the way academics think things are good. We've got plenty to chat about.

Jonathan: Spoiler alert! Pause if you want to go see this. If you want to see it, I highly recommend there's a free version on YouTube …

Kaiama: I didn't know that, I spent 99 cents watching this on Amazon Prime.

Jonathan: … I highly recommend the Amazon Prime version. There's a restored version, which does nothing for the racism, but the sound mixing and the visuals are much better in that version. So I highly recommended that.

Kaiama: Well then I don't regret giving Bezos my money. Okay. Fair enough.

Jonathan: You made the right choice. So what's going on in this thing?

Kaiama: It is a pretty straightforward and simple plot, I think it's safe to say. We've got a beautiful young White woman from New York who has shown up in Haiti, ready to reunite with and marry her fiance, a dude named Neil. He is also White, suffice it to say. He's a bank employee. He's working in the capital of Haiti in Port-au-Prince. The backstory of the film is that on her way to meet her beloved, she was on a ship with a very wealthy man, a plantation owner, whose name is Charles Beaumont or Charles Beaumont. This guy has apparently befriended her on the boat on the way over and has enjoined her to marry her fiance on his estate. And she, for some reason, agrees to get married at this stranger's house. Bad move on Madeline's part. But she and her soon to be husband Neil, show up at the estate and they do get married. But we learn very quickly that Charles Beaumont has not done this out of altruism. He is in fact, in love with Madeline. And conspires with a man named Legendre played by Bela Lugosi, who is the leader of a zombie mini hoard, a group of about six other people he's zombified in addition to a whole sugar mill's worth of zombified Black and Brown people who work for him at this sugar mill.

Charles Beaumont (Robert Fraser): Zombies!

Murder Legendre (Bela Lugosi): Yes, they are my servants. Did you think we could do it alone? In their lifetime, they were my enemies …

Jonathan: And Bela Lugosi, he's essentially a bokor. He's a sorcerer.

Kaiama: Yes, he is a sorcerer. Or he has sorcerer capabilities, because he is not Haitian, obviously. I want to come back to this clearly not Haitian practicer of magic with the left hand. But any who, Beaumont hopelessly in love with Madeline, he tries to get her to dump her fiance and marry him as he walks her down the aisle. Nonetheless, resorts to the dark magic and gets this poison from Legendre, Bela Lugosi, to zombify his beloved.

Silver (Brandon Hurst): But what you're planning is dangerous.

Beaumont: Don't you suppose I know that, Silver. You don't seem to realize what this girl means to me. Why I'd sacrifice anything I have in the world for her. Nothing matters if I can't have her.

Kaiama: And so a process of zombification happens, she "dies", as far as her fiance is concerned. She's buried and he goes on to develop a small drinking problem, I guess. But Legendre goes, as one does, retrieves the corpse of Madeline. Reanimates it and turns her into Beaumont's zombified bride.

And she then spends the next little while wafting around his mansion in a state of zombification. Beaumont soon finds this to be not ideal in a partner and is distressed by the fact that she is essentially a soulless being that lives in his house, looking pretty. That gets old fast enough.

And so he goes back to Legendre and says, "I'd like to bring her back to life, whatever the cost."

Legendre pretends to agree to do that. He then toasts to the reanimation of Madeline. But in fact, the wine he gives Beaumont is poisoned with the same zombie poison. And he too then becomes almost a zombie.

Simultaneous to this drama happening with Legendre, Beaumont and the zombified Madeline, Neil gets it together enough to work with another character, a secondary character, Dr. Bruner, who has lived in Haiti for a long time. And who is a missionary, I think. Who was a priest and a doctor. And who then with the help of, I mean, what plays in the movie is a Haitian Sherpa man.

Jonathan: In blackface.

Kaiama: They get together and say they are going to save Madeline from what they have figured out is her zombification. Neil has drunkenly stumbled to her grave, found it empty, gone to his friend, Dr. Bruner. And Dr. Bruner has clarified that, that Beaumont dude must have zombified her.

So the two of them go off to the estate. And so the sickly Neil, Dr. Bruner, they go up to Legendre's castle.

Jonathan: In Transylvania.

Kaiama: [laughs] In Transylvania. In an unrecognizable landscape, somewhere in Haiti/Transylvania, to rescue Madeline. And everything goes wrong because, so Madeline's a zombie, Beaumont about to be a zombie, Neil succumbs to his yellow fever and passes out upon arrival. And Legendre uses his zombified Madeline to maybe kill Neil, because he's got other plans for Madeline. I guess she's going to become his zombie bride.

Neil Parker (John Harron): Madeline! I found you! You are alive! Alive! What's the matter? It's I! Neil!

Kaiama: Dr. Bruner keeps Madeline from killing Neil. And then there's a climactic scene in which everyone's fighting. And the end is hilarious. And let's just say Legendre and Beaumont end up falling off the castle cliff to their deaths. Madeline gets de-zombified, Neil recovers from malaria and they embrace at the end.

Madeline Parker (Madge Bellamy): Neil, I dreamed.

Kaiama: Bruner saves the day and cracks a really funny one-liner.

Dr. Bruner (Joseph Cawthorn): Excuse me please, have you got a match?

Jonathan: So to situate this a little bit, in the late 1920s, early 1930s, there was a moral panic. There was a sense that films were perverting and turning Americans into psychopaths. And so this Presbyterian elder named William H. Hayes, who had before that been and postmaster general under President Harding, came and wrote this code that basically tried to take the sex and the murder out of movies.

So this is a pre-code film, but the whole plot is, we're dealing with dark magic. We're dealing with horror. We're dealing with exoticism. And these were all things that fall out of movies in the decades after this, once Hollywood starts following this self-imposed code. And I think that's part of why this movie ends up retaining cult status and then launching zombie literature.

This movie is actually based on a chapter from a non-fiction book, a 1929 travel log called The Magic Island written by W.B. Seabrook, who was a white journalist adventurer of the 1920s type. Who traveled to Haiti during the US occupation, which started in 1915.

And that's an invasion in which my Smedley Butler, the main character of my book, plays a central role. The Marines were actually still occupying Haiti brutally when this movie came out in the United States.

So the movie comes out in '32, the occupation ends in 1934, after 19 years in all. So in that chapter of The Magic Island, the part that is plausibly true, is that Seabrook is recounting a conversation with a Haitian tax collector who tells him this legend. The tax collector tells Seabrook about this episode that he claims to have witnessed in which a platoon of zombies have been sold as slave labor to the Haitian American Sugar Company or HASCO, which was one of the main US export companies that was propped up by the occupation.

It's through the occupation that Seabrook learns about zombies. And then he writes The Magic Island, which is a very influential book. It influences a lot of people, influences a lot of writers. It influences American perceptions of Haiti through the middle of the 20th century.

This chapter first inspired a Broadway play also called White Zombie. The Halperin brothers saw that and then redacted that into this movie. This movie is also part of a larger, just gross theft of Haitian Culture, especially Vodou. The Vodou religion. It's being suppressed actively in Haiti by the Marines. And at the same time, it is being appropriated and stolen by the Marines and by other Americans who come within the context of the occupation. And then they're repackaging it for American audiences.

I was just wondering if you can talk a little bit about what are zombies in Haitian culture? What did the zombie mean before it was taken by these American colonizers and resold as entertainment back home?

Kaiama: As you well know, in asking it, that's such a big question, right?

Jonathan: Yeah.

Kaiama: I think what one could say about the zombie that appropriate here is that, it's marked profoundly by ambivalence.

