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Civilizing Aristide

By Noam Chomsky at Aug 23, 2004

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My own judgment, for what it is worth, is that [Aristide] came into office committed to the kind of significant social and economic reform that was called for by his popular constituency in the hills and slums, desperately needed in Haiti. His few months in power seemed to be a considerable success, and were praised as such by international agencies, despite immediate efforts by the US to undermine his regime, culminating in a brutal military coup a few months later. That set off a reign of shocking terror that was effectively backed by the Bush #1 and especially Clinton administration, while Aristide was brought to Washington to "civilize him" and "give in a crash course in capitalism" as the slogans went. In 1994 he was returned on the bayonets of the marines, and with a commitment to carry the harsh neoliberal polcicies of the US favorite he defeated, a former World Bank official who won 14% of the vote. In effect, then, violence and subversion paid off for Washington: it overturned the 1990 vote, installed the policies it had backed but were overwhelmingly voted down by the population, and had done all this while winning laurels for its selfless and generous efforts to "restore democracy" and protect human rights by restoring the elected president -- bound and gagged by policy restrictions. From that point on it is a mixed story, and it is hard to judge just what course Aristide was following, not that he had a lot of choices in those circumstances. The Bush administration withholding of loans, and France's contemptuous rejection of requests to consider compensating for the enormous fraud by which it strangled Haiti economically as punishment for its liberation, narrowed the options even further. Why should the US meddle? It's a deeply ingrained habit. The US was utterly appalled by Haiti's liberation in 1804, sought in every way to prevent it, and then joined in harshly punishing Haiti for its crime of becoming the first free country of free men in the Western hemisphere -- not a good model for a slave society. In later years there was jockeying with German and Britain about who would control this region, not insignificant for commercial, extractive, and strategic purposes. Wilson invaded on the pretext that he was defending us from the Huns, and the 19-year Marine rule he installed severely harmed the country, compelled the parliament to allow US corporations to by up the land, and finally left it in the hands of a brutal national guard. In the 1980s it was redesigned as an export zone -- place to make baseballs cheaply under horrendous working conditions, and so on. The 1990 election of Aristide set the usual alarm bells ringing: a populist priest advocating the hated liberation theology, concerned for the needs of the poor minority, possibly a "virus" that might "infect others" with such evil thoughts. And on until the present. Haiti was once the richest colony in the world, the source of much of France's wealth. Now it may be lucky to survive a few generations are so. The picture is not unique Today's Bangladesh, the very symbol of misery and disaster, was crown of the British empire. Quite a few other cases, but considered improper to learn the lessons they teach, because they interfere with the preferred self-image of benevolent imperialism.

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Re: Civilizing Aristide

By Nicholsj100, Nichols at Sep 10, 2004 04:58 AM
It was after the PC that I went overseas twice more. Started an NGO for resource management, pulled out and left it in the hands of locals with 200K worth of concrete programs for starters. Helped organize People's Organizations and lobbied against government corruption alongside local activists, helping to gain national attention for neglected local causes. In Swaziland, even as PC, I got jobs for my students (first time in the school) and put pressure on the school (run by the Anglican church with an American administrator) to turn the curriculum towards the real interests of the students. Did well enough to get the US Ambassador out of his office and after my ass. Even did some industrial espionage against Enron in Mozambique in 95-96. Tourism can be fun.

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Re: Civilizing Aristide

By Nicholsj100, Nichols at Sep 10, 2004 04:56 AM
Sure, DaudMusa, write your letters, although I think getting active in your community or at the workplace is a little meatier. The stuff you outlined can easily fit into the “speaking the truth to power” category, which you might know Chomsky has derided in some contexts. There are many things to do, and many PC Volunteers are flops, but many also make some of your coffee shop activists look pretty limp. I was recommending to this person a way to get a better understanding, and then he/she at least will have better tools to decide what to do, if anything. Peace Corps can be a beginning, not the end. One can also argue that building resistance abroad is just as important as campaigning at home.

