LENIN'S TOMB

Friday, August 06, 2010

Their man in Haiti posted by Richard Seymour

Wyclef Jean wants to be the president of Haiti. Promising to be the country's Obama, he claims to represent the "voice of the youth". Well, we'll see about that. The election process is sufficiently corrupt that, while the most popular party (Famni Lavalas) is banned from participating, a non-resident may well be allowed to participate against election rules. Wyclef Jean is an ideal candidate for the Obama administration, because his record is one of outright support for American imperialism in Haiti. He attacked the elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and supported the death squad 'rebels' that overthrew him. He has continued to support the brutal MINUSTAH occupation, on the grounds that it must contain the 'gangs' (there are gangs, but his associates are involved in them - he's referring to Lavalas). He has schmoozed with Bill Clinton and Ban Ki moon, and the usual array of corporate philanthropists and entrepreneurs. His charity, Yele Haiti, is crooked, though it has made him a small fortune in charges for services rendered.

The only election in Haiti that could possibly be legitimate would be one in which Famni Lavalas was a fully legal participant, and Jean-Bertrand Aristide their presidential candidate.

Labels: aristide, barack obama, death squads, haiti, minustah, united nations, US imperialism, wyclef jean

Monday, January 25, 2010

Haiti: "The humanitarian myth" posted by Richard Seymour

Yours truly in Socialist Worker (US) on the myth of humanitarian intervention in Haiti:

The paternalistic assumptions behind the calls for 'humanitarian intervention' have sometimes been starkly expressed. Thus, the conservative columnist Eric Margolis lauds the history of American colonial rule in Haiti: "[T]he U.S. occupation is looked back on by many Haitians as their "golden age." The Marine Corps proved a fair, efficient, honest administrator and builder. This era was the only time when things worked in Haiti."

Purporting to oppose imperialism, Margolis insists that "genuine humanitarian intervention" is "different," and calls for Haiti to be "temporarily administered by a great power like the U.S. or France." He writes: "U.S. administration of Haiti may be necessary and the only recourse for this benighted nation that cannot seem to govern itself."

Labels: 'humanitarian intervention', haiti, imperial ideology, racism, the liberal defense of murder, US imperialism

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

"There are no security issues". posted by Richard Seymour

Once again, just for emphasis and instruction, the security crisis is fabricated:

One thing that I think is really important for people to understand is that misinformation and rumors and, I think at the bottom of the issue, racism has slowed the recovery efforts of this hospital. Security issues over the last forty-eight hours have been our—quote “security issues” over the last forty-eight hours have been our leading concern. And there are no security issues. I’ve been with my Haitian colleagues. I’m staying at a friend’s house in Port-au-Prince. We’re working for the Ministry of Public Health for the direction of this hospital as volunteers. But I’m living and moving with friends. We’ve been circulating throughout the city until 2:00 and 3:00 in the morning every night, evacuating patients, moving materials. There’s no UN guards. There’s no US military presence. There’s no Haitian police presence. And there’s also no violence. There is no insecurity.

This message, now coming from aid workers in the Red Cross and Partners in Health, starkly contradicts the racist coverage of the wire services, the mainstream newspapers, and the television channels and the websites belonging to all of the above - the capitalist media in toto. Take this, for example: a wire story, reproduced in newspapers and on television programmes across the world, uncritically reproducing the claims of the Haitian police, using less than a handful of named and unnamed witnesses as editorial sock puppets to justify the attempts to spread terror and organise vigilante violence - to actually create the very suspicion, mayhem, and bloodshed that has so far been notable by its absence. Of course, the give-away is the reference to 'gangs' and 'gang leaders'. In the vernacular of the White House, the US press corps, wire services, and the Group of 184 (essentially a delegation of Haiti's comprador capitalist class), these vocables refer to activists belonging to Lavalas, the most popular and rooted political party in Haiti, and the most conspicuously excluded from recent elections.

There will be some real violence, alongside the desperate efforts by starving people to secure food and water for themselves. There is no society in the world that doesn't have violence on a regular, daily basis, never mind in the middle of a horrendous tragedy and a reloaded military occupation. But what we are seeing here is the entirely justifiable expropriation of hoarded goods in stores and other situations being used to characterise the situation as a security crisis. In a scandalous if barely reported manipulation of aid workers, it has emerged that both UN and US authorities instructed people not to deliver relief directly to the victims, because doing so will lead to them being attacked by an 'angry mob'. Such sick conduct, depriving the needy of aid by means of racist scapegoating, constitutes an incitement, among other things, to the organisation of 'angry mobs'. However intelligently said 'mobs' go about trying to secure the means of existence, the right to life in other words, they can be shot without the world batting an eyelid - as recent HNP and MINUSTAH actions demonstrate. (Here, I use the phrase 'the world' in the same sense that the media does, in which 'the world' is just that combination of images and text that are generated by the news corporations themselves, and which in fact mediate our experience of the 'real world'. 'The world' does not bat an eyelid, in other words, so long as the Anglophone media remains unshaken by it.)

This 'security' mytheme has also been used to justify the imposition of martial law, at the behest of the United States, which will be enforced by the US military:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had demanded the imposition of the emergency decree during her visit to Haiti on Saturday. “The decree would give the government an enormous amount of authority, which in practice they would delegate to us,” Clinton declared.

Haitian police and UN troops have already been firing at crowds characterised as 'looters', even if they didn't necessarily have any purloined goods on them at the time. However, the US government is profoundly aware of its PR predicament, inasmuch as many people may refuse to be dazzled by the propaganda and notice the fact that the US has actually just invaded, taken control of the aid, blocked the entry of field hospitals and aid equipment on spurious grounds, and is now in the position of using its immense military advantages to impose martial law on an occupied country. So, the military bosses are telling anyone who will listen that "we're not in Haiti to fight". Well, of course they're not. They genuinely expect people to do as they're told without the question of a fight coming into it. Commentators can fulminate about machetes in Haitian hands, but 82nd Airborne has assault rifles and, if they consider it necessary, helicopter gunships, missiles, fighter jets, and behind them the entire galactically enormous arsenal of US imperialism. They are in a country whose GDP is a mere 1% of the US military budget in a single year. They are in a country that they have already tortured with death squads and terrorised under a UN mandate. Of course they don't expect a fight.