What is a zombie? I think you could ask any number of different Haitian people or Haitianists and get any number of different answers to that question. So the way I think about the zombie in my own work is, as having both anthropological and then also creative purchase or metaphorical purchase in Haitian culture.

And by Haitian culture, I mean, both the Haitian quotidian and the Haitian's popular imagination. But then also in literary culture and in cultural production. So zombie is certainly a phenomenon that originates in the Western coast of Africa. It's part of an Afro-diasporic tradition.

“Spheres of influence” are hot again these days. Here’s what Secretary of State Anthony Blinken had to say about the controversial geopolitical concept, as it regards the showdown with Russia over Ukraine:

But look, the President’s been extremely clear for many, many years about some basic principles that no one is moving back on: the principle that one country does not have the right to change by force the borders of another; that one country does not have the right to dictate the policies of another or to tell that country with whom it may associate; one country does not have the right to exert a sphere of influence. That notion should be relegated to the dustbin of history.

And he’s right, it should be! The problem is that when you sift through that dustbin you find that U.S. power was built on all the things Blinken mentioned. That is especially true in America’s original—and still primary—“sphere of influence”: Latin America. (The U.S.’s continued dominance over the hemisphere is obvious to everyone outside our borders, including Vladimir Putin, which is why he appears so eager to seed discord in the region).

Take Panama. The Central American republic was created by the U.S. military (including, of course, Smedley Butler). In short, we intervened there on behalf of Panamanian separatists, hewing the isthmus Crimea-style from Colombia for the purpose of building the Panama Canal—the waterway through which much of America’s global military and commercial power would ultimately be established. Over the century since, U.S. presidential administrations have most certainly dictated our de facto client state’s policies, as well as deciding “with whom it may associate.” When Panamanian dictator Manuel Noreiga tried to pivot toward the Soviet bloc, President George H. W. Bush (who was, not for nothing, Noriega’s former boss at the C.I.A.), ordered a full-scale invasion to overthrow him in 1989.

This week on Gangsters Movie Nights we discuss that history and more through the lens of … a boxing movie. Namely, Jonathan Jakubowicz’s 2016 drama Hands of Stone. A biopic of famed Panamanian boxer Roberto Durán, the film tries to divine the complex interior life of a man who grew up on the wrong side of U.S. imperialism (and the Canal Zone) and fought his way to becoming a four-time champion of the world. In so doing, the movie deals with—and in some cases re-enacts—some of the themes and scenes I talk about in Gangsters of Capitalism.

I’m joined for the conversation by my friend and political scientist Michael Paarlberg, a terrific thinker on Latin American policy and migration who spent much of his childhood living in Panama City.

To listen, just click the play button above. You can also download it, as well as past episodes, by searching for The Racket wherever you get podcasts (and please leave us a review if you do). A transcript is below. Thanks for listening.

The Racket is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, become a free or paid subscriber.

Thanks to everyone who has spread the word about Gangsters of Capitalism: Thanks to you, the book has now appeared for two straight weeks on the American Booksellers Association’s national bestseller list, as reported by independent stores nationwide. Please help keep the momentum going by buying the book from your favorite local indie.

The book is also being noticed by policymakers, including Rep. Ro Khanna, a Democratic congressman from California, who had this to say:

Episode transcript (may contain transcription errors)

Marine: Get off the fence.

Ray Arcel (Robert De Niro): Excuse me?

Marine: Get off the fence.

Arcel: Ah. Shut up, schmuck.

Marine: Who do you think you are, old man?

Arcel: I'm Ray Arcel from Harlem, USA. You know who that is? This is the future world champion you're talking to. [Beat] He's in a jail and he thinks he's in charge.

Roberto Durán (Edgar Ramírez): We in jail.

Arcel: No, he's in jail.

Durán: They put jail. Here.

Arcel: No, he, it's all in the head. Boxing is a mental sport.

Jonathan M. Katz: Que xopa, raqueteros. This is The Racket, a podcast and newsletter that you can find at theracket.news. I am Jonathan M. Katz. My book, Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America's Empire is out in stores. Please go buy it. Tag me @katzonearth on Twitter and Instagram to share your photos of yourself and the book, or you and your dog in the book, or you and the kid in the book, or just you and multiple copies of the book, whatever you like.

The book is built around a biography of the imperialist Marine turned anti-war activist, Smedley Butler. It's gotten some great reviews, and Jacobin, Jonah Walters calls it an exhilarating hybrid of studious history and adventuresome travel log. Thank you, Jonah. Yes, that's what I tried to do for five years. I split my time between the archives and the airports traveling around the world, following in the footsteps of Butler and his generation of Marines and trying to explore the ways in which the memory of that era still influences attitudes and events today. Around the rollout, we here at The Racket are holding what we call Gangsters Movie Nights, in which I and a guest talk about a movie that deals with some of the themes and some of the places that I went in the book.

Today, we are going to Panama, a country that Smedley Butler not only went to, and not only lived in with his family, but helped create, as the United States helped Panama secede from Colombia in 1903, for the purposes of building the Panama Canal. As part of that deal, the American conspirators and one French guy wrangle control of a 10-mile wide colony surrounding the canal in which the United States would have all the rights, power, and authority, that's a quote from the treaty, as if it were "the sovereign of the territory." This new American colony essentially split the new country of Panama in half and it also created a deep sore in the Panamanian psyche, which is still in many ways open today.

To explore that history, we are of course watching a film about boxing. What other topic could you use to explore the issues of sovereignty and nationalism and imperialism? This one is Hands of Stone, a 2016 movie about the career of the legendary, and somewhat infamous, world champion boxer, Roberto Duran. The movie was directed by Jonathan Jakubowicz, a Polish-Jewish-Venezuelan. It stars Edgar Ramirez as Roberto Duran, Robert de Niro as his trainer Ray Arcel, Ana de Armas, as the love interest and Duran's wife, and the great leftist salsero Ruben Blades as a wealthy Panamanian backer. The Panamanian government actually helped finance the creation of the movie, which I think influenced the way that it got made and some of the content, as we will be discussing soon.

It's a boxing movie, but it deals with a surprising amount of Panamanian-American, Panama-US history in the 20th century, although a bit sloppily. To talk about it, I have invited Mike Paarlberg. Mike is an assistant professor in the Political Science Department at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond and an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC. He's written for a whole bunch of places, including the Guardian, Washington Post, and Foreign Policy on immigration, Central America, and topics like that.

He is currently writing a book on transnational elections and diaspora politics in Mexico, El Salvador, and the Dominican Republic. Mike is an old friend of mine who I know from when I lived in Washington many decades ago. He helped me with Gangsters because he helped introduced me to some people when I went down to Panama to do the research, because he lived in Panama for a time. Mike, welcome to The Racket.

Michael Paarlberg: Yeah. Thank you. It's a real pleasure to be here.

Jonathan: Can you tell us a little bit about your time in Panama, what you were doing there, and how you identify and what your relationship is with the country?

Michael: Yeah. Sure. I'm a political science professor. I do focus on Latin America and Central American, in particular. I lived in Panama as a kid. My father was a foreign service officer. He was a posted US Embassy, Panama. I was there for middle school and part of high school. I have to say, I am not Panamanian. I am American. I'm Korean-American, if that matters. I am coming at this as someone who has lived there, has some lived experience in Panama, but also as an outsider and someone who studies the region from a researcher's perspective. That's where I'm coming from and that's my interest. I'm glad I was able to help out in a small way with your book. It's really fascinating. Congrats on that.

