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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:

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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. But it has its own very particular Haitian flavor to it.

Anthropologically, the zombie is a person or arguably a former person, a person's body, a corpse that has been reanimated in order to serve the interests, either of bokor, which is a sorcerer or someone who has enjoined that bokor to zombify someone on their behalf as Beaumont has done.

And what it entails is, giving a perfectly healthy human being, some poison that essentially slows down their metabolism significantly enough, that they appear as deceased to their loved ones. And as such are buried. That person with the almost to death slowed down metabolism is then reanimated by the same sorcerer.

And one of the three portions of their being, and those three portions would be their ko kadav, their petit bonanj and their gwo bonanj. One of those three portions, the petit bonanj, is retained in some sort of receptacle. An almost equivalent of the spirit or the soul, but not exactly. That's a vulgar translation into other terms.

But in any event, that important intellectual and animating force is contained. The ko kadav, which is essentially the corpse is able to work. And then the gwo bonanj, which animates that corpse is also under the control of the houngan or the person who has contracted the houngan or the bokor in this case.

Jonathan: To analogize it to a totally different realm of popular literature. It's almost a horcrux from Harry Potter. You've got-

Kaiama: Oh my gosh, yeah. Nice.

Jonathan: Right. Because, you've got basically somebody's soul, in an object.

Kaiama: Right, exactly. Well put. I'd never thought about that before. It probably doesn't belong in any of my academic papers, but it'll be useful in my classroom at the very least.

Coachman (Charles Muse): Zombies! Allez vite! Allez!

Kaiama: You mentioned a number of zombie films that have come since White Zombie. And everyone thinks they know what a zombie is, but the zombie we encounter in Hollywood films on AMC and in the Boston Zombie run or what have you, are very different to the anthropological Haitian zombie.

The Haitian zombie isn't trying to run after you bite you or eat your brain. It's not coming after you in flash mobs. The Haitian zombie is an unfortunate individual who has fallen under the spell of a bokor. More to be pitied than feared in certain kinds of ways.

Jonathan: In the genealogy of zombie literature, you can actually see the moment. It's in 1954 in Richard Matheson writes a book, I Am Legend. I Am Legend is then adapted by George Romero into Night of the Living Dead. But Romero, actually looking back, he says that when he made night of the living dead, he didn't think of those creatures as zombies.

His quote was, "We never thought of the creatures in our film as zombies like everyone else at the time, we believe zombies to be those bug-eyed soulless beings that wandered the fields in Haiti.

Kaiama: There you go.

Jonathan: Romeo also, fantastic filmmaker, he's subverting the racialization of the zombie on its head in a lot of different ways. And he ends up working in explicit references to Vodou, which zombies don't exactly come out of, but they come from the same larger spiritual tradition. I don't think, the zombie isn't part of the Vodou religion with its Pantheon of love, of gods. But it's from the people who brought you Vodou basically.

Kaiama: Oh my gosh, I love that, how you're putting it.

Jonathan: Yeah. And Romero, in his later films, in Day of the Dead and others, he brings in a little bit more of an acknowledgment of that. The interesting thing is that, what Matheson does in I Am Legend, is he marries the Haitian zombie with the vampire, and also in that book.

So it's a post apocalyptic fantasy about a global pandemic, which has turned humanity into flesh eating monsters and they're vampires. So they're chasing people down and eating them.

Kaiama: And infecting them.

Jonathan: Right. Infecting them by eating them. I guess it's a reverse vampire. Well, no, it's a vampire.

Kaiama: It's a vampire.

Jonathan: By biting your victim, they become one of you.

Kaiama: Right and they're not eating them. They're, for some inexplicable reason, just compelled to transform other people into people like them, right?

Jonathan: Yes.

Kaiama: It's like they bite them and go on their way to bite others.

Jonathan: And the way that works back into this movie, it's a post hoc situation, because these are the things that happen afterward. But it's interesting because it takes vampirism, which in the European and American context is a form of generally antisemitism. It's a conspiracy theory in which there's a group of super powerful malevolent immoral beings whose only thing is to just ruin everything for everybody else and steal other people's souls and bodies.

Which is totally different from zombies, which is in many ways, it's a remembrance, it's a cultural way of talking about the legacies and trauma of slavery.

Kaiama: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Jonathan: And as Seabrook says in his book, he describes them as a soulless human corpse, still dead, but taken from the grave and endowed by sorcery with a mechanical semblance of life. And he says that, "This is done occasionally for the commission of some crime, but more often, simply as a drudge around the habitation of the farm, setting it dull heavy tasks and beating it like a dumb beast, if it slackens."

And the thing that's interesting about looking back to this film, 1932 movie is that, the sorcerer in this movie is played by Bela Lugosi who right before this movie, right before he made this project, the project he did before that was Dracula. I don't know the extent to which seeing this movie and seeing Lugosi as the zombie bokor, as the zombie sorcerer or whatever might have influenced Matheson.

But you were talking about, that it's not entirely clear what nationality Bela Lugosi is, because Bela Lugosi, he's got his Romanian or Transylvanian accent. But I think the important thing is, and the way that he appears to an audience in 1932, is just as a foreigner.

And he's not in Blackface. There are white people in this movie who are wearing Blackface. So we can say affirmatively that they don't try to put him in blackface, but he's given this sinister goatee and he has-

Kaiama: He's not white.

Jonathan: He's not White. And he's not white in a way, which in 1932, that could be Jewish or could be it be Italian.

Kaiama: It could be German.

Jonathan: German.

Kaiama: It could be Austro-Hungarian is what I was thinking, given the historical and political context, where the US was anti, I mean, as we have often been, but particularly anti-German and in competition with Germans in Haiti, or what have you.

Not that he was meant to be German, but he was clearly distinct from the other White-ish, like the non-Black characters. He was no innocent lovely Neil or Madeline. He wasn't the wealthy Beaumont. He was clearly, maybe a blanc in the Kreyòl sense? Just a foreigner. But he was a devious and ti pe foreigner. How he looked was meant to signify his degradation or his decadent self in some way.

Jonathan: He could be a white Haitian elite. Or beke from somewhere else in the Caribbean or something like that.

Kaiama: Yeah.

Jonathan: And the movie is playing with, so as I said there is... and it was in inescapable. So we're digging back into this movie here. So one important thing I think to note, White Zombie, this is the movie, it inspires the band, White Zombie. It inspires essentially all of zombie literature and movies that come after it. Or they can be traced back to this choke point in some way.

And it is unmistakably Haiti. They make a big deal about the fact that it's Haiti, the movie opens with a burial in the road. There are Black actors, they're burying the corpse of a loved one in the road.

And the only two fully identifiable White American characters are Neil and Madeline. They're coming down the road and he's making explicit references to, "Here we are in the West Indies."

And throughout the movie, they use Haiti as a source of authenticity. It's a way to make the movie more terrifying. There's a scene where the missionary is explaining to Neil. And he's giving this scientific explanation for what is happening here.

He says, "The law of Haiti acknowledges the possibility of being buried alive." And then he says, "Here it is in the penal code."

Dr. Bruner (Joseph Cawthorn): The law of Haiti, the acknowledges the possibility of being buried alive. Here it is in the famous world. I'll read it for you. It's in French. Do you speak French?

Neil Parker (John Harron): No.

Dr. Bruner: The use of drugs or other practices, which produced lethargic coma or lifeless sleep shall be considered attempted murder.

Neil: Yes.

Dr. Bruner: Attempted.

Neil: Yes, I see.

Dr. Bruner: All right. If the person has been buried alive, he actually considered murder, no matter what result follows.

Jonathan: And he quotes Article 2.49, I think of, I guess it's the Code Rural, I'm not sure which penal code it is. But in the advertisements for the movie, they put a translated part of the penal code on the posters, because the point is, this really happens. These people are such savages.

In that scene, the missionary says to Neil, "There's superstitions in Haiti that the natives brought from Africa. Some of them can be traced back as far as ancient Egypt. And beyond that yet in the countries that were old, when Egypt was young." Neil persuaded that this is something that could actually happen.

Neil: Do you mean that Madeline was murdered so that somebody could steal her dead body?

Dr. Bruner: No. Her body yes, but not her dead body.

Neil: Well, surely you don't think she's alive in the hands of natives. Oh no, better dead than that!

Jonathan: In order to establish that authenticity. And this is interesting because this is a thing, again, that Americans have no memory of. We have no memory of where zombies came from. And we have no memory of the US occupation. And those two things are related. But there're all these references, two things that Americans would know from the occupation.

Kaiama: As a Haitianist and someone living in the 21st century who is well aware of the American occupation and the extent to which tales about voodoo proliferated in part as propagandistic justification for American imperialism. It's hard to imagine how much folks knew at the time, because it's all right there in the film.

The fact that you have, it's not a coincidence that Neil is a banker, because this is, we are well aware now of the extent to which the United States was involved in Haiti and the interest of shoring up economic interests and protecting economic interests. We know that.

Jonathan: Specifically Citibank.

Kaiama: Specifically Citibank.

We can see very clearly the trope of the virgin bride potentially being sallied by the darkness of these exotic peoples outside the safety of the United States. And so all of the subtext around her sexualization and objectification, in addition to the low key and high key racism that permeates the whole thing.

It's very easy to place this film in its moment. The question might be whether or not somehow Halperin was making some critique. Was he as the director in any way aware of the ways in which this was telling a certain story of US involvement in Haiti and of the occupation? Or was he just showing his racism and exoticism and whatever else? I think it's more likely the latter.

Jonathan: That's my read. I mean, it's interesting because Seabrook, I think in The Magic Island, the book that it is a very short chapter. I think it's called Dead Men Working in the Cane Fields. Seabrook, I think he's playing a little bit with some criticism of the occupation. There's a little bit of an anti-capitalist critique. The Americans are the bad guys here.

That while we're taking advantage of this dark prime, evil Haitian magic, we're actually the bad guys here because we're the ones who are profiting from this. Maybe I'm missing this. I didn't get that impression at all from Halperin's movie. I think that if he was going to be picking up on Seabrook's critique, I think it would come through in the sugar mill scene.

I don't know. Did you take anything out of that scene? Do you think that there was any critique going on? Because I think it was just like, "Look at these horrible people and they're so stupid." And the zombie falls off a legend into the cane crusher while a Marine zombie is, who looks a lot like Smedley Butler by the way, while he stands guard. He's introduced at another point as Marquis, Captain of Gendarmerie. And the Gendarmerie d’Haiti, the Haitian Gendarmerie was Smedley Butler's creation. That was his client military.

But anyway, I've gone on. So what did you think? That would be the one place where maybe some of Seabrook's critique might have come through, but I didn't see it in that scene personally.

Kaiama: I don't think there's a way to read any of it as critique, frankly. I mean, maybe unwitingly it sneaks in there because he borrows from the source material. But frankly, it seems more without being in Halpern's head nor knowing much about him as a director, beyond this, because I don't think he did much of note as far as I know.

But in any event, it just seems like, "Of course you would put that scene in. It's titillating. It's shocking. Gives an opportunity to see the source of Legendre's wealth and power. And it's another moment where Black folks are decorative in the film. You see them by the side of the road. If you see them in that scene. And the Coachman and the Sherpa. But there's not much.

If I were teaching the film, it would be a teachable moment only in as much as Legendre makes that comment about, "You you could use guys like this for your plantations.", which of course is an illusion first to the corvee, which was the forced work system happening during the occupation where the Marines impressed Black Haitians into service as a free workforce. That was of course itself reminiscent of enslavement. So that escapes the frame, but I wouldn't think that it was meant to do it that way.

Jonathan: And by the way, the corvee imposed by Smedley Butler from his reading of the Haitian legal code.

You brought up the Coachman scene. It opens with Neil and Madeline entering Haiti, encountering this burial on the road at night, where these people are burying their loved one in the road so that the corpse can't be taken. And then they are approached by Lugosi. And then when they get to Beaumont's house, there's an exchange between the Coachman and Neil.

Neil says, "Why did you drive like that you fool, we might have been killed."

And the Coachman says, "Worse than that, Monsieur, we might have been caught."

And he says, "Caught? By whom? Those men spoke to?”

“They are not men, Monsieur, they are dead bodies.”

“Dead?”

Coachman (Charles Muse): Yes Monsieur. Zombies. The living dead. Corpses taken from their graves. One their way to work in sugar mills and fields at night.

Jonathan: So there's a couple of interesting things about that moment. One is that, because this is the first feature length zombie movie, this is the first time that American audiences have heard the word zombie and that description of them as the living dead.

And in that initial introduction, they put in this reference to sugar mills and fields at night. The other thing that's interesting is that as an actor, who is not credited in the film, but later on people have figured out that, that was Clarence Muse. Who happened to be the first Black man to appear in a starring role in American movie. In 1929, he was in a starring role in Hearts in Dixie. A couple years after that, he starred in a movie called The Broken Earth, which was directed by the Polish immigrant, Roman Freulich. It's one of the few you films of the period that features a Black protagonist, a sharecropper against the backdrop of The Great Migration.

And so it's interesting. And it's interesting that have those lines spoken by not a Haitian, but a by a Black American. Not somebody in Black face. I read that also as a way to lend authenticity to this moment. It's like, "This is a real Black man telling you this. This is a real horror that exists."

I don't know. Do you have anything to add about that or are there other scenes which you'd to talk about?

Kaiama: Well, I mean, I guess that scene and others are really, to me, almost just one example of the phenomenon that I find rampant and difficult to resolve around the zombie, which is the ambivalence around whether or not it's "real", whether or not it's to be believed.

And I only say that because, what the film does is its stages in that scene in particular. So you've got this Black man, he's not Haitian, but American audiences at the time, whatever potato, potato. Black dude.

Jonathan: He said monsieur so he must be.

Kaiama: He must be Haitian. He just used a French word. One of those French Negros. So you've got this person who has, through this exposition, explained what a zombie is to these two White people who are clearly shocked and a little scared by what it is they're seeing. But who are also reserving some judgment.

They aren't certain that, that's what that it. It could easily be what Dr. Bruner calls, "This country full of nonsense and suspicion. And that's like staging something we can expect, which is Black and Haitian irrationality against White Western and Quasi-European reason. But then if you think about the fact that, 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. That at the end of the movie, there is no suspension of disbelief. We, as an audience, are meant to come away having seen the story of people who weren't sure that this was happening in Haiti, people who experience it, meaning that it is real.:

And so that scene strikes me as this last moment where we've got this bug eyed wide eyed, super excited Black character, who's scared and made to seem slightly ridiculous. And that then confirmed by the priest doctor, which is, it's amazing. He's both a priest and a doctor. The authority par excellance and he's been in Haiti for a minute. So he knows what he is talking about.

But at the end of the day, it's all true. The Blacks in the film are right to do the burial by the side of the road in order to make sure that nothing happens to death. And the Coachman is right to be afraid of Legendre. So it's interesting the way in which a film that's meant to showcase irrationality and savagery and impossibility like, "That's what happens in the Islands." And, "We are safe from that as rational White beings in the world.", is actually not the case.

So what is the film telling us? What is it saying then about White susceptibility to the influence of Blackness or of the Islands?

Jonathan: I was listening to a great podcast, Time To Say Goodbye as hosted by friend of mine, Jay Caspian Kang. And they were talking about conspiracy theories about China and the Coronavirus. That they both require China to be this savage land of backward people who eat rats and are really sloppy and don't know what they're doing. And are also masterminds who created this incredible, bio-weapon, that they spread around the world.

Kaiama: Exactly. That's a great point.

Jonathan: And then that one, they analogize it to antisemitism, which is another racist conspiracy theory in which Jews were both really dirty and dumb and craving, but also brilliant masterminds who are controlling the world secretly.

Racism doesn't need consistency. In fact, consistency and racism are often antithetical to each other. So I think we're seeing that here. It's like, "These dumb, crazy, magical, super powerful people." And in some ways that makes Haitians in the movie or Black people in general, I guess, extra terrifying because it's like, "You never know. They might be crazy." "Or they might be crazy like a fox and they might steal your bride."

Kaiama: I mean, but that's the common denominator in all of this. And I think the analogy with the other podcast topic is apt. The common denominator is, white vulnerability with the threat of the advancing hoards of the global South be, or the so-called Orientals.

That there's somehow both the idea behind white supremacy, which is the absolute rightness and righteousness of Whiteness, but also to sustain it has to evoke a fear of the other. But a credible fear of the other. That threat has to be credible in order to justify repression and exploitation.

And invasion and occupation in all of these things, because if it was just a bunch of silly Black people, then we wouldn't have to step in and sort things out and oppress and legitimize behavior that is anti-human and anti-humanist. We have to show that, "If we don't do this, they're going to come for, 'where are the White women at?'", from Blazing Saddles, if you catch it. "Where are the White women at?" That's the threat that remains consistent. But that's a cathexis of a bigger phenomenon of the endangerment of Whiteness.

Jonathan:

And to put it in 1932 and in the context of the US occupation, it is another example of that coming up in this movie, is Lugosi's introduction of the zombies. And he gives their back stories. And they're all archetypes from the occupation.

There's Richard, the Minister of The Interior. There's Von Gelder, the wealthy German businessmen, because the fear of German influence is part of the reason why the Wilson administration justified the invasion. That, "If we don't occupy Haiti, then the Germans are going to come and take it out from under our noses." There's the witch doctor. And then there's, like I said, there's Smedley Butler the zombie. Marquis, Captain of Gendarmerie.

Kaiama: Right

Jonathan: And one of the things that's happening here that I think we're getting at is, the terror of the encounter. Fear of Haitian, of Black self-liberation. Of Black independence. There's this idea that because Haiti is a Black country, it is the second oldest independent Republic in the Americas after the United States, the first and the only to be founded in a successful revolution by enslaved people against their French masters.

And part of what we're seeing in this movie is there's this fear that Haitians are both incredibly weak. And so they're just going to be taken over by the Germans or some other White power that's going to come and invade our backyard in the Monroe Doctrine sphere of influence sense. But also they're super powerful.

And so they can defeat White people. They defeated the French. And by the way, again, I don't think it's a coincidence that in this movie, the actor who sets the plot in motion, is this White planter who is Beaumont, who, he's European. So he's not American. It's unclear exactly what his background is.

But it's like he's weak. And then he trusts this maybe Haitian sorcerer. And then he ends up getting taken advantage of. And he ends up getting zombified himself. This is a theme that runs through zombie literature right up into the present day, which is that we have to encounter these unwashed, dirty hoards of subhuman people.

But by encountering them, they're somehow going to attack us or defeat us. That, that threat still exists. And this is my theory of why Robert Matheson's idea of the parasitic vampires zombie fits in so perfectly and ends up just taking over the entire literature in the West. It's because it's this idea that we have to go to Haiti in order to conquer these people because they can't take care of themselves. But in doing so, they will maybe infect us.

Kaiama: Absolutely. The corollary of that is, if they try to come in our direction, they've got to be quarantined at Guantanamo Bay or returned from where's they came. I mean, I've thought about this a lot. The extent to which the zombie horde is a pretty neat signifier for the way that we make efforts to build walls around the safe spaces of neoliberal White capitalism.

Be it detainment at Guantanamo, be it a border wall with Mexico, be it refugee camps in any number of places that apply only to Black and Brown people, as opposed to, I don't know, say Eastern European people. The zombie is the one subhuman being that at least in our entertainment, we can freely and without any sense of guilt, just slaughter. Or as in the case of the film you just referenced, nuke.

That was the plan for the city, is to contain the zombies and then nuke them. And I think that it's only if you scratch beneath the surface of that entertainment and you trace the lineage of the zombie to what we're doing right now, to the moment of its emergence into mainstream American consciousness.

And then we double back even a little bit more to recognize that the originary site of this creature is a Black island that we have struggled to sort out, for lack of a better phrase, since the 18th century. That continuum becomes clear. And you can see all the work that the zombie is doing.

Jonathan: Yeah. It's deep man. Zombies.

Kaiama: It's deep man. Zombies. And to be clear, this is a bad film. There's no getting around it. I was kidding with you at the beginning when I said, "How dare you?"

I mean, honestly, it's just the acting alone, the plot, the shadow puppets in the bar scene, for lack of, I guess, funding to pay extras. It's pretty rinky-dink. But nonetheless, just such a phenomenal artifact in the story that it tells about that particular moment in entertainment history and in American history. And missionary history, to an extent.

Watching the film, I was like, "Okay, I'm trying to think about it. So it's work. I'm not watching it for entertainment." But I was thinking to myself, "So when this came out, am I reacting to this film as someone in 2022 who is looking at something that was made 90 years ago?"

And that's just how people acted and that was considered good. And then I said, "Okay. That's not really. Is there a world in which in 90 years from now, people are going to look at films we've done and are like, 'That's how they acted in the 21st century.'" Maybe this is either typical or bad. But I don't have access to the feeling one would have in a theater seeing this acting. Where does it fall on the spectrum? The film is such a caricature, it's so overacted and underacted at moments. The plot is so messed up and weird and thin in many respects, that it's hard to tell if that was acceptable and fine as entertainment or if this is a particularly bad movie.

Jonathan: I think it was particularly bad. I mean seven years after this movie is made, in 1940 we get Citizen Kane, we get Gone with the Wind, we get The Wizard of Oz.

Kaiama: Fair enough.

Jonathan: Movies are still finding themselves, but you could Barbara Stanwyck is in a big film in 1932, I think in The Purchase Price all …

Kaiama: So people are doing good.

Jonathan: Laurel and Hardy and the Marx brothers are doing, there's decent movies coming out.

Kaiama: All right.

Jonathan: So I guess, I guess your final recommendation on this would be, pass.

Kaiama: Is that where we're landing. Thumbs up or thumbs down. No, it's a hard pass. Except for it's so unique and so fundamental that it's interesting for those reasons. But it's squarely not a good film.

Jonathan: So I just want to ask you very quickly about your book. You could just tell us a little bit about it and congratulations on it.

Kaiama: Thank you. There's zombies in it.

Jonathan: Excellent.

Kaiama: The second chapter. So the book is, A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being. And one of the chapters thinks about the Franco Haitian author, René Depestre was 1988 prize winning novel [foreign language 00:48:28], Hadriana in All My Dreams. Actually, which I also translated back in 2017, which has a zombie as one of its main characters.

And it has a White woman zombie as one of its main characters. And that White woman becomes a zombie on her wedding day. That is a common phenomenon in zombie literature and zombie mythology, is at the White virgin is transformed into a zombie before she can be soiled even by the hands and whatever other apparator or her legitimate spouse.

But in a way that bucks the myth as it normally goes, this zombie escapes from zombification by various disorderly moves.

And so that chapter though, it's the second chapter in the book, is the chapter that started my thinking about the ways in which certain kinds of narratives constrain women or objectify women or zombify women. So that even in the heart of thinking about zombification, which is about enslavement is about alienation and all those things on a broad scale, there's a particular hell reserved for women.

And that's the way the book thinks about a number of novels. Maryse Condé's, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem. René Depestre's, Hadriana in All My Dreams. Haitian writer, Marie Vieux-Chauvet's, Daughter of Haiti from 1954. And then two Anglophone novels. Marlon James', The Book of Night Women from 2009. And Jamaica Kincaid's, The Autobiography of My Mother.

And each of these books has at their center, a disorderly woman who refuses to be either constrained by her community or even incorporated into a community that either witingly or unwitingly seeks to do her harm. And the trick of the book is, or the way into the book is that some of those communities are communities that we consider to be progressive or liberal or good in every way.

And so a woman's decision to not be a part of those communities reads in ways that make us uncomfortable as readers. So that's the book.

Jonathan: I love it. I love it.

Kaiama: Thanks.

Jonathan: And I love that both of us managed to work zombies into our books.

Kaiama: Into our books.

Jonathan: Why not?

Kaiama: Why not?

Jonathan: They pop up everywhere. You never know where they're going pop up.

Kaiama: Literally and metaphorically, they pop up.

Jonathan: All right. Well, thank you. Thank you very much for coming on The Racket, Kaiama. This was fantastic.

Kaiama: A pleasure. And thank you for your book. I enjoyed every page of it.

Jonathan: Thank you. I really appreciate it.

Kaiama: Glad to be in conversation with you.

Jonathan: I appreciate that.

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Thank you to The Racket Podcast team. This episode was produced by Evan Roberts and Annie Malcolm. Sam Feelman is the editor of The Racket. Our theme music is by Los Plantronics. And of course, for more of my writing about foreign policy, the racket of war, all kinds of things, you can find more on my Substack at theracket.news. Thanks for listening. Stay safe.

“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 Fleming, he says this, I guess maybe a notorious, reductive quote, he's really come to resent them, and he says, "They've been isolated so long. They've developed a reactionary mentality. The zone is the perfect place for the guy who's 150% American and 50% whiskey." You knew some Zonians. You introduced me to some Zonians who were lovely people. Tell me a little bit about them and what they represent to Panamanians as well.