On top of the 10,000 US troops taking over, 3,500 extra UN troops are being sent to combat "lawlessness". This reminds us that the overthrow of Aristide and the imposition of a UN MINUSTAH ocupation was itself already a 'security' operation. It was, moreover, one with a multilateral mandate, construed as a humanitarian operation and by no means an abridgment of anyone's sovereignty. The point is made emphatically by China Mieville in this racy chastisement of international law, which notes that John Yoo, justly anathematized over the torture memos, risks no censure from liberal internationalist opponents when he describes the occupation of Haiti as an attempt to prevent a bloody civil war.

Recall that according to the spurious story originating from the White House, Aristide had 'fled' Haiti amid turmoil and unrest resulting from his poor governance and corruption. According to the imperialist narrative, the UN then helpfully intervened at the behest of the US and other concerned members of the 'international community', to put a stop to this turmoil and unrest, and facilitate the development of democratic institutions (they never seem to catch on in some countries, though we never lose faith that they might). The UN has since faced a difficult struggle against 'gangs' (see passim), but is determined to continue to protect the slum-dwellers from such predators. That the 'turmoil' had itself resulted principally from US intervention in the form of Dominican Republic-based death squads, that Aristide was the elected president and was kidnapped, and that the processes set in motion under the UN's violent occupation constituted a massive net curtailment of democracy, need not detain us for long. Nor need we malinger around the facts of the recent senatorial and congressional elections in Haiti which, even as Haiti's most popular party was banned from participation causing turnout to sink to approximately ten percent, are represented as a signal of the international community's determination to facilitate the democratic process. The point is that 'security' in this sense functions as a cynosure in a profoundly authoritarian and usually imperialist discourse in which populations rather than opposing armies, or even armed insurgencies, are construed as the source of illegitimate antagonism to be repressed. That is what 'security' is for.

This is important to understand because it is already a keyword of the Obama administration - in Afghanistan, the North-West Frontier Province, and now in Haiti. The new president's language is expunged of some of the exaggerated, triumphalist self-righteousness of the hard right. The pseudo-messianic, missionary language has been subject to de-emphasis. The contention that the US is a fervent champion of democracy, and that its opponents are in some sense evil, is not entirely abandoned, but it is more carefully deployed. Liberals breathed a sigh of relief when it was announced last year that Obama was abandoning the obsession with democracy-promotion and focusing on security. But the language of security, while possessing reassuringly technocratic cadences, is not less dangerous for that. It is a primary moral and legal justification for violent repression.

Labels: capitalism, disaster politics, haiti, lavalas, US imperialism

Monday, January 18, 2010

Security issues. posted by Richard Seymour

Or, "We haven’t had any security issues at all". (Via). Excuse me? I thought that violence was growing. I had been led to believe that "looting and gang-related activity" had taken over. Said gangs were, I was assured, "storming quake-ravaged storefronts and even ransacking coffins and piles of dead bodies in search of usable belongings". (That fascination with corpses again). As it transpires, even in the text of these reports themselves, the major act of violence was by the Haitian national police opening fire on crowds of starving earthquake survivors, murdering one of their number, and leaving others tied up on the streets to be beaten to death by 'vigilantes' later. The striking fact, patiently reported by observers on the ground, is that Haiti is not gripped by anarchy, 'mob rule', mass slaughter, or anything of the kind. There was probably no more violent crime in Haiti this weekend than there would be in any normal weekend, and probably less than in some American cities. Instead, while aid is obstructed, Haitians have cooperated to undertake rescue efforts and administer aid without the assistance of relief workers:

Labels: capitalism, disaster politics, haiti, racism, shock doctrine, US imperialism

Saturday, January 16, 2010

Haiti: getting the picture posted by Richard Seymour

So, if we can summarise. Haiti is a country which is subject to "progress-resistant cultural influences", such as:

the influence of the voodoo religion, which spreads the message that life is capricious and planning futile. There are high levels of social mistrust. Responsibility is often not internalized. Child-rearing practices often involve neglect in the early years and harsh retribution when kids hit 9 or 10.

This (rather than this), says neoconservative David Brooks, explains why Haiti is so poor. The appropriate response is imperial disdain for Haitian culture, and paternalistic intervention. Such a culturalist reading of social institutions and political economies is not exclusive to neoconservatives, but it is their preferred variant of the liberal defence of murder. As you would expect ftom the savages described by Brooks, though, they have responded to the disaster of the quake by looting and building roadblocks from the dead. The security situation (a phrase worth unpacking) is... what, you tell me - 'deteriorating'? 'Testing'? 'Tricky'? 'Challenging'? What is the bromide of choice these days? At any rate, the state of affairs arising from said "progress-resistant cultural influences" is so baleful that it is compelling the US to use its military power to obstruct the delivery of aid, because delivering aid will - so Obama's defence secretary tells us - lead to riots.

Brooks is not alone in hoping that American power can be used to discipline the hapless natives. As Obama sends in the marines and the 82nd Airborne, precisely to deal with the above-mentioned "security situation", the American Enterprise Institute insists that such forces are used to "ensure that Haiti’s gangs—particularly those loyal to ousted President Jean‐Bertrand Aristide—are suppressed." The worry about the prospect of a return of the elected president, Aristide, which "can only create further mischief". The AEI, I would confidently wager, has no reason to fret over this particular exercise in humanitarian intervention. Obama is committed to maintaining the coup government, the sweatshop oligarchy and the phoney elections. The troops are there because the Haitian population is seen not merely as pathetic supplicants but as a threat. The very sophisticated networks of community and solidarity that have been developed in Haiti under dictatorship and terror, and which are best placed to deliver assistance to those in need of it, are precisely the problem as far as the US government is concerned. It is they, the 'gangs' who refuse to assimilate to America's benevolent programme of racial uplift, whom successive US governments have attempted to destroy, whether through the IMF or the Tonton Macoutes. It cannot be long before the marines find themselves gunning down some restless ingrates, and there is certainly no prospect that the Obama administration will allow Aristide to return to his country.

Just as well, then, that we have been apprised of all these horror stories about bodies doubling as road-blocks (as if people in need of aid would actually try to block the roads), machete wielding 'looters', security breakdowns, gang violence, etc. Otherwise we might have been inclined to misunderstand the situation, and wonder whether in sending trained killers into a disaster area the Obama administration isn't hijacking a catastrophe according to a premeditated plan, a pre-conceived set of priorities, and a prefabricated story.

