Nature has done our dirty work. We are now free to invade Haiti. (Again.)
Within a few years we’ll have turned the whole place into Cuba circa 1955. Complete with puppet dictator and resort hotels. If oil just so-happens to be there, then all the better. We will, after all, need to be repaid.
Not you of course. You will never see your five dollars again. But the people who are handling your money certainly intend to make it back. And then some.
While I believe in the good intentions of the people donating money to Haiti, I also believe in the bad intentions of the people taking those donations. It’s a belief I would like to see discredited. Sadly, nothing I’ve seen in my thirty one years has shown that our leaders are even occasionally well-intentioned.
It has shown the opposite.
There are, without doubt, good groups out there. Doctors Without Borders springs to mind. The Red Cross, after Katrina, not so much. It’s just too bad that the bad groups, the ones with guns, taxes and public will on their side, aren’t allowing the DWB planes to land.
It’s awful and completely predictable.
Politics is a game played with corpses.
We’ve been playing with Haiti for years now. Two hundred years ago, the Haitian people rose up and overthrew their French slave owners. This pissed off the French and terrified the Americans.
The last thing America wanted was a slave revolt on their doorstep. That sort of thing might give good ol’ Uncle Tom and sweet Aunt Jemima ideas. And if there’s one thing that’ll scare a white slave owner, it’s coloured folks with ideas.
That’s why they like their coloured folks to look like this:
When oppressed people get ideas, they tend to look quite different. They can end up looking like this:
And white people certainly don’t like that.
Just look at the innocent women and children beat down by the uncompromising hand of the Negro oppressor! It’s positively savage. Not like slavery. That’s just economics. Besides, the slaves like it. They need it, even.
I’d bet that the white folks in that picture are thinking: But I treated my slaves well. Hardly used the whip and gave them extra gruel on the holidays!
They should, instead, be taking their few remaining seconds to reflect on the difference between charity and justice. Perhaps on how, when they weren’t simply sadistic, their inability to distinguish between charity and justice helped land them in that pickle. And the survivors might have thought on how best to avoid it.
But, instead of doing that, the rich slave owning nations did the cruel thing. They declared Haiti a pariah nation, cut off all trade and left it to rot. It remained in that state until the Haitians were forced to approach their former owners on bended knee and come to some sort of terms. The French wanted to be paid.
And paid they were. A huge amount.
Adjusting currency is a difficult task but, in modern terms, the payout was somewhere in the realm of 21 billion dollars. In these days of trillion dollar debts, that doesn’t sound like too much. But imagine if a country as large and rich as Canada had to pay that today. Not to buy something. Just to be allowed to buy and sell things. It’d be a lot for us and Haiti is no Canada.
The former Haitian slaves actually had to pay reparations to their former owners.
Not so surprisingly, during Haiti’s April 2003 bicentennial, their democratically elected leader publicly demanded that money back. Though the idea seems sensible, one should bear in mind that he was a corrupt figure (a politician, for God’s sake) who was likely looking for an external enemy to gloss over internal problems. He was soon to find one.
In 2004, Canada, the USA and France invaded Haiti.
While Canadians were proudly blathering on about our moral superiority to America and how we’re a nation of peacekeepers who would never engage in “regime change”, our Liberal government helped overthrow and kidnap the Haitian leader. Whether he was corrupt, evil or good, is not my concern. We have no place “liberating” foreigners from anyone other than ourselves.
The future of Haiti was the subject of the 2003, behind closed doors meeting called The Ottawa Initiative on Haiti.
What was said at those meetings, which included no Haitian leader, remains a government secret. So we have to use our imaginations. Or, perhaps, we should just just look at what the people who attended that meeting did in 2004.
They invaded Haiti and kidnapped its leader. Put him on a plane to Africa and occupied the country under the blue flag of the UN.
And, oddly enough, the fellow we put into power immediately dropped what he called an “illegal” and “ridiculous” demand for reparations.
I can’t imagine why.
Perhaps it’s because France is in no rush to pay 21 billion dollars to anyone while America and Canada both have a vested interest in not only avoiding the precedent of paying reparations but in avoiding the whole conversation. Both nations would end up owing a lot of money to a lot of people. We share a bloody, savage and rather embarrassing history.
And if you think the 555 million dollars that Canada spent in 2004 “helping” Haiti looks like a lot of cash, just compare it to 21 billion. It starts to look a whole lot smaller. A dishonest broker will always pay a a hundred dollars to shoot the man he or his partner owes a million to. And we’re nothing if not dishonest brokers. That is, after all, what we do.
The recent earthquake is a horrendous tragedy. What strikes me as more tragic, however, is not that we’re “re-occupying” the country but, rather, how our past actions have created this mess in the first place.
Plenty of people get earthquakes and earthquakes kill plenty of people. But when they strike an impoverished nation, the damage is just that much worse. And it is us, the people of the west, who have deliberately impoverished Haiti. We have done it for over 200 years, we were doing it up to the moment the quake hit and we are now using the quake to do it some more.
What is it that Obama’s Chief of Staff is so fond of saying? “You NEVER want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Perhaps we should take him at his word.
Over two hundred years we took France’s richest colony and methodically reduced it to the poorest nation in the west. And why? Because its people wanted to be free. Because freedom costs slave-owners money and we’re the slave-owners. It was a sort of copyright violation. France owned the rights to the Haitians and the Haitians, in refusing to see themselves as property, pirated themselves. They were sued. At gunpoint, they had to pay.
We in the rich west own and exploit most of the world. But we are a tiny minority. We are Versailles. If we hope to avoid meeting the guillotine-fate of Versailles, we need to think long and hard about who we are, what we do and why we do it. Then we need to change it. Haiti is just the most recent example of a debt we owe yet are losing the capacity to pay. It will not be the last.
Instead of congratulating ourselves on our abundance of charity, we must reflect on our lack of justice. Our victims do not have the privilege of ignoring our cruelty. They will not forget it. Especially if we do.
