> “A group of unidentified individuals, some of them speaking Spanish, attacked [...]”
This is peculiar. Might just be too early for the dust to have settled, but both tagesschau.de [1] and Le Monde [2] report both Spanish and English for to be spoken by the attackers.
Edit: The Guardian [3] also quotes only Spanish, but later speaks of an English-language announcement on a megaphone. Guess we'll have to wait for a bit until things converge to The Truth™ here.
It is a peculiar clue. For context, the majority language in Haiti is Haitian Creole, a French-derived local dialect. About half of the population, typically those better educated, involved in business, or involved in government, also speak French. Spanish and English are extremely minor languages in comparison.
Spanish is spoken throughout Central America, including across the land border on the divided island in the wealthier Dominican Republic, and English is used by travelers and tourists. With a comparable economic disparity and ongoing immigration dispute, it would be analogous to an attack in Mexico by a group of unidentified individuals, some of them speaking English - the implication seems to be that the group is not native to Haiti.
(Note that I did some fact checking, but I have no special or particularly recent knowledge here; this is speculation based on historical demographics - I haven't paid attention to Caribbean politics much at all in the past decade).
I have a sister that lived in the DR for a few years.
Here's a bit of context from what I recall.
* The Dominican Republic is the second poorest nation in the northern hemisphere. Haiti is the poorest. (so yes, technically wealthier, but not exactly swimming in the dough).
* From what my sister describes, the people of the DR HATE the Haitians.
* The DR itself is filled to the brim with corruption.
That list is incorrect. It list the incorrect order for certain nations there.
I know where these countries should rank and how poor they are because I lives in some and travelled to others since childhood and had business there enough to know.
I have never been to Haiti but I will tell you what. The DR is one of the few Caribbean islands I travelled to where I saw kids on the side of the road begging.
I was take a back given the number of huge resort there.
I also met someone whose wife was promised to him but her family because he was in a better financial state than they were. He said this kind of thing happens there.
> the implication seems to be that the group is not native to Haiti.
Pure and wild speculation - but Spanish and English is what one would expect from graduates of the school of Americas/Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) or CIA/DEA training programs. Although I suppose at this point former graduates are running their own training under various cartels etc.
You mean the megaphone part, right? Yeah, that seems to be it.
I'm just curious because all four outlets I checked marked the "Spanish" or "English and Spanish" as direct quotes so I'm not sure if they got different sources or what happened.
I think: “DEA operations everybody stand down. DEA operations everybody back up, stand down.”
The speaker definitely has a Southern American accent. The caption under the video makes it sound like the speaker was part of the security(?) team responding to the intrusion/assassination which is perhaps why there is confusion about the assailants speaking Spanish/English.
The accent is off a bit. It sounds like somebody trying to impersonate an American southern drawl. I got $20 that says that there wasn't any American on the megaphone.
Having lived in the south for many years, it’s definitely not a southern draw. It sounds more like South African. You can hear that many of the words are sharp at the end - which is opposite of southern accents that accentuate or “draw” verb endings.
It’s definitely someone that speaks english, but highly unlikely US born.
> The speaker definitely has a Southern American accent.
Are you referring to the southern United States or the South America continent? I live in the southern Mississippi and it doesn't really sound much like how people typically talk here, so I suspect you might be referring to the continent. But also, the accents can vary widely across the southern United States so I'm not really sure.
I wached the video again, the guy that is leaving is asking in Spanish "is this one of us?" about the guy in the floor, I think.
I think it could be Dominican Spanish accent, but I could be wrong. I suppose it would make sense to hire mercenaries from Dominican Republic to something like this.
> I doubt a response team in Haiti speak English with that accent - let alone would use English over a megaphone.
Could there be some kind of DEA SWAT team or something that was stationed there that may have been called?
> Could the megaphone be a pre-recorded recording designed to delay identification of the perpetrators?
Could be. One possibility is that is there were Americans involved, but they were private mercenaries (e.g. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/mercenaries-...). It sounds like there are also similar private Latin American mercenaries (e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/26/world/middleeast/emirates...). The Miami Herald article says the Haitian government is saying these were mercenaries, not DEA agents. It also sounds like this president was highly unpopular and arguably illegitimate, so he likely had a lot of enemies. It's not inconceivable that some those may have decided to hire a mercenary group for an assassination. Maybe they hired a mixed group, which would explain the use of Spanish and English.
I agree it’s very odd. I also just noticed there seems to be a person laying injured in the street and none of the armed “security response” people are rendering aid or seem to care at all. They’re just kind of casually milling around.
Something that surprise me is that nobody mention the bodyguards. I doubt the president of a country was unguarded (Olof Palme case showed how unwise that is even in Sweden).
Maybe this unlucky guy in the floor was one and just nobody care enough about them to mention them?.
Some of the videos have the sounds of multiple gunshots which are audibly different, suggesting to me that different guns were firing. Perhaps there were bodyguards but they were engaged by the assassins.
Poor country but still a LOT of money to be made for certain elements. Probable someone paid a hit squad to do the deed for a reason or another. A lot of people have that kind of money to pay for killings, so that is not an issue. What comes after can be...
Someone that follows Haitian politics could tell us the power struggle inside the country.