Labels: barack obama, haiti, humanitarian intervention, racism, the liberal defense of murder, US imperialism

Friday, January 15, 2010

No fucking way posted by Richard Seymour

You remember all those stories about Katrina victims raping babies in bathrooms and engaging in bloody orgies of destruction and mutual mutilation? You remember how the vast majority of them were utterly utterly bogus, racist fantasies that were used to justify withholding aid and sending in the military to calm the "little Somalia"? Well, I'm just saying, and it's just a suspicion, but I think this story stinks:

People have started blocking roads with corpses in Haiti's capital Port-au-Prince to protest against the delay in emergency aid, an eyewitness says.
TIME magazine photographer Shaul Schwarz said he saw at least two downtown roadblocks formed with bodies of earthquake victims and rocks.

"They are starting to block the roads with bodies; it's getting ugly out there," he said. "People are fed up with getting no help."

Labels: capitalism, disaster politics, haiti, katrina, racism, US imperialism

Thursday, January 14, 2010

Haiti: opportunity knocks posted by Richard Seymour

You want to hear about chutzpah? You want to hear about sheer gravity-defying audacity? Well, ladies and gentlemen, comrades and friends, prepare to catch your lower jaw. Forget Limbaugh's racist anxieties. Forget about Pat Robertson drooling about Haiti's 'pact with the devil'. He's a senile old bigot, and his sick provocations are familiar by now. This is the Heritage Foundation on the Haiti earthquake, which is estimated to have killed 100,000 people:

Amidst the Suffering, Crisis in Haiti Offers Opportunities to the U.S.

In addition to providing immediate humanitarian assistance, the U.S. response to the tragic earthquake in Haiti earthquake offers opportunities to re-shape Haiti’s long-dysfunctional government and economy as well as to improve the public image of the United States in the region…

While on the ground in Haiti, the U.S. military can also interrupt the nightly flights of cocaine to Haiti and the Dominican Republic from the Venezuelan coast and counter the ongoing efforts of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to destabilize the island of Hispaniola. This U.S. military presence, which should also include a large contingent of U.S. Coast Guard assets, can also prevent any large-scale movement by Haitians to take to the sea in rickety watercraft to try to enter the U.S. illegally.

Meanwhile, the U.S. must be prepared to insist that the Haiti government work closely with the U.S. to insure that corruption does not infect the humanitarian assistance flowing to Haiti. Long-term reforms for Haitian democracy and its economy are also badly overdue.

While you're letting that sink in, let me lay this on you. It is, or ought to be, widely enough understood that the category of 'natural disaster' is increasingly redundant. Whether it's an earthquake, a storm, a flood or a crop failure, the truly shocking and baleful consequences of ecological events are generally caused by their interaction with existing political economies. Ashley Smith therefore asks the right questions:

Why were 60 percent of the buildings in Port-au-Prince shoddily constructed and unsafe in normal circumstances, according to the city's mayor? Why are there no building regulations in a city that sits on a fault line? Why has Port-au-Prince swelled from a small town of 50,000 in the 1950s to a population of 2 million desperately poor people today? Why was the state completely overwhelmed by the disaster?

Well, quite. The wretched subjugation of Haiti by the 'international community', particularly since the multilateral anti-Lavalas coup in 2004, is angrily and movingly described by Peter Hallward in today's Guardian, and there is more here (the Tomb's coverage of the coup is here). The coup was promoted to advance the process of neoliberal capital accumulation, break the left and the unions, and break Famni Lavalas and the civil society organisations sustaining resistance. For years, UN 'peacekeepers' have slaughtered thousands of Haitians, and the residents have been put through rigged election procedures. Lavalas members, priests, and activists have been subject to political imprisonment and murder, some of them characterised as 'gang' members. This is all for the aid of sweatshop bosses such as Andy Apaid, and the multinationals principally based in the US and Canada that benefit enormously from the exploitation of Haitian labour. This process of capital accumulation is what has driven Haitians out of a devastated rural economy and into impoverished slums with a tinpot infrastructure, and left them vulnerable to this extraordinary catastrophe. There are a tremendous number of NGOs operating in Haiti, but there is hardly a public service infrastructure capable of a response. What support systems were available have themselves suffered terribly in the quake.

Following from the above, such disasters are generally exploited by states and companies in the vicious and predatory way that Naomi Klein outlines in The Shock Doctrine. Perhaps a lesser known example of this is the way in which in the wake of the tsunami in late 2004, the Indonesian military took the opportunity to ramp up repression in Aceh. A more obvious example is the depraved way in which the Bush administration (and the local Democratic party) effectively ethnically cleansed New Orleans and turned it into a haven for developers and construction firms after Katrina. So, what depraved agenda is going to be more forcefully thrust on Haiti in the middle of this catastrophe? Obviously, there is no danger of Obama allowing any impoverished immigrants into the US on the back of some rickety boats. You might recall that after last year's hurricanes, his administration continued to deport people, even in the middle of urgent legal appeals. So what is the plan? Back to Ashley Smith, who writes:

In close collaboration with the new UN Special Envoy to Haiti, former President Bill Clinton, Obama has pushed for an economic program familiar to much of the rest of the Caribbean--tourism, textile sweatshops and weakening of state control of the economy through privatization and deregulation.

In particular, Clinton has orchestrated a plan for turning the north of Haiti into a tourist playground, as far away as possible from the teeming slums of Port-au-Prince. Clinton lured Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines into investing $55 million to build a pier along the coastline of Labadee, which it has leased until 2050.

From there, Haiti's tourist industry hopes to lead expeditions to the mountaintop fortress Citadelle and the Palace of Sans Souci, both built by Henri Christophe, one of the leaders of Haiti's slave revolution. According to the Miami Herald:

The $40 million plan involved transforming the now quaint town of Milot, home to the Citadelle and Palace of Sans Souci ruin, into a vibrant tourist village, with arts and crafts markets, restaurants and stoned streets. Guests would be ferried past a congested Cap-Haïtien to a bay, then transported by bus past peasant plantations. Once in Milot, they would either hike or horseback to the Citadelle...named a world heritage site in 1982...

Eco-tourism, archaeological exploration and voyeuristic visits to Vodou rituals are all being touted by Haiti's struggling boutique tourism industry, as Royal Caribbean plans to bring the world largest cruise ship here, sparking the need for excursions.