Jonathan: You did. As I noted, my entire experience at Panama was going there for the book, other than I think once before that, I connected through the Panama City airport, as one often does. But when I was there, I traveled around. In my travels, I went to the neighborhood of El Chorrillo, which is the neighborhood that Roberto Duran grew up in. It's featured in this movie in Hands of Stone. I actually went to the gym that he trained in, which I believe I recognized, I think made a cameo, that gym in this movie.

Real fast, just to get everybody up to speed, and again, blanket warning, spoilers, if you want to go see Hands of Stone and not have it ruined for you, and you don't know anything about the history of Roberto Duran or the Panama Canal, go watch that. Hit pause. Come back. We're moving forward with some spoilers here. The plot of the movie is not particularly intricate. Basically, Roberto Duran grows up in El Chorrillo, which is a working class, poor neighborhood of Panama City, right next to the canal. And Ray Arcel, Robert de Niro sees him boxing, is enamored with his ring sense and his fighting style, chooses to help train him.

Duran initially refuses because he refuses to work with an American, but he eventually accepts de Niro's help. He becomes a champion of the world. He defeats Sugar Ray Leonard, who's played by Usher, and then Sugar Ray, Usher challenges him to a rematch. He's not ready for it because he's entered his decadent period of life. Most notoriously, the one thing that some people, at least people who don't remember him in his prime maybe know about Roberto Duran, is that he quits in the middle of that fight and says, or is said to have said, "No más," like he doesn't want to fight anymore. Then he redeems himself at the end, and there's an epilogue, and the movie is over.

Look, we could talk about the boxing, and I think there are actually some things to talk about there. But one of the more interesting things about the movie is that... And this surprised me. I knew that it would touch at least indirectly on themes of colonialism and American imperialism and Panama, but it does it very, very blatantly. There's a flashback at the beginning of the movie to January 9th, 1964. Mike, I don't know, for people who either haven't read Gangsters, I talk about the events of that day in the book, or seen the movie or know about it, tell us a little bit about what happened that day. Then let's talk about the way the movie dealt with it.

Michael: Yeah. That is, I'd say, the most notable event in the mid 20th century history of Panama and Panamanian relations with the US, because it is the event that led to the handover of the Panama Canal to the Panamanians. It is at this point not particularly controversial, but at the time, especially around the Carter administration, beginning the Reagan administration, it was a controversy. It was something that was seen as, I don't know, decline of US empire. Why is the US giving away this thing that they built?

In retrospect, it isn't a controversy, mostly, because the Panamanians at this point run the canal much better than it was ever run under the Americans. I think that's not just me saying this. I think any objective observer would say so. They actually improved the canal. They widened it so that larger ships can go through it. But what precipitated all this was famous moment in 1964, which is butchered, rather, by the movie, in which a number of patriotic Panamanian high school students went to raise a Panamanian flag on what was then US territory, the Panama Canal Zone.

A fight ensued between them and a number of American high school students who we would call Zonians—well, we can get into this—who did not want them to raise a flag on this territory. In the process, the Panamanian flag, which is a historic flag that had been used in previous protests, was torn. This became a huge controversy, led to an uprising by many Panamanians that did lead to a number of deaths, including of civilians, but also some Americans on the American side as well. As a result of this, the United States entered into negotiations with the Panamanian government, which eventually resulted in the signing the Panama Canal treaties between President Carter and Omar Torrijos, who was the military dictator of Panama at the time, but also a populist, and well-loved to this day by many Panamanians.

Jonathan: Let's talk really fast about Zonians. It's a really interesting thing. It's something that you see in other colonial spaces all over the world, the Pieds-Noirs war, the French in Tunisia, British Hong Kongers. I think that there are cousins of this elsewhere. During the lead-up to these flag riots, the US Army general who's in charge of the canal zone, Major General Robert Flemi

This morning, Russia and China announced a “no limits” strategic partnership against what Reuters summarized as the “malign global influence” of the United States. The reactions of the rest of the world remain to be seen. But if their current public positions are any guide, U.S. policymakers and wonks are likely to be caught flatfooted. How could anyone genuinely think we have historically been anything other than a force for unalloyed good? If only there were some framework we could use to explain why the rest of the globe doesn’t necessarily see ourselves the way we do!

Anyhoo … this week on the podcast we’re crossing the Pacific Rim, to the Philippines—America’s longtime colony and the subject of three chapters of Gangsters of Capitalism—where we’re talking about the 2018 Filipino war epic Goyo: Ang Batang Heneral (The Boy General).

The film is a biopic about Gregorio “Goyo” del Pilar, the youngest and reputedly best looking of the Filipino generals who fought the losing 1899-1902 war against American colonization. It is a sequel to 2015’s Heneral Luna, a surprise box office hit that challenged the conventional wisdom in the Philippines that people there do not like to hear about their past. These movies are fascinating, not only because they portray Americans as villains, but because of their deeper critiques about the response of colonized people.

I visited the Goyo set while I was in the Philippines doing research for Gangsters, and, as those of you who’ve read the book already know, I ended up making a cameo in the film. (That mini-story starts on p. 57, if you haven’t gotten there yet.)

To talk about all of that I’m joined from Metro Manila by film critic Philbert Dy. He shares his perspective on the movie, as well as the state of both cinema and politics in the Philippines. It’s a fascinating conversation and I hope you check it out. Click the play button above or look for it on your favorite podcast app. A transcript will be posted below.

Oh, and if you’re curious about what my five seconds of fame in the Philippines looked like, here’s a still. (I’m the prisoner of war with the red beard in the middle.)

The Racket is a reader-supported publication. Never miss a post and support my work by becoming a free or paid subscriber.

In book news, the welcome reception of Gangsters of Capitalism continues. I’ve gotten extremely kind reviews from the Washington Post, New Republic, Associated Press, Jacobin, and more. I was on Chris Hayes’ podcast and The Majority Report this week and The Intercept’s Deconstructed before that, as well as spots with Joy Reid on MSNBC, Democracy Now, and a whole bunch of others.

If you missed my guest essay in the New York Times last week, you can read that here.

Also, I was excited to learn yesterday that the book is already headed for a second printing! Thanks to all of you who have bought Gangsters, recommended it to your libraries, etc. If you haven’t yet, please do, now:

Also reading …

Jamelle Bouie on the deep accounting of slavery

Masha Gessen on the ground in Kyiv

Racket editor Sam Thielman on censorship, obscenity, and Maus at Forever Wars

The Racket is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Episode transcript (may contain transcription errors)

Jonathan M. Katz: Is there a hard edged, but with a heart of gold white American Jewish, bald figure that they would need to cast a journalist? I just want to know if my agent should get in touch.

Philbert Dy: Well, we could always use more villains and white people are easy villains in Filipino cinema.

Jonathan M. Katz: Welcome back to The Racket, a podcast and newsletter that you can find at theracket.news. I am Jonathan Katz. Gangsters of Capitalism is officially out in stores. You could buy it and read it right now. It is about America's rise to global power in the early 20th century and the consequences of that era's wars today. It is told through a stunning combination of my on-the-ground reporting, as well as the life of Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, who was a veteran of every war and occupation of that era only to turn around and become an anti-war and anti-imperialist activist. You should get it and tag me @KatzOnEarth on Twitter and Instagram, share your photos of the book in the wild. I've got some more events upcoming for the release, which I'll talk about at the end of this episode. So we here at The Racket are marking the rollout of Gangsters with what we are calling gangsters movie nights, in which I and a special guest talk about a movie that's either featured in the book or touches on one of the book's major places or themes.