Michael: Right. Again, I can't speak for Zonians. I knew a lot of them growing up, went to school with them. The school I went to, it was called Curundu Junior High School, which was roughly, roughly about a third Zonian, a third Panamanian, maybe a third US military. Actually, the time in which I was going there, there was a dividing line because the kids who were born in the '70s before the treaty were signed, were Zonians and therefore American citizens. They were born in the territory, which at the time was US territory, on 10 miles on either side of the canal. Then in the '80s, those who were born in the '80s were no longer American citizens. They would be given US residency, but would be Panamanian citizens, which mainly they resented because they were hypernationalistic.

I'm making generalizations here. But most of them had this settler colonialist mentality, which was they believed themselves to be the defenders of the United States in an outpost of what was once the US empire. They very much strongly identified with the United States as Americans, despite the fact—from my perspective, as someone who is not Zonian and coming from the United States—they didn't seem that American to me. At this point, they had been living in Panama for three generations or more. They were perfectly fluent in Spanish, spoke both Spanish and English, were mostly Catholic, and were intermarried with the elite of Panamanian society.

They identified with United States that they never actually really lived in. In many ways, what they'd lived in, in the Panama canal zone was a strange Disneyland socialist mockup of the United States. They really lived in this paradise where everything was paid for. They got free housing. The salaries they made, as people who were engineers or piloted the ships through the canal, were in the six figures. Many of them, they had these traditions, like the Cayuga Boat Races. It felt like a summer camp.

The way in which everything was taken care for them was very much not like it is in the mainland United States. When all of this officially ended, most of them stayed, but a number of them did end up migrating to the United States, mainland United States. With the handover the canal, a lot of them ended up in Florida. My understanding is a lot of them did stay in a kind of enclave communities, because I think at the time that they finally moved to the US, they realized, "We actually aren't quite as American as we thought."

Jonathan: It's interesting. In the movie, as you said, the way that the 1964 riots are... this precipitating event is portrayed, is a bit fanciful. It's very much historical memory, real events getting thrown into the Vitamix of time and memory, and coming out on the other side. First of all, it shows the child version of Roberto Duran being on the front lines of this thing.

Michael: I'm not sure about that. I can't say he wasn't there, but I had not heard of him being there.

Jonathan: It seems very unlikely, especially because what happens is, the Panamanian students, they're from the Instituto Nacional, right? It was like the most prestigious Panamanian school.

Michael: It's a prestigious technical school.

Jonathan: And he was not. He didn't go to school. And he wasn't old enough to be a high school, anyway.

Michael: He was famously illiterate for much of his life.

Jonathan: Right. Which the movie makes a big deal about. The class differences between him and Ana de Armas, they make a big deal about that in the movie. Instead of setting it up Balboa High School where this confrontation actually happens, they put it at the administrative building, which is a much more grandiose setting. It's got big steps, so the filmmakers could shoot up in a much more imposing way. They show it like the riot has started even before this flag exchange happens. Do we even explain that... what's happened here is basically that John F. Kennedy, the year before, had issued an order saying that the Panamanian and the American flags should both fly in the Panama Canal Zone.

The way that Robert Fleming, the general who had that quote about the guy who is 150% American and 50% whiskey, the way he blunted that order was just by saying that no flags would be flown in the zone. The Americans, especially high school students, both in Cristobal, which is the zone town next to Colon on the Atlantic side and Balboa, which is the zone town next to Panama City, obviously, both of these named for Spanish conquistadors, not subtle, they decide to fly the American flag. These students from the Instituto Nacional say, "Well, if you're going to fly your flag, then we're going to enforce this American edict and fly our flag as well." And s**t gets crazy.

In the movie, they show a Panamanian student shimmying up the flag pole with the flag, and then getting shot down off the pole, which there's a historical memory of people, of them trying to fly this flag on the pole. There's a historical memory of people getting shot. There's historical memory of people, I think, it was on the cover of Life Magazine, climbing up... See, it's a streetlight, I think. Not a flag pole on-

Michael: Right. That was during the riots themselves, not in the original flag incident.

Jonathan: Exactly. And then, there's a big moment in the movie where they take this super Aryan blonde girl, and they take this moment where there was a scuffle and the Panamanian flag did at some point get ripped. I don't think it's clear to anybody exactly how that happened. There's sort of competing views of that. But the movie answers it and says that this blonde girl, she just takes the Panamanian flag and just holds it in front of the camera and just tears it.

Michael: It's imbued with symbolism. As you said, the movie shows someone literally getting shot off the pole by a US soldier. In reality, they didn't actually make it to the flag pole. They had actually negotiated with the US authorities and with the military to allow them to enter. It wasn't actually the soldiers who didn't want them there. It was the students who, in many ways, and this says something about the dynamics of colonialism in many ways, it was the settlers themselves. It was the Zonians themselves who didn't want any kind of negotiation or any kind of equal demonstration, to which the US from Kennedy down to the governor general were okay with.

Of course, the symbolism of the Zonians, again, I don't want to make too many generalizations. There are Black Zonians. There are Zonians who are entirely of Latino descent. It's not that they were all white, but the stereotype there was definitely the racial difference, which was reflected in the movie too, with Duran's relationship with his future wife, who would have been termed in Panamanian terms of the rabes blancas class. These were the upper-class Panamanians who were literally called in Panamanian slang, well, white butts.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Michael: They identified kind of as such. They flew the color white, white flags and wore a lot of white when they were protesting against the Noriega dictatorship. There are definitely strong racial overtones in the movie, which maybe are exaggerated a little bit, but also do reflect dynamics in Panama.

Jonathan: Ana de Armas, she dyes her hair blonde for the role to even accentuate that. Well, one thing that I was going to say in terms of that racial aspect is that, certainly, by the time you were living in Panama, things had changed and there had been a lot of marriage and cross-cultural co-appropriation and things like this. But the color line aspect of it, it comes from somewhere like. I talk about this extensively in Gangsters. When the Canal Zone is founded by the Americans starting in 1903 and then construction of the canal takes until 1914, and all through this period and then the decades after, the Americans introduce essentially Jim Crow segregation to the Canal Zone.

It is introduced as a mark of modernity as the Americans see it. They called it the Gold and Silver System, where officially, it was separated by the payroll. It was basically the people who got paid more were white. They were on the gold roll. Basically, the white people got paid more. The people who got paid less, almost all of whom were Black because the Americans brought in West Indian, almost uniformly Black workers to do the actual digging of the canal. This was baked into the zone. Also, in addition to that, you had the separation between the zone and Panama, which is something that this movie makes a big deal about.

There's a scene where Robert de Niro or Ray Arcel and Roberto Duran go to the Panama Canal Zone, and they're sitting along, I guess, the valle de verguenza, the fence of shame. They have an exchange with a Marine who's like, "Get off the fence." And Ray Arcel, Robert de Niro is like, "He's the one who's in jail because he's trapped in his colonialism on the other side of the fence." This and the way in which the Americans refused to make reparations and actually demanded an indemnity on the Panamanian side for the death of their own people, all of these things are sort of baked in.

Again, it's like this movie, even if people don't really remember the specifics, maybe they don't remember exactly where did this riot take place and do the guys who get shot, were they on the ground or on a flag pole, they remember what it felt like. They remember the way in which they were discriminated against. They remember these hierarchies in which the white Zonians were at the top. I think that's a thing that we're seeing in this movie. In the film, they really use that kind of psychic trauma that inherited psychic trauma as a plot point, which among other things, they end up using it to explain Roberto Duran's, his famous "No mas" moment.

Announcer: He said no más.

Ray Arcel (Robert De Niro): What are you doing? You're going to get canned. What are you doing? You got to fight him.

Roberto Durán (Edgar Ramírez): No. Stop it.

Arcel: You got to fight him.

Durán: No. No. Close it. Just close it.

Arcel: Listen, you have to go in there and fight him. You can't do this. Why are you doing this?

Jonathan: When he's clearly losing to Sugar Ray Leonard, and they flash back again to this scene that we're talking about, of the flag riots at the beginning. Basically, it's like, "Oh god, I've been so traumatized by colonialism. I can't fight anymore."

Michael: Right.

Jonathan: Because this movie is made with the cooperation of the Panamanian government, it seems like this is a genuine thing that explains the way that some Panamanians look at history and look at the United States and look at themselves.

Michael: Yeah. I will have to point out, the director is Venezuelan.

Jonathan: Yes.

Michael: And the star of the movie is Venezuelan, too. But there's a lot of, I'd say, speculative psychoanalysis going on in this movie about what was driving Duran and particularly his nationalism. It portrays his nationalism as something that's ferocious, primal, basically pathological, as you say, the result of childhood trauma. It's not something that's informed by much political analysis, rather this gut reaction to bullying by the Canal Zone. He's treated as irrational, almost animal-like, anti-American, and then a foil to the affable Sugar Ray Leonard, played by the affable Usher.

It's just a little odd. This does reflect the way Duran has been portrayed in US media. There's an ESPN documentary about it. It's actually quite good, but they definitely set this up as Duran as the heel in contrast to the cool, collected, good natured manner of Sugar Ray Leonard. Certainly, Duran's brawling style of boxing is in contrast to Leonard's more technical style. In the US side of this, this narrative, his win over Sugar Ray Leonard in Montreal serves as a second act, leading up to Sugar Ray Leonard's redemption in the rematch.

Now that's not how he's generally seen in Panama, I have to say. I've never met the man myself, but I know know people who've met him. Generally, he's seen as just a patriot. He's not seen as an extremist or anti-American, but just proud to be Panamanian, just the way Sugar Ray Leonard is proud to be American. He's definitely famous for his brawling style of boxing and his heavy hands. He once notoriously knocked out a horse with a punch. I guess that's impressive.

Jonathan: Mongo in Blazing Saddles. That's what—

Michael: Exactly, but in real life. But not someone who's necessarily driven by rage. He's seen as this nice, fun, loving guy. His main problem is that he's too generous. He opened up a restaurant in Panama City, which was failing for years because he gave away too much of his food for free. His son later took it over and wanted to run it like an actual business, and then created a lot of conflict with his dad. It does in some ways, despite being a Panamanian production, reflect many ways that the US media have portrayed Duran in contrast to Sugar Ray Leonard.

Jonathan: There's another scene, this moment that is just like such a freighted moment in the middle of a movie that propels the action forward where the Carter-Torrijos Treaty is being announced, again, in this completely ahistorical manner. They're sitting around like Duran's pool. This is the treaty that leads to the eventual handover, the dissolving of the Canal Zone and the eventual handover of the Panama Canal in, what is it, '77, '78.

Michael: Yeah, '79.

Jonathan: '79, okay. Right.

Michael: The handover was in '99, but then the canal, the treaty were signed '79.

Jonathan: They act as if like they learned that the treaty was going to be signed at the moment that it is signed. They show Torrijos being Por firmar este tratado by signing this treaty and then Duran is like, "He's signing the treaty," and then they all start cheering as if they didn't know that this ceremony was just a formality. Then he goes into the bedroom with Ana de Armas, whose name, I totally forget her name in the movie, because as I'm watching it, I'm just like, "That's Ana de Armas." He's really excited. She, as the more educated, literate partner in this relationship, is like, "You idiot. They're not going to hand this canal over actually for 20 years."

Never trust the Yankees. Just because they say they're going to do this doesn't mean it's going to happen. If you want this treaty to mean anything, she says, you're going to have to basically prove Panamanian sovereignty by beating Sugar Ray Leonard. And she shows him a magazine cover with Usher, I think, as Sugar Ray on it. It's basically like you have to show with your machismo that Panama deserves the canal.

Michael: They make it out to be his wife sexually taunted him into wanting to win the championship. Duran was a professional boxer. He didn't need to be taunted sexually or otherwise in order to want to be the world champion. Of course, that's what every boxer dreams of. Another thing I'd like to point out, Duran is famous for winning the world championship in four different weight classes, and well past what most people would consider their prime years, well into his late '30s. Again, this is something despite being about Duran, it really doesn't do him justice, as a boxer.

He is someone who many professional boxers consider to be their favorite boxer. It was Duran who Mike Tyson actually credits for inspiring him to be a professional boxer. Floyd Mayweather once listed his favorite boxers of all time and put Duran as number two behind of course, Floyd Mayweather, but ahead of Muhammad Ali. So, Duran was a legendary boxer, a legendary boxer for many generations of boxers. Again, this is a little bit unnecessary psychoanalysis of this guy who was a professional and very good at what he did.

Jonathan: There's a movie about colonialism and there is this racial stratification aspect in the way that they portray the zone and in the flag riots at the beginning. But most of the Americans who appear in the movie, just as most of the Panamanians are not Panamanian, they're from other parts of Latin America, most of the Americans, they're minorities, either racial or ethnic, which I just thought was interesting. You've got de Niro playing Ray Arcel. He's playing like a Jewish character.

Michael: Barely playing it. He throws in a couple Yiddish words, but clearly he's doing the same character he always does.

Jonathan: Robert de Niro as the Irishman as this Jewish boxing trainer. Then you have Usher as Sugar Ray Leonard, and you have mafia guys, who John Turturro is clearly supposed to be read, I think he's Italian, maybe Jewish. I don't know. I thought that was interesting. I don't know if it's just that those were the characters that they had to work with, because those were the characters who were there. It was interesting that there's this, the Latinos are kind of Pan-Latino and the Americans tend to not be at least members of the WASP elite. Do you think that they were trying to make some kind of argument there or were those just the characters they had to work with?

Michael: Yeah, I'm not sure. Obviously, some of that took place outside of Panama and certainly when they were portraying both Zonians and the wealthy Panamanians, they were portraying them as white, which there's some truth to that. Actually, to get back to your conversation about Jim Crow, as you pointed out, the Jim Crow system was very much in place in the Panama Canal Zone until it ended in World War II. But when I went to middle school, high school there, there were T-shirts that were being printed by Balboa High School students that had racist caricatures of Black Panamanians on there, making fun of them, portraying them as windshield washers and service workers.

Look, these were high school kids. These were teenagers who were stupid. It did cause a bit of a stir. There was a complaint by the Panamanian government about these shirts. And I'm not saying everyone felt this way. But it is just to say, even well decades later, decades after the signing of the treaty and everything, there were some residual racist attitudes that were very much products of old-school colonialism.

Jonathan: It's baked in. You go back to 1903 to the foundation of Panama, the reason why Panama is a country. I know that there's different feelings about within Panama, about how much they like to identify the United States as having been integral to their formation as a country. But it was because American military power, without the Americans, essentially invading in 1903. But at this moment, the reason why this happens is because the United States is negotiating a treaty to dig a canal with the Colombian government, and the Colombian government refuses over the issue of sovereignty, over this issue that is also this animating thing that goes right through this movie, and in Panama today.

The national park that is the former Canal Zone is Parque Nacional Soberania, Sovereignty National Park. Soberana is the national beer, right? It's like sovereignty beer. It's very clearly on people's minds. And I think is part of why this is maybe such a controversial topic to bring up. But what happens is, it is very clear that the Colombians are not going to give the Americans everything they want. The Americans decide to take it, and they are 100% on the record influenced by racism.

Teddy Roosevelt, who's the one who's more than anybody else responsible for this, he says the idea that the Colombians would think that I would negotiate with such, I believe, he uses the term like corrupt pithecoid community, this corrupt apelike community in the same way that I would negotiate a treaty with, I think, he says like Switzerland or Denmark. They're nuts. He's like they are not our equals. They're not white. It was very clear that the reason why the United States felt empowered to intervene militarily and sever a state of Colombia from the rest of the country was because they thought these are not our equals, that these are not people who deserve equal rights.

It's also worth noting. There's a lot of talk right now with everything that's happening in Eastern Europe, about spheres of influence and the Monroe Doctrine. But Roosevelt at this moment, really, he's pretending like this goes back to the Monroe doctrine, but it's really an entirely new concept that the United States can intervene whenever we want in Latin America. That is based entirely on the idea that these people are inferior to white Americans. It's baked in. Those T-shirts that the high school kids were making when you were growing up, they almost come out of the soil. It's built into the society that they live in.

Michael: The role of the United States in inventing Panama essentially is undeniable, as you detailed in the book. It is true that Panama, when it was part of Colombia was a largely neglected province. It was the hinterlands. And it's not like there weren't genuine pro-independent sentiments in what became Panama. There was a thousand day war between the liberals and conservatives, Panama being a liberal stronghold. It's just that independence would not have been achieved without US intervention. Of course, as you write about notoriously the Panamanian Declaration of Independence, the constitution were written in New York City in the Waldorf Astoria Hotel by Bunau-Varilla. He even tried to design the Panamanian flag, which looked too much like the American flag, echoes what we tried to do in Iraq, incidentally, after Hussein was overthrown.

It's pretty clear that this would not have happened without US intervention. In terms of the racial line, again, there's a lot of irony in the sense that as you pointed out, the Panama Canal was built with Black labor. It was West Indian workers from Barbados, from the Anglophone Caribbean, who ended up moving to Panama because so many... first under the French attempt and later, under the early years, the American attempt, so many canal construction workers were dying of dengue and malaria and yellow fever, and took a long time for them to figure out that they need to drain the pools of water, where the mosquitoes lay their eggs so that they wouldn't get wiped out.

This changed the makeup of Panama. Panama is very much a Caribbean country. When I was living there, they put the word Centroamerica on the license for the first time ever in the '90s. I always thought Panama is a country that is historically South American, because it's historically part of Colombia, geographically, Central American, but culturally very much Caribbean. You see this in the music, in the accents, especially on the Caribbean side. Panamanians will claim they invented Reggaeton, which is not true. Puerto Ricans invented Reggaeton. But they had a style of music called reggae rap, which was very popular when I was living there.

There was the big artist, this guy named El General, who had that famous song “Muevelo.” He dressed as a military dictator, which was very odd because Panama was military dictatorship up until just before I lived there. A lot of people trace their family lineage to the Caribbean and to the Anglophone Caribbean as well. A lot of people speak some English. Panamanians are notorious for speaking bad Spanish with a lot of English words mixed into it. And part of that is the history of US presence, US imperialism. Also, it is the history of these roots in Barbados and Jamaican. What I say, I speak Spanish, but I speak Spanish imperfectly, and my explanation is because I learned it in Panama.

Jonathan: You mentioned a military dictator. That's a thing that's interestingly kept out of this movie. I'm interested to know what you think about that. Manuel Noriega, the movie shows the death of Omar Torrijos, which is then followed by the rise of Noriega, who does not, I think until the very end, actually become in any titular sense the head of Panama. But he is very much the de facto head of Panama for about two decades until he's essentially overthrown by the US in the invasion in 1989, which destroys El Chorrillo, the neighborhood that Roberto Duran comes from, and that Noriega has his Comandancia, his headquarters. I was wondering. I don't think the name Noriega is mentioned in this movie once.

Michael: I did not see it.

Jonathan: Thought that this movie has to be a comprehensive history of Panama, but it's interesting. I was just wondering what you make of that, and then also if you can talk a little bit about Noriega. The pretext for this invasion was Noriega involvement in narco trafficking.

Michael: It was an interesting, a notable absence in the film. Everyone loves Torrijos because he was the one who rested the Panama from the Americans in a way. No one wants to talk about Noriega. Noriega is an embarrassment, I think, to both sides, to the US and to Panama. Certainly, the legacy invasion is not a nice one. When I was living there, it was several years after the invasion, but still I took the bus past El Chorrillo on my way to school and that was a neighborhood that's still largely destroyed and had not been rebuilt years later. This is the neighborhood, a famously tough working class neighborhood that Duran grew up in and as well as Noriega.

But the invasion was ostensibly a police action. The US did not want to call it a war. Noriega was famously a US asset, literally a CIA asset for many years. Panama was an important ally of the US. It was the base of the US Southern Command, which is the command of the US Armed Forces of the Pentagon for the Western Hemisphere, which has since been relocated to Florida. But this is the jumping off point for a lot of imperial adventures of the United States in other parts of Latin America.

Noriega personally allowed the US to, for example, finance the Contras in Nicaragua, in fact, even offered to try to assassinate key Sandinista figures. In return, Noriega basically was given a free pass to be involved in drug trafficking, basically, as the Cold War was winding down and Noriega was no longer as valuable an asset to the United States. And he was genuinely a brutal guy. He pulled off the torture-murder of Hugo Spadafora. He definitely did some horrible things as the ruler. This was something that the US eventually could no longer turn a blind eye to.

They turned on him and they decided they were going to take him out as a drug trafficker. But then, the invasion itself was shrouded in a lot of myth that didn't go the way the US wanted to. There were a couple really bad battles. There was one incident in which a bunch of Navy Seals were stranded at the end of the old Panama airport runway without air cover and were mostly killed. The whole thing was originally dubbed Operation Blue Spoon, and then they had to re-dub it Operation Just Cause to make it a little sexier for the media. Then, of course, the way that Noriega was eventually captured is famous and a bit notorious. They used essentially audio torture. They blasted rock music. I forget which... Do you remember bands they were playing?

Jonathan: It was Twisted Sister, Black Sabbath and Lee Greenwood's “God Bless the USA,” I think were three of the ones that stood out to me.

Michael: Yeah. But they blasted this at the Vatican diplomatic mission where Noriega was hold up. This is of course a precursor to the use of audio torture in the US war on terror. There's a lot of things that I think both the Panamanian side and the US side would rather not remember, and is also conveniently swept another rug in this movie.

Jonathan: Well, I guess they couldn't find a way to pin Duran's boxing decisions on anything that Noriega did. So, maybe he just wasn't useful, narratively. What do you think bottom line? Is this a movie that you would show your students to teach them about Panama, or the Panama Canal Zone? Would you recommend people watch it? What did you think of the movie?

Michael: I don't think it was a good movie. I have to say, I don't think there are many good boxing movies. Maybe the first two Rockies, maybe Raging Bull, but that's about it. So, it's a very cliched movie. It does have some interesting things to say about colonialism. But I have to say there are other Panamanian movies that are a little harder to find, but one Panamanian movie I would recommend is called Chance, which is a dark comedy about a couple of domestic workers, live-in domestic workers who take the family that they work for hostage, but it's also a satire about the lottery in Panama. It's what the title refers to.

This is something I think also is telling about Panama. Panama is famously a tax haven, a fiscal paradise. They have the secret banks, just like in Switzerland, the Cayman Islands. Successful Panamanian presidents have said that they have tried to clamp down on this. It's not quite a secret, but they effectively are. If you are a foreign investor, you don't have to pay any corporate taxes, capital gains taxes, anything like that.

One way that the Panamanian government funds itself is through the national lotteries. We know this as like any lottery, it's a regressive tax. It's a tax on the poor. When I was living there, the tallest building in the country was the national lottery building. It's not necessarily a very impressive skyscraper, but it was one and it was the only really tall building in this neighborhood. I remember going past it, and even as a kid thinking, it looked like it was this tall office building is sucking up what little wealth existed in the neighborhood and putting it all in this one building.

It's symbolic in, I'd say, a cynical way that successive governments have taken advantage of the poor and turned Panama into, in some ways, a very glitzy Dubai in the Western Hemisphere. But that's not the reality, the lived reality for most Panamanians. If you look at the statistics, Panama is, by per capita GDP, the richest country in Latin America. I use this to show my students. This is why you should not use per capita GDP as a measure of economic wellbeing, because it just means that there is a handful of billionaires in the country, and many of them are laundering their money through Panama for shady businesses, drug cartels, and whatnot. And Noriega was definitely not the only one.

Jonathan: Speaking of shady businesses when I was there, the tallest building was Trump Tower.

Michael: Yeah.

Jonathan: I would say basically the same. It was enjoyable in parts. I laughed. I would say if you have anything else to watch, if you have nothing else to do, Hands of Stone. It's one of the only portrayals that I've seen on film of the 1964 flag riots. As somebody who really went down that rabbit hole and researching it for Gangsters of Capitalism, that was a really cool thing to see on screen, even if they did it in a very ahistorical way.

Michael: One coda that I think is illustrative is, as I said, US Southern Command, SOUTHCOM was based in Panama. Then, with the treaty being signed and the Canal Zone, eventually the canal being handed over, the military presence left, but the commander of SOUTHCOM at the time that I lived there was a guy named Barry McCaffrey. And at the very end, McCaffrey was making a last-minute bid to convince the Panamanians to let the US military stay and he failed.

But his bid was, "Okay. Let's not call this a military presence anymore. Let's call it a counternarcotics presence. And let's make this a site of coordinated anti-drug measures between the US and Panama, and maybe all of Latin America." The Panamanians didn't go for it. But McCaffrey went back to the US and he was later named the drug czar. And I think this is illustrative of the way that the US imperial project, colonial project morphed into the anti-drug project, but in many ways kept the same infrastructure, the same tactics, the same personnel in many ways, and has been the continuation of the US imperial project in hemisphere ever since.

