30012: (reply) Chamberlain: 30001: Simidor's comments on Alex Dupuy's book (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

> With all due respect, I think that Bob has succumbed to a much greater
degree than Dupuy to the idealist notion that Aristide gave rise to the
popular movement he lent his voice to, instead of the other way around.


As Simidor points out, historians seem to be forgetting (unprofessionally),
with the passage of time, that Aristide wasn't a significant factor in
bringing down the 29-year Duvalier family dictatorship.  The worshipful
Stalinist US left doesn't want to know this and, as so often, is peddling a
deliberately false version to those who think Haitian history began in Feb
2004, when Aristide fell and when so many of them signed up for the Haitian
cause through Revolution of the Month Inc. and that other awesome
institution, the Church of the Perpetual Conspiracy.

Aristide's influence at the time was confined to the capital, but even
there he wasn't a major public figure in the months before the 7 Feb 1986
collapse of the regime.  He was known to the poor through his sermons at
his St Jean Bosco church but the ruling class and the regime weren't taking
any notice of him at that point.  The revolt was born in the provinces (led
by Gonaives) and spread from there.  In fact there were strikingly _no_
demonstrations at all in the capital until a few hours after the Duvaliers
had left the country.  And during them, Aristide's name wasn't heard and
nobody was waiting for him to seize power.

It was the Catholic Church's Ti Legliz grassroots movement around the
country that had done all the groundwork over the previous decade, helped
by the Church's Radio Soleil (though this was tamed by the church hierarchy
after the 1980 crackdown on dissidence).  Aristide didn't much figure,
except as an energetic foot-soldier at the tail-end of this movement that
led to the regime's collapse in 1986.

This doesn't fit with the requirements of saviour politics and current-day
propaganda, but Simidor is right to say that "Aristide was less a catalyst
than a product of his times.  His dramatic 'preaching of democracy' only
reflected the mood of the moment."

After 1986, he wasn't much until the murderous attack on his church on 11
Sept 1988, along with his expulsion from his religious order a few weeks
later for "incitement to hatred, violence and class struggle," made him
into a martyr and his political career was launched.  However, he quietly
ran his orphanage for the next two years, denouncing elections as a
"bourgeois trick," only to declare his candidacy in said elections a few
months later (1990), much as he said in his US exile that he would "never,
never, never" agree to be returned to power by US troops, only to agree to
that very thing a few months later.

"September 11" -- yes, other countries have muscled in on the US
"monopoly."  Chile was first, in 1973, when Pinochet overthrew the
"godless" Allende...  Haiti even has two 9/11s:  Lavalas millionaire
financier Antoine Izméry was murdered by military thugs on 11 September
1993.



> Faced with a new hostile Bush administration, Aristide opted for a modus
operandi that abandoned all economic and foreign policy
decisions to Washington, for a free hand in domestic affairs.

Now Simidor falls into the Stalinist left's schematic habits of "analysis."
 It wasn' t that clear cut (and rarely ever is).  For a start, 600 Cuban
doctors remained in Cuba (quite enough to scare all the apes in Congress
and the White House).

.

> The two narratives also ignore, for different reasons I would think, the
negative role played by the mainstream pro-Soviet Haitian left in
comforting Aristide in his politics of capitulation to US hegemony, after
the collapse of the Soviet bloc.

The leader of this group, René Théodore, was however fiercely and publicly
opposed to Aristide almost from the start, calling him a dangerous
demagogue... even if Théodore didn't much stand up to the US.



        Greg Chamberlain