I was curious if Haiti's political system was like India's - where the President is a figurehead position and the Prime minister has the practical authority, or if it was like the US - with President at the helm. It seems like it's a bit of both, a "semi-presidential" system like France. Wikipedia says the President is the "head of state" and the Prime minister is the "head of government"... but that doesn't really help me understand the role and powers of each in practice.
In several states with such a semi-presidential system, if the prime minister and the president are oppositional, the prime minister will take primary responsibility for more domestic matters like education and health, whereas the president will take primary responsibility for most national/international matters like trade, the economy and foreign affairs. When the president and the prime minister are allied, the president often takes the lead on most matters.
I have never seen a semi-presidential federation, and my intuition has become that in a semi-presidential system, the president is holds the responsibilities of a prime minister/president of a federal government, whereas the prime minister is holds the responsibilities normally given to the premier/governor of state - as if there's only a single state and a single legislature for the state and the federation. Of course, as with federations, the exact boundaries will depend on the country concerned.
> The head of state is the leader of the country. They [..] typically are in control of the military.
This isn't true, at least in Western states. E.g in the Netherlands and Germany the king and the President respectively are head of state, but neither of them controls the military, which is done by respectively the Prime Minister and the Chancellor.
It's really hard to make a universal definition for heads of state and government, since they fulfill different roles in forms of government. However, generally, the head of state is a more ceremonial role while the head of government actually governs. But there are exceptions.
Actually, for Germany, the head of the military is the Minister of Defence. Only if the parliament declares Germany to be in a situation of defence (Verteidigungsfall), will the command of the military be given to the Chancellor.
The US has combined the head of state and head of government in a single position (President), so it doesn't make sense to say either has more power. France is indeed one of the (many) exceptions with a semi-presidential system where the head of state has more power.
In the US system the President basically assumes the constitutional position of George III circa 1770. Executive orders are Royal decrees. The president signing laws is Royal Assent. Presidential pardons are Royal pardons. The power to adjourn Congress is proroguation.
The oddity to me is the position of the Speaker of the House, which is a weird amalgam of the role of the Speaker of Parliament and also acting as a de facto Prime Minister although there really isn't an explicit equivalent role in the US.
Yeah, the obvious example is the UK, where the Queen is head of state and the PM is the head of government. Other westminster inspired systems sometimes keep around the monarchy (represented by the governor general) or replace the role with an elected president.
Usually such a role is a literal figurehead, or a de facto figurehead who de jure has power but culturally is not supposed to exercise them, (such as the aforementioned Queen, or the Irish President). Attempts by such a de facto figurehead to use powers they officially have have led to controversy, such as the 1975 incident with the Australian Governor General (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Australian_constitutional...)
There is precedent to the Irish president exercising their power. In 1994 Mary Robinson refused Albert Reynold's request to have the Dáil dissolved (well, let it be known that such a request would be refused), leading to a new government being formed without a general election. If the Queen refused a similar request from a Prime Minister that would be a shock though.
Ah, I was unaware of that, and was thinking more of the 1982 incident where Patrick Hillery shut himself in and avoided answering the phone so as not to be required to dissolve the government.
Both of these fall to me under "refusing to exercise powers" rather than exercising powers though.
Really? I don't understand that. The power isn't in dissolving the Dáil itself, it's in the choice to do if it's deemed appropriate, whether the Taoiseach wants it or not.
When the Queen dissolves parliament she's just going through the motions, it's a formality. If she had refused, say, Theresa May's request for a general election in 2017, saying that there was no need as the Government had a clear majority and Brexit needed to be the focus (and she did this by either hiding down the countryside, not answering her phone or by shooting down the idea preemptively) that would be a huge deal. That would be her exercising her power.
Yikes I can't believe that 1975 event happened and the royal family still remains in their seats.
All of these former British territories are 1 terrorist attack and 1 ambitious politician away from a political crisis.
Roll the dice 10 times, each time one of these monarchs could make a play for power.
Although I'm not even sure how to handle the dissolution of the monarchy without executing everyone. Taking their property only means a foreign state would prop them up.
The British royal family had very little to do with that incident. Yes, the monarch is the de jure head of state, but again in practice she delegates all decisions to the GG.
> The head of state is the leader of the country. They deal with other heads of states, and typically are in control of the military.
Not quite true, at least not in limited constitutional monarchies, like the UK and Canada (I'm Canadian): The Queen is the Head of State for both the UK and Canada (and for many other countries) and her role is almost exclusively ceremonial (without getting into the role of the Governor General, who represents Her Majesty when she is out of the country).
In both the UK and Canada, the head of government is the Prime Minister, that is, the leader of the party that controls the House of Parliament. In both countries, they do far more than "bureaucratty stuff" since, among other things, they choose and chair the cabinet, set the overall government agenda, etc. The military reports to cabinet through the appropriate minister(s).
(Mitchell Sharp once wrote a book on Canadian government in which he rightly asserted that ours is government-by-cabinet, more than government by parliament....)
In both countries, the PM is effectively head of the executive branch, but definitely not head of state, as well as sitting atop the legislative branch.
* The speaker of parliament is responsible for nominating and dismissing the prime minister (who appoints the prime minister? the parliament as a whole appoint the prime minister? does the king get to, but is compelled to appoint whoever the speaker nominates? does wikipedia mean "appoint" when it says "nominate"?)
* The king is not part of parliament, and bills do not need royal assent to become law.