Jonathan: Well, Mike, thanks for coming on The Racket and talking about Hands of Stone.

Michael: Of course. It was a pleasure.

Jonathan: Michael Paarlberg is an assistant professor in the Political Science Department at Virginia Commonwealth University. Thanks for coming on today. Please sign up at theracket.news or hit the subscribe button at Spotify, Downcast, iTunes, wherever you listen to podcasts. I know a lot of people are using Tidal now because of certain things happening at Spotify. If you get podcast there, look us up as well. While you're there, please leave us a review. It helps people find us. Thank you to The Racket Podcast team. This episode was produced by Evan Roberts, Annie Malcolm, and Sam Thielman. Our theme music is by Los Plantronics. Thanks for listening. Don't forget to buy Gangsters of Capitalism. Nos veremos, compañeros.

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 the Philippines, I think goes even farther beyond that. And I think it would be useful for the people listening to know that as a result of this war, the United States colonizes the Philippines, we hold it as a fully owned colony until the Second World War, which begins with the Japanese invading or trying to invade all of the American colonies in the Pacific, starting obviously with Hawaii bombing Pearl Harbor, but on the same day begins the bombing and then the seizure of the Philippine islands on December 7th and 8th, 1941.

And then it's basically a lot of the war in the Pacific is fought over, trying to get back control of the Philippines. And as Phil said, we end that by just bombing the living s**t out of Manila. And with the country in rubble, give the Philippines their long belated independence. But in exchange for that, as we talked about in the previous episode with Guantanamo, the same thing happens in the Philippines. We insist on keeping several bases, including a major Naval base at Subic Bay, which is the Pacific's answer to Guantanamo, at least in terms of its strategic position for the US Navy. But anyway, I just wanted to fill in that long footnote, but go ahead, Phil.

Phil: Yeah, no, it's great to let people know about the history of the US and the Philippines. Whenever I go to the States, there is at least one person surprised that I speak English and I tell them, "Yeah, we were an American colony and we were all taught English." Our curriculum includes English and English is actually considered one of the national languages. This is why if you call up support for almost any company in the US, you might be getting a Filipino call center agent because we all speak English.

Jonathan: Am I wrong? That the subtitles of this movie and just movies in the Philippines in general, there are often subtitles in English because there are a hundred languages in the Philippines and people who speak some of the languages don't necessarily speak Tagalog, but everybody is assumed to have some basic understanding of English. Is that accurate?

Phil: It's a little simplistic, but yes. The story goes that the Filipino itself was developed because Manuel Quezon, who is in this movie again, was on a boat and heard two people from different provinces talking to each other and they had to talk to each other in English. And that's why we established Filipino as a national language because our president saw, "Oh, hey, this is not great. It's not great that we cannot talk to each other in a language other than English."

Jonathan: Right. We've totally lost the plot.

Phil: Yeah. Going back to Luna.

Jonathan: Yeah, please.

Phil: Luna was kind of a word of mouth success. It didn't do so well in its first couple of weeks, but words spread around. I think the thing that makes Heneral Luna different from other previous historical films is that it gained to be critical of our history. It isn't just a hagiography of this hero. It's this broader look at why we failed to fend off the Americans. And I think people connected to that after years and years of disillusion. People are suddenly like, "Oh, history's actually interesting rather than what is taught in schools, which is pretty much just telling us that these guys were great and they did great things and we lost to America, but who knows why?"

Jonathan: Luna is a, it’s a movie about Filipinos killing Filipinos and then screwing themselves over in the process. And then this is the sequel is the extended denouement of that crisis at the end of the first film in your Letterboxd review about this movie. You say, "This isn't the story of heroic warriors fighting for freedom really, for the film, the revolution died with Antonio Luna and all the rest is just wealthy Ilustrados, so basically elites, playing being soldiers. It's Fiestas and parties in the middle of what's supposed to be an existential fight for the nation. It's a courtship that trumps the concerns of an impending invasion. This is a movie about being wrong. So very, very wrong."

Phil: Yes. I thought that was pretty good too.

Jonathan: Yeah. I thought it was great.

Gen. Elwell Otis (E.A. Rocha): At one point, they're going to have to admit that America is the best thing that ever happened to their country. You can translate this: That you are guests of the Eighth Army Corps. You've been given a safe passage across American lines, good for 24 hours. After that, you're expected to leave the territories or face arrest and imprisonment.

Jonathan: One of the things that stuck out to me as an American, especially when I was watching Luna, was that I wasn't used to seeing movies in which the Americans are just the unalloyed bad guys. Sometimes, well, movies about the Vietnam War, including Apocalypse Now, which was shot predominantly in the Philippines, right? Those are movies all often about Americans doing bad things, but you've got for every Colonel Kurtz or Robert Duvall, you've got the Martin Sheen character who's wrestling with himself and trying to think of where do we go wrong? And then we've got great American music in the background. And in Luna, and this is also true I think in Goyo, the Americans, they're just the villains. I mean, they're just almost kind of cardboard cutout bad guys, which took me by surprise, but you're noting that it wasn't really that so much as the criticism of Filipinos by Filipinos and of these really important revolutionary historic figures that got so much attention that helps first Luna and then I guess maybe this one find its audience.

Phil: Well, first of all, yeah, the Americans are villains. It's a running theme in our history so I think that's almost a given. I think the way history is taught here, which was pretty much established by Americans themselves because they ran our schooling system for 40 years. I mean, it's tends to be kinder to Americans, but yeah, we've had a push and pull relationship, I guess, with our relationship with America as a whole. It's a colonial thing. I grew up thinking America is great. It's the dream, right? It's the Filipino dream to move to America because that's where all our richest people went and then came back from. That's where they found work and then they sent money back here and you saw all those families becoming affluent because of the American dream.

But yeah, the more you study our history, it's like, "Oh yeah, no, colonialism sucks and we really shouldn't have been under the imperial thrall of America." But I think it's not super uncommon already to be like, "Oh yeah, blame America," outside of the US. It's a pretty common sentiment.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Phil: What I think is uncommon in these movies is the idea that like, "Oh yeah, our heroes were human. They were a bunch of messy folks who kept doing messy things who kept sabotaging themselves." That's kind of a running theme in Goyo where we hear the letters of Apolinario Mabini. Apolinario Mabini is maybe the one person who comes out of these films still pristine, still a real hero. He was called basically the "Brain of the Katipunan". The Katipunan was the revolutionary army of the Philippines. The film frames its criticism of our heroes with his letters, the letters that he sent to Emilio Aguinaldo, where he was saying to Aguinaldo, "Hey, what you're doing is wrong and we're going to lose because of-"

Jonathan: He's sort of the philosopher and chief of the revolution. I mean, to put it in American centric terms, he's maybe the Jefferson of the revolution. He's the one providing the intellectual framework and writing the prettiest things. He's not a soldier.

Phil: Yeah. He's not a soldier. And he had a disability, he was stuck in a wheelchair for most of his life because of polio. Although interestingly, other side note to that, is that Aguinaldo, apparently there was a... Again, because he was so beloved by other people, there was news going around that he got lame because of syphilis, which was apparently rumors being spread again by heroes because this is a running theme in Filipino history.

One of the most interesting things about the Philippines is that because it's an archipelago, it's hard to think of the Philippines as a singular nation, honestly. It's a really a bunch of provinces that develop independently of each other. When we say that we have over a hundred language, that's because there was very little interconnection between these provinces and the revolution grew out of these different provinces and these provinces didn't necessarily get along with each other. Manila was the center of government, but Emilio Aguinaldo, for example, was from Cavite nearby in the south. The conflict between provinces led into a conflict between these generals of the Katipunan and that's why the revolution was such a s**t show.

Jonathan: Right. And the main character of Goyo, Del Pilar, the boy general, he's portrayed at least in the movie as being almost like the Darth Vader to Aguinaldo's Emperor or Grand Moff Tarkin. Because at the beginning of the movie, he's tasked with rounding up the remaining Luna loyalists, right? I mean, it's a little bit like pursuing the rebels to the ice planet, Hoth, at the beginning of Empire Strikes Back. If Aguinaldo is the villain or the sub-villain, behind the Americans of Luna, then the hero of this one is also an outgrowth of that villainy in the first movie, right?

Phil: Goyo is in the first movie. And even then, he's shown to be contentious at least with Antonio Luna, precisely because he was Aguinaldo's favorite and he was shown to mostly defy the orders of Antonio Luna because he would only take orders from Aguinaldo. And yeah, here he is... This is what I think one of the most interesting things about the film is that the film doesn't like Goyo very much. It doesn't like its main character very much. The opening act really shows him he's called a dog, he's called a dog of Emilio Aguinaldo. And there's very little in the film that contradicts that fact. And you could read the film as his whole messing around in the Dagupan, spending his time flirting with ladies in Dagupan was the only way he could deal with the fact that he wasn't really a soldier anymore. That he was a pet dog to this higher power.

Jonathan: He's played by Paulo Avelino. He's a star of romantic comedies in the Philippines, right?

Phil: Yeah. Yeah. He looks like it, right? But I think that was always the concept behind Goyo because the things that are written about him. He was quite a heroic soldier prior to him becoming a general. But when you read about his stuff in Dagupan in Pangasinan, he really was just messing around and famously, Goyo had a lot of women. He slept around, he got around.

Jonathan: Yeah. And the movie makes a big deal about that. There's the scene where he's at the party and he is dancing with his chief love interest. And then it's the photographer, right? Joven, the fictional character who's in the movie in, I don't know, like a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern sort of role. He's just sitting at the side, reading all of these letters from other women who are like, "I know you have another woman." And there's letters from 20 different women, right?

Phil: Yeah. It's a running them with our national heroes. Jose Rizal, our actual national hero, was also known to be a playboy much has been made of his gallivanting around Europe.

Jonathan: That's really interesting.

Phil: Yeah.

Jonathan: Rizal being the poet essayist who wrote against the Spanish and was assassinated by the Spanish before the Americans got involved. Yeah. So, I mean, what do you think about this movie? Is it a good movie? How did it do? Did people like it? Was it as popular as Luna was? What do you think about it?

Phil: I like it. I do have my reservations. Again, I think it's very interesting as a historical document. The issue is as a movie, you tend to want a movie to like the main character. To build to the tragedy of Gregorio del Pilar, you have to feel something for him, but he really was just an a*****e mostly. And he's not that interesting a figure.

I mean, again, in the context of looking at it as from history, it's certainly interesting that the film would cover how the Philippine army spent five months doing nothing when they could have been basically waiting for the United States to reinforce their troops. It's an interesting thing to see. Oh yeah, they're having parties and stuff. And I think the film covers a lot of interesting ground in that way. It also covers the treatment of indigenous peoples by the Philippines army really shows that the revolution wasn't as inclusive as it could have been. In fact, Gregorio in the movie is actually written as historical fact that the Philippine army was betrayed by an Igorot guide who taught them a back way into Tirad Pass and that's why the Philippine army was surrounded.

Filipino soldier: [Tagalog 00:25:02]

American solider: Did he say general?

Filipino soldier: (speaking Spanish) El general está muerto! El general está muerto!

American soldier: We got him, we got the general.

Jonathan: Mapping this onto Smedley Butler and Gangsters, this five month period where the Filipino Revolutionary Army could have been preparing for the next reinforcements. It's that period when Butler and the Marines come in and part of the reason why it takes the Americans so long to send reinforcements is because there's a fight going on within Congress about sending more of the army, because there were still, even at that late date, arguments going on within American politics about whether the United States should have basically a standing army, large numbers of soldiers in the army, that would be able to go overseas at moments notice because again, the war in 1898, the Spanish-American War, the Spanish Cuban Filipino American war, that was the first overseas war that US troops were part of where large numbers of soldiers got on boats and got off the boat.

And while that fight was going on in Congress about sending the army, the McKinley administration decided to send the only troops that they had direct control over, which were the infantry of the Navy, a.k.a the United States Marine Corps. And that is why Smedley Butler ended up in the Philippines. He gets to the Philippines in October of 1899. So right when these things are happening and as the army, or really in preparation for army, going north to pursue Aguinaldo, which is on the way they end up at this rear guard action at Tirad Pass. Butler and the Marines are on the Cavite peninsula, south of Manila next to Manila bay.

And they're fighting against the remnants of the Philippine army that was there. And then after all of this, Aguinaldo, the character of Aguinaldo talks about this in this film, he decides, "Well, we're not doing it on the battlefield. Let's divide ourselves among the different provinces and meld into a guerilla war." Which is the form that the war ends up taking on Samar and then ends up taking for the decade after that. But anyway, I just wanted to throw that in as in context to sort of tie it to things that maybe people who are listening to this might be more familiar with at this point.

Phil: Isn't it entirely possible that Smedley Butler was one of the Marines who receive the prisoners of war that the Philippines traded to the US?

Jonathan: Oh, yes. You're talking about me now.

Phil: Yeah. The character you played so brilliantly for five seconds might have been guarded by Smedley Butler.

Jonathan: Let's think about that. As a critic and as an expert on Philippine film, do you think... I prepared for that role. Let me talk about my preparation for that role. I prepared for that role by the costume department taking away my shoes and my glasses and my cell phone so I was blind. And then there was a pretty big monsoon rainstorm that ended up flooding the set and stopping filming for a while. I found myself along with my fellow prisoners of war in this flood of this soup of fake dirt, real dirt, styrofoam from the set, and then submerged black wires that I was afraid were going to be killing myself and the other extras. I assumed that they would get the leads off the set before that happened. But so just noting that, were you captivated by my five seconds on screen? How do you think I acquitted myself? Is there a future for me in Filipino film?

Phil: I can at least say, Jonathan, that your experience came through on screen.

Jonathan: That's great. Thank you for that. I really appreciate that.

Phil: Yeah, no problem. Yeah.

Jonathan: There's going to be a third film in this series, right?

Phil: Oh, well, let's see. I mean, we'll see. I mean, the pandemic has really shut production down. Jerrold Tarog is working on a big superhero property here.

Jonathan: What's that?

Phil: We have basically these knockoff DC heroes here all created by this one creator, Mars Ravelo. Darna is our Wonder Woman. She swallows a stone and becomes a Wonder Woman analog. And he's been working on that for a while, but it's a troubled production that's switched director several times. But yeah, he seems to be the final one doing it, we'll see.

Jonathan: 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 with.

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

Jonathan: One of the things about this movie is it's at least it struck me as long. The run times what? Two and a half hours?

Phil: Two and a half hours. It is quite long.

Jonathan: I mean, they spend about... It's about half an hour of screen time on the final battle, right?

Phil: Yeah.

Jonathan: First of all, is that typical of movies in the Philippines? And second of all, did you think it worked?

Phil: I wouldn't say it's typical. Our most famous filmmaker is Lav Diaz and he makes ginormous movies, four hours, eight hours is not uncommon with him, but he is an outlier. I mean, this film in itself is an outlier in the Philippines. Mostly the typical Filipino releases either a horror movie or a romantic comedy. The industry has compressed, I don't know, since we started sending people out of the country to work, we've had fewer and fewer kinds of movies. I think they were bolstered by the success of Luna and they thought, "Yeah, no, let's try it. Let's make the actual epic film that maybe this story deserves." Except I'm not sure that the story actually deserves it because it's not actually a war epic, it's actually just half of it is Goyo just spending time in a town being regaled by women, swimming in the river with his friends.

Jonathan: And then having constant PTSD flashbacks to things that have happened before that.

Phil: I like the idea of being presented with history that isn't a war thing, but maybe what should have been done then is we spent that hour in the Dagupan with him messing around and then cut immediately to him dying in Tirad Pass, because I think that makes for a more interesting movie that says a lot more about who he was and what this whole thing was.

I think the trek of the Tirad Pass has interesting things in it, shows his disillusionment with the leader that he's following. But it creates two tones for the film where one, it's this romantic film, a romantic comedy, almost a hangout movie with Ilustrados in 1899 and the other half is this almost this survival film trudging through the north Philippines trying to get somewhere.

I don't think that's invalid. I think it's a very fascinating way to approach this particular story. I mean, Goyo didn't do nearly as well as Heneral Luna. Part of it was just people were like, "Oh, it's really long and I don't really understand the tone that this film is going for." Because Heneral Luna presented its hero as somebody completely unlikable, but he was totally in the right. This is a film where the hero is unlikable and the film thinks he's an idiot.

Jonathan: Right. I mean, there's very strong nationalistic overtones. I mean, at the end... So Tirad Pass is obviously a mountain pass and there are all these scenes where Goyo and a captain who I guess had been loyal to Luna are standing on this mountain and they're going on these soliloquies about the Philippine nation and how it doesn't really matter who's the leader of the Philippines, that Aguinaldo could die, but what really matters is sort of protecting the nation, which is symbolized by this view of the mountains, right?

Actually, I mean, I should ask. There's a pretty powerful personality in charge of the Philippines right now in Rodrigo Duterte. Do you think the filmmakers were trying to sort of put in some subtext there and be like, "Well, it doesn't really matter who's in charge." There's a bit at the end where one of Mabini's letters is quoted and I guess he's reading the quote, the actor who plays him. And he's basically saying that the problem was that in order to win a revolution, you have to have loyalty to the nation, but that Aguinaldo just wanted to have people who were loyal to him. Is there some subtle or perhaps not so subtle tweak of Duterte running through this? Or am I reading way too much into this from the comfort of being overseas?

Phil: I think if you ask Jerrold Tarog, he'll tell you that the script was written before Duterte was elected. He'd tell you that he isn't being reactive. But as somebody who watched it, I think it's unavoidable to want to talk about charismatic leaders, I guess, to talk about these people who are all about maintaining power above all else. It is just the story of the Philippines. And some would say that Heneral Luna, which presented this cursing hero, strong man general, some would say that like, "Oh, that's actually part of the zeitgeist that got a strong man like Duterte elected and Jerrold would probably deny this, but how can you as a filmmaker be accused of that and not try to create some sort of corrective in the film that follows?

Jonathan: Right.

Phil: I think the film does speak of that, whether it was intended or not. It speaks of this idea of the Philippines as basically a bunch of tribes protecting each other. And that there's this ruling elite that doesn't really care about the people that they're ruling and just giving out all these promises about how things are going to work out or whatever and none of it ever working out where their primary concern is making deals with other powerful people. The parallels are, I think, indisputable, they're there whether it was intended or not.

Jonathan: Right. And it was something that people would see in the theaters.

Phil: Sure.

Jonathan: Do you know what Duterte's response was? He loved Luna, right? Do you know what his response was to Goyo?

Phil: I don't think the film made enough of a splash for the president of the Philippines to comment on it. So I don't know. I don't know if he even saw it. He was probably too concerned with killing more people to watch Goyo.

Jonathan: How much longer is left in his current term?

Phil: We have an election this year so everything is terrible and the internet is a place to avoid now in the Philippines.

Jonathan: And he's not running for reelection?

Phil: Ever since our constitution in 1986, after we toppled a dictator who spent 20 years in power, we decided that term limit should be six years and only one term for president. He can't run again. His daughter, Sara Duterte, is running for vice president and her running mate is Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the son of the dictator that previously talked about being ousted. So yeah, things are great, Jonathan.

Jonathan: That's fantastic. That's wonderful.

Phil: Yeah. This is where we talk about history is not very important to the Philippines.

Jonathan: Is this the daughter who's rape allegations he mocked? Or is that a different daughter?

Phil: I don't know. She was the mayor of Davao. She basically took his post.

Jonathan: So this is essentially Ivanka Trump teaming up with this, I don't know. Because we didn't have-

Phil: You didn't have a dictator.

Jonathan: Yet. But yeah, it would be Ivanka Trump running with the child of, I don't know, George Wallace, George Lincoln Rockwell, the head of the American Nazi party or something.

Phil: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's bizarre. Again, this is about the Philippines being fragmented. We did oust the dictator, but his stronghold up north in Ilocos, where actually this movie ends, kept... The northern Philippines just kept loyal to the Marcoses and we failed to take away their wealth. We failed to recover the wealth that they stole from the Philippines. We somehow kept them in the media. The elite were almost ready to welcome them back.

They became magazine poster kids. They ended up on the covers of magazines and the magazines that talked about the society, Philippine society. And yeah, this is where we are. He actually failed to win the vice presidency in the last election. It was theorized that the Marcoses, that family, were funding Duterte, hoping that the Ferdinand Marcos Jr. would become the vice president and that Duterte would just step away from the presidency if they both got elected. Thankfully, our current vice president, Leni Robredo, made it to the vice presidency and she's running this year and well, we'll see. We'll see.

Jonathan: So what's his nickname? Is it boom boom? Is that right?

Phil: Bongbong.

Jonathan: Bongbong.

Phil: Bongbong. Bong as in sound of a terrible bell.

Jonathan: Bongbong, got it.

Phil: Yeah. Bongbong calling the death knell of the Philippines.

Jonathan: Lovely. Beautiful.

Phil: Yeah. Yeah.

Jonathan: I have to ask, I mean, there have been severe curtailing of speech and of the press in the Philippines. It seems like you're speaking out about this pretty freely. Is this something that people can do or do you just not give a s**t anymore?

Phil: I think like all things in the Philippines, it's just when they go after you for speech it's personal, rather than some higher minded fascistic intentions, although they are fascistic, don't mistake that. But they go after Rappler because it was a personal issue between the Duterte and Maria Ressa. So yeah, I'm just a film critic. I mean, certainly studios have gone after me. Film distributors have tried to sue me, but yeah, I don't make enough waves to actually be a target for anybody.

Jonathan: Okay. Well, good. Before we put this out, I want to be sure of that.

Phil: Yeah.

Jonathan: Speaking of film studios, the head of the studio that made this movie plays the lead American General Elwell Otis in this, right?

Phil: Yeah. He's been in the film industry for a few years, a couple of decades actually. He was an actor mostly. He ended up forming this production company specifically to produce films like this. Luna was their first big project. This is what our studio's going to do. We're going to make these big films that actually have ambition because that's always been the criticism of the Filipino film industry.

Yet, we certainly make a lot of interesting, good films. But because the budgets are so small, ambition has to be, let's say, conceptual. You can have thematic or conceptual ambition, but the actual kind of staging of the production has to be limited. You can't have a war epic, you can't have a big sci-fi film. So what they set out to do was to let's spend a lot of money and then hopefully we'll make a lot of money back. It's a weird thing because of course, he and his partner, they're of the [Maniclas 00:42:35], they're descendants of the hacienderos of the Spanish hacienderos who came here and got really rich off being basically given land. And now they're funding films about the Filipino revolution. So, well, okay, that's a strange wrinkle.

Jonathan: Yeah. And all of the Americans in the movie, except for the dashing red bearded POW but all the major American roles are played by Filipino actors, right?

Phil: As far as I know, yes. They did not import any Americans to do it.

Jonathan: So you said that this film did not do as well as Luna did. Was there a fallout? I mean, has it hurt anybody's career? Is Paulo Avelino back to doing romcoms? Or what have the people who were in this, what are they doing since? You said Tarog is working on a superhero franchise, but what are the others doing?

Phil: Paulo Avelino continues to do what he does. He showed up in a film, he's been doing a TV series. In the Philippines, actors, their bread and butter is TV. It's the more regular gig. It's the more steady gig. That's where they make the most money. So films are actually almost just a prestige thing for them. In 2020, he did a film called Fan Girl, which is also on Netflix, which is also a film very critical of the current government, though it does it obliquely telling a story about this girl who gets to meet her favorite actor. Paulo Avelino actually plays himself, a version of himself, and they spent a couple of days in this abandoned house. And he's kind of a psycho. It's great. I like it a lot, you should check it out.

Jonathan: So in your final analysis as a critic, thumbs up or thumbs down? It's on Netflix, should people go watch Goyo?

Phil: I'm always going to tell people to just watch Filipino films. I do have my reservations about this film, but I think what I value most in the film is that it really expresses something about the creator, whether or not you think it's good or bad. The most interesting thing for me when like, "Oh, I can hear a creator's voice behind it." And I think this film very much has a very distinct voice, certainly a distinct approach to history that's different from almost anywhere else in the world. I's very specifically Filipino. It has this weird anguish to it despite its big production values beside... This is trying to do epic stuff you feel. I think what mostly comes through is frustration with the Philippines and anguish, but yeah, no, check it out. See Heneral Luna too, which I think is also flawed, but I mean, great performances. And also, that same sense of anguish that I think really makes the film more than what it might seem at first.

Jonathan: Is there another movie from the Philippines that you think people should also be sure to check out?