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Re: Civilizing Aristide

By Geazan7, Daudmusa at Sep 09, 2004 23:05 PM
Thank you Mr. Chomsky for your insightful blog. Although I like your discussions with Mr. Barsamian best. I also thank you for giving us some ideas on what 'we' can do. Pressure the news media to tell the whole story of Aristides ouster. Contact congress and pressure them to investigate the ouster and US role. Form groups with others to demand reparations of Haiti to France to cease and for reparations from the US to Haiti to begin for the problems the US has caused. Maybe these steps [there are others] would allow the Haitians to solve their own problems or we can continue to get those disney shirts real cheap. Or pretend we are doing something by being very serious tourists...

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Re: Civilizing Aristide

By Nicholsj100, Nichols at Sep 06, 2004 00:34 AM
I assume Prof. Chomsky tries to read everything here. I'm sure he would tell to be an involved citizen –in your community (if you have one), as an activist, voter, correspondent to office holders, etc. Might I suggest you join the Peace Corps for a couple of years? It's got problems, but it can do a good job of putting you into awkward situations in other cultures and working at the local level. Sometimes, trying to overcome the Peace Corps bureaucracy is a good challenge all its own. Certainly you will get a better sense of the issues confronting people in another part of the world. If you go in with a broad attitude to primarily learn, even the most frustrating things can benefit you. Fresh perspectives; shaking things up inside; looking for a new angle, seeing how the other 90 % live and meeting really interesting people. I might do it again.

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Re: Civilizing Aristide

By Ted_heistman, Truthseeker at Sep 04, 2004 21:21 PM
I don't suffer from any delusions about the future. First of all I am aware global oil production is about to peak. I just want to try to be a force for good. So I am looking for answers as to what good I can do in the world in whatever small way I can. If I am going to die, I want to die at least trying to do good. I do think you for your interesting replies. I wonder if Noam Chomsky ever reads these I hope he does.

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Re: Civilizing Aristide

By Nicholsj100, Nichols at Sep 04, 2004 18:17 PM
The point about things like population and environmental degradation being focal (not just in Haiti, but everywhere) is that we have run out of time for the concepts of “progress” or even justice to characterize what should be done. Without broadly embracing the paradigm that regards man as a fairly humble inhabitant on a fragile planet, we're all screwed –some sooner than others. Look in Google for “earth at night” in quotes. As far as taking in a flow of immigrants from Haiti, that could become a constant flow, along with many other nations, and would solve nothing. But I'm fairly indifferent to all of that at some level. I know it sounds cruel to speak as I do, but just wait another 20 years and watch people around the world turn back upon each other as the crops stop growing and the water runs out. Be sure to save some of your sympathy for then. It will be quite a spectacle, and it will be a lot harder to care about it.

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Re: Civilizing Aristide

By Nicholsj100, Nichols at Sep 04, 2004 18:17 PM
I look at Haiti and also think of Liberia, which is worth studying. Yes, it's the product (or by-product) of slavery, colonialism and Cold War machinations –and of capitalism. But what's interesting is the way freed slaves and free-born American blacks regarded and interacted with local cultures and peoples. They were probably as contemptuous and exploitative of the indigenous groups as were many other colonizing groups. In Haiti, I have to ask what it would be like had the US just left it alone. We can't know, and such speculation shouldn't diminish our outrage at what the US has done there, but one does want to understand the local realities well enough not to be deluded. My guess is that Haiti/Dominican Republic would have had further wars, eventually becoming one country after great loss of life, and would have developed its own elite class with or without racial characteristics. This elite would still reach out to establish trading relationships favorable to itself.

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Re: Civilizing Aristide

By Nicholsj100, Nichols at Sep 04, 2004 18:16 PM
In my opinion, much of the problem is that a whole collection of things have been grafted onto societies around the world in the wake of European colonialism that have thrown the so-called Third World into a state of chaos, and this chaos has been kept at a pitch, but with the collusion of hybridized yet indigenous elements, for its continuing exploitation by developed countries and for national “elites”. This overlapps with savage US consolidation of “its own” territory and was followed up by its continuing drive for power, and to a lesser extent by the Soviet Union (which in some ways can be seen as a once base of resistance against the continuing US-led onslaught of capitalism, which has no patience for things like culture or nature or justice). Some societies –such as Haiti- have been constructed entirely from the ruins, but so has Cuba to a great extent, although with a greater national aptitude for solidarity. Despite its difficulties and shortcomings, Cuba is a miracle.