* The king is not part of an executive council like the UK privy council. Formerly there was a Council of State.
However the king does have royal immunity from criminal prosecution. If the Swedish King killed you, they would probably have a crisis over whether the absolute immunity the king possesses is in fact not absolute.
So the king is clearly a special person in Sweden, but it does seem they are almost powerless according to the constitution, unlike say the British queen.
> who appoints the prime minister? the parliament as a whole appoint the prime minister? does the king get to, but is compelled to appoint whoever the speaker nominates? does wikipedia mean "appoint" when it says "nominate"?
Prime minister is whoever gets the majority of the parliament behind them in a vote. In practice in Sweden’s case the leader of the biggest party in the coalition that makes the majority.
(Due to how the voting system works in Sweden more than 2 parties exist in the parliament and thus coalitions of parties make up the government as no party manages to get 50% if the seats)
Parliament votes on whoever the speaker nominates. If that person is tolerated (<50% of parliament votes against the nominee) they become prime minister.
If the vote fails the speaker gets to nominate someone else. After 4 failed such votes, an extra election is called.
Thanks for the clear answer. I think I like that system. Sometimes minority governments make more sense that slightly larger but more fractious coalitions. If I was trying to design a republican constitution for my own country I think I would include a similar provision.
In general, head of state is more ceremonial and has less power, but there are so many exceptions that making a rule of thumb is tough because it varies so much state-by-state.
In the US, head of state and head of gov are the same (the President).
In Russia, the head of state is Putin. He's not officially head of gov, but c'mon, we all know who controls the show there.
In Canada, the Head of State is Queen Elizabeth II. But for all practical purposes, Justin Trudeau holds both rows. It's not like the Queen is handling Canada's foreign policy. She technically has the power to dissolve Canada's parliament, but it would be hard to imagine her exercising this power. When foreign leaders visit Canada, they aren't going to see the Queen, whereas they might if they visit the UK.
In Switzerland the President has is just one of the 7 chief ministers who are in control of departments like military, justice, finance, The Federal Council.
The person who is president get 2x the vote in case a vote is tied (abstention is permitted). Also the high honer of being the first to shake hands with foreign presidents when they arrive.
The Federal Council is both head of state and head of government.
Seems to be a pretty good system, the idea is to actually share this between different parties at all times. It always seems strange to me when in countries like the US there is the constant massive power shift back and forth every couple years.
>In Canada, the Head of State is Queen Elizabeth II. But for all practical purposes, Justin Trudeau holds both rows.
Does Canada not have a Governor General, like other countries where Elizabeth II is the absentee monarch? The Governor General performs most of the functions of the head of state and technically has the power to appoint or dismiss the Prime Minister, but much like the Queen the role is mostly ceremonial.
Yes, Canada does. The Queen is Head of State, who appoints a governor general to rule in her place. Effectively though, the Queen appoints a governor general on the advice of the prime minister. The Governor General and the Queen are constitutionally the "Crown" in Canada.
The Governor General is mostly ceremonial, but is mostly a case of Chesterton's Fence. The Crown is an important safety value for when things are abnormal. For example, the Governor General of Canada in 2008 essentially chose who would be prime minister (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008%E2%80%932009_Canadian_par...). The issue that arose was that, during a hung parliament, the opposition announced that they would vote non-confidence in the government at the next opportunity and intended to form a coalition. The prime minister at the time instead went to the Governor General to request prorogation, ending the parliamentary session.
This was a crisis that required judgement by the governor general. The prime minister clearly no longer held the confidence of the House, but not officially. On the other hand, the governor general is constitutionally required to follow the advice of the prime minister. She chose to follow the prime minister and prorogue Parliament for better or for worse. I'm not a legal scholar and I think the Governor General got it right, but having an independent individual make these decisions is a feature, not a bug.
There is, but in all seriousness outside of events that will probably also happen in a republican state (like tension between the prime minister and the leader of the opposition) the Government-General takes a hands-off approach, so effectively (de facto, in practice) the prime minister is the head of state.
It's hard to imagine of the UK or Canada, but it's a nice safety net. Perhaps easier to imagine of a smaller less developed Commonwealth nation (not an Australia joke!) - I can sort of see a tyrannical (and probably crucially also unpopular) leader getting overthrown that way if it were necessary; probably led by/combined with measures through other parliaments, i.e. military intervention.
I don't have one in mind, I don't think there's a likely one - there's an argument that it brings a sort of long-term stability that makes an actual application of its powers unnecessary, like a nuclear deterrent - I just think if there was some sort of unrest or rising dictatorial power in a state with ER as monarch 'we' would pay (even) more attention than otherwise?
> When foreign leaders visit Canada, they aren't going to see the Queen, whereas they might if they visit the UK.
Though they would typically be hosted by the Queen's representative in Canada, the Governor General (as of yesterday, R.H. Mary Simon). The Queen would never directly exercise her head-of-state powers in Canada. However, the GG does have to make some controversial decisions about choosing governments from time to time.
In Great Britain at least the Prime Minister frequently meets with other heads of state, e.g., Churchill meeting with Roosevelt. Of course the monarch is the head of the state in Great Britain and she does meet with other heads of state as well, but it seems less clear-cut than you describe? Is this a peculiarity of Britain? Or does “head of state” imply a sort of figurehead position?