Phil: There are a lot of things. I think the first things I would recommend are a couple of documentaries. There's this film, Aswang, A-S-W-A-N-G, which is a documentary about the drug war in the Philippines. It's terrific. I think PBS showed it. Check out their website, aswangmovie.com and that stuff is there. On [two B 00:46:05], there's this documentary called Sunday Beauty Queen, which is about Filipino domestic helpers in Hong Kong. Every Sunday is their day off and sometimes they hold beauty pageants for themselves. It's really interesting. Oh, you mentioned Apocalypse Now earlier. There's this film called Apocalypse Child from 2015, I think. It's available, I think, on to rent on Apple TV. And it is set in Baler where Apocalypse Child was set or it was shot. And the main character is a guy who might be the son of Francis Ford Coppola.

Jonathan: Oh really?

Phil: Yeah. Yeah. It's not a documentary.

Jonathan: Okay. Okay. Okay. This is not a true story. Got it. Got it.

Phil: Baler is an interesting place because they shot the... The lore goes that surfing... It's a surf town now, but they say that surfing started there specifically because Apocalypse Now was shot there and the Americans left surfboards and the locals picked it up.

Jonathan: Huh.

Phil: In general, a lot of what's happened to the Philippines because Americans left something here, cinema itself. Cinema itself might be because the Americans took us over and built cinemas in Manila to serve the expatriate crowd.

Jonathan: Well, on behalf of the United States, I guess you're welcome for the movies, but sorry about the rest of it. I suppose.

Phil: I do not accept your apology. This will, of course, come off as pure bias and perceived as nationalism, but I think Filipino cinema is for the last 10 years, I think we've been making some of the best films in the world. If you're somebody who follows the festival scene and you'll see that the Philippines is weirdly overrepresented in international film festivals, but if they're stuck in festivals, then that doesn't help anybody. But it's easier than ever to see Filipino films because of streaming and stuff like that.

All of the films of Lav Diaz who could be described as the Filipino Tarkovsky maybe, the Filipino Béla Tarr, they're all up on MUBI. There's this film, Cleaners. Cleaners is this film from also up north from Tuguegarao, which is a coming-of-age film that it's hard to describe, but it topped several lists last year because its quality is undeniable. It's one of the most unique films out there. So yeah, if you haven't checked out any Filipino films, ignore most of the things on Netflix because that's just the mainstream kind of studio things that can be seen anywhere. But if you stumble onto something weird, it's probably going to be worth your time.

Jonathan: That's cool. And I don't know what's going to happen with possible film adaptations of Gangsters, but there are three chapters in the Philippines so maybe I'll end up working with somebody on something over there.

Phil: Yeah, no. Sure. A Smedley Butler biopic would be fascinating.

Jonathan: Let's do it.

Phil: I'd pay to see it.

Jonathan: All right. Well, Phil, thank you for coming on. This was a great conversation.

Phil: Yeah. This was fun.

Jonathan: Philbert Dy is a writer and film critic in Quezon city, Philippines. You can find him on Twitter @philbertdy, on Letterboxd. Thanks for coming on today, Phil. That was terrific. Sign up at theracket.news or hit the subscribe button wherever you're listening to this right now, Spotify, Downcast, iTunes, wherever you listen to podcasts so you don't miss the next episode of The Racket and the next Gangsters movie night. While you're there, leave us a review. It really helps people find us. Thanks to The Racket podcast team. This episode is produced by Evan Roberts, Annie Malcolm, and Sam Thielman. Our theme music is by Los Plantronics. Thanks for listening. Stay safe. Buy Gangsters of Capitalism. See you next time.

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 there included a future President of the United States, Herbert Hoover, and his wife, who I think is a really extraordinary, a wonderful character in her own right, Lou Henry Hoover, who I actually devote a chapter to in my book.

Jonathan: And it should be noted, by the way, and this is in Gangsters, but Herbert Hoover gets conscripted by the Marines—by Littleton Waller and Smedley Butler's unit essentially—to guide them into the battle of Tianjin and Herbert Hoover is singularly responsible for getting Smedley Butler shot in the leg for the first time that he's wounded in action, which is something that Smedley Butler remembers later on when Hoover becomes president in the late 20s and early 30s. But anyway, I didn't mean to...

Jeffrey: No, no. That's really interesting. I mean, so Lou Henry Hoover tried to write a book. I related to her when I was writing my book, because I started worrying that I would never finish the damn thing, and I have, I know I'm close enough now that I can talk about it as being finished. But she worked on a manuscript for decades after that. She kept refining at about their experiences during the siege and she never published it. So, I was kind of haunted by that idea. But she sometimes would write letters, people would write letters to her about the stories about what she and her husband did during the siege. And apparently, there were stories about her husband being like a leader of the military forces inside Tianjin. And she would write back letters saying, "No, we didn't really do anything, all that heroic during it." But yeah, it was really interesting, but she kind of tried to demythologize some of it. So, I love that idea by the First Lady de mythologizing the heroism of her husband.

Jonathan: Well, one of the things that's interesting about this movie, 55 Days at Peking, it's the result of, at that point, 60 years of game of a broken telephone. And it's interesting to note actually, by the way, that it's been almost as long now since this movie came out as it was between the Boxer crisis and the release of this movie in 1963. But it's this very kind of fever dream, half remembered version of the events of 1900. So, as you note, the movie, it takes place almost entirely, I think, actually entirely within the legation quarter in Beijing, which is its essentially the embassy district. It was right next to the Forbidden City, which was the seat of the Qing Dynasty and the Imperial Palace.

And as you said, there was a siege. The diplomatic personnel were trapped in there for 55 days, but none of the big battles that happened in this movie happened in real life. It seems like this movie is kind of grabbing bits and pieces. There's a memory of big battles, but the real big battles were like Tianjin, where Smedley Butler was fighting his way into up the canal to Beijing. There were rumors and I talked about this a lot in Gangsters because they very much helped informed what Smedley Butler and the other Marines were thinking. Butler was 19 years old at the time.

There were all these rumors of these Boxer atrocities, the Boxer horrors that they were killing all the white people that they could find, they were crucifying white women. And Charlton Heston says in this movie, he says to David Niven at one point, "They're coming here and I just came from Tientsin, and they're killing every white man they can find." And that's not true, it was what the foreigners thought was happening, but it was actually an exaggeration. And this movie is, sort of, it is repeating the exaggerated version that it come down to the filmmakers as opposed to any sense of what actually happened in 1900.

Maj. Matt Lewis (Charlton Heston): I have just marched 70 miles from Tientsin. There are Boxers everywhere. They're killing every white man, especially missionaries, and every Chinese Christian they can find. And the Imperial Army isn't lifting a finger to stop them.

Sir Arthur Robertsen (David Niven): The Boxer bandits have been with us for years, Major. It could be that you're unnecessarily alarmed.

Maj. Lewis: Well, the next time I see some bandits murdering an English priest, I'll try not to be alarmed.

Jeffrey: Yeah, yeah. I mean, there were terrible murders committed by the Boxers, but the biggest murders were of Chinese villagers. The great tragedy of 1900 is the main victims of violence throughout were Chinese villagers first being killed by the Boxers if they were Christian villagers. I don't call them converts because actually some of them were Chinese Catholics from families who've been Catholics for generations. But the Boxers killed both Protestant and Catholic Chinese, and they did kill, there are some terrible atrocities of missionary families. But then, what happened was after and this is what's crucial is the movie, the credits roll, and this is in many of the Westerns tellings of the story, in books symbolically, the credits roll after the sieges are lifted.

But after that there were a whole series of atrocities committed by the foreign troops in China as acts of revenge as well as to suppress any possible future Boxers. But there were also rumors that were just unfounded of a wholesale massacre of all the foreigners in Beijing, and Beijing was cut off from telegraphic communication for a couple of weeks. So actually, there's this very dramatic period, during the summer of 1900, when people around the world were pretty sure the rumor circulated that the streets of Beijing had flowed red with foreign blood. And there were things like there was a planned mass funeral to be held at St. Paul's in London, for basically the character that David Niven plays, and his wife and children who were imagined to have been part of this massacre. And then when news came that, hey, actually, they're all still alive, they didn't actually cancel the funeral. They postponed it. Because the idea was, it could still happen.

And in the United States, there were a lot of stories about diplomats and their families who were believed to have been killed. And so, stories ran in the newspaper that look like obituaries with pictures of them. And there were plans for a funeral for Edwin Conger and his wife, Sarah Conger, and other Americans who were killed, and that too, that had to be canceled, or in that case, they said, "Well, let's take our plans for their funeral. And since they're not dead, let's start planning for their triumphant welcome home." So, it was a very bizarre summer, it was a time when China was the focus of global attention in a way on a kind of something that we would think of as real time following of a crisis. Not real time, like we have of minute by minute, but day by day. People would wake up, look in the newspaper and say, "What happened in China?"

Jonathan: Yeah, it was a big deal. And those stories, were then making their way back to the soldiers on the ground. So, the Marines, they were hearing from their people back home, "Oh, I just heard that all the foreigners had been killed in Beijing." And these rumors were, they were spurring them on into action. They were making them more aggressive than they otherwise might have been. One Marine, it seems according to Butler's memoirs, killed himself out of terror for what he was going to find when they got to Tianjin. Butler himself takes on this kind of Victorian, I guess, Edwardian swagger, where he's writing to his mother, something along the lines of, "And if I should die, don't be worried. I'm just doing my part to save women and children who are as dear to others, as you and my dear little brother Horace are to me," stuff like that.

And so, in real time, those games of broken telephone we're actually influencing events. And as you note, there were foreigners killed, especially at the end of 1899, to some extent in 1900. But those foreigners tended to be in the rural provinces of Xianzhi and Xiangdong, which were hundreds of miles away from where the military action was between the foreign invaders and the Qing Imperial soldiers and the Boxers who were fighting against them. Those killings were used as a pretext for the military action, even though the idea was we're going to save our precious missionaries and diplomats. They actually weren't doing anything to save them. They were just moving on Beijing basically to exert their prerogatives as imperial powers and to give the Chinese what for.

Jeffrey: Well, since your books coming out before mine, I'll draw on that in your part about the Marines, in part of what I'm writing, there's a guardian correspondent who wrote really powerfully about the sort of campaigns of revenge after the crashing of the Boxers. And he said he made this speculation, which I find really interesting that even once the rumors were disproved, there were stories that were so vivid in people's minds about this massacre of all foreigners in Beijing that hadn't happened. That was part of what spurred the allied soldiers to go about breaking nearly all the rules of war that had recently been agreed upon at The Hague. And so I think that idea that even when a rumor is disproved, if it was believed and had enough emotional power for a while, it can actually affect what happens in the history going forward.

Jonathan: Over the course of my research when I was in Tianjin, I happened on this local history that talked about the use of chlorine gun, as they call this. So essentially, chemical weapons, which were illegal under international law already at that time. Supposedly, they were used by the British, and you turn me on to a poem, that sort of back this up. There was a memory of that by a Chinese poet as well, but that some kind of chemical weapon or some kind of chlorine bomb had been used.

Jeffrey: You talked about the interconnection between these wars. I mean, by Smedley Butler being in Cuba, being in China, being in the Philippines, and there's also the connection you mentioned between this film and Westerns that were made. And in 1900, that's how people were thinking about these things as being connected. When the Boxers were being covered in the American newspapers, one thing that was brought up was similarities to the stories about what Native American groups had done to settlers on the frontier. The Boxers themselves were compared to the Ghost Dance rising.

There were some similar beliefs. There was a belief and invulnerability, and this happens in different parts of the world, in different places. When a technologically advanced foe, you sort of claim that there are some sort of spiritual techniques that can even the playing field by summoning powers, supernatural powers, go soldiers invulnerability rights. But that was part of what the discourse was at that time, and the newspapers would talk about Boxer Braves following Boxer Chiefs into battle, so there was a kind of connection between that.

And there was also an idea that there was a connection between the fighting in the Spanish American War and in China and the personnel were going from place to place. The head of the American forces in the allied army, he had been one of the heroes of the Battle of Santiago in Cuba. After the Boxers, he would go on to the Philippines. But before all of this, he had been in what were then called the Indian troubles or the Indian wars.

And so, there was a kind of connection, you we can see the American expansion that expropriated land from Native Americans was a kind of dress rehearsal for the overseas expansion that comes further. And I was really glad to see that in your book. You draw on one of my favorite recent history books on any topic, Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire. It's not just that American involvement of the Boxer war is largely forgotten, but this whole set of interlocking forms of expansion first over land, and then across seas.

Jonathan: Yeah. So, the things that we're talking about, this is a huge event in 1900. It is a big international event. It's got everybody's attention. And then, it just disappears, basically from, I mean, if you ask people, "What is a Boxer? What is the Boxer Rebellion? Why is it even called the Boxer Rebellion?" The answer, by the way, is that they were doing martial arts and the anglophones didn't know what kung fu was. So, they just said, "It looks like they're boxing. They must be boxers."

This movie has sort of an interesting inflection point in that passage or not of historical memory. So, it's 1963. It's 63 years after this war. It had been a while, but there are people who are still alive when this movie comes out who would remember. In fact, they may have even been some veterans of the war who were still around. So, it's a movie that is transmitting this memory and it's also very much of its moment, right? So, it's 1963. It's the Cold War. The Cultural Revolution in China is still three years away. The Great Leap Forward is ending. Mao's big agricultural experiment that basically turned into a de facto genocide.

As far as most people in the United States know, China has retreated. It's essentially kind of an unknowable black hole, it's kind of the way that we would sort of think about North Korea today. The Vietnam War is happening, but escalation is just starting. And so, this movie gets made. A lot of money went into it. It was a $10 million movie, which is a pretty big budget in 1963. It flops at the box office. It just sort of makes back what they put into it. But the biggest movies of that year were Cleopatra, starring Elizabeth Taylor and the number two movie was How the West Was Won directed by John Ford, who, by the way, also came on set for this movie to advise at various points along the way.

And so, this Hollywood studio, they're like, "Okay, we need to make a Western, we need to make a movie about China. We're making a movie that's looking backward across two world wars. And we're making a movie that's really at the height of the Cold War." We're just removed from the Cuban Missile Crisis. I guess what I'm asking is, what do you think the point of this movie was? Why did they make it? And do you think there's anything about this movie that is part of the reason why the Boxer crisis doesn't get remembered in the 60 years since it came out?

Jeffrey: So, I think, I mean, I just pushed back a little, compared to most other events in Chinese history, people do have at least a vague sense of it, they recognize the name. They're not just one, but two rock groups called the Boxer Rebellion. And it lives on in this kind of strange, half remembered way, that I think, in a way that the Taiping Rebellion or Taiping uprising in the middle of the 19th century. Much, much bigger death toll, not as much involvement of foreigners, but some involvement of foreigners, it was a very big event at when it took place, but has now been really, really forgotten as most events in China. It just don't resonate outside of the West.

But the Boxer Rebellion because it has a kind of catchy name to remember and things like that, so it lives. There's a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode that has a kind of flashback to Beijing in 1900. So, it has this curious kind of half-life, it does stay on, but it's only very imperfectly remembered. So, for the time when the movie was made, the director or the writer did mention that one of the things that kind of intrigued them was that it was an example of international cooperation the way that the UN was supposed to do but kind of wasn't, so they were intrigued by all these different foreign powers getting together.

And actually, my favorite scene probably is one where you have the different foreign contingents are each playing their own national anthem or different songs. And so, you just hear this kind of what starts out is as different national anthems but it quickly becomes the kind of cacophony. And one of the Chinese characters in the film just says, "This western music, it's really terrible." It's great, because it's kind of a play on the fact that Westerners so often think of Chinese music as discordant, but there was this kind of discord going on.

Jonathan: And I believe that those are also white people in yellow face. But one of them says they're all saying the same thing, "We want China."

Jeffrey: Right, right. It's very interesting that way, and there are bits and pieces of Cold War, that show through. The Japanese doesn't have a big role, the Japanese diplomat, but he comes across relatively well in a way that 20 years before this, they were making films in which the Japanese had to be the enemies and the Chinese were the heroes because you had the alliance. So, there's a kind of flexibility there.

Jonathan: And as you noted, so that the producer describes that, what they're trying to do here is they're trying to express this international ideal, that's kind of, the UN, it's the high Cold War, but it's also the high days of idealism of the United Nations or what the United Nations could be. I think it's notable. So, you were talking about that that seemed at the beginning, when everybody's playing their national anthem.

It's interesting that the first national anthem that you hear is the Russian national anthem. But then you see the Russian flag, which happens to be the current Russian flag, but at that point was anachronistic, right? Or not, I mean, it was it was appropriate for its time, but it was not the flag that was being used in 1963. It's what is now the flag of the Russian Federation.

A lot of the plot has, it's sort of about Charlton Heston as the rootin’ tootin’ American militarist marine. He's sort of what Smedley Butler imagined himself to be when he was 19 years old. He's the cowboy on the frontier. And then David Niven as the erudite or bane British diplomat. And they have a scene toward the beginning where Charlton Heston is basically like, "These people are going to come and kill all of us. We have to kill all of them first or defend ourselves or get out of here," or whatever.

And David Niven keeps talking about principle and how, and throughout the movie, he's saying that it's easy to fight over a piece of land, it's hard to fight for a principle. And the only principle that I could figure out that he was talking about was sort of this international ideal that perhaps all of the all of the "civilized countries" in the world could come together and not start World War Three, essentially.

But because it's done under the rubric of a Western, and also, it's coming out of the larger culture that produced both of those, it seems like what this principle is and what this movie represents is sort of the civilized mostly white plus Japanese nations coming together against barbarism. In the same way that in Fort Apache it's John Wayne and the cavalry against the Indians. And David Niven even at one point, he makes a direct parallel, right? He says, "You can't just go around shooting Chinese the way you shoot Red Indians in your own country." But it seems like sort of the idea is that civilization can come together against a threat. And that threat is the scary, barbaric Chinese who are shot from below and they have the long alien fingernails and they just look and sound really weird.

Jeffrey : In that parallel, also Teddy Roosevelt in 1900, did directly say, "If you think we're wrong to be going against the Boxers, what do you think, we were wrong to move against the Apache when they were on the warpath?" This is carrying over of that things. But there's one other part of the movie that is based in history. It's given a particular spin that I think is worth mentioning, which is that when the Empress Dowager is trying to decide how to deal with the Boxers, because there are two members of the court who are close to her. And one of them is arguing, which is clearly a villain of this Prince [Duan 00:33:24] is saying, "We've got to work with the Boxers because we need to push back against the foreigners." But another is arguing differently and has a more kind of cultured persona and voice. They're both white actors playing in yellow face.

Jonathan: The good one is British and speaking sort of with a received pronunciation.

Jeffrey : Very refined. Yeah.

Jonathan: And Prince Duan is played by an Australian character actor, who I think probably was, and they definitely lean into this, he definitely reads as gay on screen, which in 1963, I think is meant to signal sinisterness, untrustworthiness. His makeup is heavier. The movie is trying to show kind of this good Chinese figure and the evil one, and the evil one is winning that contest.

Jeffrey : Right. And you could think about, I mean, this is playing into the Cold War side. You could think of it like the one who wants to be more cooperative with the West and loses the struggle with the Empress Dowager over this policy. You could think of that as representing say, Taiwan at that point under Chiang Kai Shek, if you want to think about it. With China, there's often been in the American imagination. There is a good China that we could be allies, whether we have been allies with them, and there's a bad China that we're sort of at irreconcilable odds with. And clearly at that point, the People's Republic of China was beyond the pale representing the China that we can't deal with.

Although, by the time of Deng Xiaoping, there's a period of a kind of romance of the idea of the possibilities for engagement where hopes are invested in him. So, I teach the film most often in a kind of US China class and things like that. And it's of a particular moment where it was a low point in US China relations, and we're in another low point.

Jonathan: The racism in the movie, which you definitely could not get away with in 2022, you also couldn't have probably gotten away with it just a decade or two after this movie was made. So, this comes out in '63. So, the Hart Celler Act, the big Immigration Reform Act, which is in a lot of ways, itself a product of the Cold War. At the time that this movie was made, we're sort of at the end of the decades of the Chinese Exclusion Acts, where US policy is essentially that Chinese people cannot immigrate to the United States. And the Asian people, more generally, there are some exceptions, the paper names and you have immigrants who are pretending to be members of families that are already here.

But it's two years after this that really the doors are opened, and most Chinese Americans, Korean Americans, Vietnamese Americans, most Indian Americans, most people from Asia, whose ancestry is from Asia recently who are in the United States now, come as a result of this law that is passed two years after this movie comes out. In the movie, one of the subplots is the half Chinese, half Anglo daughter of one of the Marines who's killed in the movie, the end of the movie, when Charlton Heston basically rides off into the sunset, he rides off with her. And sort of earlier in the movie, there's this discussion about whether this Marine should take his half Chinese daughter with him to Illinois, and Charlton Heston is like, "Are you crazy? They'll look at her like she's a freak. She's better here with her own people."

And there's like, there's some self-awareness that America is racist against people from Asia, Chinese people, people of Chinese descent, but obviously, not enough awareness that would then keep the makers of the movie from casting all of the major Chinese roles as white people in heavy alien makeup. I don't know. I should ask you maybe like that. What are your students think of that when you show them the movie? How did things like that read today?

Jeffrey : That is very dated. I've thought a lot about the Exclusion Act and where it fits into this story. I think of it partly because five years after the Boxers are crushed, there's a boycott movement in China to try to push back against the exclusionary act and get it overturned. And it's a non-violent boycott movement. But what happens is that the Americans tried to discredit it by saying, "Oh, this is just Boxerism again." There's a way in which this kind of the Boxers become this specter that can be raised by whichever imperialist power is being threatened by a popular movement, even when it's a non-violent popular movement. But the specter of the Boxers gets raised again in the 1960s during the Cultural Revolution, where the Red Guards actually do threaten diplomats at one point in this kind of heyday of anti-foreignism during the Cultural Revolution.

But at that point, in the time of the anti-American boycott in 1905, the response is, "No, we're nothing like the Boxers. They were xenophobic and they used violence." We're just trying to get justice and we're using non-violence. By the Cultural Revolution moment, Mao and as far as you're saying, well, the Boxers actually were heroes. We shouldn't try to distance ourselves from the Boxers because after all, didn't they have right on their side in the sense of being against imperialism, even if they didn't have the benefit of scientific Marxism so they could succeed. Still, we should think about them as something to admire.

So, around the time of this film, another thing to say is this is the biggest divide between the way the story of the event is told inside China and outside of China. Because in 1960 itself, the 60th anniversary of the crisis, there's enormous outpouring writings about the Boxers in China because 60th anniversary is in traditional calendrical systems, it's almost like a centennial in western timekeeping. And under Mao, the Boxers were being seen as heroes. So, there were tons of academic books and nonacademic books being published and a whole series of comic books were put out to try to convince young Chinese people to think of the Boxers as heroic figures. So, you have the totally opposite view of the event going on in 1960 within China as this film is being dreamed up for Hollywood.

Jonathan: Yeah, yeah. I'm guessing this movie was not shown in Mao's China. I mean, do you know how this movie has been received since?

Jeffrey : So, I don't know about this film being shown then, but during the Cultural Revolution, there was so much of a kind of identifying Mao of the Red Guards with the Boxers and Mao to some extent with the Empress Dowager in a strange way. That there was actually a call for public condemnation of a Chinese language of film, Secret History of the Qing court, which because it portrayed the Boxers not heroically enough.

Jonathan: Yeah, it's really interesting. And when I was in China doing research for Gangsters, there was a lot of memory of the Boxers that was preserved in this heroic way. The Dagu Fort Ruins Museum, which was the place where Smedley Butler and the Marines and most of the foreign troops first came ashore in 1900 at the mouth of a Haihe River. And I ended up at the Boxer Shrine and there's people doing exercise, sort of trying to recreate in sort of a slow motion Tai Chi style, like the methods of the Boxers. This is still remembered in China today as a as a heroic event. Totally opposite of the portrayal that's in this movie of essentially just a bunch of barbarians who fall over themselves and then all end up getting killed, and then the dynasty falls.

Jeffrey : Yeah, I think there's been a shift in post Mao China, while there are places where there's this has kind of kept alive and the heroic vision. In general, there's a bit of a discomfort with the Boxers, because they were also anti technology and can be to easily flow into this kind of superstitious or [inaudible 00:42:52]. But there's a very strong memory of the catastrophe of the invasion and the injustice of the Boxer protocol. The treaty that was signed in 1901 right after a period when lots of people on all sides had behaved really abominably. But the treaty just said that foreign countries could get an indemnity for the loss of foreign lives and property. And there was nothing done to try to hold the foreign armies to account for the looting, the destruction of villages.