So while Pat Robertson denounces Haiti's great slave revolution as a pact with the devil, Clinton is helping to reduce it to a tourist trap.

At the same time, Clinton's plans for Haiti include an expansion of the sweatshop industry to take advantage of cheap labor available from the urban masses. The U.S. granted duty-free treatment for Haitian apparel exports to make it easy for sweatshops to return to Haiti.

Clinton celebrated the possibilities of sweatshop development during a whirlwind tour of a textile plant owned and operated by the infamous Cintas Corp. He announced that George Soros had offered $50 million for a new industrial park of sweatshops that could create 25,000 jobs in the garment industry. Clinton explained at a press conference that Haiti's government could create "more jobs by lowering the cost of doing business, including the cost of rent."

As TransAfrica founder Randall Robinson told Democracy Now! "That isn't the kind of investment that Haiti needs. It needs capital investment. It needs investment so that it can be self-sufficient. It needs investment so that it can feed itself."
One of the reasons why Clinton could be so unabashed in celebrating sweatshops is that the U.S.-backed coup repressed any and all resistance. It got rid of Aristide and his troublesome habit of raising the minimum wage. It banished him from the country, terrorized his remaining allies and barred his political party, Fanmi Lavalas, the most popular in the country, from running for office. The coup regime also attacked union organizers within the sweatshops themselves.

As a result, Clinton could state to business leaders: "Your political risk in Haiti is lower than it has ever been in my lifetime."

Would those who sycophantically defended Clinton, particularly over his Haiti policy, care to comment? Do the 'progressives for Obama' have anything to say at this point?

Labels: capitalism, haiti, multilateralism, shock doctrine, united nations, US imperialism

Friday, June 26, 2009

Murder in Port-au-Prince posted by Richard Seymour

Gabriel Ash at Jews Sans Frontieres has been doing a few posts highlighting instances of state murders caught on camera and not reported as avidly as the death of Neda Soltani (actually, hardly reported at all). This is worth adding to the list:

Labels: haiti, imperialism, iran, murder, palestine, protest, state

Sunday, August 24, 2008

The blackness of Dessalines posted by Richard Seymour

In the comments to the post below, it is pointed out that the early outstanding strike against white supremacy was the Haitian revolution. It was also pointed out to me that when it comes to subverting the racial order, there is no better example than Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the first ruler of an independent Haiti:

All Haitians, - Ayisyen yo - "shall hence forward be known only by the generic appellation of "Blacks." (See, Dessalines' 1805 Constitution).

Thus, in Dessalines' Haiti, "Black," is deracialized. We all now know that race is purely a social construct with no scientific grounds. The truth is there is just one race, the human race. But back at its creation, the country of Haiti was based on this truth.

For, Dessalines defined those who fought for the abolishment of chattel slavery in Haiti and against colonialism, including the few whites that did fight on the side of the Africans, as "Blacks." To study Dessalines' life, achievements and first Constitution is to come to know that a "Black" is a person (no matter his/her skin color, European or African) who stands for freedom, human dignity and against slavery, colonialism and imperialism. No ideal in this modern world so directly confronts and conquers the biological fatalism of white privilege. In Dessalines' 1805 Constitution, all Haitians are "known only by the generic appellation of "Blacks." And "Blacks" included even the Polish and Germans who fought with the African warriors on the side of liberty and equality, not slavery, plunder and profit. Black people in Dessalines' Haiti are "lovers-of-liberty" who are willing to live free or die. To reiterate, there is no modern philosophy or ideal that has so directly provided the world with an ALTERNATIVE to the manufactured "race game," based on skin color, as this Dessalines ideal.

The Constitution of 1805 declared that no white, of whatever nation, could set foot on Haiti as a master or owner of property. This was reasonable enough: the last time they came in that guise, they totally wrecked the place and turned it into the most miserable slave colony in the world. But white people were in fact permitted to stay and be naturalised as Haitians - namely, those who had fought alongside the indigenes. But they would be referred to as "black", not white. This was partly a domestic strategy to defuse the tension between newly freed black Haitians (nouveaux libres) and those mulattoes who had been freedmen under the French empire (ancien libres). Indeed, it was Dessalines attempt to redistribute the estates confiscated from the French to the nouveaux libres that raised the ire of the ancien libres and led to his assassination in 1806. But in effect as well as in intent, it subverted the very idea of 'race' by interpreting blackness as a mode of social equality, not of natural hierarchy.

Labels: black, haiti, jean-jacques dessalines, race

Friday, May 09, 2008

Two Kinds of Image Problem posted by Richard Seymour

This:

And this:

(Click on images).

Labels: haiti, iraq, orientalism, racism, the arab mind, torture, US imperialism

Sunday, May 04, 2008

Resources of resistance posted by Richard Seymour

A few excellent new resources for readers of LT. First of all, for those involved in the fightback against the Tories in London, Boris Watch is hopefully going to be a useful source of information. Second of all, for those watching the US electoral train crash and the economic collapse that is sure to produce some tough struggles in the coming months and years, the new US Socialist Worker website is looking good, and has some star material including from John Pilger and others. I don't know if they're updating regularly throughout the week like our own UK Socialist Worker (where you can find a solid analysis of the latest election results), but if you want insight on last week's shocking verdict on Sean Bell, or on the recent SEIU fiasco, it's got the goods. I see the website is also promoting an ISR article on the Mahalla revolt by my Egyptian comrade Hossam el-Hamalawy. Incidentally, he will be useful for those of you wanting to know about the effects of world food prices on the struggle against the Egyptian dictatorship (Mubarak is looking seriously threatened). For news on Haiti, where the riots and street battles with UN occupiers are reaching a zenith on account of food prices, I would check out Haitianalysis.com. Any other good resources you think of, post them in the comments boxes.

Labels: boris johnson, egypt, food prices, haiti, mubarak, socialist worker

Thursday, April 17, 2008

The Deluge posted by Richard Seymour

The global food riots and protests have hit hardest in Haiti. It is to be expected that Haiti, which has struggled for so long to escape the tyranny of external powers and is today struggling under a UN mandate in which civilians are regularly murdered, should suffer the worst of the food crisis - an acute crisis, moreover, obviously created by the markets and not simply by scarcity. (Incidentally, to the extent to which poor harvests were a factor, these cannot be extracted from the intensifying problem of 'climate change'.)