> In Great Britain at least the Prime Minister frequently meets with other heads of state, e.g., Churchill meeting with Roosevelt.
The exception here is that the US President is both head of state and head of government, so Churchill meeting Roosevelt is actually a meeting between two heads of government.
One thing to add is that the prime minister is often appointed by the president so he does not really hold any real power. I think the closest equivalent in the US system would be the Vice President, except that the prime minister can often be replaced at the president's discretion before the end of the term.
Or the opposite. The German prime minister is Angela Merkel while the president is Frank-Walter Steinmeister. I had to look the second up because I didn't know who it was but I know that he doesn't have political power like Merkel.
> They deal with other heads of states, and typically are in control of the military
No head of state is in control of the military. Head of state is a ceremonial role. They may be the ceremonial "head" of the military, as in "her majesty's ship".
In the U.S. the office of the President unifies the roles of head of state, head of government, and Commander in Chief of the military. This is not merely a ceremonial role.
As the saying goes, the exception proves the rule false.
There are multiple types of semi-presidential systems in practice. Those where the Prime Minister is appointed by and accountable to the President (and not just by Parliament) are typically much closer to a pure presidential system in practice.
In France (source: I'm French) the President is typically extremely strong despite it being nominally a semi-presidential system, in some respects even stronger than his US counterpart. Also note that this depends a lot on practical details, like political customs — former President Nicolas Sarkozy famously publicly called his Prime Minister his "collaborator", for instance — and electoral timings. There was a reform in the early 00s to sync Presidential elections and Parliamentary elections, meaning that even though the Prime Minister is accountable to the Parliament, in practice the latter tends to be of the same majority as the President (whereas before, we had cases of Presidents and Primes being of opposing parties, which is known as 'cohabitation'), which gives him enormous power.
> Wikipedia says the President is the "head of state" and the Prime minister is the "head of government"... but that doesn't really help me understand the role and powers of each in practice.
This is like Ireland. The head of government is responsible for running the country day to day. While the president is responsible for representing the country in a ceremonial way (far less powerful but often more popular). Often they rubber stamp some legislation but often have little power.
In the US the roles are combined in to the Presidency. In the UK the Queen is the head of state and Boris Johnson is head of government.
Following the assassination, the prime minister (Claude Joseph) has said he is now running the country, which suggests that the president has real power.
My parents live in Haiti. This looks like it was an inside job/collaboration. He was assassinated inside his home, in the middle of the night. His home has multiple gates/barriers to get inside, very secured by guards, yet
only him died. No guards or 3rd parties were injured. No resistance or loud gun exchanges to prevent them from getting in. His wife was shot and injured, but is currently stable in a US hospital. From what I heard, the gunmen were all Spanish speaking. 5-7 of them arrived in multiple cars, killed him and left without issues. Very disturbing, but that's the world we live in.
One thing that's always puzzled me - why are Haiti and Dominican Republic so different politically and economically? They both share the same island. Curious as to why their fortunes seem to have diverged so dramatically.
Sharing the same island means nothing unless the two places also share an ethnic seed and they don't. Haitians and Dominicans are not one nation split apart. They're two different nations that grew side by side.
The Taíno, the original inhabitants of the island, were wiped out / assimilated by the Europeans who settled the island. Years later the Spanish and criollo settlers relocated to the east of the island leaving the west free for the French to develop.
The French and the Spanish had different cultures and radically different strategies on how to develop their colonies and thus the island ended up with two different cultures and governments and languages and political systems and with people of different (but overlapping) racial composition.
A lot of people wrongly assume that Caribbean is an ethnic group but that couldn't be farther from the truth. I'm a Puerto Rican and I have a lot in common with Dominicans and Cubans because the three territories are former Spanish colonies. But I have little in common with Haitians, Jamaicans or the inhabitants of the smaller islands of the archipelago. To illustrate my point, I have an archipelago 40 miles east of where I live and we have no ferry between the islands and no connection of any sort beyond the fact that we're both US territories. I've been there as a tourist but nothing more.
OP didn't understand why the two countries were so different despite sharing an island.
I explained that they're different because they're comprised of different people with different histories.
This might be obvious to you but in my experience a lot of people assume that the inhabitants of the Hispaniola came from the same seed, as in they were the same group of people who later split when that was not the case. One country was seeded by the Spanish and the other one by the French.
My comment was not meant to be a thorough analysis on their respective economies.
The Haitian revolution ravaged the new nation's economy. The machinery used to process raw materials for Haiti's valuable export products, in particular sugar and coffee, were mostly destroyed in slave uprisings, and they could not be produced locally. Haiti also lacked the natural resources necessary to develop an independent industrial base, and even if plantation outputs increased again (as many tried to make happen), luxury goods like sugar and coffee are only valuable as trade goods.
Simply put, Haiti was highly dependent on international trade for the resources it needed, which meant that the embargoes from major powers crippled the nation.
Mike Duncan has an excellent series on the Haitian revolution in his Revolutions podcast series, which includes a final episode that summarizes the history of the nation up to the mid-20th century.
Haiti's historical issues notwithstanding, it is also incredibly dysfunctional politically. The difference in forestry policies alone between Haiti and the Dominican Republic make their land border almost possible to identify from satellite/aerial photos alone:
"It has been widely reported that in 1923 over 60% of Haiti's land was forested; the source of this assertion remains unknown but may be linked to the U.S. Marine Occupation in Haiti. In 2006, the country was claimed to have less than 2% forest cover."