I mean, and just to give you a sense of scale, in October of 1900, German historian has estimated the German troops alone destroyed 20 villages in China. And that was just in one month and one set of troops. So, what's remembered in China now very broadly is that 1900, 1901 was this period of the [inaudible 00:43:51] eight allied army invasion and villainy. And so, in the Mao period, you talked a lot about the heroes of the Boxers, and then these comic books, that would be this strong Boxer hero who would win a great victory even though in the end the movement didn't succeed, you were trying to remember them as heroes. Now it's more, the Boxers they had a justified reason because they wanted China to be protected under Chinese control, but don't talk too much about them siding with the Manchu Qing Dynasty, which some movements saw as outsiders but they were loyal to it.

But what you really focus on is, this was used as a pretext for in a sense of military occupation that then lasted for many months and caused a great deal of suffering. When you grew up in America, in my generation, you learned about the Red Coats. You learned about this group that stood for people who were on your soil doing bad things. And there are all kinds of things that are remembered or not, but I thought about that, What does it mean if the only violence that we remember taking place in China in 1900, to the extent we remember at all, is Boxers killing Christians, when you also had all of these actions of foreign soldiers killing Chinese people?

Jonathan: Right. Right. And I mean, and that's one of the things that stuck out to watching this movie. It had been 60 years since the events but trying to imagine a movie about World War Two even 50, 60 years after the end of that war. That just got all of the actual military details just completely wrong. I mean, it was almost as if somebody was trying to make Inglourious Basterds, but Solden is an accurate depiction of how Hitler had died in 1944 in a movie theater in Paris, right?

It relies, Nicholas Ray, the director, who has a heart attack, or like some kind of tachycardia early on and he had to drop out of the production and they brought in two others. And that's part of the reason why it was a sort of a conceptual mess as they were putting it together. But they were, they were sort of untethered from the need to have any kind of fealty to historical accuracy. Because the eight-nation allied army is not an important part of Americans historical memory of themselves or the major historical memory of the West.

It is just sort of like, "Oh, a thing happened in China. Some people died. There were some battles. There was a siege. There were some troops who were moving 70 miles from the coast to Beijing." I remember all that. Just sort of put all that in the food processor, put it on high, and then you end up with this movie, which would be a very hard thing to do about an event that people remember in more detail, like World War Two or Vietnam.

Jeffrey : Yeah, I think that's a good point. And I mean, they're just playing fast and loose with things. And it's us also, getting back to this kind of idea of a UN vision of this, I do think of the Allied Army as being a kind of precursor to things like UN peacekeeping forces. And like those peacekeepers, they sometimes get involved in doing things that are very different from their alleged civilizing mission. But one thing about these international stories...

Jonathan: As I know very well from firsthand experience, yeah.

Jeffrey : You know very well, but I think it's also interesting that the way the story is told, who you put at the center, but I mean, so even though it's an international story, there's Charlton Heston is clearly who you're always supposed to place at the center, an American. And the British during the event, they would think of the center figures in it being British and there was a German story of it as well. So even in these global moments, I think what's very interesting is they get fed through also a very nationalistic lens, even when there's an internationalism to it, it's part of a national story and national myths.

And one of the national mess that that Americans have tried to cling to is not being an empire building kind of country. So, you can see why things about the allied army, I mean, the American government didn't want a formal colony in China, but there were also plenty, there Americans who said, "Yeah, well, we need an island like the British got Hong Kong. Maybe we could get Hainan island, which is in between the Philippines and China. And a lot of the discussions of the Philippines was the value of having a strong presence to the Philippines, it would be a stepping stone to China or at least be access to the market.

So, these are all part of that milieu. So even when it was an international effort, it was also fed through these national rivalries that were just being kept partially in check, and there was actually worry at the time. China was seen as too big a prize for any one of the foreign powers, to get it would offset the balance. But there was worry that at some point, there could be a big international war fought over control of China if these countries that were tenuously cooperating stopped being able to cooperate. And in some ways, this isn't that far off. There were predictions that maybe even though Russia and Japan were part of the allies, soon they would come to blows over competition for influence in Northeast Asia.

Jonathan: Which of course they did.

Jeffrey : Exactly what happened.

Jonathan: Exactly.

Jeffrey : So, that's what happened. So, there are ways in which the Boxer crisis to me seems it's a harbinger of things to come.

Jonathan: And in a lot of ways, I mean, most Americans wouldn't think about it this way, but there was a war fought between powers over control of China. It was called World War Two. I mean, Japan and the United States, that was main part of what we were fighting over. It's interesting in this movie. So, Nicholas Ray, the director, and by the way, this movie ruined his career. This was the last major feature that he directed because it did so poorly at the box office. Charlton Heston said that his takeaway from the movie was never film a movie without a finished shooting script before it starts.

But Nicholas Ray, and I assume this is after his heart attack thing, he actually makes a cameo in the movie as the US minister. And in the scene, where all of the ambassadors basically are deciding like should we stay or should we go, and they're all like, we should go. And then David Niven is like, "We should stay." And then they're all like, "Well, you're the British guy. You sound like you know what you're talking about. We should stay." Nicholas Ray, he has this cameo and they made sure to put in his mouth this line that, "The United States has never wanted any kind of territory in China, never will."

Sir Arthur Robertsen (David Niven): We need your vote on whether to stay or leave Peking.

U.S. minister to China (Nicholas Ray): The United States has no territorial concession in China. Never asked for and don't want one. I'm afraid I've to abstain, Sir Arthur.

Jonathan: That really goes to the heart of the American self-story about ourselves as an empire, that is not an empire.

And China was a place that was very formative in that because as people might remember from their high school US history classes, the reason why the United States was arguing for an open door trading policy in China, where no nation would dominate was because we knew in 1900, that we weren't going to be able to defeat the Brits, and the Russians and the French, and kick them out of China and make China a colony for ourselves. So, we needed as a place to share.

But were very convinced that it was a place where white people especially English speakers, should dominate. And so that was very much in the thinking that was behind the pressure that was being put on then President McKinley. And then later, he didn't need any pressure, because he just had these thoughts himself, Teddy Roosevelt basically make China our play thing to the greatest extent possible, as long as it didn't then get us involved in a world war against the British or the Russians or whatever,

Jeffrey: My students, my family have certain drinking games about these topics I have to bring up no matter what the topic is, and one of them is Mark Twain. So, Mark Twain was one person who didn't buy this idea and actually thought that the United States was more similar to these other countries than different and his last writing of the 19th century was the salutation from the 19th century to the 20th. And he talked about how the century was ending with Christendom, besmirching its reputation around the world through pirate raids. And he said, and in South Africa, in the Philippines, and in China, he used different terms for each one. So, he was basically saying, what the British are doing formally an empire in South Africa and is not that different and is reprehensible in the same way than what the United States wants to be doing in the Philippines and what all the groups are doing together in China.

Jonathan: And Mark Twain plays a big role in bringing attention to the looting that the foreigners including, by the way, Smedley Butler engaged in China during the Boxer war. And there's sort of a sideways reverse nod to that at the beginning of this movie, when Charlton Heston in his opening monologue says, "This is like anywhere else. You have to pay for pay for anything that you want. Don't tae things that don't belong to you." Which is not what the Marines were saying to themselves. We need to wrap up briefly, what do you think? Thumbs up or thumbs down? Do you recommend that people go watch 55 days at Peking?

Jeffrey : I'd say it's a great opening sequence. I mean, in different way, you can get a lot of the things that are interesting out of the movie out of the first 15 minutes or so including this sort of beautiful watercolor start. So, I think maybe thumbs down, but maybe, do some fast forwarding through it. Look at the beginning. Don't get hung up on the love story. So, yeah, I'd say it's of historical interest.

Jonathan: I think it's yes. It's of historical interest as a document. I think it's worth watching. As a movie, it is not a good movie, even if you need to watch a super, racist Western from the period. I would recommend most movies by John Ford and John Wayne over this one. I think this one didn't make it at the box office for a reason, but it is an interesting historical document and sort of a good cringe watch, if you need [crosstalk 00:55:36].

Jeffrey : Exactly, exactly.

Jonathan: Thank you very much, Jeff. I really appreciate it. I think I learned a lot and I hope everybody else did too.

Jeffrey : That's great. I got a lot out of it, too. I learned some great tidbits. Thanks a lot.

Jonathan: Jeffrey Wasserstrom is a professor of modern Chinese history at the University of California, Irvine. So, as I said at the top, this is pub week for Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, The Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America's Empire. Please buy the book.

On January 27th, at noon, Eastern Time, I'm going to be doing another online event. That one is going to be hosted by New America. And that one is going to be me in conversation with Clint Smith, the freshly minted number one New York Times bestselling author of How The Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America. It's on the top 10 list of all the books of 2021. It's a terrific book. And our books actually have a lot in common. Both of us traveled to and explored sites of memory of eras whose memory has been largely suppressed and sanitized. So that's going to be a great conversation as well. More information about the Clint Smith event at newamerica.org/events.

Our next Racket podcast is going to be another Gangsters Movie Night. This one is going to be about a movie about the Philippine American war in which Smedley Butler served. It's also going to be our first non-American made film and the first movies specifically referenced in Gangsters, 2018 Filipino epic Goyo: The Boy General. It is also, I can confidently assert the only movie we'll be talking about in which I personally made an appearance. We're going to be talking about that with Filipino film critic Philbert Dy, who will be joining us from Manila. It's going to be great.

Sign up at theracket.N-E-W-S or hit the subscribe button at Spotify, Downcast iTunes, wherever you listen to podcasts so you don't miss it. While you're there, please leave us a review. It helps people find us. Thanks to The Racket podcast team. This episode was produced by Evan Roberts, Annie Malcolm and Sam Thielman. Our theme music is by Los Plantronics. Thanks for listening. Stay safe. Buy Gangsters of Capitalism. See you next time.

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.

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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 was in 2005 and you can definitely trace the trajectory of normalization of Guantanamo as it has become sort of less and less crass.

So culturally, the way we get here is that, as weird as it is to say, not everything at Guantanamo Bay is a gulag. So, you have Naval operations that don't have to do with detention operations. So that's what the Joint Task Force, the JTF that Jonathan referred to, they are the ones who control the detention operations, which of course is most of Guantanamo now, and also what is relevant about Guantanamo now.

But however, because ... there's really no other way to say it. The U.S. Navy stole this land from Cuba, continues to have stolen this land from Cuba in any understanding of what happened here. This is just simply stolen land that the United States very proudly continues to occupy. There's a radio station that calls itself Radio Gitmo, the heart of rock and roll in Fidel's backyard or something like that.

In 2005, they would sell t-shirts with the guard towers in silhouette over barbed wire stylized Camp America. And they would have legends on the shirts that would read things like, "Check to the Taliban towers, five stars," representing the armed services.

Kumar: So what are you guys in here for?

Terrorist #1: For giving the United States taste of their own medicine.

Kumar: You guys are real terrorists?

Terrorist #2: Some call us terrorists. Others call us heroes.

Kumar: You think you guys are heroes for killing innocent people?!

Harold: It's because of a******s like you that we're even in this f*****g place, you f*****g cowards!

Terrorist #2: Well maybe the people in your country stopped eating donuts and started realizing what their government is doing to the world, a******s like us wouldn't exist.

Kumar: F**k you! Donuts are awesome!

Harold: They're delicious.

Jonathan: They're these very broad Islamophobic terrorist characters who identify themselves as terrorists who stage the escape by biting off the penis of one of the guards. And then one of them tries to escape across the electrified fence and that ends up shorting out the electricity at the prison. And then Harold and Kumar used that to escape.

That is impossible for many reasons. Among other things, the fence that surrounds the military base, you immediately end up in a minefield.

Spencer: Yeah, you're not going to do that. No one's escaping Guantanamo Bay. This has been a ludicrous bugaboo for a long time.

Jonathan: For the rest of the movie, Harold and Kumar are basically trying to escape, not Guantanamo, which they get out of rather easily, but they're trying to escape the national security state.

Spencer: They're being pursued by an idiot played by Rob Corddry, who's a Department of Homeland security official and sadist.

Jonathan: Until Bush himself makes his appearance at the end, I sort of interpreted him as a stand in for George W. Bush. He's full of malapropisms, he's bluntly racist, he's kind of an idiot.

Spencer: An out of control bureaucrat determined to abuse his power.

Jonathan: Rob Corddry's character at one point, literally wipes his ass with the bill of rights. And then because it's a stoner film, he then shows the camera the skid marked page of the Bill of Rights.

Ron Fox: Want to know what I think about the fifth amendment?

Rosenberg (Eddie Kaye Thomas): Oh.

Ron Fox: That's what I think of the fifth amendment.

Goldstein (David Krumholtz): Why the hell is your ass so dirty? Don't you wipe?

Ron Fox: Don't ask questions you don't want the answer to, buddy.

Spencer: Through that broadened, crude parody, I don't want to say that Harold and Kumar escape from Guantanamo Bay has a critique, but nevertheless, expresses a way of getting at the heart of the matter by looking at the war on terror, not through its operations, but through its id.

Jonathan: I kind of hate to say it, but this movie does, in a lot of ways, touch on some very important things, some very important themes, certainly of Gangsters of Capitalism, not tonally. But there are a couple of things here that I'm thinking about.

So I went for Gangsters in 2017 because Smedley Butler, he starts his Marine Corps career, he lies about his age, he's 16 years old and he goes to Cuba during the Spanish-Cuban-Filipino-American war, I guess would be fullest name of it. And it's 1898. And he goes to the just seized beachhead on the Eastern tip of Cuba at Guantanamo Bay. And that is the first place that American troops land in Cuba in America's first real overseas war and the war that really begins our American empire.

And so Guantanamo, to a certain extent, it's the alpha and the omega of American empire, at least to date. It remains in American hands because we intervene in Cuba's independence war against Spain toward the end of the war. And we midwife Cuba into existence as an independent Republic at the cost of their true independence. We force them to essentially become a client state.

And one of the things that we force the new Cuban government to do is to grant us in perpetuity, land for what were known as calling stations, basically refueling depots for Navy ships. And even the communist revolution of the 1950s, which our client dictator Batista opposed with the help of the Americans from Guantanamo Bay, even that was not able to extricate us, evict us from that parcel of land.

And so the reason why, and this is how it comes into your world, Spencer and the War on Terror, is because in the 1990s, before the War on Terror begins, the Marines build a holding facility at Guantanamo for Cuban and especially Haitian migrants. And then when 9/11 happens and the U.S. Invades Afghanistan, Guantanamo occupies this strange neither fish nor foul legal status because it is not U.S. Soil, but it is also not under the control of the Cuban government, which puts it in, the George W. Bush administration argues, a legal gray area where essentially, anything can happen.

Which in a way, honestly, makes a stoner film, maybe not the only way to talk about it, but an ideal way to talk about it, because this is a movie where Neil Patrick Harris is eating an entire bag of mushrooms as he drives along the highway and is hallucinating unicorns. It's a crazy absurdist film. Gitmo, Guantanamo Bay prison, it's an absurdist stoner fantasy of international law. It exists in a quantum legal state where the same action in a different temporal place or a different action in the same temporal place is not legal, depending on the exigencies of the person trying to preserve impunity. So, that is not some unexpected deviation from Guantanamo. That's the entire point.

Once in 2008, the Supreme Court grants that Guantanamo detainee have the right to habeas corpus, which means the right to contest their detention, then the real rationale for Guantanamo evaporates because now suddenly, there is the overhang of applicable federal law that's going to normalize it. And what ends up happening instead is that the Justice Department and the Defense Department under the Obama administration very successfully litigate to make sure that in order to preserve military impunity in a variety of contexts, both real and imagined, it goes to court to ensure that the rights to contest their detention functionally end once they file a writ of habeas corpus. No one gets out of Guantanamo that way. And it is a major contributing factor to why Guantanamo persists for 20 years.

Spencer: In the base town, you're just in America. You're like in an American suburb. There's McDonald's, there's an elementary, middle, and high school. There's little playgrounds on ... when I was there in 2017, the kids had just, I guess a couple years before started returning. A while after 9/11, full families were in and allowed for their security concerns, because the military was afraid of, of attacks on Guantanamo. But honestly, to a certain extent, trying to build up the myth of Guantanamo as a horrendous unknowable black hole into which we throw our enemies is also a major project of the United States and of the empire.

Jonathan: Like all of Guantanamo in every respect is a mind f**k. Something like 600 yards away from the detention facility ... this is often remarked upon, you have manicured, suburban style lawns for officers who live on the base and their families. And so as you leave a place that makes your skin crawl, you quickly see kids' big wheels left out on nicely manicured lawns, as you feel an evening breeze coming in off the Antilles and Guantanamo is just sort of like that.

It's one of the ugliest places on earth that also happens to take place in one of the most majestic and just physically beautiful. I haven't been to many places in the world that are just as beautiful as the beaches at Guantanamo and the cliffs above them, looking on onto the Antilles. It's poetic, it's sublime. It's so beautiful and so disgusting, what is concealed there.

Dr. Beecher (Roger Bart): I've looked through the files on Harold Lee and Kumar Patel. They were both born and raised in New Jersey. Other than a couple of traffic tickets, they're clean.

Ron Fox: Oh, right! That's why they just broke out of prison.

Dr. Beecher: It's not even clear that they should have been there in the first place.

Ron Fox: You see this cute little white girl, Beecher?

Dr. Beecher: Yeah.

Ron Fox: Do you want her to get raped and murdered?

Dr. Beecher: Of course not.

Ron Fox: Are you sure? Because this is America. Do you want to rape America?

Dr. Beecher: No.

Ron Fox: Then stop f*****g with me. This is serious.

Spencer: And then there isn't really Guantanamo Bay at all in this movie. The escape from part ends up becoming much more prominent. They basically, through a variety of zany circumstances that obviously bear no relationship to reality, they find themselves back in America trying to get to the site of Kumar's ex's wedding. Lots of zany things ensue.

Jonathan: They're betrayed by the fiancé of Kumar's ex-girlfriend. They end up on a military transport headed back to Guantanamo. Their escape is made possible by this sort of liberal foil played by Roger Bart. And he bursts out of, I guess, the cockpit or some other part of the plane.

Rob Corddry as the venal, George W. Bush-y DHS guy has literally been sitting there listening to-

Spencer: Highway to the Danger Zone.

Jonathan: Exactly.

Spencer: Air drumming and s**t.

Jonathan: Exactly. It's really ... it's real, right? And he comes out with a gun and he says to Rob Corddry, "It's people like you who make the world think Americans are stupid."

Dr. Beecher: It's obvious these kids are innocent but you're too dumb to realize that. You know, it's people like you who make the world think that Americans are stupid! But we're not stupid! And we're not going to take this s**t anymore!

Ron Fox: It's okay, guys. It's all over now. everything's going to be all right. Whoa!

Jonathan: At the risk of taking ... one of the reasons why you maybe should take this movie a little bit more seriously, why one could take this movie a little bit more seriously than perhaps we are, Cal Penn who plays Kumar goes to work for the Obama administration. He becomes a white house official in the Office of Public Engagement or whatever.

So this movie comes out in 2008. It's, I guess, filmed probably as Barack Obama ... while he's a U.S. senator pondering his next moves. It ends up being released in the election year and in the years after it, the war on terror, as you talk about in Reign of Terror, really becomes a permanent feature of American life, or at least a more permanent-ized feature in this handoff from Bush to Obama.

And to a certain extent, without putting too fine a point on it, it's a handoff from Rob Corddry's character to the Roger Bart character, and literally to Kal Penn, who ends up as an Obama administration official and we see that handoff happen on that plane as they then get blown out of the fuselage and Rob Corddry's character, in Dr. Strangelove, Major Kong style ends up plummeting to his death.

Spencer: It's a wonderful point because you also get to see in that moment ... because as an audience, we're primed at this point to be done with Rob Corddry, to miss the part where Kumar also says to the NSA guy, "And we Americans aren't going to take it anymore." And you get a great window into, what happens then? Because Harold and Kumar escaped from Guantanamo Bay, but a whole lot of people don't, and there's still a Guantanamo Bay.

When the guy from the NSA says, "It's people like you who make people think Americans are stupid." And it's like, I get why that's going to be as far as a movie, like this is going to go, but it's deeds like this, that show the world that it's not about Americans being stupid. It's that the acts of America are venal and evil. What America does is the root of the problem. Not as either liberals or conservatives during the war on terror wanted to variously contend what America is or the abuses that America commits as if the policies themselves, the acts themselves are not the heart of the problem, but are instead unfortunate deviations that can be trimmed away.

Jonathan: The movie's critique is a liberal critique. It's an Obama-ite critique. In so far as it occupies this larger space in the broader cultural conversation, it is about representation and it's about showing that people of color, to use that term, a Korean American and an Indian American can be as dumb and vulgar and stupid and a couple of stoner bros as only white guys had been up to that point. And it's really carrying that critique forward to Guantanamo empire and the War on Terror.

There's that scene where Ed Helms makes a cameo as an interpreter and he's trying to talk to Harold's Korean parents in Korean, and they keep responding to him in English.

Mr. Lee (Clyde Kusatsu): We've been American citizens for over 40 years. Now, frankly, I find this very offensive.

Unnamed Interpreter (Ed Helms): They're using some sort of dialect I've never heard before, but I'm pretty sure he said something about going on the offensive.

Jonathan: They're making the point, they're like "We are American. We're as American as you. We belong here." But the way that they are sort of positioning themselves is, they are not the them that are in the cell next to them at Guantanamo. At Guantanamo, when they're in the cell, they encounter these two nebulous, middle Eastern looking guys, one of whom honestly looks like a character of a Jew from Der Sturmer.

And the guys basically admit to Harold and Kumar, they're like, "Yes, we wanted to attack the United States because you guys deserve it." And Harold and Kumar, they react as you know, American liberals might. Kal Penn and John Cho, they're positioning themselves with the audience, and the audience is obviously imagined to be a liberal audience who voted for Kerry and will ultimately vote for Barack Obama. That's the frame that they're approaching this.

And they're not approaching it from, "Let's get rid of Guantanamo entirely. Let's stop these atrocities and this Imperial war." At no point, are they like, "Why do we have this? Why is there an American base in Cuba? How does this make sense?" At no point are they approaching it from that angle. It is just, "We just need to not be as dumb as W."

Spencer: There's a moment that is super weird, which is they crash land into George W. Bush's house. And they get high with President Bush.

Harold: Listen, about our situation.

George W. Bush (James Adomian): Oh, f**k that. Listen, guys, guys, guys. I am the f*****g president. All right? That means I get to pardon in whoever I want. You guys are in the f*****g clear. Don't worry.

Harold: Holy s**t.

Kumar: Oh my God.

Harold: Are you serious? Thank you.

Kumar: Thank you, Mr. President.

George W. Bush: Yeah.

Harold: Thank you.

George W. Bush: Don't mention it.

Harold: Thank you.

Spencer: It's weirdly humanizing of Bush, the architect of, ultimately, this entire enterprise.

Jonathan: The other thing that the movie does that is interesting is the fact that it acknowledges that Guantanamo is a real place that exists in Cuba. That is a step beyond, honestly, the place where Guantanamo exists in the vast majority of American imaginations. When QAnon is fantasizing about sending Killary and Joe Biden and American liberals to Guantanamo, they're not imagining it as a real place that exists in Cuba. They're imagining it in this place that exists outside of space and time.

To a certain extent, this movie directed by Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, they're doing a little bit of intellectual work.

Spencer: Emphasis on a little bit.

Jonathan: By locating Guantanamo as a real place that exists on earth, which is an intervention that I think is worth exploring.

Spencer: Well, we tend not to think about it as Cuba, except in a simplistic, "F**k you to the actual Cuban government" sense because when you think about how it is that Guantanamo Bay is in American hands demands a reckoning with the way in which this is really just outright theft.

Every year, the United States, out of the magnificence of its heart, delivers a rent check to the Cuban government that the Cuban government will never cash because it would be acknowledging, and this is the point of the check, to give a sense of probity of ethics and legality for how it is that Guantanamo is there.

As if, "Well, the landlord didn't deposit the check, but we paid the landlord." But what that act is doing is trying to get Cuban government into a circumstance where it recognizes the initial theft of Guantanamo as a legitimate act, which is entailed in the act of cashing that check. All Guantanamo is, is stolen Cuban land.

Jonathan: It was a prominent U.S. senator named Orville Platt wrote this amendment that basically made conditions for the new constitution of Cuba when we basically midwifed into existence by invading it as they were about to win their own independence.

There were a number of requirements, including the idea that we could invade any time we wanted, which we did multiple times after 1898. And then ultimately, the U.S. client government of, of Fulgencio Batista, which is then overthrown by Fidel Castro, that amendment, which is then encoded in the initial Cuban constitution, enables us to hold such lands, meaning Guantanamo Bay, in perpetuity.