Amid the uninformative and frequently racist pieties of the media when it comes to Haiti, I have been struck by the lucidity and power of Peter Hallward's recent book, Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment. It stands out as the single most informative account of Haiti's politics so far produced, and it will surely become a classic and a key reference. If it is a counterblast to critiques of Aristide as a sell-out whose rule was becoming disastrous and autocratic, that counterblast is aimed at left-wing critiques as well as the conventional right-wing ones. I can think of Alex Dupuy's hostile book, The Prophet and Power, which - while it does not conceal what the Bush administration did to Haiti in 2004 - maintains that Aristide was a sell-out after 1994, having reverted to an authoritarian paradigm that he once condemned with the formation of Fanmi Lavalas as a split from the broader Organisation Politique Lavalas, and was arming Lavalas-supporting gangs to murder opponents. It's not just Dupuy - many former supporters believed that he had refashioned himself in the mould of the Ton Ton Macoutes. Hallward does a sterling job of defending Lavalas and Aristide, and describing the means by which Haitian popular democracy was repeatedly subverted by the United States. (In fact, Hallward's review of Dupuy's book can be read here).

Hallward's argument, based on a surfeit of data, documents and interviews, is roughly as follows (it follows at some length too - you may as well forget this post and just buy the bloody book). Lavalas as it emerged in the 1980s was a movement of unprecedented moment, led by a man hated by the elite as a combination of Castro and Khomeini, the sophisticated liberation theologian Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Hallward makes clear the particular nature of Aristide's theology: "That Aristide prefers to assert this [egalitarian] principle in primarily theological terms is an indication of its unconditional quality, not of its dependence on any sort of supernatural domain. What he calls 'God' is simply a name for an uncompromising commitment to equality and justice. 'There is no force superior to humankind' and 'There is no Messiah other than the people'." It was a grave climacteric for an elite cultivated by the US during its occupation from 1915-1934 during which time it massacred the Cacos rebels, killing up to 30,000 people, and created a plantation state from corvée labour, defended by a violent government militia comparable to the Guardia Nacionale created in Nicaragua. The US has supported that elite to this date, whether its leading spokesman is Duvalier or Apaid. The threat of popular self-government that culminated in a landslide victory for Aristide in the 1990 elections could only be answered by a coup and a wave of CIA-backed death squad violence, which killed some 5,000 people.

Aristide responded to this terror by arguing that there could be no question of confronting this terror with an armed struggle. He set about negotiating a means back to power with the US, accepting some harsh terms and more or less being compelled to take up much of the agenda of his opponent who had lost the previous elections. Critics of Aristide say that he made too many compromises to return to power, and effectively become a wholly bought adjutant of American power. Hallward maintains that Aristide had little choice by 1994, given the balance of power in Haiti, but to cut a deal with the US and adopt a more conciliatory posture. Moreover, the fact that he was able to do so was nothing short of miraculous, given that the Ton Ton Macoutes who were ravaging the country even as the negotiations wore on, were a direct extension of American power in the country. In fact, as the violence of the FRAPH escalated, US negotiators were not shy about reminding Aristide that unless he was a lot more cooperative, those nasty people might end up becoming "the dominant force on the ground". (Aristide's own account of the negotiations can be read in his 1996 book Dignity). It was quite a remarkable turnabout to have Clinton announce in September 1994 - to great disquiet among neocons and nutters of the John McCain variety - that he was going to send in 20,000 marines to remove the "most brutal, most violent" regime in the hemisphere. The solidarity movements in the US undoubtedly had a great deal to do with this, but the main reason is that the Clinton administration now had come by a different means of getting what it wanted. For, what those marines actually did was not to disarm the army, but to ensure the protection of the FRAPH soldiers and extend courtesy to the murderers while key coup leaders were exiled to the US. Many former soldiers were integrated into the new national police force (PNH) which at any rate was an immediate target for assassinations, and that police force rapidly reverted to behaviour redolent of the old army. As the transition was effected, the US was able to exert overbearing control over the reconfiguration of the state, populating it with chosen advisors and consultants. This will be familiar to those who follow such institutions as the NED - the professionalisation of the civilian component of imperialism has been a critical component of American power since the 1980s. It has helped convert quite explicit dictation of the affairs of others into a neutral exercise, a simple fulfillment of a sort of corporate strategy. The best recent guide to this tendency, albeit one that places too much emphasis on former Shachtmanites, is Nicolas Guilhot's The Democracy Makers.

Most US marines remained in Haiti from 1994 to 1996, while a small number remained behind until 2000. America's multilayered presence intensified its grip over the country. But the US could not stop Aristide from doing the one thing that the people demanded above all, which was to disband the army. However, neoliberalism meant conserving the elite, and any attempt to dilute its power was resisted by the US, usually successfully. Lavalas won the 1995 parliamentary elections resoundingly, but the main organ in the Lavalas Front, the Organisation Politique Lavalas no longer supported Aristide. Led by the career politician Gerard Pierre-Charles, the OPL sought to adapt to the new power balance. One of its leading members in the new parliament was the US-imposed conservative Prime Minister Smarck Michel. At the same time, USAID and a Washington-funded body called the Programme Integre pour le Renforcement de la Democratie (PIRED) were organising for the contuination of the business elite's dominance, with the latter using its influence to win over labour and community groups. The International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) was contracted by USAID to organise 'civil society' groups - business leaders in the main - to maintain pressure on the government. Instead of allowing Aristide to continue as President, the OPL opted in 1996 to back his former Prime Minister René Préval, and - although they were swiftly disappointed by the latter's continued loyalty to Aristide's aideas - they did successfully under-sell a series of public utilities. The right-wing drift of OPL politics led to the formation by Aristide and his allies of Famni Lavalas (FL), a grassroots-based party designed to create a link between the Haiti's working population and their representatives. When several Aristide supporters won decisive victories in the 1997 legislative elections, the OPL refused to accept the results and its supporters resigned from the government, refused to accept any nominations from Préval for a Prime Minister and blocked legislation until their terms expired in January 1999. They then acted to delay elections until May 2000, which meant that Préval had to govern by decree for the next 18 months.