Given that the slaves rose up and murdered their slaveowners, who were also Haitian, there is no one left for them to collect from, even if you could find someone still alive from that period who worked as a slave. In other words, those slaves took payment, via genocide, a long time ago. That's one of the problems with murdering all your oppressors and seizing all their assets -- at that point you have no one left to blame when things go bad over the next few hundred years.
"That's one of the problems with murdering all your oppressors and seizing all their assets -- at that point you have no one left to blame when things go bad over the next few hundred years."
I recommend reading up on the history of Haiti. Independence was declared first (by the upper classes) and the 1804 massacre came later. There were, of course, a number of slave revolts that happened throughout that time, but the genocide was in 1804.
In addition to what cryptohacks said, Haiti always had horrible relations with the US because it was founded by slaves. The revolution took place in 1804, a time when Americans, especially southerners were very worried about slave revolts. In order to dissuade more slave revolts the US did everything in its power to make sure Haiti turned into a failed state.
crytohacks comments above are a good place to start to understand Haiti's troubled history. Neither have faired so well as American neocolonies, not that foreign influence is the only factor. In "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed", Jared Diamond contrasts the two countries ecological policies in recent decades, and that may have something to do with DR slight edge.
The western part of the island was a French colony and gained independence early by force. The population was made of black former slaves so they might not have had a lot going for them in the beginning, even just in terms of organizational capacity, and none of the neighbouring countries particularly wanted them to do well (slavery was a thing in all of them).
Spain colonized the East of the island and government and power remained in the hands of European settlers.
Haiti was also occupied by the US in the early 20th century, which was not exactly a glorious episode, either, and certainly did not help.
The roots of the presently dire economic situation go back much further, but for persons interested in learning more about the current instability in Haiti, I would suggest researching/reading more about the 2010 earthquake and its aftermath.
Many countries are in tough economic situations after a prolonged fight for independence.
What stopped Hati from growing was 20 years after independence, the arrival of France with warships demanding 150 million gold francs as "reparations" for the slave-holders losing their "property".
An absurd demand which was still being repaid until almost the 1950s. That's what screwed the country over.
Still does not explain why since the 50's it never developed, lot of examples of quick development like South Korea, Israel, baltic countries ... I guess it's a combination of a lot of factors, with Papa Doc not helping either.
Just next to the border, the Dominican Republic, a former colony is doing way better.
Different circumstances. Israel received large amounts of foreign aid particularly from the US. South Korea's growth coincided with the Vietnam war and was a combination of domestic changes, and economic growth indirectly supported a lot by the US via aid and purchasing its exports (ex. textiles) - also part of Cold War geo-politics. (both of these are very handwavy summaries).
Similarly for Haiti the summary is: post independence country was in debt as most are. 20 years later France demands payment. By late 1800s 80% of GDP is going to paying back that debt and loans taken out to cover the debt. Top holders of the debt are France, Germany, USA. Early 1900s US businesses (mainly banks) want to ensure they'll be repaid, so convince govt to invade Haiti. US occupies Haiti for 20 years. Takes over the national bank, takes the national gold reserves moves it to Wall St for "safe keeping".
US puts in place propped up presidents from the mulatto elite vs the black majority population. Causes more economic issues, introduces things like Jim Crow - all of this leads to more racial and class strife. Great depression hits. US and and mulatto elites still controlling the country in the 1940s. This eventually causes the backlash and revolution of 1946 of which Estime then is the first elected on a platform of helping the working class and supporting the poor. Papa Doc rides this same platform of resentment of external intervention particularly in finances, and the poor and black working class being ignored and takes over. He's incredibly corrupt and horrible, but raises to power given the circumstances. Their family rules until the mid 1980s.
The country shows some growth, then a massive earthquake hits and it hasn't fully recovered economically.
Summary, US banks wanted to be ensured they'd get paid back so convinced US govt to take over the country. The violence and racism of the US occupation along with poor economics lead to a growth of populism in the country, which set the stage for Papa Doc whose family was a disaster. And there hasn't been much time since then to get back on track.
So while not the same, a story that rhymes with the US propping up the Shah of Iran and setting the stage for a worse govt, and Batista in Cuba and then getting a worse govt. Here post the US occupation it took longer to develop, but the movement that Papa Doc rode was born out of the US occupation of Haiti.
South Korea, Israel and the Baltic Countries have received large inflows of Western capital and technological investments. Haiti, not so much.
Ballparking a proxy number, for example annual FDI net inflows circa 2010: KOR=10B, ISR=10B, LTU=1B, DOM=2B, HTI=0.1B. Per capita, 20x-100x investment levels.
There was an earlier submission from another site that got eventually flagged. It had not attracted that many on-topic comments but here is the link anyways:
I don't know much about Haiti's international affairs, but I'm curious if other countries will be involved at all in the investigation of this murder (because the victim was a head of state). Complicating the situation of course, is the english and spanish speaking assailants, indicating that they might be foreigners.
Will the D.E.A. (audio of the event being shared has a clip of someone yelling "this is a DEA operation, stand down" in a southern american accent) be expected to make some sort of statement regarding this? Should we believe them without a formal investigation and evidence?