That law is then replaced in the 1930s under Franklin Roosevelt. As president, he recognizes we're not making a lot of friends in Latin America and so he tries to revise the relationship and he loosens some of the requirements by essentially repealing the Platt amendment. But the one thing that he makes sure to keep is Guantanamo Bay because it was, and is to a certain extent, a strategic Naval base. Guantanamo is unique in that it remains stolen and captured land on essentially enemy territory because Cuba's communist government does not want us there. They would evict us if they could. That's really what the fences are for. That's what the minefield is for. It's not really to keep the so-called worst of the worst, many of whom were pretty low level, if not just outright falsely accused detainees in the forever prison.

Spencer: One of the imperatives about having not just a forever prison like Guantanamo, but a carceral state at all, is that you and I, and everyone listening to this, is supposed to forget that any of it's happening. That you forget about the people who are locked inside. And at least Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay thinks about them.

Harold: Listen, to be honest, after all the s**t that we've been through, I don't know if we can trust our government anymore.

George W. Bush: Trust the government?

Harold Lee: Yeah.

George W. Bush: Heck, I'm in the government and I don't even trust it. You don't have to believe in your government to be a good American. You just have to believe in your country.

Harold: Exactly.

Kumar: Exactly.

Harold: Right.

George W. Bush: That's just good s**t, isn't it?

Kumar Patel: Yeah, it is.

Jonathan: My final takeaway is just, it is a shame that discussions about as important a place in the American imagination as Guantanamo, even discussions that I think would be ripe for a Strangelove-ian broad satire, that it has been left to a gross out misogynist, homophobic and in some ways, low key Islamophobic and racist, and kind of antisemetic stoner comedy as Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. But what do you think?

Spencer: Did we just cancel Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo? It's not ... this whole episode, like we've been saying from the start, this is a bad idea that we've run with. I feel almost bad for it. We've given it much, much more than this movie in its own context really deserves.

If you want to watch wild, bad, often offensive, but ultimately fairly harmless, forgettable stoner movie, that happens to have this backdrop of s**t that we write our books about, there you go. Otherwise, I had thought that you could get this on Netflix. Apparently it has been taken off of Netflix. I had to purchase this. So, you guys owe $10 dollars. That's all I got. You owe me $10.

Let me just say before we go that Gangsters of Capitalism is an excellent, excellent book. It is a real achievement that you should be proud of, listeners should purchase and really grapple with. There's not just real righteous moments in the book, but also just real feats of wizardry, in terms of both the reporting and the writing of it. It's crafted extremely well. You write really beautifully about very ugly things. And I couldn't recommend this book higher.

Jonathan: That means the absolute world to me. To hear that from you is just ... it's great. Reign of Terror also ... I'm not even piling on here. Independently, read Reign of Terror. You, I'm sure heard this from many people by now, but it is an absolutely indispensable book for understanding the war on terror and the last 20 years of American history. I leaned on it toward the end of my research on Gangsters and I'm very glad to be able to put Gangsters in conversation with it.

Thank you for being here. Thanks for coming on The Racket.

Spencer: Thank you very much, Jonathan.

Jonathan: That was Spencer Ackerman, author of Reign of Terror and writer of the Forever Wars substack at foreverwars.substack.com. That was a great conversation, Spencer. Thanks. I'll get you the $10.

Gangsters of Capitalism comes out January 18th. Please, please pre-order. There is going to be a launch day event on Tuesday, January 18th at 6:00 PM. It's going to be an online event hosted by Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, DC. I'm going to be in conversation with Mike Duncan. He does the Revolutions podcast. You might know him from History of Rome. He's a badass podcaster. He's really cool and I'm really excited about this conversation.

I'm also excited to note that Politics & Prose’s employees have now formed a union. That union has been recognized by management there. It was touch and go for a little while. And I'm really excited to be able to be launching this book at a bookstore, an independent bookstore with a unionized workforce that can fight for its own rights. I know that Smedley Butler would be glad that a book about him is being launched there as well. Again, that's Politics and Prose. You can find more of information at politics-pros.com. I'll also put a link to the Eventbrite in the show notes. It's January 18th at 6:00 PM eastern time.

The next Racket podcast is going to be another Gangsters Movie Night. We're going to be talking about 55 days at Peking, the 1963 movie about the boxer rebellion in China, starring Charlton Heston, directed by Nicholas Ray, who's best known for Rebel Without a Cause. It's going to be really cool. So, that's going to be here on The Racket. I'm going to be with Jeffrey Wasserstrom, who's an expert on China and the boxer rebellion.

You can find this podcast anywhere you find podcasts. On Spotify, Downcast, iTunes, wherever. Sign up, subscribe so you'll be ready for when that one drops. A rating will help us if you can give us one, please, as well. You can also, of course, find transcripts, previous issues, all that stuff at theracket.news. That's dot N-E-W-S. There are often written editions of this newsletter, so you don't want to miss those, so sign up there.

Thanks to the Racket podcast team. This episode was produced by Evan Roberts, Annie Malcolm, and Sam Thielman. Our theme music is by Los Plantronics. Stay safe out there. Stay warm, mask up, get your boosters, talk to you soon.

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 of African-Americans who are acutely painfully aware of , the long histories of ways in which African-Americans have been failed by medical system and used as test subjects and subjected to unethical treatment, and trust has been broken there.

It's not terribly surprising that, that you then have a lot of people from this community who feel reluctant around vaccination, because There's been so much damage done that's why I think it's ultimately pretty unproductive to think about vaccination solely as a question of personal choice, rather than in the context of our interactions as a society and our interactions with institutions , and systems like healthcare systems. It's because I think there are certain reforms that have to happen on the institutional structural level for some people to feel absolutely confident with preventative health measures like vaccination. So I don't want to sound like an apologist, you know, for people who don't vaccinate. But I think that a lot has happened politically and socially That has created a lack of trust or damaged trust and huge segments of our society when it comes to medical care.

You know, there's an excellent piece in the New York times recently. One of the possibilities that's brought up in this article is that the people who aren't vaccinating. This journalist, she says that the most powerful predictor is not politics, race, or income, but a lack of health insurance. We could speculate a lot of different reasons for why that may be, but. One of the things is brought up in this article, is that people who don't have health insurance don't have, , established relationships with healthcare professionals who they trust. , when they see healthcare professionals, it's often not the same one, twice is it's in the emergency room. It's in a chaotic environment. They're not having, you know, long conversations with their family doctor about the benefits and drawbacks of vaccination. , so, and they probably have had a lot of bad experiences around healthcare, or they haven't had any healthcare at all and they don't think they need it. You know? So it's, I think this is, this comes back to the point I was trying to make around institutional and structural change. This data, you know, which is fairly recent. It comes from a study that was done in September suggests that, you know, one of the things that we could do to increase vaccination in this country would be to make sure everyone has healthcare coverage.

[00:17:39] JONATHAN: um, you can't, you can't see me nodding, but I'm nodding. And it's, like that goes into that is the vicious cycle this sort of inherent fear of like communal life and like social responsibility, creates these systems where, you know, trust is broken because you know, the government isn't helpful in, in the way that, that people are promising that it's going to be.

And so people who get the short end of the sticks or people who just, are predisposed to, you know, distrust state authority, You know, and so you've, you know, you have people who are just, talking about black people, you know, who, sort of have the, you know, the long tail of the, you know, Tuskegee, , experiment. you have women who have been failed by doctor, after doctor. You have all these people who have just been, you know, you know, just shat on by the system. And then here's the system saying, trust me, I'm going to stick, I'm going to put this needle in your arm and like give you, and, and as, as far as like a lot of people's understandings of vaccines work, it's like, I'm going to give you a disease or like some form of a disease.

You're asking people to trust the system that gives them no reason to trust that. You know, a country that refuses to, to ensure its own population and provide adequate medical care to his population is then saying like, but no, trust us, like this is a good vaccine, but then the problem is, and I, and I feel like you're sort of on the same page at the end of the day.

And I'm not just saying this on faith, like I'm, I'm saying this like on the basis of, of, you know, oh, you know, having read a lot of research the end, the end of this, the end of this spiraling, you know, thought is get vaccinated because it is, is better to be vaccinated than to get measles, it is better to be vaccinated than get polio. And it's better to be vaccinated then to get fricking COVID. Are you crazy? But yeah, but it's like, how do you deal with that?

[00:19:37] EULA: I do feel very strongly that It's not fair to totally leave a huge segment of the population unprotected economically in terms of health care, in terms of childcare in every way. And then, like you said, say, oh, but trust me, and take this shot because it's good for you. And it's good for everyone. That's it's an unfair ask. That said, I do think it's worth talking about how incredible. This technology is and how amazing vaccination is and how, , it isn't a lot of the things that we think it is. It's nowhere near as dangerous as variolation was, but compared to variolation you know, the vaccination especially of today of, of now is astonishingly safe.

And as far as medical interventions go it's, pretty extraordinary. It's not a drug. First of all, you know, it's not a typical pharmaceutical, , that's not how vaccines work so when people think of a vaccine is inherently unnatural, that's, that's not really true. You're harnessing your own immune system. It's quite, you're making use of your body's own natural response to a pathogen. Uh, the only thing that's unnatural is that the pathogen has been, uh, you know, usually you're being exposed to only part of it, a little bit of it, or a damaged or killed part of the pathogen. So it can't actually infect you.

 It's almost the best we've got, you know, in terms of medical technology and. What you get out of vaccinating is you get to avoid all of these other much more imperfect therapies that you would get in the hospital if you had the disease that you're vaccinating against. Right? So that's the other powerful thing about this is it's it's preventative medicine. So it's the thing that is going to keep you out of the hospital. Yeah, if you're suspicious of hospitals and medical professionals and you don't want to be there, you don't want to have those interactions. It totally makes sense to vaccinate because that's part of, what's going to keep you out of that setting and reduce the number of interactions you have to have with medical professionals.

[00:21:49] JONATHAN: What are some of the other reasons other than, “I am an entitled white man and I make all the decisions for myself and everybody else can go and go screw themselves.” They're the ones who, you know, have been banging this drum, the loudest. Um, but as you note, they're not the only ones.

[00:22:07] EULA: Yeah, totally. But that's real. And it's worth mentioning. And that's, you know, I definitely saw that when I was talking with other parents in 2009 and around that time that there, there is an overlap between a general sensibility of entitlement and a resistance to vaccination. And that attitude, when you're talking about childhood vaccinations, that attitude sometimes manifests as a pretty offensive stance. That's along the lines of. Vaccination is for poor people. you know, I'm able to feed my child organic food and get them plenty of sunlight and we never take public transportation and all these other things that that person clearly considers dirty, you know? And, um, there's all kinds of offensive, ideas around what constitutes, you know, dirty or clean running through this conversation. So I just want to acknowledge that all that is offensive, but you know, it, it, so people are, you know, more or less saying, yes, yes, this is something that other people need, but people who live good, clean, healthy lifestyles, like myself don't need this because my child is not going to be, at risk of this disease or it's not going to be, exposed to it.

Rarely does the person with that mindset think about their child is potentially harmful to other children. And in general, it's kind of hard to think that way, especially when you have a newborn, your newborn seems so incredibly vulnerable in every way that it is hard to imagine that same vulnerable newborn as potentially dangerous to other people. Um, but everyone who has a body is both vulnerable and dangerous when it comes to disease.

And so, you know, I did see people who had what I considered that kind of entitled mindset. I saw them change their minds when they were able to understand their children as dangerous, rather than vulnerable. So, so a person in my own community who I had had some arguments about vaccination with, I ran into, , on the beach, but she let me know that she'd vaccinated her two children. And the reason she had was that one of her neighbor's children was being treated for cancer. And, , that neighbor requested that the children around for child. Be vaccinated so that her child who had a suppressed immune system, wouldn't be, , exposed to things like chickenpox, which might not be super serious for someone with a normal immune system, but could be very, very serious for someone with a suppressed immune system. And it just never occurred to this woman. That's what she said to me that her kids could be dangerous to someone else's kids, , that had never crossed her mind. And she went straight out and got them vaccinated once it did cross their mind. So, so that is, you know, and I think that that is significant to me. People, you know, might fall into thinking in a very entitled way. But they can also, when they're faced with the reality of their children being potentially dangerous to other children, don't want to hurt other people, you know, and I, I still believe this to be true of most people that most people who are not sociopaths don't want to hurt other people.

Um, But need to be able to understand the ways in which your child might be dangerous to someone else's child or that your body might be dangerous to someone else's body in order to then accept something that you're fearful of.

[00:25:42] JONATHAN: The subtitle of On Immunity is “an inoculation,” which is a great subtitle. You obviously couldn't predict that COVID was going to happen or that, the, this new disease was going to come and then a vaccine would be available like immediately after. But it does kind of feel reading your book now on, on the other end of this, you know, it kind of isn't inoculation that it could have been, or it could still be a way to sort of inject, you know, empathy into this conversation.

Um, and I mean, I guess I'm wondering. what do you think the way out of this is it seems like it's only the state, , or the community through mutual aid and, and civic action that can sort of convince people to, you know, just embrace this technology and vaccinate our way out of this and then other, and possibly future pandemics. But also that in order to have that work, you have to have some kind of empathy and some kind of mutual understanding for what other people are going to in the S the hardships that they're facing, in order to, to make that possible, because without it, if you're just trying to force it down, the throats of people who just don't trust you don't trust the system don't want it. They're never going to go along. So do you have an answer please? Help, Eula.

[00:27:05] EULA: I don't have an answer, but you, you know, I am. I'm a huge believer in the power of conversation. The primary way in which I know other people is by talking with them and by asking them questions and by finding out, um, what's, what's behind their fears. And I saw, you know, when, when I was working, started working on vaccination, researching it, you know, there was also an idea at that time that, um, people didn't change their minds about this and that it was pointless to talk to people about vaccination and a number of the people close to me, who I routinely talked with about this subject did change their minds. I changed my mind. I wrote this whole book, you know, it's because this book has very, you know, it has a very pro-vaccine message. I think what gets lost is that what's written into the book is that I was not vaccinating my son when he was born. I changed my mind. You know, he didn't get his first vaccine on the childhood schedule. He didn't get it because I. I told the doctors, I didn't want it in, which I believe was a mistake, but I changed my mind, you know? And so this book in my mind, it really is a record of changing my mind. And I changed my mind after conversation and in conversation with a lot of other people.

And when I was, you know, doing this in the process of doing this with on immunity, um, I I found out all kinds of things about the people I was talking with, um, that made their choice not to vaccinate seem utterly reasonable to me, even though I still didn't think it was in their best interest or in the best interest of society at large, you know. One of my close friends during the time period and someone who helped me a lot with this book, she's also a writer and she read many drafts of this book. She had not vaccinated her daughter. , she ultimately did. Um, but she had not vaccinated her daughter for years because her partner died of ALS. Um, and in, in the process of seeing him die, she kind of lost faith in the medical system because she kept, they kept going to doctors who just kept saying, we don't know enough to do anything. and the answer seemed to always be, we don't know, we don't know. And she was consistently being told that, you know, they, they didn't even know how to treat his pain, how to make him more comfortable. You know, it's, the answer was always, we don't know. And she, you know, she left that experience of course, you know, scarred in many ways, but also just having lost faith. In that system that kept on telling her, we don't know, we don't know. And the reality is we can't expect medical professionals to know everything. It's not fair. It, knowledge is always incomplete. That's just the nature of knowledge, but it, you know, it is fair for someone who's had a horrible, , traumatizing experience to then have to, , go through a process of building back their trust in the system. Um, but I think the kinds of conversations that lead people to change their minds rarely begin with somebody saying you're an idiot, you know? So I just don't think that's the most productive starting point.

Pre COVID people who were far left and far right, um, were more likely not to vaccinate than people who are somewhere in the middle. , and I've seen various reasons for that. but. W the one that I find most convincing is that people who are on either political, extreme don't feel represented by their government. Um, and so are less likely to trust that government or its, , recommendations.

So this is also something that, you know, in a slightly different shape and on different scale that you see internationally. Internationally, some of the places with the worst co vaccine coverage are the places that have the most chaotic government structures and, um, have the, the most political chaos and the least, , faith among their citizens. Um, so you know, this comes up, if you look at polio, which is, uh, radicating nearly everywhere in the world except, , Nigeria and Pakistan. And the reason for that is in both of these places, , political chaos, and, , lack of faith in governance structures. You know, led to people, refusing vaccination. It's more complicated than that in both places it's substantially more complicated

[00:31:51] JONATHAN: the fact that the CIA faked the vaccine program to get information about the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. Didn't really help Pakistan. Yeah,

[00:32:00] EULA: U S cost lives there, you know, significant number, not just the children's lives, who didn't get vaccinated, but the women health workers who were then murdered, , as, you know, , the response to that CIA campaign, that, that was it tremendously poor judgment, but yeah, there's also vaccines are also in some places, including Nigeria associated with the west and Western power in Western prejudices and colonialism. And so they're like, oh, this stuff is just, I guess what I think is that vaccination is all wrapped up in all of our social ills. Right? So We've really got to sort out all these things before we can get people to vaccinate. You know, we've, we've got to create governance structures that make people feel confident and, and that they can trust. And that deserve the trust of citizens. And we've got to give people medical coverage. Um, we've got to make sure that people have good experiences when they seek medical treatment. Um, it's all of this as part of it. Um, but w we also have to like, not fake vaccination campaigns and, and fold vaccination into acts of war. That's incredibly stupid.

[00:33:13] JONATHAN: Yeah. Yeah. Maybe, maybe it is. Maybe you would sum it up as, as like do the good things. don’t do the bad things.

[00:33:23] EULA: It does, but it does come back to this difficult work of consensus making and consensus building that is, you know, consensus making is, does demand that people meet each other as equals trust each other and talking good faith, you know, and, and this is, we're not doing that right now. You know, everyone knows that in this country. So it's, um, that like that I think is that's the, the part that we've got to figure out the fastest is, you know, how to have a conversation.

[00:33:59] JONATHAN: We were talking about, , children, you know, being, being vectors of, of disease and people, trying to understand their attitudes toward vaccination through that, you know, I sort of, you know, with as a fairly new parent, , you know, but my baby was born during the pandemic.

[00:34:16] EULA: You have a COVID baby.

[00:34:17] JONATHAN: I've got a COVID baby. Like, and this was like you know, one of the things that has really informed my thinking about it the whole time, and of course it was, it was basically where I started, but is that, you know, she still can't get vaccinated. And so it was like, I need everybody else to get vaccinated, to protect my child.

[00:34:31] EULA: To me, this is the beautiful thing about vaccination, is that in many cases, I feel like I can be aware of other people's vulnerability and in various ways, political vulnerability, economic vulnerability, and, and I feel a little overwhelmed. Like there's nothing I can do about it. And what's exciting to me about vaccination is that this is a situation where you can actively do something to address someone else's vulnerability, you know, it's, you can't do it alone. You have to do it in concert with a lot of other people. But there's a number of diseases where the actually the most vulnerable group can't be vaccinated. So children under one, as you probably know, are the most likely to die of pertussis and their vaccines aren't fully effective, you know, , they aren't able to get all the doses, um, in, in time to make them. Yeah, we can't make a six month old child, fully immune to pertussis. Um, so we need to surround, you know, I think the word they use is cocoon, cocoon, the child, but with adults who are vaccinated against pertussis, pertussis is not fun. If you're an adult from everything I've heard, you know, I've heard of people breaking ribs, coughing from her testis, but it's, it's far less likely to kill you as an adult. Um, but it can kill an infant. And that's why we want everyone to carry immunity is to protect that one very vulnerable group. Um, but I just think that this is kind of like, there's some moral beauty to it that here's an opportunity where we get to protect vulnerable people with our own bodies,

[00:36:16] JONATHAN: I just have this very vivid memory of, you know, that she was just this. Image of just perfect angelic innocence. And she was sitting on the, examining table, as, you know, the, the, the assistant was getting ready to give her, you know, these, these vaccinations and my wife was there and she couldn't even stand next to us. Right. She was across the room and I was holding my daughter so that she wouldn't move. And she was just looking at me with just this beautiful smile of just like perfect trust and love. And I was like, oh sweetie, this I I know what's about to happen to you. And you don't. And then she just went when the needle goes in, she just turns completely white and then completely red. And it's just. Explosion of just like pain and betrayal. And it was like, I was like, oh God, I did this to you. Like you are so innocent and perfect that I did this to you. If I didn't come into that situation with, to a certain extent, I want to say the knowledge, but also the faith. And also like the bias that I have, you know, being the son of a pediatrician, like, you know, coming into it and being like, it's for your own good. And to be able to say, wholeheartedly, if I was like, I'm not sure about this and then to see your child just suffer, I could totally understand like why somebody would have, if they came into it with a different set of priors, um, why they would have just a much harder time getting over that feeling.

[00:37:56] EULA: of course. yeah, It's no, it's a very, I think it's very visceral. It's very emotional. It's like what you were going through is real and, you know, anywhere that we've experienced, you know, pain or trauma in our lives, we're going to map it onto that experience too. It's I think it can become such a complex stew of emotion. what we were talking about. 

[00:38:21] JONATHAN: we were talking about places that people should get information and besides, the CDC or the, you know, journal of the American medical association, I think your book on immunity is a great place that people should go for information about this. Tell us, uh, where can people read more of your work, about your new book?

[00:38:40] EULA: Sure. Yeah. I do have a new book, um, Having and Being Had, and its relationship to on immunity. , is that I'm writing about the mindset of entitlement. So I'm writing about through from the mindset of entitlement. So that's partly how it's related to on a Monday. You and I were talking about entitlement being one of the mindsets of people who don't vaccinate, so that was a jumping off point for me, but there is also a short chapter in on immunity where I talk about the anticapitalist reasons, why people sometimes resist vaccination. Um, so suspicion of big pharmaceutical companies and, uh, suspicion of the profit motive, , for doctors , , and other healthcare professionals and what I was writing that chapter, I became very interested in. The psychological and emotional effects of capitalism. So that, that chapter in on immunity was also a jumping off point for this new book, having him being had, which just came out in paperback. And I am continuing to write about capitalism. I'm, I'm hoping to have a long essay about the origins of capitalism coming out sometime this winter. I don't know yet when or where, but that's, I guess that's a stay tuned thing. And I’m very excited for your book on capitalism too.

[00:40:06] JONATHAN: Yeah. Thank you. I was going to say when Gangsters of Capitalism comes out in January — on January 18th — maybe we'll maybe we'll do this again. I feel like the, the, the ultimate big bad of every of every podcast is maybe especially this one always comes back to capitalism—it always goes back to capitalism.

[00:40:25] EULA: It's a big subject. It's a big subject. It's worth, it's worth the conversation. I think. Well, Jonathan, this was great. It was terrific talking with you. Thank you so much.

[00:40:37] JONATHAN: Yeah it was great having you on.

[00:41:29] EULA: Talk to you soon.

[00:41:30] JONATHAN: Thank you. That was Eula Biss, the author of On Immunity, which came out in 2014. Her current book is Having and Being Had, it’s about the mindset of entitlement, it just came out in paperback form. Thank you so much Eula we’d love to have you back on very soon. The New York Times article that Eula referenced is titled “The Unvaccinated May Not be Who You Think,” it was written by my friend Zeynep Tufekci, we’ll link to it in the shownotes. Hey Zeynep. Our theme music is by Los Plantronics. Thanks to The Racket podcast team. This episode was produced by the diligent Evan Roberts, Annie Malcolm and the editor of The Racket is Sam Thielman. You can subscribe, find transcripts, previous issues all that stuff at theracket.news — that’s dot N E W S — you can also stream the audio version on Spotify, Downcast, or wherever fine podcasts are downloaded. Stay safe out there. Please get vaccinated. Vaccinate your kids. See you next time.

For the debut podcast edition of The Racket I talked to Amy Spitalnick, Executive Director of Integrity First for America, the organization behind the federal lawsuit against the organizers of the 2017 Charlottesville rampage. I also talked with Heidi Beirich, an expert on global far-right extremism about the bigger implications of the case.

You can also get audio editions of The Racket on Spotify, Downcast, or wherever you get podcasts.

If you like this, share it. And if you haven’t yet, please subscribe. Thanks as always.

Transcript (may contain transcription errors):

Jonathan Katz:

Hello, and welcome. You are listening to The Racket, a brand new podcast that is piggybacking off the relaunch of my newsletter, which has an old name, which you don't need to worry about anymore because it's now just The Racket. And if you've been reading The Racket at theracket.news for the last of couple days, you know that I have been covering in depth, the lawsuit Sines v. Kessler, which is the big lawsuit against the organizers, against the conspirators who conspired to sow mayhem on the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, back in 2017.