So in the first episode, I watched Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay with Spencer Ackerman. After that, we watched 55 Days at Peking, Nicholas Ray's Western about the Boxer rebellion in China with a scholar of the Boxer rebellion, Jeff Wasserstrom.

Today, we are headed to the Philippines. We're watching Goyo: The Boy General, an epic about the Philippine-American War. It was directed by Jerrold Tarog and starred Filipino heartthrob, Paulo Avelino. It is the first non-American film that we're doing. It is the first one that I talk about specifically in the book. And I believe I can confidently say it is going to be the only movie we do during the series in which I personally make an appearance. That is right, I visited the set of Goyo in 2017 while I was doing research for Gangsters and they cast me as an American prisoner of war.

I am on screen for a stunning five seconds. I assume that my Filipino Oscar is in the mail. To talk about it, I've invited my friend Philbert Dy. I met Phil while I was in the Philippines and he actually makes an unnamed cameo in Gangsters as he was the one responsible for getting me on the set of Goyo. He is a professional writer coming to us from Quezon city who is best known for his work in film criticism. He was a writer at large for Esquire Philippines. Phil was an editor for Rogue Magazine. He was also the co-curator of the New Filipino Cinema program at the Yerba Buena Center of the Arts in San Francisco, California. Currently, he is the editor of CREATEPhilippines, a website that covers the rise of the creative industries in the Philippines. Phil, welcome to The Racket.

Philbert Dy: Hey, Jonathan, good morning from the Philippines.

Jonathan: So, okay. So like I said, this movie came out in 2018. It was actually as you know, the sequel to another movie about the Philippine-American war of 1898 to 1902, a surprise hit at the Filipino box office called Heneral Luna. So Phil, could you set up this conversation by briefly taking us through the plot here? What happens at the end? And obviously, just a blanket warning. This is spoiler central. We're just going blow through all the possible spoilers and all these movies, but can you tell us what happened at the end of Heneral Luna and broadly what is going on in Goyo: The Boy General?

Phil: So yeah, Heneral Luna is about the Philippine hero, Antonio Luna, who was, I believe, considered by the American forces as the most competent general that the Philippines had, but the first president of the Republic hated him so he got killed. So that's the end of Heneral Luna after serving valiantly, I guess, and pissing off all the other generals in the Philippine Revolutionary Army. He was assassinated under the orders of the first president of the Republic, Emilio Aguinaldo. This film, Goya, then pretty much picks up where Luna left off with Luna having just died in the fallout of that. But we follow this other general now who was actually in the first movie, Gregorio del Pilar, nicknamed Goyo. He is the youngest general in the Philippine Revolutionary Army, a particular favorite of Emilio Aguinaldo. The first half of the film basically follows him when he's given command over the province of Pangasinan.

And there are five months of a truce between the Philippines and America. And he just hangs out in Pangasinan and flirts with ladies and holds parties and messes around with his friends. And then the second half follows the flight from Pangasinan towards the northern Philippines. He was accompanying the president, Emilio Aguinaldo, as they were being pursued by the American army going all the way up to Tirad Pass where this mountain in Ilocos Sur. And that's where Emilio Aguinaldo was hiding out for a little bit. And then Gregorio del Pilar basically led the defense of the Tirad Pass, where the Philippine army was crushed and then he died.

Jonathan: So it's [laughs] a very exciting, it's a very thrilling ending.

Phil: Yes

Jonathan: And just so our listeners are going to follow along what's going on here. So broadly speaking, what happens in the history here is that the United States declares war on Spain in 1898, and we declare war on the entire Spanish Empire. So the main focus is on Cuba, but as soon as war is declared, we make sure to sink the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay and the Filipinos and the Americans are fighting alongside each other to defeat the Spanish. But as soon as the Spanish are defeated, we, in true American fashion, betray the Filipinos and decide to colonize the islands for ourselves. So Emilio Aguinaldo, who Phil was talking about, is the president of the abortive first Philippine Republic. And essentially the arc of these movies is that it's following two generals in the first movie, Antonio Luna, and then the second movie, Gregorio "Goyo" del Pilar, as basically the Filipinos lose the war on the battlefield. The war doesn't actually end with Tirad Pass.

First of all, it goes on for another year or so. In Gangsters, the action continues to the Visayas, the islands in the center of the Filipino archipelago. There's a horrendous massacre. Well, the first there's a massacre of American troops, and then there's a revenge massacre of Filipinos on the island of Samar and actually, in a lot of ways, this war continues for another decade after that because there's continued fighting, there's a continued insurgency of the Moros, the Muslim Filipinos in the south, on Mindanao and in the Sulu archipelago.

So, Heneral Luna comes out, it's 2015, right?

Phil: Yeah.

Jonathan: And so that was a shock, right? That movie was as successful as it was. I guess you've talked a lot about this, but my understanding was that there was an assumption among people in the Filipino movie industry that a movie about history and about specifically the Philippine-American war wouldn't be a success.

Phil: Yeah, that's true. We don't actually get a lot of historical films anyway, because they're very expensive to make. And the industry, while we do have what I would consider a pretty thriving film industry with lots of movies made, we tend not to go above a certain budget just because we're the Philippines, it's a third-world. It's very difficult to make movies. And also it's very hard to get sets for period stuff, because most of the Philippines was bombed during World War II and we just don't have old looking buildings anymore where that would look natural.

And usually we get maybe one historical film every two years by some ambitious director who thinks he has something new to say about history. And also I'm going to say that history isn't taught very well in the Philippines. It doesn't seem to be a priority. There's actually this film by John Gianvito, a documentary about high incidents of cancer and birth defects around the American bases in Pampanga. And he went around talking to people around the bases about their problems. And he asked them, "Did you even know that America and the Philippines went to war?" And they didn't because apparently it wasn't being taught in schools. So there's this assumption that there's just a very low interest in history.

Jonathan: Well, it is definitely true for what you're saying in the Philippines, like American's ignorance of our own history, especially our own history in t

Folks, the day has arrived: Gangsters of Capitalism is in the world. You can find it at your local bookstore. If you order it online, it will be shipped or appear in your e-reader or audiobook app immediately. Hallelujah. Oorah.

Elsewhere, things are rougher. Russia looks poised to invade Ukraine. Voting rights are in deep peril. The pandemic is … well, you know. At moments like this, it can be tempting to look back to earlier moments of crisis for inspiration and comfort—only to find our forebears did the exact same thing, by looking back to their past for examples to follow.

This week’s Gangsters Movie Night is 55 Days in Peking, Nicholas Ray’s 1963 film about the Boxer Rebellion, starring Charlton Heston, David Niven, and Ava Gardner. Stylistically a Western, it is set in the China of 1900, during the invasion in which the Marines and Smedley Butler took part. But the messages of internationalism, the fears of imminent world war, and the overriding theme of civilization vs. barbarism are straight out of the high Cold War in which it was made.

My guest is Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a professor of modern Chinese history at the University of Calfornia, Irvine, and author of the upcoming book, The Ghosts of 1900: Stories of China in the Year of the Boxers. It’s a great conversation. Please enjoy and share widely. A transcript is below.

For more on the real Boxer War and how memories of the U.S. role in that invasion shape Chinese policy today, you can also check out this abridged excerpt from Gangsters that just went up at Foreign Policy.

And be sure you’re signed up for The Racket so you don’t miss the next episode when it drops:

Meanwhile, I’ve been busy with the Gangsters launch. If you missed my launch event at Politics & Prose with Mike Duncan, don’t fret—you can catch the replay here.