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Re: Civilizing Aristide

By Nicholsj100, Nichols at Sep 04, 2004 18:15 PM
I was in the Peace Corps in Swaziland, Africa, which is another example. It has a relatively mild history of exploitation by outsiders as compared to nearby Mozambique and South Africa, and is still governed by playboy King Mswati and the Dlamini clan. It is also a country without the problem of having corralled various cultural groups or opposing tribes into artificial borders. Yet, overgrazing there is rampant and this is largely still done according to indigenous practice on the commons, while most of the stock is treated like standing capital and not sold for export. The cultivation of maze has been adopted as the national staple for local consumption despite its inadequacies in some respects, and crop diversification is a hard sell. There are plantations and tree farms and there is foreign-owned, export-driven agriculture, but much of what plagues the country is internal in nature.

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Re: Civilizing Aristide

By Nicholsj100, Nichols at Sep 04, 2004 18:15 PM
And yet this was a fairly remote province, underdeveloped and in the hands of what was largely local culture, although having appropriated much in the way of technology over the years. Exports (which were small) consisted mostly of copra and still people migrated out, while in some municipalities the population was growing at over 4% per year. This is not to say that appropriation of land in many places and conversion to export crops is not a huge problem, often forcefully imposed going back several centuries. But this had often also included exchanging or transforming one scale or kind of exploitation for a pre-existing one. There were many examples of this in Philippines history, much of which has been dominated by a ruthless elite all of its own. Pop. in the Philippines went from 16 million in 1945 to 83 mil. today, and should hit 140 mil. by 2050.

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Re: Civilizing Aristide

By Nicholsj100, Nichols at Sep 04, 2004 18:14 PM
Everything you say is true, but humans also have a history of outstripping their resources in many cases well before the IMF. The same is true of exploitation of fellow man. I did this kind of work in the Philippines. In the province where I lived (Antique, on Panay Island), a narrow coastal territory, there was a fairly long history of people migrating out to other Islands, the land base for agriculture was small and the coastal resources –once rich- had been systematically degraded by reckless local practices like cyanide and dynamite fishing on the coral reefs. Slash-and-burn farming was eating steadily into the watershed that was already causing landslides and flooding, and much land had been rendered useless by short fallow periods and constant pressure. If land was being denied to small farmers, it was in the hands of local patrons –and there simply was not enough land for the growing population (much less if we add migrants).

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Re: Civilizing Aristide

By Ted_heistman, Truthseeker at Sep 04, 2004 02:57 AM
This also often leads to devestation of the environment and "slash and burn agriculture" when landless peasants are given forest as an appeasement to being totally shut out from the valuable land, you know to prevent revolution. Then we turn around a they have too many babies and are destroying the rainforest. In Haitis perhaps case overpopulation is a factor, I don't know. Seems like when people life in a cardboard shanty, and the only help we offer is abortion and contraceptives and stern warnings about them destroying their ecology, I really wonder if that is thre best advice. Though I am at a loss as to what the solution really is. Though I think perhaps other countries, like the US could reach out and accept many of them as refuugees.

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Re: Civilizing Aristide

By Ted_heistman, Truthseeker at Sep 04, 2004 02:56 AM
Thanks for all the interesting demographic data. No I am not from Haiti, I am just very concerned about them as the poorest nation in the western hemisphere. I guess I am somtimes just very skeptical of the so called population crisis in the third world when those of us in the west seem to have created a lot of the poverty problems. For example creating in them export economies through the structural readjustment policies of the world bank and IMF. A lot of these countries then devote huge tracts of land to things like coffee, sugacane and othe cash crops designed for export, while neglecting food for their own people, meanwhile such a large portion of their gdp is allocated to interest on these loans causing their governments to neglect education, infrastructure and healthcare.

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Re: Civilizing Aristide

By Nicholsj100, Nichols at Sep 02, 2004 23:59 PM
In the short term, culture and experience are more influential than economy for reproductiive behavior, and Haiti has no realistic means to improve its economy sufficient to even begin to put it on a path to affluence, and has no time to avoid more direct, radical alternatives. Even coming from the sympathetic left, the failure to address Haiti's broad environmental stresses (including population growth) in preference for a “just” solution vis-à-vis its past and ongoing torment by cynical powers is a formula for catastrophe. Perhaps Haiti can once again demonstrate its uniqeness in the hemisphere, by rising up under the banner of straightforward ecological imperatives, like good management of its uplands, fields, and coastal resources –something like what might have been possible back in 1491, before all the ambition of the West descended upon the Caribeann Islands.