So, an American newspaper writes about Haiti, including a few paragraphs about the historical context: the independence from France in 1803, the thirty years of the Duvalier dictatorship, etc. And they forgot to mention the 20 years of American occupation ! Would they write that Vietnam fought against the French occupation, then suffered under communist rule?
I don't expect a random American to know any of the various countries that the USA invaded and occupied, apart from Vietnam, but I sure expect a big newspaper to give this basic context.
For those interested, VICE recently did a fantastic report about the street violence that's consuming parts of Port-au-Prince, and how it's connected to Haiti's current political climate.
A continent consisting of North+Central+South America would be considered a "Super-Continent".
And no one says "I live in America" when they live in Canada. Do you refer to yourself as American? I've never heard anyone refer to a Canadian citizen as "American". Or someone from Mexico as "American".
You can link any dictionary definitions you want, but in 99% of cases when people say "America" they mean the US.
Just because the largest video sharing platform ever know is willing to comply with GDPR doesn't mean there isn't a cost associated, or that everyone is willing to pay that cost.
Isn't privacy protection worth that cost? I value my right to privacy, and I'm happy that GDPR protects it to an extent. Not that this has anything to do with the news report being unavailable.
As US forces withdraw from Afghanistan and the West’s loss of confidence finally results in actual withdrawals (though see the reversal by the French in Mali), it’s worth noting that old-style selfish neocolonialism is still alive and kicking e.g. in Haiti. Whether or not it is wise to withdraw Afghanistan-style, it seems sad that this blatant selfishness and incompetence—which does not benefit Western peoples terribly much these days anyway—continues despite a change in the thinking of Western foreign policy élites.
> Moïse says he is entitled to another year in office. Legal experts agree that his interpretation of the law requires twisting it beyond recognition, but there’s an old Haitian saying that the constitution is paper and guns are steel, and Moïse has the backing he needs from the OAS and the USA. At a press conference on 5 February, the State Department took Moïse’s side in the end-of-term argument. Perhaps this was mere expediency from the White House – Haiti is a small country and the Biden administration has inherited a myriad messes – but Moïse saw a green light.
> American ignorance and blitheness was on full display this month during a hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. When one of the Haitian witnesses, Guerline Jozef, urged legislators to examine the root causes of Haiti’s predicament, going back to the indemnity Haiti was forced to pay in 1825 to compensate France for its slaves,Congressman Brian Mast (R-FL) cut her off. He mansplained:
> > Haitians individually within Haiti [need to] look in the mirror and say: ‘We can’t rely on America, we can’t rely on France, we can’t rely on others. We’re hopeful for their assistance. But we have to look in the mirror and say, how do we do this?’ And that’s what I hope we can really really get to the root of, is ... what is it that they can look in the mirror and do to correct what is missing there?
> A few minutes later, the Haitian activist Emmanuela Douyon tried to set Mast straight. ‘Haiti is not waiting for the US, France or any other country in the international community,’ she said:
> > We’ve already decided what we want to do. What we’re asking is for the international community to listen and respect our choice. We have a president whose term ended last February. He has benefited from the support of the OAS [and] the US State Department, despite the fact that most of Haitian civil society acknowledges that his term has ended, according to the constitution ... This is what we’re facing now. And this is a perfect example of how when we don’t listen to Haitians, we can’t blame them later for the outcome. We want to end with all this corruption and impunity, we want to end with the old practices. [But] so many people do not want to give us a chance to decide for ourselves.
A bit of an aside, but it sounds like congressman mast was just being condescending in his explanation, I dislike the not-so-subtly implied sexism of the article's usage of the verb "mansplain" just by virtue of the fact that he is male and guerline is female.
I suppose that there’s no guarantee that it was motivated by sexism. I think some authors choose to use such words even when they aren’t entirely sure because it’s impossible to be completely sure and so they think it’s better to flag cases somewhat inaccurately rather than not at all. I don’t really agree with this, but on the other hand I don’t know what else I’d do.
The US is not leaving Afghanistan because of 'loss in confidence' but rather because they are finally admitting what has been clear for more then a decade now (arguable for 1000 years). Its incredibly idiotic and nonsensical to occupy Afghanistan. I would prefer to call it 'accepting reality' and that seems a good thing.
And the problem in Mali is in large part because of totally idiotic over-confidence just a few years ago.
I’m not sure we actually disagree: the Americans started out far too confident in their abilities and their view of what they can do now is, tempered by two decades of fighting, much more realistic. A loss of confidence, even if caused by a collision with reality, is still a fairly accurate description when taking into account what you point out.
The French I think have a much more accurate understanding of their abilities. The reversals they suffer have been far fewer and less disastrous than those the Americans face. For example, in Chad, the FACT is now certainly on the back foot—even the opposition media who previously seemed to think that the FACT had a good chance of taking N’Djamena have stopped suggesting that that’s a possibility and now focus on ructions between Déby fils et frères. Meanwhile in Afghanistan, the Taliban’s hold on its strongholds is pretty much secure, and they may even retain some cities.
Maybe we don't disagree, but it just seems to me that is a very strange way of looking of analyzing things. There is so much talk about confidence and who believes what, both the state itself and the people and media.
You point at some things the media believes and that is of course a different question compared to what the government itself believes.
> The French I think have a much more accurate understanding of their abilities.