I’ve also been making the rounds of other people’s podcasts. Highlights include my interviews on DeRay Mckesson’s Pod Save the People, Jared Yates Sexton’s Muckrake, and Michael Issikoff’s Skullduggery. Some other big names to come.

I’m glad to report the reviews are stellar so far. I’ve most appreciated the raves from my former comrades at the Associated Press and this one from a Marine veteran at Task & Purpose.

And my next virtual bookstore discussion will be hosted by New America and Solid State Books. It features me in conversation with Clint Smith, the Atlantic writer and author of How the Word is Passed. I expect we’ll dive into our books’ shared focus on sites of memory and the silencing of the past. That will be on Jan. 27 at 12 p.m. ET. You can register and find more information here.

The Racket is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, become a free or paid subscriber.

Episode transcript (may contain transcription errors)

Movie Narrator: Peking, China, the summer of the year 1900. The rains are late. The crops have failed. A hundred million Chinese are hungry and the violent wind of discontent disturbs the land. Within the foreign compound, a thousand foreigners live and work. Citizens of a dozen far-off nations …

Jonathan M. Katz: You're listening to The Racket, a podcast and newsletter that you can find at theracket.news. I am Jonathan M. Katz. It is pub week for my book Gangsters of Capitalism, Smedley Butler, The Marines, and The Making and Breaking of America's Empire. It's an exploration of the hidden history of America's path to global power and the ways that all seems to be crashing down around us today. Told through historical memory and the life of one of history's most fascinating but not well enough known figures, the Marine Major General Smedley Darlington Butler.

Gangsters is getting nice reviews from all over the spectrum. The Federalist called it “immensely readable.” Yes, the Federalist. Noam Chomsky calls it “a real page turner,” so there you go. Please go buy it and hit me up at @KatzOnEarth on Twitter to share your photos of the book in the wild. Stay tuned to the end of this podcast and I'll talk about some upcoming events for the release.

This is our second episode of Gangsters Movie Nights. So, each episode we're featuring a different movie that explores a theme or place from the book. Last time I had on Spencer Ackerman to talk about Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. Not a great film, but it made for a great discussion. Check it out at theracket.news or wherever you get your podcasts.

This week we are moving actually across an ocean and a half, I suppose, to China, with 1963’s 55 Days at Peking. It's a war movie, although stylistically it's more of a Western, about the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. A war almost entirely forgotten by Americans, well remembered by people in China. However, it's covered in Gangsters and of course, Smedley Butler and the Marines took part.

So, this movie stars Charlton Heston as the Marine major, David Niven as a British diplomat, Ava Gardener as a disgraced Russian Baroness. It was directed—officially—by Nicholas Ray who is best known for directing James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. It's kind of a weird movie, entertaining in parts, just cringey in others, not least because the main Chinese characters are played by white British and Australian character actors in yellowface, and it was a flop at the box office, but I think, like Harold and Kumar last week, it holds an interesting place in cultural memory, and is going to be a great jumping off point to talk about a lot of different issues.

So, to do that, I have a special guest, Professor Jeffrey Wasserstrom. Jeff is the Chancellor's Professor of History at UC Irvine, where he also holds courtesy appointments in law and literary journalism. His most recent books are Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink, and he's the editor of The Oxford History of Modern China. He often contributes to newspapers, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, literary reviews, magazines, The Nation, Dissent, The Atlantic, a whole bunch of other places. And he's currently finishing work on a new book, appropriately, The Ghosts of 1900: Stories of China in the Year of the Boxers. Jeff helped me a lot in preparation for my research in Gangsters ahead of the month that I spent reporting in China for the book. And he turned me onto this film at that time, and I'm really glad to be talking to him about it today. Jeff, welcome to The Racket.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom: Thanks, I'm glad you're glad I got you to watch this movie, even though parts of it are, as you say, very cringe-worthy.

Jonathan: All right, so here's how we're going to do this. Because this is a movie that no one—very few people—in 2022 have heard of, about a historical event that most people listening to this, in English in the United States especially, have not heard about, I'm going to give a very, very brief summary of the plot of the movie. And then, Jeff, I'm going to ask you to give a brief summary of the Boxer Rebellion, or the Boxer Crisis, as I believe you prefer to call it, so everyone knows more or less what we're talking about, and note that this is going to spoil the entire movie. So, if you want to watch it, it's on YouTube for free, hit pause, come back when you're ready.

All right. So, as I said, this is a Western, specifically a fort movie, except instead of Fort Apache being surrounded by menacing Native Americans. It's the foreign legation quarter in Beijing surrounded by menacing Chinese people. The movie opens with a long overture, there's some setup about how there's a big drought in China that foreigners are taking advantage of the crisis to seize more land and resources. Charlton Heston playing Marine Major Matt Lewis rides in on a horse leading a column of Marines who all look especially like cowboys.

He has a brief showdown with some Boxers which ends with an English missionary dead and a Boxer killed. Things keep getting worse between the Boxers and the foreigners until the Empress Dowager of China played by Flora Robson decides to ally with the Boxers to drive the foreigners out. The foreigners want to leave but David Niven as the senior British diplomat convinces everybody else in the legation quarter to stay. The Boxers kill the German Minister while another Chinese official played by another white guy looks on.

Then basically, there's a long siege, a couple of battles, and pretty impressive special effects for 1963. Charlton Heston and David Niven go on this weird raid dressed as Boxers to blow up the Chinese armory. A lot of people die bloodlessly, like they just kind of like fall over. And then finally, the cavalry arrives in the form of reinforcements from the eight-nation allied armies. There's also this weird romantic subplot involving Ava Gardner as this disgraced Russian baroness whose husband killed himself because she had an affair with a Chinese man and she and Charlton Heston kind of fall in love and then she dies and he doesn't really care. The movie ends with Charlton Heston riding off into the sunset with the half Chinese half Anglo-American teenage daughter of a Marine who died during the movie with the implication that Heston is going to raise her as his own daughter.

So, Jeff, why don't you take us through what actually happened briefly, more or less, in 1900 and explain what is the history that this movie is awkwardly, and often wrongly, trying to tell?

Jeffrey: So, the Boxers believe that the world had been thrown out of whack by the coming of what they saw as a foreign religion in the form of Christianity, and foreign objects, including railways and telegraphs and things like that. And so, there was a terrible drought and they blamed the drought in part on local Gods withholding rain to show their displeasure at the presence of these polluting foreign presences on sacred soil.

So, one thing that the movie leaves out is it most of the people, the Boxers attacked were Chinese Christians. And so, most of the violence was directed against Chinese Christians in the late 1890s. And the first foreigner they killed, they killed a missionary at the end of 1899. But then it became a global crisis, and the world became more invested in what was going on there, when they started attacking more missionary families.

And then they converged on Beijing, the capital of the Qing Empire, and also the nearby city of Tianjin. And they ended up putting both those cities under siege, threatening the lives of foreigners from many different places in those two cities. I don't like to call it the Boxer Rebellion because they weren't rebels. They talked about being loyal to the Qing Dynasty. Rebels traditionally in China tried to overthrow a dynasty. But instead, they claim to support the dynasty in standing up to foreign powers who had been bullying the dynasty and foreign powers have been carving out zones of influence and even claiming parts of Chinese territory for decades before that. First the British, but then the French as well. And then other countries, [such as] Japan, got in on the action as well.

So, the movie takes up at this point where what had been an uprising in rural North China has become an international crisis in two major cities of North China. And the focus is on Beijing, which makes sense, that's where the diplomats from around the world were. And so, it really made it an issue that led to the formation of this incredibly cosmopolitan, eight-[nation] allied army, which was, there had been alliances of powers in wars before, but usually they were just groups of European powers.