What happened next shocked the OPL (now renamed the Organisation du Peuple en Lutte in order to distance itself from the old Lavalas front from which it had emerged) and Haiti's business elites. Aristide won a decisive mandate with the backing of a disciplined political organisation that was far more cohesive than the loose coalition that had backed him in 1990. If Haiti used a first-past-the-post system like that in the UK or US, "Famni Lavalas would have won more than 95% of the seats in both houses of parliament". This, Hallward maintains, made the Lavalas movement more threatening than before. The opposition howled that it was a fix. Both the OPL and the new pro-army, pro-US coalition called Convergence Démocratique (CD) vowed not to accept the results. They were followed in their dismissal of the results by Western politicians and also by media sources such as Reuters and AP - the agenda-setting media, as Chomsky points out. The basis of this is a minor technical complaint by the OAS, which did not dispute the fairness of the vote or the legitimacy of the result. The OAS referred to a mistaken methology used by the independent electoral arbiter, the CEP, which had no Lavalas representatives on it. On this basis, the opposition and the United States undermined the legitimacy of a highly popular elected government and proceeded to sabotage it. The US imposed an embargo on all aid and blocked development loans, cutting the national budget in half and reducing the GDP by over a quarter in the period that followed. The Clinton administration instructed its ambassador to tell the new government that relations would not be normalised until the "problems" with the elections were resolved. The Bush administration continued these policies with even less subtlety, insistent that Aristide had no future. USAID and other organisations poured money into the coffers of his opponents, and IFES was put to work to mobilise various groups under the rubric of professional associations to act against the government.

This is where Hallward's documentation and reportage is essential. Myths abound about this period, with Aristide accused of orchestrating violence against opponents and ruling by decree. This despite the fact that having won so convincingly, he had invited the CD into the government and was met with intransigent hostility. The CD embodied leading US clients, and was quickly adopted for grooming by American PR experts (Hallward notes that James Foley, the US ambassador to Haiti from 2003, had cut his teeth grooming the KLA into a 'respectable' outfit in the late 1990s). IFES and the IRI embraced the Group of 184 (G184), which represented the most reactionary elements of the business sector under the sweatshop owner Andy Apaid junior. But it was not enough to destabilise the government in non-violent ways, so by late 2000, the opposition was trying to recruit some of the armed groups operating in the slums, some of which were simple criminal enterprise. They had no success in this venture until mid-2003. Former army personnel such as Guy Philippe, an admirer of Augusto Pinochet, were organised by the US under the rubric of the Fronte pour la Libération et la Reconstruction Nationale (FLRN). This was an organisation comparable to the Contras in Nicaragua. Other leaders included former FRAPH death squads fighters including Jodel Chamblain and Jean Tatoune. The FLRN organised from the Dominican Republic, and launched its first incursion into Haiti in July 2001, attacking the Haitian National Police Academy and various police stations. The government's subsequent arrests of suspected insurgents included some CD members, and was used as a pretext to call off negotiations between the CD and the government. Then, on 17 December 2001, 30 commandos took over the presidential palace with the help of the national police and announced that Aristide was no longer president. The subsequent popular uprising that thwarted the coup involved a few offices belonging to constituent parties of the CD being attacked. And so it went on, with repeated attacks and destabilisation, and all the while US policymakers and the IRI disavowed its connections to Guy Philippe and his merry band of putschists. (Philippe himself was unhelpful enough to warmly recall his 'good friend Stanley Lucas, scion of a wealthy Haitian family and the IRI programme director whose subsequent starring roles involved him in support for the Venezuelan opposition). The opposition itself abandoned its disavowal by 2004, warmly referring to the insurgent Macoutes as "heroes".

Despite all this pressure, the Préval-Aristide governments managed several remarkable accomplishments - reducing infant mortality from 125 to 110 per thousand live births; bringing illiteracy down from 65% to 45%; slowing the rate of new HIV infections. They did what they could to soften the blow of 'structural adjustment', by maintaining subsidies, implementing some land reforms, and promulgating certain social programmes. However, they were not in a position to implement socialist or even social democratic reforms, and most people suffered from the effects of neoliberalism. Realistically, what Lavalas could do was create a lively popular movement to try to pressure elites for change, to formulate popular demands and try to fulfil them. That movement consists of a national network of ti famnis, groups of neighbourhood militants. Because of its popularity, however, and also because of its relatively informal structure, it has been susceptible to infiltration by criminal or opportunistic elements. Leading Lavalas politicians often ended up showing more in common with the party's opponents than with its base, and did a great deal to enrich themselves and further their own careers. Corruption spread throughout segments of the Lavalas hierarchy, albeit on nothing like the scale of previous administrations, particularly that of Duvalier. Further, when the success of Lavalas showed the difficulty of organising outside it, so many opponents decided to oppose from within. Aristide had to work with hostile elements in the police, particularly the force attached to the presidential palace which - surprise - was composed of large numbers of former army members. Chavez can call upon the loyalty of army cadres in Venezuela; Aristide does not come from a military background and has no experience in fighting wars. He put up with demonstrations calling for a coup d'etat, allowed an unashamedly insurgent opposition to organise, and sought compromise everywhere: far from being a dictator, Aristide was in an extremely weak position. Yet, human rights organisations have tended to depict the Preval-Aristide years as continuous with previous and subsequent administrations in terms of human rights abuses. Hallward comments: "Here we reach the crowning achievement of the disinformation campaign ... Remember the basic numbers: perhaps 50,000 dead under the Duvaliers (1957-86), perhaps 700-1,000 dead under Namphy/Avril (1986-90), 4,000 dead under Cedras (1991-94) and then at least 3,000 killed under Latortue (2004-06). And under Aristide?" Between ten and thirty individuals killed by the PNH "whose political affiliation was often anti-government".