Funny then that they thought they can overthrow Gadafi only then to literally begged the US to intervene as they totally failed.
>The reversals they suffer have been far fewer and less disastrous than those the Americans face.
Well if you try far less you can lose less. But of course also if you have far less, even those much smaller loses are just as big a deal as the much larger loses for the US.
I must admit I am not all that informed on the details of French wars in different African countries. So I can not speak on those details.
> I must admit I am not all that informed on the details of French wars in different African countries. So I can not speak on those details.
I think this is somewhat in tension with the tenor of your claims above, e.g.—
> Well if you try far less you can lose less. But of course also if you have far less, even those much smaller loses are just as big a deal as the much larger loses for the US.
Of course Gaddafi is a reasonable example in the other direction, but I’d point out that Françafrique is still entirely under Francophile dictatorial rule—even the CNSP is content to permit French forces to remain; it was Macron who threatened to pull out. Contrast this to Iraq (lost to a great extent to Iran). I suppose there is increasing CAR-Russia coöperation, but given Françafrique’s scale, the CAR is much less important than Iraq.
Thankyou this has given me some needed context regards Haiti. Wish perhaps the Afghanistan subject was not mixed in, as again I don't know enough and for sure its a different subject.
Afghanistan I think is illustrative of the fundamental logic underpinning foreign policy decisions. There is no direct connexion, I agree. (Well, perhaps there is but neither of us are aware of it.)
Is it just me or is this article badly written ? There are mentions of tryannical leaders of the past such as Papa and baby doc but no mention of where Mr moise comes from, how many years he has ruled, how he came to power, etc
Rule? The guy wasn't a despot he was the elected president in 2 largely uncontroversial elections.
He comes from the political elite as a member of the popular Tet Kale party where he eventually won 55% of the vote to become president. He wasn't a dictator, he didn't emerge from a military junta, or as a foreign backed darkhorse candidate. He was just your typical, center-right, Caribbean politician who had to make unpopular choices after taking office.
Until something emerges there is nothing that says this guy deserved assassination. And that is the worrying bit, by all accounts he was popular which means his replacement will be under a great deal of scrutiny.
"But debt is not just victor's justice; it can also be a way of punishing winners who weren't supposed to win. The most spectacular example of this is the history of the Republic of Haiti - the first poor country to be placed in permanent debt peonage. Haiti was a nation founded by former plantation slaves who had the temerity not only to rise up in rebellion, amidst grand declarations of universal rights and freedoms, but to defeat Napoleon's armies sent to return them to bondage. France immediately insisted that the new republic owed it 150 million francs in damages for the expropriated plantations, as well as the expenses of outfitting the failed military expeditions, and all other nations, including the United States, agreed to impose an embargo on the country until it was paid. The sum was intentionally impossible (equivalent to about 18 billion dollars), and the resultant embargo en sured that the name "Haiti" has been a synonym for debt, poverty, and human misery ever since."
- Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber
Copy-pasting a piece of high ideological rhetoric into this thread created one of the worst tire fires I've seen in a long time, including flamewars about competing genocides, the origins of Apple, Bitcoin, the bombing of Japan, and the devil knows what else.
Perhaps if it were one flamewar amid a bunch of on-topic, thoughtful replies, that could be called a coincidence, but in this case it's painfully clear that your comment set off the whole thing. Please don't ever do anything like this on HN again.
(Can someone please clarify) how was that ideological rhetoric? Are these not historical facts? And if they are, aren't they relevant to a story about political instability in Haiti? Is Haitian politics itself off-topic? It seems like it's such emotionally charged territory due to its agonizing history that containing all the flame wars would constitute a de facto ban on the topic.
Yes you can clearly see the contrast between that thread and this one, starting from the root comments, and that's the point: it's possible to have a factual discussion, and it's possible to start a massive flamewar with exactly the same underlying facts. The burden is on commenters to contribute in ways that are likely to lead to the former, not the latter. Of course you can't know for sure what the effects will be, but you can play the odds. These things are fairly predictable.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I'm afraid I still don't exactly understand where the post erred, because I think it provided valuable context that I was not aware of. OTOH I'm not the mod who had to deal with the mess, so if you say this is where the leak is, I've got to take your word for it.
> Trolling can only be measured by effects, not intent.
While I hope that principal helps you do your job, I also hope I never encounter it anywhere else. It's a free backdoor to deplatform anyone at anytime. Brigade the discussion and suddenly they're the troll. Yikes.
> the temerity not only to rise up in rebellion, amidst grand declarations of universal rights and freedoms
See, I read that in a sarcastic "how dare they" tone. Maybe that's why I don't think it's controversial.
> But debt is not just victor's justice; it can also be a way of punishing winners who weren't supposed to win.
Are you saying the debt/embargoes weren't meant to be punitive? "Weren't supposed to win" being the prevailing attitude of global economic powers of the time.
What monumental cowardice. The "high ideological rhetoric" is something not even mildly "ideological". And then it's their fault that the shitty dudebros of HN had a fit?
Please ban me from the orange hellsite so that I'm never tempted on commenting something ever again, while you reflect on why you're defending such garbage people
You're demonstrating the very vector into internet dudgeon that I'm talking about.
