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Haiti Must Not be Rebuilt
Alex Kurtagic
Day after day, our brains are blitzed by the media with the horror
from Haiti. While I would not wish a like disaster to befall my friends and
loved ones, I cannot help but roll my eyes at the Western governments’ response.
I
do not mind the initiatives to forgive Haiti’s external debt, as I understand
enough about modern banking to know that banks lose nothing except profits when
writing off a so-called ‘loan’: When banks issue a ‘loan’, as it happens, they are not lending actual
assets that they have in their possession, but are, in, fact, creating an
electronic fiction, out of nothing and backed by nothing, with a few keystrokes
and clicks of a mouse on a computer. For this and other reasons, which I shall
discuss later, I fully agree with the idea of writing off Haiti’s
loans.
I
also do not mind Western charities lending succour to the victims, provided said
charities are private institutions, funded by private, consenting
donors.
In agreement with Cong. Ron
Paul,
however, I do mind when a Western government, such
as that of Barack Obama in the United States, seeks to commit
its taxpayer’s money to a programme of reconstruction
in that part of the world. This is not so much because Western countries are all
technically bankrupt and have been for years: after all, we still have the
material means and intellectual wherewithal to extricate ourselves from our
economic plight. No. This is because reconstructing Haiti would simply repeat
the mistakes of the past, which have shown, conclusively and supported by
examples elsewhere, that any effort to encourage a former colony now run by
Black Africans to become a Western-style society, complete with rule of law, a
thriving market economy, property rights, industrial production, modern
communications, and the like, is futile and counterproductive. Haiti must not be
re-built.
Haiti’s death toll — currently estimated at 200,000 — might have been
caused by an earthquake, but it did not have to be that high. Walter E.
Williams, professor of economics at George Mason University, pointed out a few days ago
that
Northern California’s 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake was more violent,
measuring 7.1 on the Richter scale, resulting in 63 deaths and 3,757 injuries.
The 1906 San Francisco earthquake measured 7.8 on the Richter scale, about eight
times more violent than Haiti’s, and cost 3,000 lives.
That Haiti’s death toll was 3,000 times higher than that of Loma
Prieta, and 66 times higher than that of San Francisco owes less to an
"especially cruel and incomprehensible" cataclysm than to Haitian’s lack of
work-ethic, corruption, and ability to plan ahead.
True, Haiti is one of the world’s least developed countries and the poorest in the Western hemisphere, with 80% living below the poverty line and 54% living in abject poverty; and, in our world, calamities only multiply in the absence of money — without money it is difficult to do anything. But Haiti was not always poor. In the 18th century, Haiti, then under French rule and called Saint-Domingue, was the most prosperous French colony in the New World. Its enormously profitable plantations produced sugar, coffee, cotton, and indigo, and drew in tens of thousands of French settlers. The impoverishment of Haiti, the first Black-ruled republic on the planet, with a population that is 95% Black, has taken place since its independence in 1804. In the struggle for independence, nearly 200 plantations were burnt or destroyed, and 24,000 of the by then 40,000 White settlers were killed.
Since then, there have been 32 coups d’etats, the forests have been destroyed,
the population has exploded, and Haiti has come to rank near the bottom out of
179 countries in Transparency International’s
Corruption Perceptions Index. Indeed, the situation
has become so chaotic at times that the United States has been forced to deploy
troops there on three separate occasions: in 1915 (until 1934), during which
time the United States funded a huge reconstruction programme; in 1958, during
which time the United States attempted to once again rebuild Haiti’s economic
infrastructure; and in 1994 (until 1996), during which time yet another rebuild
tool place under Operation Uphold Democracy and Operation New Horizons.
The situation before the quake was no better a century ago. Writing
in 1900, Hesketh Pritchard, an explorer and fellow of the Royal Geographic
Society, reported in his book Where Black Rules White: A Journey Across and
About Hayti:
What most astonishes the traveller in Hayti is that they have
everything there. Ask for what you please, the answer invariably is, ‘Yes, yes,
we have it.’ They possess everything that a civilised and progressive nation can
desire. Electric light? They proudly point to a [power] plant on a hilltop
outside the town. Constitutional government? A Chamber of Deputies elected by
public vote, a Senate, and all the elaborate paraphernalia of the law: they are
to be found here, seemingly all of them. Institutions, churches, schools, roads,
railways . . . On paper their system is flawless . . . If one puts one’s trust
in the mirage of hearsay, the Haitians can boast of possessing all desirable
things, but on nearer approach these pleasant prospects are apt to take on
another complexion.
For instance, you are standing in what was once a building, but is
now a spindle-shanked ghost of its former self. A single man, nursing a broken
leg, sprawls on the black, earthen floor; a pile of wooden beds is heaped in the
north corner; rain has formed a pool in the middle of the room, crawling and
spreading into an ever wider circle as the last shower drips from the roof. Some
filthy sheets lie wound into a sticky ball on two beds, one of which is
overturned. A large, iron washing tub stands in the open doorway.
Now where are you? It would be impossible to guess. As a matter of
fact, you are in the Military Hospital of the second most important town of
Hayti, a state-supported concern in which the soldiers of the Republic are
supposed to be cured of all the ills of the flesh . . .
It was the same with the electric light. The [power] plant was here,
but it did not work. It was the same with the [Army’s] cannon. There are cannon,
but they won’t go off. It was the same with their railways. They were being
‘hurried forward,’ but they never progressed. It was the same with
everything.