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Re: Civilizing Aristide

By Nicholsj100, Nichols at Sep 02, 2004 23:59 PM
Barbados, for instance, which has a density rate considerably higher than Haiti, is largely Protestant, does enjoy a considerable tourist industry (although like many, confronting environmental problems), has a thriving offshore banking industry, and has an economy that depends on agriculture at about 10% of GDP, none of which factors it has in common with Haiti. It has a different population structure as well, with 42% below the age of 14 as compared to 21% in Barbados. Haiti's sectoral GDP is about 30% dependent on agriculture, but as much as two-thirds of the population depends on agriculture and 80% of the total pop. are abjectly poor. There are significant correlations between affluency, poverty and population growth rates, but wealth and poverty are by no means the only factors influencing pop. growth.

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Re: Civilizing Aristide

By Nicholsj100, Nichols at Sep 02, 2004 23:58 PM
Truthseeker, Look – I feel bad for casting such a pall over Haiti. Maybe you are from there. If you do a search for “World Population Data Sheet” on Google, you can get the 2004 outputs and we will be looking at the same numbers. GDP, population densities, history, politics, geography, culture and economy have to be taken into account at the same time. Haiti's pop. now stands at about 8 million, but is projected to rise to almost 12 million by 2025 and 16 million by 2050 based on current trends, which includes low life expectancy and high infant mortality, with a total fertility rate of about 4.7 and increases per/annum by about 1.9% (more than the 1.4-5% I cited from earlier projections). Next door, the Dominican Republic, with about 8,000 more square miles of land is to go from 8.8 million to 11.1 to 13.4 in the same period, making the combined total for the island around 23 million in 2025 and almost 30 million in 2050 (land total about 29,000 sq. miles). Compared to Cuba, with about 42,000 sq. miles, going from 11.3 to about 11.8 million in 2025, or 0.5 % per year.

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Re: Civilizing Aristide

By Ted_heistman, Truthseeker at Sep 02, 2004 22:36 PM
Is there really too many people there though? That just strikes me as very...I don't know what to say...You have these alienated people with no rights...It's seems like its just too easy for us to say its because they have too many babies. The lifespan is 48, half are illeiterate 7% or somthing like that are HIV positive. I was looking at an index of caribean countries by GDP and I was amazed that some carribean countrires do quite well like Barbados, Jamaica...Is that all tourism you think?

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Re: Civilizing Aristide

By Nicholsj100, Nichols at Sep 02, 2004 15:18 PM
If population growth in Haiti is down to about %1.4-5/annum, it is probably largely due to factors like infant mortality and short life expectancy (helped by violence, malnutrition, disease, etc), and an immediate relaxation of these pressures would lead to a boom in the population, which would offset the improvements that led to the boom in the first place. A largely Catholic nation, there is a strong disinclination towards birth control, family planning, etc. Participation in enterprises that improve worker welfare should be linked to mandated family management strategies, giving security to small, stable families. Haiti still needs to divorce itself from the US completely and undergo a revolution akin to Cuba's. As it is, Haiti will likely be reduced to cannibalism at some point in the future.

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Re: Civilizing Aristide

By Nicholsj100, Nichols at Sep 02, 2004 15:17 PM
Truthseeker. Just my opinion, but I can't see any place for the business model in Haiti unless it reinvests all its capital back into Haiti, and is preferably of a type that serves to restore some aspect of the islands' ecology. Even with this, there would need to be a deliberate cap put on worker's expectations and salaries to management. Haiti has reached that point where the priorities must be environmental restoration, population stabilization (preferably reduction) and social reorganization to achieve these two main goals. The capitalist model is predicated on growth, but for Haiti even small enterprise must be focused on extending its activities horizontally rather than vertically, and this is not a business model.

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By Ted_heistman, Truthseeker at Aug 30, 2004 18:44 PM
Dr Chomsky what do you think would happen if say a bussiness from the United states went there and opened up shop and paid its workers say $4.00 an hour and had some minimum amount of benefits? Could some type of a trend be created? I am a Political science major and I am doing what I can to educate people I know about Haiti, and after I get passed the part about what the US has done to keep them down I am asked what can be done?

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