This constellation included for the first time—and this is what's crucial to your book and where your book captures this very well—American forces[, which] are kind of a major part of this joint imperialist effort, as it's seen in the perspective from China. And there's a lot to be said for it. These are a group of foreign powers who have designs on maximizing their access to the Chinese market, and also ideally to get sort of beachheads of one kind or another, their former formal possessions or at least parts of cities that they can have beachheads in.

And so, there are eight countries involved in this what becomes a war, and it's often called the Boxer war. Japan is part of it, Russia is part of it, the Western European powers, you kind of expect to be part of it, and the United States. So, it really is quite extraordinary. And then, there is the 55-day siege of Beijing, that's eventually lifted by the coming of an international relief force. So, it's strange because they focus more on the actions by groups within delegations. Whereas in a sense, the main action that decides the war is this foreign force that fights its way first to Tianjin and frees the captives there. By the way, captives the

Happy belated new year! We are dangerously close to the Jan. 18 release of Gangsters of Capitalism, my book about Smedley Butler and the making and breaking of America’s empire. (Thanks to everyone who has pre-ordered so far—if you haven’t, here’s a link.)

Since I’m doing a bunch of interviews around the debut, I wanted to do something a little different with the book here. Gangsters of Capitalism is to a large extent about historical memory—about how the first great wave of U.S. overseas imperialism has (and hasn’t) been passed down through the generations, including through movies. So, we thought, why not watch some movies about the themes and places in the book? And invite interesting people to talk about them?

We are calling it “Gangsters Movie Nights.” And we are starting with a banger. Spencer Ackerman, author of Reign of Terror, writer of Forever Wars, and Pulitzer Prize winner for his work on the Snowden files, joins me to talk about the place where Smedley Butler’s career and America’s overseas empire both began: Guantánamo Bay.

As I note in the episode, there aren’t many movies that deal with Gitmo. There’s A Few Good Men, but it’s set in the days before the prison camp. There’s a recent Jodie Foster film that didn’t make a huge splash. Then Spencer came up with the answer: 2008’s Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay.

What does a gross-out/buddy/stoner comedy have to say about American empire? How long can two investigative journalists talk about what was originally slated to be a direct-to-DVD sequel to a movie about a trip to White Castle? To find out, hit play above or download this episode wherever you get your podcasts—Spotify, iTunes, etc. If you’re more of a reader, a transcript is below.

Thanks for listening and spreading the word. Please subscribe below to make sure you don’t miss an episode.

Subscribe to The Racket

Also a reminder that the online launch event for Gangsters will be next Tuesday, January 18, at 6 p.m. ET, featuring me in conversation with Mike Duncan of the Revolutions and History of Rome podcasts. It will be hosted online by D.C.’s Politics & Prose bookstore. You can RSVP to virtually “attend” here.

Transcript (may contain errors)

Harold Lee (John Cho): Do we have the right to make a phone call?

Ron Fox (Rob Corddry): Oh, oh yeah. Oh yeah. I'm sorry. You want rights now? You want freedoms right now? Is it time ... is it freedom o'clock?

Guess what? Where you guys are going, they have never even heard of rights.

Harold: Well, where are we going?

Jonathan M. Katz: Hello, you are listening to The Racket, a newsletter and podcast, which you can also find online at theracket.news, that's dot N-E-W-S. I am Jonathan M. Katz and I've got a really cool episode of the podcast newsletter for you here today.

So this is part of the run up to the release of Gangsters of Capitalism, my book, which comes out on January 18th. Go pre-order it if you have not pre-ordered it yet. There's a lot going on as we move into pub date. The first excerpt is up at Rolling Stone. You can go read it right now at rollingstone.com. It is about the main figure in my book, the Marine Smedley Butler and his foiling of an alleged 1934 fascist coup to overthrow Franklin Roosevelt, which has a lot of very clear tie-ins to the crises of democracy that are happening today and January 6th, and all those things.

For those of you who are not familiar, Smedley Butler was a Marine who fought in basically every overseas war, invasion, occupation of the early 20th century. And the book looks at Butler's life to understand American empire, both from our perspective and the perspective of the people whose countries we've invaded. It's, I think, a fascinating book. I think you're really going to enjoy it.

We here at The Racket thought we would do something a little different in the run up to the book's release as a way of exploring the many places and themes discussed in Gangsters of Capitalism through the medium of film. We're calling it Gangsters Movie Nights. So each week we are going to be talking about a film set in one of the places that I talk about in Gangsters of Capitalism. One of the places that the United States and Smedley Butler invaded, occupied in the early 20th century. So, China, Haiti, the Philippines, it goes on from there, and we have a really exciting roster of guests who are experts in the regions, the histories of the places that I wrote about who I have constricted to watching these films with me. Some of them are movies that I talk about in the book. Some of them are movies that you have possibly heard of. Some of them are extremely obscure and some of them are absolutely horrible.

So we are starting off in the place where America's overseas empire and Smedley Butler's career began. A place in Cuba called Guantanamo Bay. So I visited there in 2017, which is a trip you can read about in Gangsters and to talk about Guantanamo, I have the best person I can think of to talk about Guantanamo Bay, Spencer Ackerman.

Spencer spent 20 years covering the war on terror from Guantanamo, as well as Iraq, Afghanistan, Washington, all over the place. In 2014, he shared the Pulitzer Prize for his work on the revelations about the national security agency that came courtesy of Edward Snowden. Spencer also wrote an incredible book, which you should go read right now, it's called Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump. Spencer also writes the Forever Wars newsletter at substack.com, which I should note is edited by the editor of The Racket, Sam Thielman.

So I've wanted to put Gangsters of Capitalism in conversation with Reign of Terror from the moment I read Spencer's book and our shared coverage of Guantanamo seemed like the ideal place to do it. The problem was that there aren't actually very many movies that talk about Guantanamo, at least those that have come out since the prison camp opened. There was one film, however, and I'm going to blame Spencer for suggesting it. And that is 2008's Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay written and directed by Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg.

So before we get into it, I have a couple of content warnings. First of all, this film contains racist stereotypes, mostly but not, I think honestly, solely for the purpose of mocking them, very graphic jokes about sexual assault, which we'll discuss. We're also going to proceed on the assumption that anyone who would care about spoilers saw this thing sometime over the last 14 or so years. Though, granted, the target audience for this movie may admittedly not remember what they saw when they did.

So I also want to note, it might sound like a weird choice to talk about American empire abuses and the war on terror through the lens of, let's just admit it here, it's a gross out stoner comedy. But I think that it actually is going to provide for a very productive conversation. Gangsters is all about exploring historical memory and there is no better way to do that than ... or there are fewer better ways to do that, I should say, than looking at the documents that a culture produces to delve into its own dreams and its own nightmares. So Spencer, let's get into it.

Spencer Ackerman: So I guess that's a disclaimer to listeners that conceptually, this episode may not work. We came up with the idea of doing Harold and Kumar, not just cause it's one of the only movies we could think of that really does apply here, but also the fact of a movie like that, playing this accidentally cultural outsized role when it comes to the existence of a forever prison is, itself worthy of discussing because when you realize that the Guantanamo post 9/11 cannon prominently features Harold and Kumar escape from Guantanamo Bay, that's a lesson in how normalization proceeds.