Pritchard’s account is often sympathetic towards Haitians, but, all
the same, the picture that emerges is very negative. In the final chapter, the
explorer concluded:
The present condition of Hayti gives the best possible answer to the question, and, considering the experiment has lasted for a century, perhaps also a conclusive one. For a century the answer has been working itself out there in flesh and blood. The Negro has had his chance, a fair field, and no favor. He has had the most beautiful and fertile of the Caribbees for his own; he has had the advantage of excellent French laws; he inherited a made country, with Cap Haitien for its Paris . . . Here was a wide land sown with prosperity, a land of wood, water, towns and plantations, and in the midst of it the Black man was turned loose to work out his own salvation. What has he made of the chances that were given to him? . . . Today in Haiti we come to the real crux of the question. At the end of a hundred years of trial, how does the black man governs himself? What progress has he made? Absolutely none. When he undertakes the task of government, he does so, not with the intent of promoting the public weal, but for the sake of filling his own pocket. His motto is still, "Pluck the fowl, but take care she does not cry out". Corruption has spread through every portion and every department of the Government. Almost all the ills of the country may be traced to their source in tyranny, the ineptitude, and the improbity of those at the helm of state . . . Can the Negro rule himself? Is he congenitally capable? . . . Today, and as matters stand, he certainly cannot rule himself.
A
century later, we may be justified in reaching a similar
conclusion.
Having said this, I am not here to replicate simplistic conservative
arguments that blame Haitians for their predicament and prescribe solutions
based on democracy, liberalisation, education, investment, accountability,
transparency, and open markets. There is no doubt that Haitians, like
sub-Saharan Africans, are the architects of their own misfortunes; but it is
disingenuous to judge the diverse peoples of the world in terms of how well they
conform to a European standard. As I have argued here and elsewhere, not all the peoples of the world were
destined to be exactly like us. And, certainly, not all needed, or even desired,
to be exactly like us.
19th-century explorers of sub-Saharan Africa — the Haitians’
ancestral homeland — were shocked by the absence of civilisation in traditional
black African societies. The latter’s uncivilisation, however, was not the
abnormal result of failed states or the World Bank’s interest rates, because
these did not exist at the time: It was their normal condition. Uninfluenced by
European or Arabic cultures, these were prehistorical tribal societies, which
had never developed a written script, recorded history, used money, kept
calendars, maintained roads, or had any need for an administration or a code of
law. These societies still exist today in the African bush, and if they have
changed noticeably or at all in the past 50,000 years, they certainly have not
changed in our direction. Obviously, the traits that characterise us Europeans,
and which we value so highly, were not essential for survival in the sub-Saharan
bush; and, by extension, what Europeans find normal and natural, Black Africans
find abnormal and artificial. Ideologies of progress and modernity — defining
products of the liberal European mind — never occurred to the black man, even if
subsequently he found them instrumentally useful. It is not surprising,
therefore, that when a modern nation-state is placed under Black rule,
conditions rapidly deteriorate: At best, Blacks are able to simulate the outer
forms the European system, but never their substance.
With this in mind, it should be obvious that rebuilding Haiti would be a waste of time. I would also call it a form of
imperialism. That the Western political establishment fails to recognise it and
act accordingly, even though deep down our politicians know it, owes more to
ideology than to ignorance of the facts.
The Left has a religious belief in progress. And, although they do
not realise it, their thinking is profoundly Eurocentric. Consequently, the Left
interprets history as a process in which humans — essentially Europeans with
exotic skin colours and minor differences in physiognomy — go from worse to
better, measured against values that are important to Europeans and no one else.
When progress fails to happen, the self-absorbed, navel-gazing Left blames
Europeans and sees it as the product of the imperfect implementation of Leftist
theories. Unfortunately, modern conservatives have been influenced the Left and
merely prefer a capitalistic and pragmatic — as opposed to a socialistic and
utopian — interpretation of the Left’s progress ideology. The result is a
campaign for ever more aid and development, fuelled by the belief that, given
enough money, education, and opportunity, the Third World (including even Haiti)
will eventually converge with Europe. For the Left, the daydream is universal
equality; for the conservatives, bigger markets for capitalist
enterprise.
Without a radical eugenics programme, however, the progress utopia
will remain a fanciful dream.
With regards to the death toll in Haiti, I of course blame the
Spanish and the French for purchasing slaves and shipping them to the Caribbean
to work on their plantations. Had they dispensed with this nefarious practice
and relied, instead, on their own muscle, Hispaniola would be today an immensely
rich island, well prepared for any natural disaster. Short of loopy schemes such
as shipping 9 million Haitians back to Africa, however, I propose that the best
that we can do at this stage is not to re-build, but to complete the demolition.
Subsistence farming, single-story mud dwellings of simple construction, no
motorised vehicles, no electricity, no money, no books, no manufactured tools,
and, most importantly, no firearms, trade, or Western intervention, is the model
to follow. Let Haitians lose all vestiges of European civilisation and
re-organise themselves in a manner harmonious with their endowments,
sensibilities, and ancestral culture. Let them find their own point of
equilibrium, even if it diverges greatly from ours. There is nothing wrong with voodoo or a pre-industrial,
agricultural society, if that is what works for the people who live in
it.
Alex Kurtagic
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