22172: erzilidanto: Response to Adam Hochschild article in SF Chronicle (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Erzilidanto@aol.com

Letter to SF Chronicle's Sunday Magazine in reference to their cover story
(5/30/04) on Haiti by Adam Hochschild entitled: " Birth of a Nation - Has the
bloody 200-year history of Haiti doomed it to more violence?"

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/05/30/CMGKG6F3UV1.D
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Response to Adam Hochschild article in SF Chronicle
May 30, 2004,

May 30, 2004,

In a story published, May 30, 2004, in the SF Chronicle's Sunday Magazine,
Adam Hochschild  regales  us with tales of luxury in colonial Haiti and
conveys, in various cumulative ways, how particularly horrific and savage the Haitian
Revolutionary war was (more than, I would suppose the French and American
ones were perhaps) and how Haiti used to be "the most lucrative European colony
in the world" but that today "most Americans think of Haiti as a wasteland of
repeated coups and dire poverty, which hundreds of thousands of desperate
refugees are willing to risk their lives in small boats to escape."

As soon as I read the title, much less the opening lines, I knew what was
coming: that old self-serving and warped story about how violent Haitians are,
how they won, in combat, against the then most powerful nations on earth
(French, British, Spain) because disease and pestilence killed-off the Europeans and
how their 200-year history so far ONLY shows that Blacks simply can't govern
themselves without white guidance and "civilization."

Adam Hochschild doesn't say this typical dribble outright, but that, in
essence, is the gist of his article entitled: "Birth of a Nation - Has the bloody
200-year history of Haiti doomed it to more violence?"

Someone sent me the article thinking it reflected Haiti's history in a
balance way!

If you put on racists-colored glasses, ignore the fact Haitians live in a
hostile American Mediterranean, hike-up the Tarzan complex and let the "regime
change" mantras role. Then absolutely, the partisan view that "Haiti is violent
and was doomed at birth" is  the typical point of view sold as TRUTH for
generations - for no less than 200 years and 5 months to be exact, to an already
well-conditioned-to believe-Black-is-innately-violent U.S. public. First off,
according to white supremacy doctrines, Haiti wasn't even supposed to exist much
less still be barely surviving and today meriting the attention of not one,
but three of the most powerful Western troops on earth to be on its soil to
de-mobilize and disenfranchise its people once again.

 What this Haitian woman wants to know is how many blood thirsty, savage
Haitian peasants, farmers, factory-workers, literacy workers, herbal healers and
slum dwellers has Mr. Hochschild ran into lately? Does he actually believe
those death squad units like FRAPH and the bloody Haitian military were created,
funded and armed by Haitian peasants, factory-workers and farmers? Gran Met,
please, how many more offenses must the Haitian people suffer at the hands of
such pseudo-scholars, purporting to know about Haiti but just regurgitating the
same old racist bull that comforts the greedy exploiters of Haitian labor?

In 1994, at the height of the last U.S. sponsored Coup D'etat, Disney made a
profit in Haiti of 1.1 billion dollars; Wal Mart made a profit of 2.8 billion.

There are MORE millionaires living in Haiti than in the ENTIRE Caribbean.
Yet, those millionaires, these tiny Haitian economic elites, have done NOTHING
but exploit the masses, on their own behalf but primarily as agents of U.S./Euro
multinational companies and their geopolitical and hegemonic interests.

The U.S. is in Haiti right now guiding its new imported dictator, Gerald
Latortue, to adopt more anti-Haitianist policies benefiting only the Washington
Consensus economists and neoliberalist adherents, while standing by as their
former Haitian soldiers and death squad units destroy every advancement made,
these last ten years, by the people's governments. It is alleged, by the
habitants in the area, that the U.S. is also busy building itself an unauthorized
military base on Haitian soil at Mount St Nicolas across from Cuba's Guantannamo
Bay. Yet, from reading Adam Hochschild's article you would not get a glimmer of
the real situation of U.S. plunder and naked conquest in Haiti, nor the story
of debt, dependency and foreign domination which has ushered in all the 33
Coup D'etats in Haiti's history. No. You would come away thinking Haiti is
doomed because it fought off white "civilization" at birth.

Here's how Hochschild puts it: "Haiti's almost unparalleled legacy of
violence has crippled the land to this day. And neither colonialism, nor slavery, nor
the African monarchies many of its citizens had been born in provided much
fertile soil for the democratic ideas circulating elsewhere in the North
Atlantic world at the time of Haiti's birth. "

What unparalleled legacy of violence? Fighting to live and be free from
European and American chains? Is that Haiti's great sin? If so, that proud Haitian
sin continues.

For, more Haitians have died, fighting for liberty and the right to have
their vote for President Aristide be counted and respected since the U.S., France,
and Canada unlawfully invaded Haiti on February 29, 2004 than since the last
U.S.-sponsored Coup D'etat in 1991-1994. Yes that legacy as pioneers in the
human rights struggle against U.S.-supported despotism, dictatorship, death
squads and underdevelopment continues in Haiti today. No people in this Western
Hemisphere have fought as long and as hard as Haitians have against Euro/U.S.
slavery, financial colonialism, despotism, dictatorship, globalization and now
regime change, again.

What has no parallel is the indomitable Haitian spirit of struggle and
refusal to lose their independence even after 200 years of containment-in-poverty
and de facto colonialism re-established  by France in 1825 when, under the
threat of re-enslavement,  and with 12 French warships armed with 500 canons,
France blackmailed Haiti into agreeing to pay it for the lost of our African
grandparents as property.

This unparalleled and grievous injustice  is what crippled Haiti, its
sovereignty, its development - not, as Mr. Hochschild would have us believe, Haiti's
separation from those  "democratic ideas circulating elsewhere in the North
Atlantic world at the time of Haiti's birth. "

More than half-a-century of a U.S. embargo, the legacy of slavery,
ecclesiastic colonialism combined with servicing the French debt -  which was
"renegotiated" in 1915 by the U.S. - that is what has crippled and doomed Haiti.  That
150 million francs (later lowered to 90 million francs), estimated at 22
billion today, extorted from Haiti by France, which tiny, tiny Haiti had to pay
while France sold off, for only 15 million francs, a parcel of land to the U.S.
that virtually doubled it size, that vengeful weight put upon the shoulders of
Africans digging themselves out of 300-years of white imposed slavery, forced i
lliteracy and other inhumane physical and psychological trauma, virtually
began the colonial model of debt dependency that was then used throughout the
Africa continent after their "independence."

It was the first 'structural adjustment' plan as Haiti had no money left for
social spending on health care, roads, public services and infrastructure
development. In fact, Haiti had to close its rural schools, adopt the Rural Code
which further systematized the class divisions in Haiti (between rural and
city/elite folks) and bound the majority to work the land to pay off this debt.

Haitians  paid for their liberty and independence in a river of blood, earned
it after 300 years (1503-1804) of a European-sponsored holocaust where
millions upon millions of Africans where tortured and murdered by the French,
English, Spanish, et. Yet, Mr. Hochschild's article appears to want us to give more
value to the white lives that were lost, and even perhaps to believe more
whites died during the thirteen-year (1791-1804) war of Haitian independence than
Blacks?

According to Mr. Hoshchild's article, the manner of Haiti's birth, not
Euro/American inhumanity, systemic violence, greed, brutality, despotism and regime
change politics, would explain why the Haitian masses are today again facing
down the U.S/French and Canadian soldiers and dying off like flies while these
troops give firepower-cover to the guns of FRAPH and former U.S.-supported and
trained soldiers and mercenaries. Thus, if we follow Mr. Hoshchild's thesis,
it is the "bloody 200-year history of Haiti" that has doomed it to more
violence and herald back dictatorship and the economic elites' rule these First
Worlders' troops, have, in 2004, come to put back into power.

This is total, absolute TRASH. The sort of slant that comforts the ostrich
mindset. Haiti was rich because of SUGAR, Mr. Hochschild blithely maintains.
Fact is, Mr. Hochschild, the European's "Pearl of the Antilles" was never our
African grandma's pearl. Haiti provided riches for France because of a brutal,
barbaric slavery system that breeded our Haitian grandmamas' like mares and
worked them until death, if the lash and whips didn't kill them off first. The
idea that because Haiti was born by spilling the blood of Europeans so that means
Haiti is doomed, that idea forwarded in Hochschild's article is racist to the
extreme, not to mentions disingenuous.

In the annals of human history, no country, no settlers in the Americas,
killed more people, shed more BLOOD than the English, French, Spanish - than the
European tribes and their white settlers. Period, no comma. So, how does Haiti
get to be the one "doomed?" Why? Because the blood shed and people eradicated
out of Haiti where said whites, who had annihilated the Amerindians all over
the Americas and then kidnapped and enslaved Africans to come work the land of
the Tainos so that the European's coffee at home would be sweet? Right?  ....
The kidnapping of Blacks, spreading of lies about black inferiority and sav
agery continue as we see with this article and the abduction out of Haiti of
President Aristide. If only I had the time, on behalf of the African ancestors and
those courageous Haitians dying right now fighting off, yet again, another
U.S.-sponsored Coup D'etat in Haiti, to fully and individually address the
racist propagandas of the Adam Hochschild's of this world?

In any account about the plight of Haiti, what has no parallel and that must
be stressed Mr. Hochschild is the 200-year campaign, by the U.S./Euros to
disenfranchise - economically and politically - the Haitian people and the blood
letting, poverty and class divisions that that brings forth.

Marguerite Laurent
May 30, 2004

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Forwarded by the Haitian Lawyers Leadership
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"Men anpil chaj pa lou"  is Kreyol for - "Many hands make light a heavy load."

See, The Haitian Leadership Networks'  7 "men anpil chaj pa

lou" campaigns to help restore Haiti's independence, the will of the mass
electorate and the rule of law. See,
http://www.margueritelaurent.com/pressclips/haitianlawyers.html ; http://www.margueritelaurent.com/campaigns/campaigns.html

and Haitiaction.net

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