Jonathan Katz:

And I'm going to be talking later in this episode to Heidi Beirich who is an expert on extremism. But first I am chatting with Amy Spitalnick, who's the executive director of Integrity First for America, which is the group that has organized the plaintiff's case. Amy, thanks for joining me.

Amy Spitalnick:

Thanks so much for having me.

Jonathan Katz:

So tell me a little bit first about Integrity First for America. It's not a very old organization.

Amy Spitalnick:

No. IFA was founded in 2017, recognizing that there would be gaps in the work meant to hold accountable those who threaten the principles of our democracy. And as IFA was getting off the ground, Charlottesville happened, Unite the Right happened. And it was crystal clear that it was precisely the sort of moment IFA was designed to help address, to spring into action. And so within days of the violence, our legal team in conjunction with IFA was working closely together because it was very obvious very quickly that what happened wasn't an accident, but rather it was planned meticulously in advance and obviously resulted in horrific violence.

Amy Spitalnick:

And so since then, our main focus at IFA has been the Charlottesville case. It's too important, frankly, too resource intensive, even with extensive pro bono work and just too crucial, not just to the justice we're seeking for our plaintiffs, but to the broader fight against extremism for it not to be the focus of our work. And so four years later, we are finally going to trial here. But it has been four years for IFA, four years for the plaintiffs, four years for this legal team working to hold these defendants accountable. And certainly we are so proud to do that work and it has certainly been challenging work at times.

Jonathan Katz:

It's quite a legal team. So you've got Karen Dunn, but I guess the headliner is probably Roberta Kaplan most famous for arguing in front of the Supreme court in United States v. Windsor, the case that overturned the Defense of Marriage Act. Is that right?

Amy Spitalnick:

We have an incredible legal team. Our two lead councils, as you said, are Karen Dunn and Robbie Kaplan. We have so many other incredible attorneys from Kaplan Hecker Fink, Paul Weiss, Cooley Woods Rogers, folks like Michael Bloch and Jessica Phillips and Allen Levine and others who you will all meet over the course of this trial because they will be the ones examining witnesses, crossing defendants.

Amy Spitalnick:

And I think it's really worth shouting out the attorneys, some of whom's names are well known and many of whom you might not necessarily get to know over the course of this trial, but their work has just been tireless and invaluable here. And the defendants certainly haven't made it easy, but this team led by Robbie and Karen and others has really just been as incredible as we could have hoped.

Jonathan Katz:

And they're all working pro bono?

Amy Spitalnick:

Yeah. So we have this legal work being done pro bono by the various firms involved. Of course, this case involves significant other expenses, some of them unique to suing Nazis. I think this idea of taking neo-Nazis to court is an interesting and a compelling one, partially because of how challenging it can be. And one of the reasons it's so challenging is because of unique dynamics like security, which is by far our biggest expense, or for example, scraping evidence off of these defendant's phones and computers, social media accounts, emails. And that evidence you're starting to see in court right now, but over the course of the last few years, we've collected terabytes of this evidence, 5.3 terabytes, which is 5.3 million megabytes, and all of that comes with a significant price tag. And so a case like this is crucial, but it is also quite resource intensive, which is frankly, why IFA has had to play such a central role.

Jonathan Katz:

So tell me about the case. What's the logic behind the case? What are you trying to accomplish and what laws are you using to get there?

Amy Spitalnick:

So the case is a simple one in that it's really about holding accountable the core individuals in groups responsible for orchestrating the violence four years ago. And what the evidence makes crystal clear is that what happened wasn't an accident. It wasn't a clash between different sides, but rather it was planned meticulously in advance, in social media chats, text messages, in-person conversations and meetings, and so many other ways.

Amy Spitalnick:

And how this was planned is truly horrifying when you look at that evidence, if you look at these Discord chats, for example, where a number of the defendants and their co-conspirators discussed every detail from what to wear, what to bring for lunch, how do you best sew a swastika on a flag, will mayonnaise spoil in the sun, sort of the mundane and banal. When Hannah Arendt talked about the banality of evil, this is certainly what she meant.

Amy Spitalnick:

And they, of course also talked about the vile and the violent, how they planned to, quote, "crack Commie skulls," use free speech tools as weapons, and even whether they could hit protestors with cars and claim self defense. And there were these horrific memes in the Discord chats of for example, a protestor digester, a John Deere tractor that they intended to illustrate hitting protestors with cars precisely as happened just a month later.

Amy Spitalnick:

And it didn't stop there. In court this week, our lawyers for example, talked about text messages between the defendants. People like Cantwell, Chris Cantwell, who talked about how he is willing to risk a lot, including violence and incarceration for this cause and he just wants to make sure it's worth it. And Spencer says, "It is worth it, at least for me." Or another tax message in which Kessler says to Spencer, "We're raising an army, my liege, for free speech, but also for the cracking of skulls, if it comes to it."

Amy Spitalnick:

And so this was happening very explicitly, very obviously, and very horrifically in these chats and other forums and conversations in the months leading up to Unite the Right. And so the fact that these defendants planned for violence as the evidence clearly shows, came to Charlottesville and engaged in that violence and then celebrated the violence very explicitly is the definition of what a racially motivated violent conspiracy is. And we have laws that are meant to protect against that, specifically something called the KU Klux Klan Act of 1871, which is a central statute in our lawsuit.

Jonathan Katz:

It seems like mayonnaise spoiling in the sun seems like a metaphor for the entire event. One of the things that I've been wondering sitting in the courthouse for the last couple days is the strictures of a jury trial in US Federal Court. There's this necessity of formal bothsidesism, that there has to be equivalency between the defendants and the plaintiffs both get equal time, they get equal deference, they're assumed to both be accorded the same level of deference.

Jonathan Katz:

And then ultimately the juror who end up on the panel they kind of have to come in, it seemed like the only jurors who were eligible to serve and not get struck for cause by Judge Moon were people who live in this incredible state of grace in which they've never thought about whether Nazis are bad or not. Does that put a higher degree of difficulty on the plaintiff's legal team? Or how are you guys navigating that in this case?

Amy Spitalnick:

Look, I think what's true now and what has always been true is that when a jury hears this case, they will see the same thing that the facts illustrate, which is that this again was not an accident, but planned meticulously in advance. And this case has always been about simply telling the story of what happened. And I think just laying out that story from start to finish, hearing from our plaintiffs, hearing from expert witnesses and fact witnesses, hearing from the defendants themselves in their own words, which in some ways may better illustrate this than anything is going to be compelling to a jury and to any human being who is offended at the thought of violent extremism and who believes that this country should be governed by a rule of law and by accountability and justice. And so I think that has always been true in this case. It's certainly still true as we head into arguments and testimony at this trial. And so we are feeling that this case is as strong as it ever was and certainly the evidence backs that up.

Amy Spitalnick:

And I'm just really eager for this jury to hear directly from our plaintiffs who are going into this, willing to relive their trauma, literally sit in the courthouse with the very people who orchestrated the violence against them, in some cases be crossed by the very people who helped orchestrate the violence against them. And they're willing to relive that trauma to seek the accountability and justice that's been lacking. And so I think when the jury hears that, when the world hears that through this trial, it will be shocking and horrific and compelling.

Jonathan Katz:

It's definitely going to be a big test of that. I mean, if there's anything that we've learned as Americans over the last, what's it been now, five years, is that certain attitudes that we took for granted as being either unacceptable in the public square or intolerable in the public square are actually tolerable to a larger number of people than I think we would've felt comfortable with. Although, it does seem that what happened at Unite the Right, it was very clearly a bridge too far for a lot of people, which is why to a certain extent the defendants in this case ended up not achieving their ultimate aims. I mean, it kind of ended up being a disaster for them.

Jonathan Katz:

You were talking about having the evidence presented. So opening statements were today, and man, I mean ... so you've got the two pro se defendants, Richard Spencer, and Chris Cantwell, the crying Nazi. And then you've got the lawyers, some of whom are themselves open antisemites, open racists, they've made no secret of that in interviews with media and things like that as this case has been grinding along. I know you probably can't talk about it, but when Chris Cantwell today in his first couple of seconds of his speech, or first minute of his speech cited Mein Kampf and then dropped the N word, it seems like they're doing your legal team's work for them to a certain extent.

Amy Spitalnick:

Well, look, I'll say for those of us who have been steeped in this case for four years now, nothing was surprising, right? We're talking about Chris Cantwell, one of the defendants in this case. This is a defendant who has quoted Hitler in filings before, who just a few weeks ago, put in a filing suggesting that the Holocaust or antisemitism should not be allowed to be mentioned at trial, of course, a trial about a white supremacist attack that involved virulent antisemitism and comments like, "Next stop, Charlottesville, final stop Auschwitz." And in this filing, he said things like, "Holocaust trademark," to suggest that the Holocaust of course couldn't have possibly happened and is a fabricated concept.

Amy Spitalnick:

And so I think for many who know these defendants well, and who have been following this case and the broader extremism that these defendants are involved with, it probably wasn't surprising to anyone. I think perhaps today helped open people's eyes, not just to the extremism and the violence at the core of how this movement operates, but also I think of course, what happened in Charlottesville, the story that people think they know, how much deeper and darker it goes in terms of just how, well, not just how well planned it was, but the hate and the violence that fueled it. And that was certainly made clear today in court.

Jonathan Katz:

One of the things that really stood out to me was just how impressed with themselves the defendants are, particularly Cantwell. He kept playing both sides of this fence. He kept either saying shocking things, saying extremely racist and bigoted things, but then claiming that he's also an entertainer and he's just joking. It obviously reminded me of Jean-Paul Sartre's famous paragraph in his book on antisemitism about how antisemites, that they know their remarks are frivolous and that they're just amusing themselves because it's their adversary who's obliged to use words responsibly.

Jonathan Katz:

And I know that in the opening that your lawyers were giving today, they were talking about how the defendants would try to wrap the horrible things that they said that came out in the Discord chat in this bubble wrap of, oh, we were just joking, we said LOL at the end of a sentence so obviously we didn't mean it. That must make your guys' job harder, right? How do you deal with something that people can just say, oh you just don't have a sense of humor, we're just saying these things for shock value, you just don't speak the language?

Amy Spitalnick:

How you deal with it is you have experts like Pete Simi and Kathy Blee who wrote a brilliant expert report, and Pete is going to testify in this case. You speak to that, as was mentioned in the opening argument today. We know that this is a core strategy of how white supremacists operate. They say that they were simply joking when they post memes about hitting protestors with cars, and then hit protestors with cars. They try to claim that those memes were just jokes even if of course the reality of the situation tells you otherwise. And so having an expert lay out how this is a deliberate tactic, how there's that front stage, backstage rhetoric that we see, where what they're showing to the world is this, not even contrite, but just sort of moderate, polished persona that couldn't possibly commit the violence they're being accused of.

Amy Spitalnick:

And then when you pull back the curtains and you look at their private Discord chats, private text messages, private conversations, as the evidence in this case shows, the goal of course is always violence. And so just because they're saying publicly that those memes and comments were simply jokes doesn't mean that there isn't clear evidence privately that we now have in this case that makes crystal clear it was not a joke, but rather planned meticulously in advance as is just so clear here.

Amy Spitalnick:

And so I think that it's very well worth reading Pete and Kathy's expert report, which is available on IFA's website on integrityfirstamerica.org. I think it goes into this in a level of detail that I think will be shocking to most people because it is true, of course, not just of what happened in Charlottesville, but of so many other acts of extremism and white supremacist violence in recent years.

Jonathan Katz:

It was one of the main tools that Donald Trump had that if he said something very shocking, then he could just be, oh, I was just kidding, they were just mean tweets, I was just saying this stuff for effect. But then at the same time, people can be like, but also he means it, he really does think Mexicans are rapists and that's why I'm voting for him.

Amy Spitalnick:

Right. Well, and I think frankly that speaks to how, for example, this case has now become a model to hold accountable some of those responsible for January 6th. And we've seen lawsuits come out of January 6th that use the same KKK Act, a different section, but the same statute and some of those lawsuits are against Trump and other leaders of that horrific day.

Amy Spitalnick:

And so I think, again, the point here is that conspiring for violence, planning violence, that words in pursuit of violence are not protected speech. And there's this sort of false equivalency, or just total misunderstanding, or in some cases active, I would say disinformation out there suggesting that any words whatsoever are somehow protected. But when words are used to plan violence, and then you go and do that violence, and then of course you celebrate that violence, it's not protected just as if you and I were going to talk about here, robbing a bank and then we went out and robbed a bank, that wouldn't be protected.

Amy Spitalnick:

And I think it's really important to make that clear. This case has already made that clear in many ways with the judge saying, for example, in his opinion, rejecting defendant's motions to dismiss, that the First Amendment does not protect violence. And I think certainly that will be made clear over the course of this trial.

Jonathan Katz:

One of the things that's flooring is the specifics of the bigotry that have been on display in the court. And so a lot of the focus, especially in Charlottesville has rightly been on anti-Black racism, to a certain extent a lot of the focus on Unite the Right, especially the press coverage of it was about the Confederate statues, the Lee statue in particular. But it's really been amazing how much the focus in the courtroom in terms of what the defendants are actually saying is antisemitism, the invocation of Jews and denigrating the lawyers on the plaintiff side for being Jews and just like old school German National Socialism, just like Lebensraum, blood and soil, like the particular interest in war. I don't know what more to say about that, but it seems really striking to me that the particular brand of bigotry that seems to be the mode in this conspiracy is just so focused on Jews and this kind of old school antisemitism.

Amy Spitalnick:

Yeah, and that's very deliberate. And I think it's speak to not just the motivation behind Unite the Right, but really the broader cycle of white supremacist violence. And you're absolutely right, that all of these attacks have targeted a variety of communities, of course, the Black community, Latinx, refugee, immigrant, Sikh, Muslim different communities across the board who are targets of these white supremacists. But these acts of extremism in recent years from Charlottesville to Pittsburgh, which we just marked the three year anniversary of, to Poway, to El Paso and Christchurch and even January 6th in many ways are motivated by this idea of The Great Replacement, that somehow there is a conspiracy in which some shadowy force, which in many cases is explicitly the Jews, is conspiring to orchestrate a replacement of the white race.

Amy Spitalnick:

And that's what they mean when they say Jews will not replace us. That's what is implied by suggesting that the country is being stolen and immigrants and refugees are coming in to steal the election or otherwise. And it's certainly the same conspiracy theory that has fueled so many attacks on different communities, not just the Pittsburgh attack, which targeted a synagogue because they worked with the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society supporting refugees, or the Christchurch attack, which targeted Muslim communities, or the Poway attack in California, which targeted a Chabad, or the El Paso attack, which specifically targeted a predominantly Latinx community, and so on and so forth.

Amy Spitalnick:

And so understanding how antisemitism really is at the core of white supremacy is one of the animating factors. And Eric Ward of the Western States Center explains this better than anyone I know in his fantastic essay, Skin in the Game, which I definitely recommend. And understanding how antisemitism really is the animating force behind white supremacy is a little easier when you sadly look at the evidence in this case, when you look at the fact that defendants Elliot Klein, who literally was an exterminator in his day job, talked about wanting to exterminate the Jews, or how the defendants talked about, quote, "wanting to gas the Kikes."

Amy Spitalnick:

And it is, as you said, direct language that comes right from Nazi Germany. It should be horrifying to all of us, but I think it's important to understand because it illustrates how you can't take on antisemitism without taking on white supremacy. And you can't take on white supremacy in any other form of hate that it motivates without taking on the antisemitism at its core. And certainly this case, I think is one of the most perfect examples of how that works.

Amy Spitalnick:

And I'll just say also on a personal note, I'm a granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, certainly this is personal for me and for many on this team because of those sorts of family connections. And the fact that this hate, which in some cases verbatim is the same sort of hate that took the lives of many of my family members and obviously millions of others is now so emboldened, so empowered that we can see it fuel something like Unite the Right, and I will also say become increasingly normalized in mainstream with pundits like Tucker Carlson talking about it on primetime news or elected officials talking about it in their campaign emails. And so we need to have clear eyes about this. We need to understand what this conspiracy is, how it's motivated so much hate that has claimed so many lives and the danger of it becoming an increasingly normal part of our discourse.

Jonathan Katz:

Yeah. I mean, I'm Jewish, my great-grandparents fled the pogroms. My direct family was already in the States before the Holocaust, but all of my family had a lot of family that they lost in the Holocaust specifically. And then also of course people who were killed by the Russians and other waves of antisemitism in history. That's one of the reasons why just for me personally, I can see you feel the same and a lot of other people who are in the courtroom as well. It's just so weighty to just hear just this casual genocidal antisemitism.

Jonathan Katz:

And one of the things about Unite the Right, was that to a certain extent, it discredited some of the more overt, like I'm in the National Socialist Movement, I'm carrying a swastika type of street violence. But as you said, there's the Tucker Carlson version where instead of just saying the Jew, they say George Soros. And we even saw it just in the last 24, 48 hours in Virginia, Glenn Youngkin, the Republican candidate for governor, that election is happening on Tuesday, November 2nd, and he talked about George Soros. And I don't remember if it was in context of Great Replacement theory of bringing in migrants, or just bankrolling his opponent, or whatever nefarious thing he was accusing him of. But there are still ways that it's being digested and disseminated on the right.

Amy Spitalnick:

Absolutely. And I don't think it can be partisan to call that out. I think there's an effort to make it seem like calling this out, calling out the normalization of it on the right is somehow partisan. And the fact that it is being labeled as partisan by some just further illustrates how normal the extremism is becoming and it can't.

Jonathan Katz:

Yeah. So you were talking about some of the larger hopes for this case, what would success look like? Would it just be the jury finding for the plaintiffs? Does it require a massive punitive number levied against the defendants to cripple them? Does it have to survive appeal? At what point will you be able to look back and say, we did what we were trying to do in this particular case?

Amy Spitalnick:

Well, I'll start by saying, in some ways it's already been successful and that some of the defendants have made clear that this case has had major financial and operational impacts on them. Richard Spencer has used the phrase, quote, "financially crippling," to describe this case. Defendants have talked about how this has undermined their ability to operate, prevented them from opening a new building, deterred them from participating in certain other events that would potentially also become violent. And so seeing the impacts that this has had already is important because it illustrates that accountability matters, even if the wheels of justice grind slowly. It's been four years since we first filed this case. Certainly there have been very real impacts along the way and that's powerful and I think a deterrent to some, in many ways.

Amy Spitalnick:

But at the end of the day, obviously we're in the midst of trial and it's about making the case to a jury and hoping to win accountability and justice in the courtroom. And so first and foremost, that's what this is about, accountability for those responsible for the violence and justice for our plaintiffs and for the community of Charlottesville who have seen such little accountability over the last few years.

Amy Spitalnick:

And what that means is that a jury has the potential, not just to find in favor of our plaintiffs, but to effectively award them large financial damages that can bankrupt, disrupt and dismantle the groups and the leaders responsible. And that doesn't mean that our plaintiffs are necessarily going to get millions of dollars instantaneously, but rather by being able to collect on these judgements for the rest of the defendant's lives, we can have major impacts on their ability to operate, deter others who are looking on and understanding the consequences for this sort of violence and I think send a clear message that if you do participate in something like this, if you're part of this violence, if you plan for violence, if you engage in racially motivated violence, there will of course be consequences. And so that's crucial in and of itself.

Amy Spitalnick:

And I think there's something a little bit more intangible, but equally important here, which is the power of a trial like this, waking the country up to the crisis of extremism that we're facing, making sure people understand that what they think happened in Charlottesville is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of how well planned these events are, how fueled by racism and antisemitism and hate these attacks are, and that we have the power to do something about it. It requires sometimes being creative and being resilient, given how challenging and hard and long it can be to seek that accountability. And certainly I think our plaintiffs are so incredibly brave for choosing to do this despite the difficulties and the risks. But I think having that message seen, not just by this community in Charlottesville, but by the country and by the world to understand, it's very powerful.

Jonathan Katz:

So many of the excuses that were made after Unite the Right, we heard them during jury selection, we heard them today in court during the opening statements from the defendants, that it was both sides, right? It was that there were very fine people on both sides as Donald Trump said, the comment that he had made two or three days before that he was then trying to clean up by saying, unsuccessfully, that there was violence on many sides and that there was just this equivalency between the counter protestors, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and the Nazis. How are you addressing that? Did that influence the choice of plaintiffs that you are representing in this case? How do you hope to navigate that set of assumptions that just has become so mainstream in America's understanding of what happened in Charlottesville?

Amy Spitalnick:

Well, I think in many ways, this case is the answer to that, right? It's obviously not a silver bullet. We have much work to do in this country when it comes to that sort of bothsidesism. But what this case clearly illustrates is that there are not fine people on both sides, there are not two equal sides to the story. On one side are Charlottesville community members, UVA students who were peacefully counter protesting at the Thomas Jefferson statue, or walking up the street celebrating what they thought was the end of a white supremacist rally in their town and then were of course hit by that car. And these are regular people who had come out to speak out against hate in their communities, to peacefully stand up.

Amy Spitalnick:

And on the other side, are the people who planned that violence, who engaged in that violence and then celebrated that violence, people who very clearly talked about how what happened, the car attack, for example, and the injuries that our plaintiff's and others sustained, they saw it as, quote, "a huge moral victory," or quote, "payback time for Heather Heyer." And so you can't look at that, you can't look at that evidence, you can't look at the facts of this and somehow believe that there are indeed equivalencies between those sides or fine people on both sides. And I think this case in many ways says if you think that, these facts will tell you otherwise.

Jonathan Katz:

One thing that's really notable is how little the statues have been mentioned. I mean again, in this popular, both sides understanding that a lot of people have of what is just known outside of Charlottesville as Charlottesville is that you had these people who were pro statue protestors, and you had anti-statue protestors and then there were some like extremists on both sides who came in. But it really comes out in both of the plaintiff's and the defendant's opening statements today, how ancillary a role at best the Lee statue and the Jackson statue played in what happened in August 2017.

Amy Spitalnick:

Well, I think that speaks to how this was never really about the statues per se. The statues were used as the guise or the hook for these white supremacists to descend on Charlottesville. And I think it's worth noting that nearly all of the defendants are from well outside Charlottesville, in most cases well outside Virginia. There's one local defendant, Jason Kessler, but the rest come from all over the country. And so these statues and the removal of them-

Jonathan Katz:

Although Richard Spencer is a UVA alum.

Amy Spitalnick:

That is true. But the vast majority of these defendants and many of the people who participated came from well outside the area. And it's because these statues were used as a guise or a hook to create what happened, to create an opportunity for the sort of hate and violence that unfolded. And so this case is not about the statues and what happened in many ways is not about the statues beyond the fact that they were the guise or the hook that was used to help create Unite the Right.

Jonathan Katz:

The last thing I would ask you about is what you think the implications are for things like the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse is going on right now in Kenosha? You've got the trials for January 6th are starting to plod through, although if they go at the pace that Sines v. Kessler did, it'll be years before we actually see them in court.

Amy Spitalnick:

Yeah. Some of those are criminal, many of those are criminal, but of course, yes, there are civil suits, as I mentioned, and my hope is that they have a faster process than we did thanks to COVID and the defendant's discovery misconduct.

Jonathan Katz:

But do you think that there are precedents that could get set here even for criminal cases, that could help make precedent for federal court for these cases going forward?

Amy Spitalnick:

Look, I think this case already has emerged as a model in certain ways, and certainly if, and when our plaintiffs win, it can truly be an example of how you use the justice system, how you use civil lawsuits to hold these extremists accountable. We're certainly not the first people in history to bring a civil case like this, and to use civil litigation as a tool for justice and accountability against extremists. But I think that this case is by far the broadest, most expansive, frankly innovative use of some of this sort of civil litigation, because it goes after the full conspiracy, it goes after the 24 individuals and groups who orchestrated the violence, as opposed to just a handful of individual groups.

Amy Spitalnick:

And so by taking on that conspiracy, taking on really the core leadership that orchestrated Unite the Right and unsurprisingly have deep connections to the broader movement and the broader cycle of extremism, that can absolutely be not just an example for others, but hopefully a line in the sand that if you do this sort of thing, there will be consequences. And this is how you ensure there are those consequences.

Jonathan Katz:

Well, Amy Spitalnick, executive director of Integrity First America, thank you for joining me on The Racket.

Amy Spitalnick:

Thanks so much for having me.

Jonathan Katz:

That was Amy Spitalnick, executive director of Integrity First for America. You can find out more about her organization at integrityfirstforamerica.org. They've got a lot of updates about the trial, court documents and information about the defendants and the plaintiffs there.