At any rate, given the manifest weakness of the government, and the growing problems faced by the country's poor, it should not have been difficult for the US to start paving the way for a coup and the subsequent UN protectorate. In fact, as Hallward points out, it took quite a long time and was much more difficult than the coup in 1991 - a testament to the resilience of the Lavalas movement. It required massive intervention, with 11,000 people in 1,000 organisations trained within Haiti by USAID. It required repeated incursions and a failed putsch. But perhaps most striking of all, it required elaborate attempts at winning over a diverse array of NGOs and unlikely groups like Batay Ouvriye (BO). Hallward documents who groups like Christian Aid performed a neo-colonial function, advocating CD's preferred version of events and a version of their preferred outcome (the elimination of Lavalas as the dominant force in Haitian politics). Hallward rightly points to the funding that BO received from the NED, as well, and the role it performed in polemicising against Aristide despite the fact that their own aims would be served worst by the overthrow of the government (although he uses the unfortunate term "neo-Trotskyite" to describe them). He suggests that they may have supported the coup, and that they were at least content to see Aristide go. Whatever the case, their sectarian analysis and actions did not see them attempt to hinder the coup in any way. The coup began with the siezure of Raboteau in September 2003, and the emergence of the Cannibal Army as an anti-government gang engaged in attacks on government forces the same year. In February 2004, the death squads and criminal gangs and ex-army men united for the insurgency and were shortly on the march to Port-au-Prince, perhaps even already there with several sympathisers in the presidential palace guards. The myths that were widely repeated in the media - that it was a democratic rebellion, a popular liberation struggle, or perhaps a combination of genuine revolt with initial criminal instigation, which at any rate had nothing to do with any outside powers - are meticulously taken to pieces in Damming the Flood. Essentially, it is clear that despite national and regional efforts at finding a negotiated settlement, and despite the fact that the evident difficulties being experienced by the insurgents, the opposition was determined this time to bring the government down. And it seems it was Assistant Secretary of State Roger Noriega who pulled the plug on final negotiations. The Chirac government was also anxious to get rid of Aristide and his demands for restitution for the systematic extortion of the Haitian treasury by the French state after L'Ouverture's revolution (for the amount the French deemed that they had lost as a result of the overthrow of slavery), and it restored France's longstanding relationship with Haitian elite figures such as G184 supporter Serge Gilles. Finally, Aristide was abducted on 29 September 2004. The US ambassador at the time, James Foley, claimed that it had been a rescue mission, that the US was deeply saddened by what was happening, and that to protect Aristide's endangered life they absconded with him to a safe place. It was claimed that he had resigned voluntary, with an air of passivity and acceptance. Some 36 hours after his 'resignation', as soon as he found a phone, he told every news outlet that would listen that he had been kidnapped by US forces. Hallward does not profess to be a detective, but he does an excellent job here of piecing together what happened and skewering the propaganda.

We know some of what happened next, of course: the revenge of Haiti's ruling class. The mass imprisonment and murder of prominent Aristide supporters. The restoration of convicted genocidaires. A government under a UN protectorate that carried out attacks on pro-Lavalas neighbourhoods (not to mention hospitals). Hallward documents in some detail the Latortue government's repression, as well as the massacres of the UN and anti-Lavalas gangs. However, he is fundamentally optimistic - as is Jean-Bertand Aristide in the closing interview. The coup was difficult to effect, and it could not withstand the popular counter-coup that resulted in another Preval administration. The government is still beholden to neoliberalism, the UN troops continue to commit atrocities, but Lavalas is still a powerful popular movement. Terror has not been able to destroy it in the way that the Sandinistas were destroyed, even if Haiti's position means it will take a global upturn for the left to help shake it free of domination for good. Over 200 years old now, Haiti's liberation struggle could hardly have asked for a better contemporary advocate than Peter Hallward.

Labels: coup, damming the flood, haiti, imperialism, neoliberalism, peter hallward, united nations

Saturday, December 01, 2007

On white plagues and black magic posted by Richard Seymour

Since it is World AIDS day. The old thesis that Haiti was responsible for bringing the dominant HIV strain to the United States and Europe has been resuscitated. The scientists behind it say that they may now be able to trace its origins back to the Congo, and find a cure. As these authors point out, the theory is dubious, and the last time this accusation was in vogue was when Haitians were labouring under a US-imposed dictatorship in the 1980s. The scientific work behind these claims, and the nature of their presentation, is questioned only in some of the mainstream coverage. In fact, as William Bowles points out, the study is months old and has been gravely criticised by leading scientists in the meantime, not least because some of the speculations offered as conclusion rest on the irrational and dangerous mythology of a single identifiable transmitter of the virus. Given the trends in sex tourism, AIDS might as easily have been transmitted from any part of the United States to any part of the Carribean (although, curiously, Cuba has largely averted the pandemic). However, part of the significance of these claims is in part the ideology they slot into, that being the Kaplanesque drama of decivilisation in which Africa is the source of disease, crime and political instability.

One of the most powerful challenges to this dogma is also one that has been attacked most vitriolically, though praised handsomely by some highly qualified peeps. Edward Hooper's work of reportage and detection, The River, traces the origins of AIDS to polio vaccinations in the Belgian-ruled Congo in the 1960s. The vaccinations were, in Hooper's view, probably contaminated with SIV from chimps livers harvested (often through live vivisection) by the medical centre in question and used to cultivate the vaccine. If Hooper is right, then AIDS is one further tragedy of colonialism. No wonder, then, that such invective has been poured on the book by some: it's sanctimonious, boring, doctrinaire, hysterical, etc (one of Hooper's hostile critics happens to be the lead author of the latest study). Hooper mildly terms this mixture of condescension and derision a "defensive response". Even if Hooper's basic thesis turns out to be wrong, which seems unlikely, there remain huge questions opened up by Hooper's reporting - strange gaps in the record, missing documents, the problems with the way in which science has been conducted, the narrow avoidance of transmission of other dangerous diseases through the same practises etc. That the alternative theory, that infected chimp meat was ingested by hunters, is widely believed among virologists tells us a great deal more about the status of science in the ideological field than it does about the status of the theory.

Even if Hooper was wrong, we would be left with the question of social justice. Capital's systemic opportunism is such that, while AIDS has killed tens of millions of people, most of whom are Africans, Western pharmaceutical capital has located unprecedented profit opportunities in the holocaust. Its most aggressive political auxiliaries now in command of the White House, relying on an opportunistic coalition between the Christian Right and Wall Street, are pushing policies designed to intensfy the problem with a sadistic insistence on 'abstinence education' which substantially blunts the effect of a victory won by activists in 2001, specifically in their demand that Third World countries should be permitted to break the intellectual property claims of medical giants. So AIDS, a holocaust inflicted by colonialism, is now one that is perpetuated by capitalism. Some people might ask, as a certain oleaginous American politician did on Question Time a few years back, if we will leave anything to be settled outside of politics. Isn't this one of those things that politics doesn't touch? Can't you leave well enough alone? Can't you resist dirtying everything (even fatal disease) with your politics? The question is analogous to the older one: is nothing sacred? The obvious answer is, of course not.

Labels: death squads, germ invasion, haiti, white plague

Thursday, September 06, 2007

Crime and publicity posted by Richard Seymour

1 missing, no suspect. 80 dead, suspected state criminality. Guess which story caught the media's imagination [sic]?