Jonathan: Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle came out in 2004 and it is an unapologetic stoner film, as is this one. It's essentially a movie about two college friends who get stoned and try to go to White Castle, and it takes them on basically a picturesque adventure in which they get into all kinds of trouble. Insofar as Harold and Kumar occupied a larger place in the culture than its role in stoner culture. It was one of the first movies to feature two Asian actors, a John Cho, who's of Korean descent and Cal Penn, who's Indian American. So it got some plaudits ... it inspired some people. I think some of my Indian and east Asian American stoner friends saw themselves in that movie. But beyond that, it's a stoner movie. It's just the dumb misogynist kind of stoner movie.

Spencer: Again, this is a pretty bad movie. It's not so bad that respect must be paid, except in some places. This isn’t an irredeemable movie, but I got pretty high watching this and that didn't improve the experience. There's really sublime, stoner humor and then there's whatever Harold and Kumar is.

Harold is the friend with the stick up his ass and Kumar is the irresponsible one who keeps getting Harold into some zany capers.

There's a bit of a subplot that we should mention where Kumar's ex-girlfriend is marrying a Bush administration official. And you know, the guy before going to marry Kumar's ex says something on the order of, "If you ever find yourself in any jams, let me know and through my connections to the president, through my dad, we'll get you out of it."

So our boys get on the plane to Amsterdam and Kumar, wacky guy that he is, can't resist having built a smoke free bong. Basically he invents a vaporizer. And because Kumar is brown, once the device is revealed on the plane, it's suspected that they're terrorists.

Woman on plane: Terrorist!

Harold: Goldie? No, ma'am-

Woman on plane: What the f**k is that thing in his hand?

Harold: Not a terrorist. He's just an idiot.

Kumar Patel (Kal Penn): This is just a bong.

Man on plane: He said he got a bomb!

Spencer: So they end up in Guantanamo Bay. I think this movie was released in 2008. I got to say that I did see this movie in the theaters. So, this is a return trip to escape from Guantanamo Bay for me.

This is really the amazing thing about this movie. There's maybe five minutes of screen time where they're actually at Guantanamo Bay. This is more a movie about the country that creates a Guantanamo Bay than it is a movie about Guantanamo Bay. But among the remarkable things that we see at Guantanamo is male sexual assault.

Unfortunately, because this movie is what it is, this is a very serious thing that gets played for laughs. People in U.S. custody, whether it's at Guantanamo or whether it's at the CIA black sites, were sexually tortured. This was not a torture program that somehow found itself able to avoid the pitfalls, shall we say, of the temptation to harm people sexually when you have impunity over them.

Harold and Kumar, again, badly, offensively to play this for laughs, nevertheless, show the reality that among the things that happen at Guantanamo Bay is sexual assault. I'm unfortunately forgetting the detainee's names, but one of the detainees who went on a hunger strike in 2013, a pivotal moment in the Guantanamo Bay detention facility's history wrote an op-ed that ended up getting published in the New York Times, talking about how among the places that U.S. Guards and medical personnel inserted tubes in order, ostensibly, to forcibly hydrate and feed him, was his penis. Again, very, very rarely have we come to terms with that, or even have it as acceptable framing for what goes on there.

Jonathan: The joke here is that the detainees are forced to eat what the guards charmingly call a cock meat sandwich. Harold and Kumar are about to perform the act when two middle Eastern guys in the cell next to them bite off the guard's penis. But that isn't the only form of prisoner abuse that the film lampoons.

They're thrown into the cell. They have a goat shitting on their bed? But that's touching on a real thing, right? The detainees, for years, have talked about animal infestations, the infamous banana rats, that s**t in their cells.

Spencer: So a banana rat is an abnormal, even for New York City, large rodent. It's not feral like a rat is, but it's so named because its feces remind us somewhat of bananas. So it's called the banana rat.

Jonathan: So I went in 2017 to do the historical research and also to talk about Guantanamo now. So in this movie, unsanitary conditions and animal infestation is played for a joke at Guantanamo. You probably remember, I'm sure you remember, Spencer, the gift shops at Guantanamo.

Spencer: Yeah.

Jonathan: There were gift shops everywhere. It was just like American capitalism taken to its reductio ad absurdum.

So Guantanamo is ... it's a Naval station. There's a base town. There is the JTF, the Joint Task Force section, which is the prison. In the main gift shop in the base town, they sell plush toys and one of the plush toys that you can buy for your kid is a banana rat. Those weren't the only bad jokes that were being made in that gift shop.

Spencer: No. Nowhere near.

Jonathan: Yeah. There were t-shirts with iguana in front of barbed wire and it was like "fun in the sun."

Spencer: Yeah. So the first time I went to Guantanamo bay w

Are the unvaccinated entitled, deprived, or just misunderstood? What would be a more effective way of controlling the COVID pandemic—shame or providing healthcare for all? (Or both?)

I talked with Eula Biss, author of On Immunity: An Inoculation, for this week’s Racket podcast. We went deep into the long history of debates over inoculation (debates that started even before the first vaccine was invented!), the power of conversation, and our own experiences vaccinating our respective kids.

The Racket is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

You can also listen to audio episodes on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Also discussed in this episode:

“The Unvaccinated May Not Be Who You Think” by Zeynep Tufekci

“Who’s afraid of the vaccine mandate” (The Racket)

Having and Being Had by Eula Biss

Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, The Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire by Jonathan M. Katz

Historian Farren Yero

Produced by Evan Roberts. Research by Annie Malcolm.

Transcript (may contain errors)

[00:00:00] JONATHAN KATZ: Welcome to The Racket, a newsletter and podcast that asks what's really going on out there. I'm Jonathan M. Katz. A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece at The Racket called Who's Afraid of the Vaccine Mandate in which I discussed the most thought-provoking and enlightening book on vaccines in American culture that I've read "On Immunity" by the essayist Eula Biss, who I'm very pleased to say is joining us here on the show right now. Eula is the author of four books most recently Having and Being Had. She won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. I can't really think of a higher honor than being awarded a prize for criticism by critics. And she also used to teach at Northwestern University—which, and I don't know if this takes the luster off of that particular accolade, but that happens to be my Alma mater— um in the English major in writing. Eula, thanks for being here.

[00:01:15] EULA BISS: Oh, totally. My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

[00:01:18] JONATHAN: So the reason I wanted to talk to you is because, On Immunity is just this incredible deep dive meditation. , and really, I like, I highly recommend it to every, I've been recommending it since like before the pandemic, but especially in this COVID moment, this ongoing COVID moment, um, it's just this incredible meditation on. What vaccines mean, what it means to be, you know, anti-vaccine or pro-vaccine. , and I just, just to get us started, you know, obviously you wrote the book, uh, it came out in 2014, long before COVID , was a thing. What was happening in, in your life? What was happening in, the conversation around vaccines, that set you on the path to write it?

[00:02:04] EULA: Um, well, I started writing this book very shortly after having my first child. , when the question of vaccination was high on my mind. I had just gone through the decision of whether or not to vaccinate my own child. I was in conversation with lots of other parents around me about their vaccination decisions. And I was just, uh, I was really intrigued by some of the philosophical questions around vaccination. the biggest and most pressing one for me was really like the question of parenthood. How do you care for someone who can't care for themselves? You know, this to me felt like a Tremendously difficult question to answer. So I was very aware that I was making decisions for someone who couldn't make their own decisions. , and that's where a lot of the research that, that began the book came from was wanting , to do, , due diligence, I guess.

[00:03:04] JONATHAN: Yeah, I mean, and I think one of the important things to remember that is easy to forget in, in 2021 is that, you know, these arguments over vaccination over vaccine mandates, , have been going on for a very, very long time. Before COVID was even a glimmer in the eye of the horse shoot bat or, or wherever it started.

[00:03:26] EULA: I was actually really surprised when I started doing research to find out how very old these debates are. the first really robust anti-vaccination movement was in England, in the 1850s. So it's, you know, well over 150 years ago, so And there was something about finding that out. That, that also drove me further into the questions around vaccination. I was, I was really intrigued to discover that even though all the technology around vaccination was different in the 1850s, some of the fears around vaccination were the same and it had remained the same. Um, so some of the same things that I heard parents saying to me around 2009, I was seeing quoted in the texts and the pamphlets from the 1850s. So especially. You know, things about, uh, suspicion of state power, you know, and fear of state power, um, or the role of the state and the lives of individuals. but also fears about impurities entering the body and that vaccine back in the 1850s, this is before hollow needles, so people are not getting injections back then. A slit is made in the skin in the 1850s and the vaccine material is rubbed into that slit. So the skin is being broken and something is entering the body. So a lot of the fears people have around vaccination are just visceral responses to the body being penetrated. Right. It's and, and sometimes they're sexualized because there's some sexual nature to that penetration. So that, that comes up again. And again, if you read a lot about fear of vaccination, you'll see sexualized descriptions of vaccination that, you know, compare it to rape in some cases. Soit's definitely the people's sense of integrity of their own body is very, you know, caught up in, in their fears and resistance to vaccination.

[00:05:27] JONATHAN: Some of these conversations go back even before the invention of the first vaccine, they, they, they were happening around inoculation, which was an earlier process where, how did it work? They would cut part of your arm and like put a pustule from somebody who had smallpox into your body. Right.

[00:05:45] EULA: Yeah. So inoculation is the broader category that both vaccination and variolation fall into. And so variolation is the technology that preceded vaccination and it's really, really old it's um, probably thousands of years old. It goes back to, , Eastern medicine. It was practiced in China. It was practiced in India first. Variolation was folk medicine. and this was intentionally giving someone a less severe case of the disease. , so it's different than vaccination in that disease hasn't been. Attenuated in a way that prevents you from actually getting the disease you are in variolation, you're being given the disease. But ideally you're , being given a less severe version of it, you know, a strain that has shown itself to be less deadly. And there's various ways that this was done sometimes scabs from people who had had smallpox were ground up and sniffed through the nose sometimes. , plus was rubbed into a wound on a person, a child. But because variolation was actually giving someone smallpox. It was very dangerous. But it was less dangerous than getting the most deadly strain of smallpox. So for hundreds of years, people looked at this as a better alternative than to just leaving one's child to chance, this is usually done. Variolation was usually done on a child and it was done to try to prevent that child from later getting a more serious version of the same disease.

[00:07:24] JONATHAN: And, you know, you're hitting the nail on the head there. I mean, that's, that was the calculus that a lot of people were making back then. And it's the calculus that people are making today. And I think it's important. I mean, um,one of my friends, a historian named, uh, Farren Yero, her project is all about, original, uh, attempts at variolation under the Spanish empire, um, where they were, bringing smallpox in the bodies of enslaved people to the new world. Like that was the container that they were then using to then kind of scoop out and put into, into people in, in Mexico and, and, and their, and their colonies. And so, like, there is this, you know, very invasive Imperial, uh, you know, history, but as you note, you have to, you know, run these risk benefit calculations right from the beginning of American history.

 you talk in, in, in, on immunity about George Washington, trying to balance that ledger in his mind between the risk of, very leading his troops and the risk of a major smallpox epidemic that could have, you know, wiped out the American revolution. Uh, can you, can you talk a little bit more about that?

[00:08:40] EULA: Yeah. Yeah. This came after, um, Washington lost a major battle. I think it was the first major loss of the revolutionary war. Um, and he lost it because so many of his troops were sick. There was a smallpox epidemic going on at the moment and he didn’t want to have to force variolation on his troops, but I think he also saw the possibility that the war could be lost to this epidemic. And so that's, as I understand it, that's the calculation that was going on for him. and he did end up forcing the variolation of all of his troops. and that wasn't something that his troops were necessarily happy about at that time. You know, this is a dangerous therapy that he's insisting on. This is from, um, Michael Welch's book, Pox Americana. It's a great history of, it's kind of like a legal history of both of smallpox in the US but of how many of our laws today originated in conflicts around disease and vaccination,

[00:09:55] JONATHAN: Yeah. I mean, I know you've talked about how conversations about vaccination are often conversations about other things. This kind of goes to the heart of what we're talking about here, right? Because to put it mildly, there's a lot of bad faith in the conversation about vaccines, vaccine mandates, and specifically the COVID vaccine. I don't know, it's something that I've had a hard time navigating myself. And it's one of the reasons why I really wanted to talk to you because I feel like you've explored a lot of these questions, you know, before the fact. One of the things that reading On Immunity did for me, was it gave me an extreme amount of empathy for people who make a different choice, as much as I think is a horrible choice, but just to understand a little bit where they're coming from. Not everybody who is refusing a vaccine is doing so because they're just an absolute moral monster.

[00:10:58] EULA: You know, back in 2009, when I first started writing about this part of the problem was that vaccination was very often framed as a question of personal choice. Like, like many things are framed in our society. You know, we're, we're very focused on personal choice and individualism. Um, it's more common now to see vaccination framed as a question of civic responsibility or civic duty, which is what I think it is. But it took quite a bit of time kind of mucking around in the information and the science of vaccination before I came to understand that myself. So much of the conversation back then in 2009, was still you, it might be helpful to say this is also in the moment of the H 1 N 1 pandemic, right? So there was kind of a special intensity around vaccination when I started writing about it because of H 1 N 1. When I was reading about vaccination in say, you know, the magazines that I picked up , in the waiting room at my, midwife's office or you know, the pediatrician's office or, popular newspapers, almost all those places, vacs vaccination was framed as a matter of personal choice. And you should make the choice that you're most comfortable with was how it was framed. I, I don't think that's how we should talk about vaccination, but I do think that it is useful to understand what is going on for people who feel resistant to vaccination, because what we're really dealing with with vaccination is. Uh, technology, that is a consensus technology. It works best if we all agree to do it. So we're not really used to building consensus in this society and this governance structure. and so I think we're fairly rusty around consensus building skills, but that's where we need to go. And I think part of that consensus building project is to understand why people who don't vaccinate don't vaccinate. So back in 2009, you know, part of what I learned in my research and my research included just casual conversations with other parents. So on playgrounds and on beaches and at my son's daycare and preschool, I was just talking to other parents about their decisions. And I found that there were lots of reasons why, people were hesitant around vaccination or didn't vaccinate or delayed vaccines. and that's backed up by research too, that we now know that that's true, that there is not one homogenous anti-vax position. That it's a very diverse, philosophical stance. People take the stance for lots of different reasons and sometimes don't even take it intentionally. Sometimes people don't vaccinate because of their situation in life. It's not a deliberate decision.

Various people associate vaccination with institutions and entities that they're deeply mistrustful of. And in many cases they have every reason to be mistrustful of those entities. So some, Some people who are very familiar with the long history of the medical establishments failure to, effectively treat women and women's health are, you know, for feminist reasons. Suspicious of vaccination and suspicious of what they see as a kind of paternalistic authority of doctors.

Does that mean that it serves women not to be vaccinated? No. But does that mean that some women have legitimate reasons to be kind of cautious around medical care? Yes, I think so. And the same is true for African-Americans, you know, there's a number o