6564: Starting from scratch: Simidor responds to his critics

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: karioka9@cs.com

"One of the enduring characteristics of radicalism has precisely been that it 
refuses to choose between two equally distasteful alternatives, that it 
refuses to choose between cholera and the pest." (Lewis Coser)

This is my honest answer to Florestal and Dorce who seem rather alarmed by my 
apparent propensity toward bloodshed.  I too share their aspiration for 
stability within a framework of democracy and human growth.  I just don't 
think this is where Haiti is being led right now.  Not necessarily because 
Aristide is evil (on some level I rather think he still means well), but 
because Haiti is what it is, i.e. a desperately poor and abjectly dependent 
country; because imperialism is what it is, i.e. a predatory world system 
grabbing Haiti by the throat; and because Aristide and his Lavalas party are 
what they are, i.e. a populist front condemned to sacrifice its followers on 
the altar of imperialism and of an execrable comprador bourgeoisie. What's 
true for Lavalas is also true for the so-called opposition.  What we see 
brilliantly exposed today is the inability of the system to reform itself.  
Meanwhile, the country is burrowing deeper into the shit hole.  So why not 
indeed turn the table and restart from scratch?

For some people, this may sound foolhardy and hopelessly dogmatic. That 
cannot be helped. Chamberlain, my newfound ally, will likely part company 
with me with much fanfare on this very count.  But the fact remains that the 
masses of people, driven by desperation and hunger, will reach for anything 
that promises relief: bourgeois democracy and US benevolence one day, Lavalas 
populism today, even the return to the "golden days" of Duvalierism tomorrow! 
 But sooner or later, the people will realize who their class enemies are.  
Then another "koupe tèt boule kay," another day of reckoning will come, 
leaving behind "rien que du propre, du bien lavé..."

Will there be a revolution in Haiti in the foreseeable future?  I fervently 
hope so.  Where I will be when the revolution done come is nobody's business, 
and I will not be provoked on that subject by petty provocations from Lavalas 
sycophants.  But am I licking my chops waiting for all hell to break loose?  
Not really.  Revolution is bloodshed (Malcolm X said that), and usually very 
messy.  And the great masses of people, who usually pay the bloody price of 
any revolutionary upsurge, will generally try everything else before 
resorting to that last resort. Or to quote Marx just this once on this list:

"Proletarian revolutions criticize themselves constantly, interrupt 
themselves continually in their own course, come back to the apparently 
accomplished in order to begin afresh, deride with unmerciful thoroughness 
the inadequacies, weaknesses, and paltriness of their first attempts, seem to 
throw down their adversary only in order that he may draw new strength from 
the earth and rise again, more gigantic, before them, recoil ever and anon 
from the indefinite prodigiousness of their own aims, until a situation has 
been created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions 
themselves cry out:

          Hic Rhodus, hic salta!
          Here is the rose, here dance!"

Daniel Simidor