|
| w |
|
Haiti Must Not be Re-Built
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,
I do mind, however, 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
(
Permanent link: http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/authors/Kurtagic-Haiti.html
