15193: Simidor, re Ives review of Dailey article (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Daniel Simidor <karioka9@mail.arczip.com>


Kim Ives' review is as harsh as Dailey’s was toward  Aristide and
his Lavalas mignons. Dailey's article, Ives writes, "purports to
be a review of Roger (sic) Fatton Jr.'s book," but as one nullité
writes elsewhere, it's not really a review. Magnifique et
irréfutable trouvaille!  Poor Dailey is exposed from the get go!
Never mind that the NY Review of Books (!) calls his article a
review.  Or that, as Ives knows quite well, authors seldom pick
their own headlines. In fact, the daily NY papers have entire
departments in charge of writing headlines! Can we not move on?

Dailey's review is a journalistic exposé of Lavalas' predatory
politics, inspired by Fatton's more scholarly work which took a
long view of the problem of predation. The essence of Ives'
criticism is that Dailey is soft on US imperialism and that
somehow Dailey is a mouthpiece for OPL leader, Gerard
Pierre-Charles.  I'm obliged to agree with Master Ives on the
first count.  It is good hygiene to always pass judgment on one's
own imperialism, especially at a time when nasty US imperialism
has begun to bomb disarmed Iraq into oblivion.  The use of the
so-called "international community" as a euphemism for U.S. and
European imperialisms opens the door to all sorts of confusion.
Certainly, Uncle Sam's intent toward Haiti has never been
benevolent.  Having said that, Dailey can very well counter that
in the spirit of Fatton's book, his was not a story about US
predation, but a story about Haitian predation in the here and
now.  And boy, oh boy!  With Lavalas in power over the last
decade, is there a lot to write about!

Surprisingly, Kim Ives doesn't think so.  Nowhere in his long
refutation of Dailey's article is there any mention of Lavalas
corruption and mismanagement as two key factors pushing the
country to the brink.  Aristide, he tells us, is not without
fault, "but the principal problem, for progressives, is not
Aristide's 'authoritarianism,' as Dailey contends, but rather his
half-measures, vagueness, and hesitation in defending the Haitian
people's demands for radical change in Haiti, whether due to
political cowardice, immaturity, miscalculation, or duplicity."
The problem, for Ives, is Aristide's indecision and "vagueness" --
not the mammoth thievery that the Titid-Mildwèt couple has
instituted from the top, not the corruption of the democratic
process, and not the rapacious and murderous gangs associated with
Lavalas.  It strikes me that the only Haitian progressives Ives is
entitled to speak for are paramount leader Ben Dupuy and his staff
-- and the hosts of PPN members, if they would ever materialize.
With those noted exceptions, Haitian progressives across the board
abhor Aristide, his lies and his greed, and most of all his
corruption of the grassroots movement.

Haiti-Progres is back in another spiral of subservience toward
Aristide.  The rationale, as they would explain it, is that Haiti
is faced with another US occupation, and that Lavalas populism is
an ally in that struggle.  In other words, the folks at
Haiti-Progres know that Aristide is spoiled goods, they know in
their hearts and practice that he's a nasty little dictator, but
they hope against reason that they can cajole him into standing up
against another US invasion.  Never mind that such cajoling hasn't
worked in the past, and that back in 1993 Aristide fervently
begged the US imperialists to invade his own country.  Never mind
that Aristide cares so little about Haitian sovereignty that he
has abdicated (or was about to abdicate) control over 10% of his
country to the Dominican Republic, in exchange for God only knows
what.  The typical Lavalas reaction to the threat of another US
occupation is to get richer faster, to grab anything they can grab
in a hurry, before they lose control.  Kim Ives was quite clear on
that before the last change in orientation.

But here we come to the crux of the matter.  Ives refers to Gerard
Pierre-Charles and the OPL leadership as "boot-lickers of U.S.
imperialism," because they "encouraged Aristide to break with
Haiti's leftist popular organizations and return from exile in
1994 on the shoulders of 23,000 U.S. troops," etc.  It is quite
true that Pierre-Charles traveled to Washington in the summer of
1993 to push just such a line.  But what Ives doesn't tell his
readers is that as early as spring '92, Aristide had pointedly
forbidden his followers to use violence even in self-defense, but
to rely instead on the good will of the "international community"
(read his imperialist “allies”). Those, including Eddie Moise and
his Front des Militants Réunis, who dared to call for armed
resistance were roundly denounced by the Lavalas bureaucrats as
"agents provocateurs," and neatly betrayed to the US and Canadian
embassies as "terrorists."  Aristide's embrace of the US invasion
was in keeping with that early politic of betrayal.  My point is
that what's good for the goose is also good for the gander. You
can't honestly call the OPL leadership imperialist boot-lickers
without calling Aristide by the same name.

Ives' intent with that sentence was altogether different.  His
main reason for denouncing the OPL gang as "boot-lickers of U.S.
imperialism" is that they had "encouraged Aristide to break with
Haiti's leftist popular organizations," in advance of the
invasion.  The "leftist popular organization (s)" in question
being of course Ben Dupuy's own National Popular Assembly (APN).
A few naïve people on the left, myself included, assumed that
Dupuy had made a principled break from Aristide, after a foreign
invasion that he had begged for.  Ives is now telling us that it
was not so, that it was in fact Aristide who distanced himself
from Haiti-Progres and from APN. And Ives clearly holds a grudge
against the OPL gang for causing Aristide to give his side the
cold shoulder.

Few people on this list know the reasons why Haiti-Progres hates
the OPL gang, Gerard Pierre-Charles in particular, with such
unrelenting passion.  What Ives reveals is only the tip of the
iceberg.  It is an open secret that while Chairman Dupuy was
working diligently at being the paramount Haitian communist leader
in the 1970s and 1980s, the people most active in OPL kept him out
of the limelight, not only in Europe and Latin America where they
outshone him intellectually, but also within the international
socialist movement where the revisionist PUCH (read the
OPL/Convergence gang) condescended to him as a petty-bourgeois
radical.  Dupuy and his Haitian Liberation Movement (MHL) were
kept out of international socialist gatherings (and away from the
subsidies that came with recognition as a legitimate party) by the
same people who are now competing for Uncle Sam's approval against
Aristide.

"The enemy of my enemy is my friend" – this is a key factor in
understanding Haitian politics, left and right.  On that basis,
every lowlife, ex-FRAPH murderer can become a respected member of
the opposition. The same principle applies to Haiti-Progres'
alliance with Lavalas: anything to keep the PUCH/OPL competition
from winning. In the "Predatory Republic” of Haiti, there is room
for only one bull in the pen. Tout pour gagner, and everything
goes to the winner.  Strike the guy next to you, or else he will
get in your way.  Thus Dessalines betrayed Charles Belair to the
French, and Geffrard had Aimé Legros killed. In such a context
ideology means nothing, while atavism and amour-propre are
everything.  Still, to get back to Ives and Dailey, I think
Marassa Lwasauvaj says it best: “Mr Dailey try to make bad
government sound bad. Mr Ives try to make bad government sound
like they have little problems.”


Daniel Simidor