Labels: haiti, media

Saturday, June 23, 2007

Whitey's planet, whitey's rules: on those unfit for self-government posted by Richard Seymour

Ignatieff complains, repeatedly, of Woodrow Wilson's legacy, for having embedded the concept of self-determination in liberal discourse. He thinks that it has failed, that the dream of national sovereignty is over and that the American empire will have to take over and live up to, or down to, his own liberal ideals (which, by the way, include defense of the state's inalienable right to torture suspects, until it becomes an electoral liability). If he had actually read a little bit of Wilson, or knew what he was talking about - which I can assure you he doesn't - he would know that he is actually very close to being a Wilsonian, but that this is no compliment. His was a doctrine mainly about those unfit for self-government and who could, at best, be redeemed after a training course under the despotism of whitey. Wilson was, as I think I briefly indicated elsewhere, for the sternest repression of the 'savage' races of the earth. He wasn't alone in it, and I only mention it again because he in particular has such a mountainous reputation. Well, they have never stopped with the white despotism, and are even today preparing for more of the same.

Consider: This has passed at the start of the year. That is a Congressional resolution calling upon the UN to "charge Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with violating the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and the United Nations Charter because of his calls for the destruction of the State of Israel." Genocide. This passed with bipartisan support. Wanna see how they support the claim of genocide? Well: "the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (commonly referred to as the `Genocide Convention') defines genocide as, among other things, the act of killing members of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the targeted group, and it also prohibits conspiracy to commit genocide, as well as `direct and public incitement to commit genocide'".

Seriously? Apparently so. It goes on to imply that Iran has threatened to use force against Israel, and then to elide the distinction between the threat of force and genocide; and then it repeats the 'wiped off the map' bullshit. This has been comprehensively debunked more times than the average US congressperson could count. The resolution also recites a mutilated quote from the Modern Right reformer Hashemi Rafsanjani, which has been bruited widely on the scum blogs and most reactionary news sites. The quote as rendered in the resolution is: "[i]f one day, the Islamic world is also equipped with weapons like those that Israel possesses now, then the imperialists' strategy will reach a standstill because the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything [in Israel], while it will merely harm the Islamic world". Now, I don't expect much rhetorical maturity from American politicians, but I expect a little bit of sophistication. The quote is taken from a 2001 speech, (you can read all of it here), and it clearly doesn't signal an intent to harm Israel or destroy it. All to what end? Well, if the United Nations should consider a country guilty of breaching the genocide convention, that is a mountainous cassus belli, and would legitimise intervention - perhaps by the state of Israel - to thwart this 'genocide'. The news now is: IAF preparing for Iran strike. The Wahabbi Jundullah militia based in Pakistan have been probing and softening targets in the south of Iran on behalf of Washington, and have even been honoured on Voice of America as the leaders of a popular Iranian resistance movement. Their atrocities have easily matched the various assaults by people calling themselves 'Al Qaeda' affiliates in Europe, but who ever thinks to ask a White House spokesperson why they are supporting what Bush called in a moment of puerile demagogery, "Islamic fascism", in the Middle East, and why - if they are so concerned with the well-being of Iranians - they think it is more permissible to murder them than New Yorkers? Wouldn't Iran be entitled to its own 'war on terror', including retaliatory strikes on American military buildings, or a full-scale invasion if America refused to hand over the people who ordered this horror? What news corporation would allow a reporter of theirs to ask such a question, and broadcast the reply?

In Afghanistan, where the massacres pile up daily, they expect to stay for decades: the white man's tutelage was as long in the Philippines, and didn't ever completely end, even to this date. Similarly, in Iraq, the plan is to make a Korea out of it. If they could ever get troops to the heart of Tehran, you could be sure that it too would be temporary to begin with, transitional for a few years, and then mandatory for the ensuing decades. And recently, as Eli pointed out recently, the House of Representatives approved new money for 'democracy promotion' in both Venezuela and Cuba. In both cases, their allies for democracy are ultra-rightists nostalgic for Phillipine monarchy, adamant supporters of racial hierarchy, putschists and opponents of all forms of genuine democracy. Nor will they allow Somalia to govern itself, unless it accepts self-government to mean the rule of a clutch of warlords. Haiti, following a coup and multinational governance under the especial auspices and direction of the United States, France and Canada, is only now - after the invasion of death squads, after the overthrow of the elected government, after several massacres by the UN troops, after the empowering of former genocidaires, after the locking up of thousands of political prisoners, and after the destruction of cities - taking tentative moves toward getting its own security forces, that might "one day" replace the MINUSTAH forces. Although Haitian resistance ensured that they couldn't restore completely the butchers of Raboteau, Haiti is secured once more in North America's 'free trade' circuit, with the sporting goods and t-shirts flooding into US and Canadian markets on the back of the cheapest labour possible. You will recall also that in Nicaragua, the US government was even unwilling to leave the Nicaraguans to elect their own government in peace last year, since they feared that the winner would be one of the people who helped overthrow the dynastic autocracy that US forces imposed in 1937. The repeated, unveiled threats probably did much to alter the election result, as their combination of death squad terror and bribery decided the result of the 1990 election in favour of Chamorro. They are doing all possible to finish off even the prospect of real Palestinian self-government. And they are now worried, terribly, that Pakistanis and Egyptians may achieve self-government.

This résumé, far from comprehensive, describes a current and pressing state of affairs. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the lives and conditions of millions of people not living in the United States are determined in part by a largely Anglo-Saxon ruling class, which has learned not to openly espouse the principles of white supremacy and 'race' hierarchy, but operates on them nevertheless. Such an order cannot but be organised through the repeated and perpetual application of extreme violence - which task is effected not only by legions of amphetamined Alabama-bred eighteen year olds pumped up on racism and pornography, but also by the private contingent, the warlords and mercenaries and shock troops of different fundamentalisms. Now they are settled on decades of jackboot rule in several strategically important areas, mandate-style colonial governance with a few nods toward representation, as was very much the style in the old days. Apopthegmatically, of course, those who resist that order and support such resistance are evil, inhumane, and anti-democratic. Such people hate freedom, even their own, and abjure it every time they refuse whitey's rule.

Labels: cuba, genocide, haiti, iran, nicaragua, somalia, US imperialism, venezuela, white man's burden