Jonathan Katz:

Next up, we're going to talk with Dr. Heidi Beirich, an expert on right wing extremism to get more background on who the players in this trial are and what's at stake. Heidi is also the chief strategy officer at the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. Welcome Heidi. Now you were with the Southern Poverty Law Center for many years. Can you tell us more about your work there?

Heidi Beirich:

I ran the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project for about 10 years, which is the part of the SPLC that monitors hate groups and extremists, and creates the hate map that people are very familiar with. I'd been there 20 years before I left in 2019 and left to co-found the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, which looks at the same issues, but from a transnational frame.

Jonathan Katz:

Talk to us about who some of the specific players are, Vanguard America, Identity Evropa, the Traditionalist Workers Party. Who are these people who are being sued in Charlottesville?

Heidi Beirich:

Sure. So Sines v. Kessler is taking on the groups that were in 2017 the most important neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups in the United States. The Traditionalist Workers Party, for example, which has fallen apart since the case was filed, was run by a guy named Matt Heimbach, who had been involved in dozens, it seemed like, of neo-Nazi groups, including the National Socialist Movement, and was one of the most prominent voices in white supremacy at the time. Also, Jason Kessler, who's the name in Sines v. Kessler, and the organizer of Unite the Right, the primary organizer, was a central figure in neo-Nazi and white supremacist circles. He came up with the idea for Unite the Right, and brought all his buddies along.

Heidi Beirich:

Other prominent organizations and individuals that were in Charlottesville for Unite the Right were for example, Richard Spencer. Many of us are reminded of him having basically Sieg Heil Trump's win back in 2016 in a video that went viral, in an office in Washington, DC. He ran something called the National Policy Institute. Was a very, very well known figure, I think only second to maybe David Duke in many Americans' minds in terms of white supremacy. He's also one of the people who's being sued in this case. And there are others, Identity Evropa. It's a huge case. League of the South, a neo-Confederate group that wants to basically throw all people of color out of the South and reestablished the Confederacy. I mean, it was quite a cask of white supremacist characters that showed up in Charlottesville in 2017.

Jonathan Katz:

The National Socialist Movement and a couple chapters of the actual KU Klux Klan. Is that right?

Heidi Beirich:

That is right. And also there were members of militias at the event from the Three Percenter militia, which is a outfit that you could find all over the country. So it wasn't just all white supremacists, there were also heavily armed, angry anti-government types that were in the mix that day as well.

Jonathan Katz:

But they're not involved in this lawsuit.

Heidi Beirich:

They are not involved in this lawsuit. Some militia members have actually been sued by folks at Georgetown University, and there was an injunction eventually agreed to in that case to keep armed militia members out of Charlottesville, but that's a separate situation from what we have here.

Jonathan Katz:

So what's the relationship between these guys? I mean, just in the last 48, 72 hours, there's been some sniping back and forth between Jason Kessler and Richard Spencer. There was this weird moment in the courtroom on Tuesday when Richard Spencer and Christopher Cantwell, the infamous crying Nazi wanted to keep somebody on the jury who said that Richard Spencer was evil. And one of the lawyers for some of the others, just called them out and was just, why am I stuck on this side with these incompetent people. And then Jason Kessler was mocking Richard Spencer on Twitter. Are these new divisions or were they surfing these divisions even at the time, that they were trying to, as they said, Unite the Right.

Heidi Beirich:

Yeah. Well look, the American white supremacist movement is notorious for its infighting and thank God, because it makes them less effective. But even coming together for Unite the Right, there was a lot of pushing and shoving among these various folks about who was the quote-unquote, "leader," or the person in charge of Unite the Rights. So the sniping started pretty early in particular between Richard Spencer and Jason Kessler. However, they still were able to organize enough to show up on that weekend in August 2017 and do these terrible things in Charlottesville.

Heidi Beirich:

That said, by the following week, when a lot of these groups started to see their material de-platform from places like Facebook and started to lose their PayPal accounts, the infighting revved up again. There was quite a lot of discussion in white supremacist circles after Unite the Right, if it had been just a wholesale disaster for the white supremacist movement, because they lost their place to push their propaganda out and they lost access to financial resources.

Heidi Beirich:

And by the time Sines v. Kessler was filed by IFA, the fallout was even worse, because at that point, everybody turned on each other. Each of these people who were being sued started to blame others for what had happened over the weekend at Unite the Right. And people who weren't named in the IFA lawsuit abandoned the groups who were for fear of being drawn into the case in some way. So at the end of the day, Unite the Right was a bit of a disaster for the groups who showed up.

Jonathan Katz:

In your estimation, why didn't they achieve ... What were they trying to achieve and why didn't they achieve it, I guess would be the way to ask?

Heidi Beirich:

Well, I would say there's two levels to this. One is what happened to the groups and individuals who actually showed up in Charlottesville in the wake of the violence of that weekend. And the fact that they lost access to all the social media, that was really, really devastating for those organizations. But at the same time, the weekend's events were a potent reminder of the power of white supremacy in this country.

Heidi Beirich:

And even though a lot of the particular people who are being sued have been either already crushed through the discovery process or sanctions from the court, and we'll see what happens with the case, but I have a feeling it's not going to go well for the white supremacists, even so, white supremacy in this country became larger and other organizations filled those gaps. I'm thinking about groups like the Proud Boys, for example, which became real prominent a year later and are also facing some civil suits that hopefully will impact them. But white supremacy didn't go away.

Heidi Beirich:

So in a way, the writ large movement of white supremacy has only grown in the years since Charlottesville. That's why this case is actually so important to remind all of us about how dangerous it is, and also to get some justice for the victims. And really I think of Charlottesville and then January 6th and the insurrection as book-ending the Trump era. We began the Trump era with a horrible racist rally, and we ended it with an attempt to overthrow our democracy.

Jonathan Katz:

Was it just that the optics were so bad? Was it the death of Heather Heyer and James Alex Fields' car attack on the counter protestors and the people just walking down the Charlottesville Mall? What made it turn out so bad for the defendants in this particular case, and then create this space that the Proud Boys and other groups were able to fill?

Heidi Beirich:

Yeah, well, I mean, it was definitely the violence, right? The violence was a shock to all of us who paid attention to what happened that weekend. I also think the scary scenes of the first night of these young white men with their torches rallying and saying the Jews will not replace us was terrifying to people as well it should have been. And those images did not paint a movement that wanted to go more mainstream exactly in the light they wanted. So there was actually a debate among white supremacists after Charlottesville over, quote-unquote, "optics." In other words, were the optics that they presented the wrong ones to try to recruit more people into their movement?

Heidi Beirich:

But I really do think the two things that most affected the movement, the particular players at Charlottesville, was the loss of those PayPal accounts and the case in Sines v. Kessler, both of which made it impractical for them to continue to do their work because they didn't have the resources, they didn't have the audience, and they were facing a legal juggernaut in the wake of the case.

Jonathan Katz:

When you talk about optics, the quote that immediately pops into my mind was Robert Bowers at the Tree of Life massacre at the synagogue in Pittsburgh, when he said, "Screw your optics, I'm going in." And that was just a couple years later, but it seems like some people were just murderous enough to not care about how it looked. But then there were other groups like the Proud Boys, which Jason Kessler was briefly a part of, he was beaten into with the name five serials beat down. But they felt that they could put a more marketable spin on their white supremacy than the groups that were associated with Unite the Right. Is that what you think?

Heidi Beirich:

Yeah, that is definitely true. So the Proud Boys was founded by a guy named Gavin McInnes, who was a legitimate media personality for a while.

Jonathan Katz:

Co-founder of Vice, right?

Heidi Beirich:

Exactly. A Canadian co-founder of Vice. And they put themselves in these little Perry polo shirts and khakis, and tried to look as though they were just like any other kind of man on the street, very mainstream. In the early days, they tried to play games about how they weren't racist, that they had members who were of different races, which was true. But over time, they too descended into so much street violence, especially out on the West Coast that at this point they don't look much different than the kinds of folks that showed up in Charlottesville for Unite the Right. So yes, there was this attempt to appear more mainstream and have optics that don't look like what we saw in Charlottesville.

Heidi Beirich:

I should say, though you brought up Robert Bowers, which is a very good point because what was chanted that night at the torch rally, Jews will not replace us, that idea, which is a version of what's called The Great Replacement theory, this idea that there's some plot by Jews to replace white people in their home countries with people of color, that idea not only inspired Bowers in the Tree of Life shooting, but also the El Paso Walmart attack. So Charlottesville reinforced this horrific ideology that led to these major domestic terrorism attacks, not just in the US, but in places like Christchurch, New Zealand. So this is all the fallout of what we saw that weekend in August 2017.

Jonathan Katz:

And it seems like in terms of the American public writ large, the mainstream of the Republican party, there's a different appetite for violence that is done explicitly in the name of we are Nazis, we are trying to eradicate the Jews and violence by somebody like Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha, Wisconsin, who was armed, crossed state lines, but he went under the pretense of enforcing property rights. And it seems like mainstream Republicans see his targets as being more legitimate. Have you picked up on the connection that I'm positing here or is it completely off?

Heidi Beirich:

No, no, no, I get what you're saying. When I think of the Republican Party, what I really think about is the fact that it has become so incredibly radicalized into racial ideas over the last ... basically since Trump came down that escalator and started talking about Mexicans as rapists. And where we sit today, we have members of white supremacist groups, like the Proud Boys involved in GOP activity in Nevada. We're seeing local attacks by militias who are involved with the GOP on school boards. And we've got numbers now in the Republican Party that are a really high percentage that believe in the QAnon, crazy conspiracy theory, or believe in The Great Replacement theory, or have anti-immigrant views, or believe that the November 2020 election was completely fraudulent. And this began in a way with the bomb going off in Charlottesville, this shift.

Jonathan Katz:

All these later groups, the ones who were behind or most involved in January 6th, they're more on the Proud Boys, Kyle Rittenhouse side of the ledger, where it's like the election is illegitimate. The subtext of that is because of people of color in cities, Black people in Philadelphia and Atlanta and Detroit who voted and shouldn't have been allowed to, or that their votes are inherently more suspect than the votes of white people. You have the QAnon guys who, I mean, that's essentially just a repackaging of medieval European blood libel against Jews, but it has enough plausible deniability in it that a sitting member of Congress can essentially endorse them even more closely than Steve King endorsed white nationalists, and not really have to suffer major political consequences for it.

Heidi Beirich:

Yeah, that's where we've ended up, right? Marjorie Taylor Greene is a QAnon adherent, our former president, Trump, I think retweeted QAnon material more than a hundred times, and there's no price to be paid anymore for doing things that are just unimaginable under other Republican administrations or the GOP would not tolerate. I always think about the fact that when George Allen ran for Senate it on the GOP ticket, I think in 2006, and he used a disparaging word for Black people, and it was filmed and he was gone from the race in a week. That world doesn't exist anymore, period.

Jonathan Katz:

It got some pushback. He definitely had his defenders in the mainstream, but those defenders have been drowned out. These are not just notional ties. I mean, there are actual material connections between the defendants in Sines v. Kessler in the case in Charlottesville, and people on January 6th, and also the shooter in Christchurch, New Zealand. There're actual, tangible connections between these people. Is that correct?

Heidi Beirich:

Yeah. Yeah. And it's not just ideological, although they do share a lot of beliefs. There are tangible connections between these individuals in these groups. As you pointed out, Kessler was a Proud Boy. They had a wing called the Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights, I think to the Proud Boys that was there at Charlottesville and those people remained in the Proud Boys group going forward. The Three Percenters, the individuals in the Three Percenter militia who showed up at Charlottesville and were part of the rally. There were Three Percenters who have been charged with conspiracy now on January 6th. The ideas that they were spouting that night at the torch rally are exactly the ideas that the shooter in Christchurch imbibed. And he was connected to the network Generation Identity, one part of which was a group called Identity Evropa that was in Charlottesville in 2017. So these are real, tangible connections among the folks that were there at Charlottesville and people, frankly, around the world who have been involved in all kinds of different types of violence.

Jonathan Katz:

And The Great Replacement has a platform almost every night on Fox News on Tucker Carlson's show.

Heidi Beirich:

Yeah. I mean, this is perhaps more horrifying in a way than anything, excepting the violence that we've seen. Tucker Carlson is sitting there talking to millions of viewers on a regular basis in which he's spouting a white supremacist theory that is antisemitic and has created multiple violent mass death situations. And apparently that's not a problem for Fox News. I mean, it is completely outrageous.

Heidi Beirich:

And he's not the only prominent Republican who's pushing these ideas, so has Newt Gingrich, for example. And I think, as I already said earlier, there's a percentage, a large percentage of Republicans who believe The Great Replacement is really happening. I'm sure Tucker has helped them along in that thinking. But I mean, how is it that we've gotten to a place where white supremacy is a topic of discussion, not on David Duke's podcast, that five people listen to, but on Fox News and it's one of its most watched shows.

Jonathan Katz:

Thinking of Tucker Carlson, he certainly has his more respectable seeming defenders who defend him on grounds of free speech, of a free press from a civil libertarian bend. Jason Kessler referenced cancel culture in his own defense on social media during this first week of the trial in Charlottesville and this has been a talking point among the defendants as well. How do you navigate that? I mean, there's a lot of conversation about freedom of speech and yes, perhaps some of these are horrendous, odious things to say, but why don't we just let them speak and let them raise money and defeat them in the marketplace of ideas. What do you say to people who say that?

Heidi Beirich:

Well, what I say is that there is a misunderstanding of what free speech means, and it keeps getting dragged into this particular context. Free speech is about the government not restricting your speech. Free speech is not about what Facebook decides to do on their platform or PayPal decides to do with their accounts. Those are private businesses, they have a choice to decide what to have on there and not to have on there. And I think a spirit of free speech matters, but it's ultimately their call just like a restaurant where I live, doesn't have to let me in if I'm wearing a KKK robe and spouting racist statements. And so the line is there to be drawn by the companies that are involved. And also in the case of Tucker Carlson, it is Fox News's affirmative decision to allow him to say these things on their platform.

Heidi Beirich:

And what I really think is going on in the back of this is not really about freedom of speech, it's about freedom of reach. What they're complaining about is they don't have the audiences that they used to have for their horrible ideas. They are more than welcome to go down to the public park and say whatever they want, or put up a website and spout their ideas, or create a podcast if they can find a place to host it, but they don't have any right to any of those things. So I just think that we have a wrong notion all the time about this issue.

Heidi Beirich:

Now that said, I do believe there should be a spirit of freedom of speech, but there are lines that are crossed that harm other people's ability to speak, potentially threaten violence, and the lines have to be drawn there. And the US is very different than anywhere else in the Western World. Most places don't allow hate speech and they try to weigh the benefits of freedom of speech with the harms that can come from the kind of speech that the people at Unite the Right rally engage in.

Jonathan Katz:

It seems like, thinking about Unite the Right specifically in 2017 and that as a metaphor for the larger debate, when you have armed white supremacists on the street, people who are literally calling for Jews and Black people to be gassed and murdered en masse and are working with people who are actually carrying out mass killings in real life, it's very hard to imagine what that marketplace of ideas could even look like.

Jonathan Katz:

People who consider themselves in the center have been critical of the fact that there were counter protestors, there were people on the left who came into the streets of Charlottesville on August 12th armed, but it seems to me and I'd be interested in getting your take on it that when you allow an expressly violent ideology that uses violence to secure its platform into the conversation, you're essentially guaranteeing that the only people who would be able to speak are people who also are willing to use violence to enter the conversation and generally speaking for most people, speech is essentially silenced. Do you think there's something there?

Heidi Beirich:

Well, first of all, the marketplace of ideas, I just think we have to put quite a few asterisks behind the quote-unquote, "ideas" of the people at Charlottesville, right? I mean, we're not going to debate the merits of white supremacy as possibly something that is relevant to a discussion.But yes, what happens is there's so much fear from the violent imagery, ideas of ethnic cleansing that are pushed by the kinds of people who showed up at Unite the Right that other people are simply going to get out of there, get away from that in fear. And so it does tend to draw, if there are going to be counter protests, pretty aggressive people who are willing to stand up to this.

Heidi Beirich:

Now I have to say, overall, what happened in Charlottesville was also just a horrific failure on the part of law enforcement. And that's not just me saying that. There was a postmortem done by the city, I think, or the state that showed that they just failed to grasp the serious nature of what was coming. And this wasn't the first ever white supremacist rally to occur where violence broke out between counter protestors and protestors, and many law enforcement agencies have learned lessons about how to keep them apart. What was different is nobody expected it to be that big.

Jonathan Katz:

But we saw on January 6th, a similar or at least a similarly serious failure of law enforcement to use one term. But in some cases it wasn't a failure, it was some cops wanted ... It seems that there's this slippery divide between respectable conservatism, respectable anti anti-racist centrism and the really hard, violent, extreme stuff. And sometimes it seems like you've got people with the power of the state who don't appreciate the threat, or they don't feel like it's threatening themselves personally and so they just let it happen.

Heidi Beirich:

Yeah. I think that you're making the right point. There was a certain amount of benign neglect, both at Charlottesville and at the Capitol on January 6th that somehow right wing protestors can't get out of hand or that they're not the real serious threat, it's Antifa, which of course is a narrative we're hearing from the right wing all the time now, that Antifa's the problem.

Heidi Beirich:

And then there's a deeper, deeper thing, and I say this as someone who teaches a class on extremists and law enforcement of bonafide members of extremist groups. We saw active duty cops get arrested for activities on January 6th, same with military veterans and so on. Groups like the Oath Keepers whose members are charged in a conspiracy for January 6th, they have quite a few law enforcement officials on their membership list. That's an even deeper and scarier problem that has, I think, been on full display, especially on January 6th.

Jonathan Katz:

White supremacy is as old as America, older, and some of the groups who are named as defendants in Sines v. Kessler are the KU Klux Klan, which going back to the original Klan and one of the laws that the plaintiff's attorneys are trying to implement was the law that basically disbanded the original Klan only to have the Klan reemerge as an anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, antisemitic force in the 1920s.

Jonathan Katz:

But it seems that one of the things that was lost in the Trump era and that the hate groups that descended on Charlottesville in August 2017, that they were trying clumsily to figure out how to exploit is that there'd been a little bit of a re-erosion of the stigma of the shame of being a white supremacist in America, that there's a little bit of more space to cheat your way over and be like, well, I'm against affirmative action, I'm against critical race theory, and then I think that maybe white people should be easier to vote and then white people should be in charge of everything, and then a white ethno state.

Jonathan Katz:

It seems that part of what's happening here is that there were, I don't want to say bright lines because they were very hard to place, but there was a very clear sense that under Ronald Reagan that you really had to at least use a wink and a nod, if you were going to support neo-segregationist ideas. And now there are people in Congress and there are people, the major news platforms of the right from Fox News to Breitbart, all the way up to The Daily Stormer who are just constantly playing with how much can we get away with and they keep finding that they're able to get away with more and more.

Heidi Beirich:

I think Donald Trump just drove a Mack truck through any lines of civility we had about racial language and expressing racist ideas and so on. You used to be able to dog whistle, Republicans dog whistled on race. I mean, for God's sakes, Reagan began his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and he wasn't there to talk about the civil rights workers who were killed and you had the Willie Horton ad under the first Bush. But what Trump did is he just made racist statements, bald-faced all the time. He ran an ad blaming prominent Jewish officials for taking over the world. And the last ad he ran online in his 2016 campaign, he called Mexicans invaders, Muslims terrorists. I mean, everything that you could think of. He made fun of Black people. He said that, which is just a complete lie, that white farmers in South Africa were under attack by Black people there.

Heidi Beirich:

He ended whatever norms as shaky as they were that we had. And it's been absolutely tragic because it has completely mainstreamed ideas that just would not have seen the light of day. And lucky for Trump, he had social media to amplify it in ways that weren't possible say in the 1990s. So, I mean, he just took a wrecking ball to boundaries on racism and antisemitism and various forms of bigotry, anti-woman stuff, the bus. And I mean, it's just, I don't know how we get back to that kind of a norm place. And Republicans in particular, don't seem interested in trying to get rid of this stuff. They seem interested in proliferating it and allowing it to happen more and more. And I watch this like white washing on the part of the right, right now about January 6th and it is hard to believe. It is just absolutely hard to believe.

Jonathan Katz:

Which kind of brings us back to this case. I mean during jury selection a number of jurors, they were expressing versions of these kind of sanitized ideas, that Black Lives Matter and Antifa are terrorists, that it's the left that is trying to stoke a race war, that discrimination isn't a problem against Jews or Black people or Hispanics, but that the real problem is racism against white people. And they were getting very approving nods and comments from the white supremacists, both the ones who are representing themselves in the courtroom and on social media.

Jonathan Katz:

That said, if the plaintiffs are successful in this case, if they achieve their goal, do you think that this could help undo some of the damage, that it could either reinstall a kind of stigma against a certain kind of white supremacy and say this is too far and you shall not pass beyond this line? Could it help destroy these networks? Could it set a precedent for future cases that would try to do the same? How do you see this case possibly serving a role in this conversation that we're having?

Heidi Beirich:

I'm hoping that it serves a very important narrative shift role, as you're describing. In other words, it's not just about holding the defendants responsible financially for all the damage they did, all the people that they hurt, but also it's a big reminder about the dangers of white supremacy, that this isn't a joke, that this shouldn't be mainstream, that this should be taken seriously. There is a story here that America needs to hear and listen to, maybe it's more important to listen to about how dangerous these people are and how far our culture has gone in terms of accepting ideas that are frankly, just unacceptable.

Heidi Beirich:

And I'm obviously not involved in any of the trial strategy and whatnot, but when I was at the Southern Poverty Law Center, we'd sued hate groups, much narrower cases than this. This is a really ambitious, really important case because it takes on multiple organizations at once. But we would always talk about the fact that the story we told was of great importance. We wanted to educate the public on the dangers of say the Aryan Nations or The Daily Stormer, which is also a defendant in this case.

Heidi Beirich:

So I think what you're bringing up matters immensely. And I also hope that this case will be successful and then will also prompt more such cases to come to hold hate groups responsible for acts of their members and the violence and the mayhem that they create. So I think IFA's trial team is also going to be teaching the legal world about things that can be done to get accountability for these types of individuals and organizations.

Jonathan Katz:

How would you describe to somebody who is not involved in politics, who tries to avoid the news media, who sees themself as they'd be extremely offended to be likened to a Nazi or a member of the Klan, but how do you explain what the dangers are of the kind of extremist ideology that the more sanitized members of this group of defendants, all the way to say the Proud Boys or other neo-fascist groups, how would you describe to somebody like that, the dangers that these groups pose?

Heidi Beirich:

Yeah, well, I mean, I would talk about the violence, both the street violence and the kinds of attacks like at the Tree of Life synagogue. But I also probably would give an analogy to what happened in Germany. It's not a perfect analogy, but Germany before World War II, before the Holocaust was one of the wealthiest, most successful, in the arts, culture, universities, countries in the world and it descended into neo-Nazism and violence because people didn't pay attention and they didn't stand up. That was particularly true in Germany of people on the right, conservatives who thought that they could somehow corral the Nazi regime and Adolf Hitler for their own purposes and were soon to find out that that was absolutely not the case.

Heidi Beirich:

And I think we always have to stay on our toes because we have seen democracies descend into horrific things like genocide when under pressure from the kinds of movements that are being sued in Charlottesville right now. And we can never ever ignore this. And that's why this is so important, that's why the story about this is important, and that's why getting a measure of justice is important. And that's also why it's important that these groups be held to account for what they do and pay for what they do, because we've got to keep them out of violence, keep them as weak as is possible. And we all need to keep projecting these ideas over and over and over again.

Jonathan Katz:

Thank you, Heidi Beirich for speaking with me on The Racket, and all the best.

Heidi Beirich:

It was my pleasure.

Jonathan Katz:

You can find more from Heidi and the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism on Twitter at globalextremism, and on the web at globalextremism.org.

Jonathan Katz:

Sines v. Kessler, the trial is continuing, witnesses are starting to be placed on the stand. Plaintiffs are testifying about the horror that they experienced that day. It's some really harrowing stuff. Some very brave people, are the plaintiffs. They've been through a lot and they're still coming into court to face their attackers and try to get justice. So it's going to be a fascinating thing.

Jonathan Katz:

We're going to be talking about it at The Racket, both in audio and written form. You can read The Racket at theracket.news. You can also, if you came to us from the Substack, find the podcast elsewhere at anywhere that you get podcasts, Spotify, Downcast, iTunes. Wherever you listen to podcasts, you will find this. I want to thank our Racket podcast team, producer, Evan Roberts, researcher, Annie Malcolm, and help from the editor of The Racket, Sam Thielman. You'll find me on Twitter at KatzOnEarth. We're going to have more audio editions, more podcasts coming up very soon. I'm really excited about what we've got planned. Stay safe out there.