Jonathan M. Katz > Quotes

“[For] decades, researchers have told us that the link between cataclysm and social disintegration is a myth perpetuated by movies, fiction, and misguided journalism. In fact, in case after case, the opposite occurs: In the earthquake and fire of 1906, Jack London observed: "never, in all San Francisco's history, were her people so kind and courteous as on this night of terror." "We did not panic. We coped," a British psychiatrist recalled after the July 7, 2005, London subway bombings. We often assume that such humanity among survivors, what author Rebecca Solnit has called "a paradise built in hell," is an exception after catastrophes, specific to a particular culture or place. In fact, it is the rule.”
― Jonathan M. Katz, The Big Truck that Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster

“A March 2010 Fox News poll would find that more than half of U.S. registered voters donated to Haiti’s relief.”
― Jonathan M. Katz, The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster

“The world spent more than $5.2 billion on the emergency relief effort; private donations reached $1.4 billion in the United States alone.1 Thousands of doctors and nurses performed lifesaving surgeries.”
― Jonathan M. Katz, The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster

“for anyone who gave money to a major aid group, that they were going to be able to spend your $20 donation on actual survivors of the actual disaster you intended; for the most part, they were not.”
― Jonathan M. Katz, The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster

“two-thirds of the colony’s slave population at the start of the 1790s had been born in Africa, nearly all arriving after the last great earthquake on Saint-Domingue.7 The white masters refused to educate slaves, if they could communicate with them at all.”
― Jonathan M. Katz, The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster

“Bill Clinton became the UN Special Envoy for Haiti, pledging, in a slogan borrowed from his work after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, to “Build Back Better” from the storms. The stakes, everyone knew, were high. President Préval, ever more”
― Jonathan M. Katz, The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster

“Despite an upwelling of sympathy from millions of Americans, those in business and government ended up channeling their energies into the worst of our historical patterns, treating Haiti’s disaster as an opportunity to make profits and execute political schemes, treating Haitian lives and priorities as largely irrelevant.”
― Jonathan M. Katz, Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America's Empire

“Why do we expend so much time and money preserving the memory of the short-duration wars in which European powers were involved; and so little, relatively speaking, remembering the kind of wars Butler fought—protracted, decades-long conflicts in the Americas, Asia, and Africa that have been the most common mode of warfare throughout U.S. history? And why does America celebrate its generals who oversaw death and destruction on a massive scale, while forgetting the exceptional few who spent their later years trying to stop them?”
― Jonathan M. Katz, Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America's Empire

“As long as the United States seemed eternally ascendant, it was easy to tell ourselves as Americans that the global dominance of U.S. capital and the unparalleled reach of the U.S. military had been coincidences, or fate; that America’s rise as a cultural and economic superpower was just natural—a galaxy of individual choices, freely made, by a planet hungry for an endless supply of Marvel superheroes and the perfect salty crunch of McDonald’s fries.”
― Jonathan M. Katz, Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America's Empire

“I thought about the work of the great Haitian scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot, who wrote that “any historical narrative is a particular bundle of silences”—of events downplayed or forgotten, of perspectives excluded from the archives. “One ‘silences’ a fact or an individual,” Trouillot wrote, “as a silencer silences a gun.”
― Jonathan M. Katz, Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America's Empire

“we focus so much on the problems,” he once remarked, “we forget to acknowledge the small miracles.”
― Jonathan M. Katz, The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster

“Zoning wasn’t a priority in those tumultuous times, much less the enforcement of building codes.”
― Jonathan M. Katz, The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster

“Aristide promised social equity and a redistribution of land and wealth and, above all, bo tab la, a place for the disenfranchised at the decision-making table. The people rewarded him with an overwhelming 67 percent of the vote.”
― Jonathan M. Katz, The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster