22270: Mikelsons: Fwd: [News] Response to racist Chron article on Haiti (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Nancy Mikelsons <Nancy.Mikelsons@pobox.com>
>
>
>Sent: Monday, May 31, 2004 5:42 PM
>Subject: adam hochschild article-A response
>
>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>http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/05/30/CMGKG6F3UV1.D
>TL
>******
>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
>
>*********
>Forwarded by the Haitian Lawyers Leadership
>******
>
>******
>
>"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/pressclips/haitianlawyers.html
>; http://www.margueritelaurent.com/campaigns/campaigns.html
>
>and Haitiaction.net
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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>522 Valencia Street
>San Francisco, CA 94110
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>www.freedomarchives.org
>
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-- 
   Nancy Mikelsons                Nancy.Mikelsons@pobox.com