Yes, commenters do bear some responsibility for the subthreads that come from their comments. These things are pretty predictable, after all. (To be fair, I probably came down on cryptohacks a little too harshly—it's an occupational hazard, especially after hours of cleaning up shit—sorry, cryptohacks. But the principles hold good.)
I don't agree that it's cowardice to go for substantive discussion rather than people screaming at each other and losing their minds off-topically. I'd say it takes some courage to do that. What strikes me as closer to cowardice (not the best way to put it, but we'll go with your word) is defining one side of these bloodbaths-in-a-teacup as virtuous and the other side as "garbage people", instead of facing the truth that they are co-creations.
Btw, I like Graeber. I personally protected his account on HN and made sure he got to say everything he wanted to here. I think his death was a loss for intellectual life—he may not have been a meticulous scholar but his creativity is not the sort of thing that comes along very often. I think making a big deal out of that one lame sentence about Apple is an example of the stupidest sort of internet battle. At the same time, of course he was an ideological writer and of course that paragraph is ideological rhetoric. That it also contains facts doesn't change that; that's what good rhetoricians do.
Nor is there anything wrong with that paragraph in its original context in a book—a genre where the volume knob needs to be turned up quite a bit at times, and generally wielded with a lot of variation. But McLuhan got it right, the medium is the message, and copy-pasting that paragraph into an internet thread on an inflammatory topic is definitely flamebait. We're trying to learn how to avoid that here because the threads it produces are repetitive, and therefore tedious, and therefore turn nasty. That's really all I'm saying—anything else people are adding onto it (such as secret political agendas, positions on Haitian history, or whatever) is imaginary.
It’s described in that quote and in the article as if the Haitians defeated the French on their own. The Haitian revolution was essentially part of a fight between the French and the British, and internecine conflict between various French factions. 45,000 British soldiers died vs 75,000 french soldiers, so presumably the British involvement was also as significant as the French one.
Also, of the first leader of “liberated” Haiti, Dessalines:
“Dessalines marched into Port-au-Prince, where he was welcomed as a hero by the 100 whites who had chosen to stay behind. Dessalines thanked them all for their kindness and belief in racial equality, but then he said that the French had treated him as less than human when he was a slave, and so to avenge his mistreatment, he promptly had the 100 whites all hanged.”
Please don't take HN threads into race flamewar hell or any other flamewar hell. With this glib and snarky provocation of atrocity grievance, you turned what was already a wretched subthread into a tire fire. I assume you didn't intend that, but if it wasn't arson it was criminal negligence. We want the exact opposite of this on HN.
You also have a history of posting flamebait to HN. Please review the site guidelines and take a lot more care with this place. The ecosystem here is fragile. I'm sure you wouldn't drop lit matches in a dry forest or at a gas station, or toss Molotov cocktails into crowds at parks. So please don't do the equivalent here.
"It’s described in that quote and in the article as if the Americans defeated the British on their own. The American revolution was essentially part of a fight between the French and the British..."
The second sentence is incorrect, according to the American founding myth. It was a fight between the revolutionaries and the British, with assistance of the French. It turns out, when it comes to the founding of countries, the parties you give agency to matters a lot
What a bizarre comment. Someone describes Haiti's revolution accurately (presumably), and your claim is "how dare you prioritize reality over mythology", using the (also-incorrect) American founding myth to somehow support your point?
> [...] your claim is "how dare you prioritize reality over mythology", using the (also-incorrect) American founding myth to somehow support your point?
I made no such claim. Also "founding myth" is a term with a distinct meaning separate from "mythology" in that it is not necessarily untrue - romanticizing the truth and excluding any unflattering details is usually enough.
I really wish more people read biographies, especially by multiple people who where belligerents in the same conflict. When you hear the same story told from different perspectives, you begin to question if the history your were taught was in fact, the objective "reality".
What you called "reality" was just a perspective from a single point of view, which I can safely assume was European.
What's incorrect about the American "founding myth"? Please explain what role France played in the disagreement about taxes between the colonists and the crown?
Mentally insert "under the assumption that these are myths", if that makes you feel better. I have no interest in getting derailed into an essentially irrelevant conversation.
It's 100% what I was taught, as I mentioned in my previous comment before even reading those. Where do you get such confidence in claims that are so incredibly wrong and so guaranteed to be easily rebutted?
I'm curious to see the curricula that are teaching this incorrect rubbish.
What role did France play in the Boston Tea Party? I'm not aware of any at all. Certainly France jumped in once they saw the opportunity happening, but the idea that the revolution was really part of the conflict with France is just wrong.
The joke's on you! I was taught world history in high school and never American history.
The "American" studies class was about the Constitution, various laws, major Lobbying groups (ACLU, NAACP, FOP, NRA), how primaries work, etc. etc. American history was left to grade school.
The French didn't get involved directly with the revolutionary war until then, but the greater impact was war with France in Canada and the Seven Years' War, which pulled British resources away from the New World.
Without France as a belligerent to England in the years up to the war, the latter would have been far better equipped to defend the colonies.
The David versus Goliath mythology that tells of feisty upstart democratic republic felling the great monarchy taught in school typically doesn't get into a Great Britain heavily depleted and indebted from years of war with France.
Undoubtedly. But saying conflicts with France significantly affected the outcome of the American Revolution is a far cry from saying the Revolution was essentially part of the conflicts between Britain and France, as if the Revolution was some kind of proxy war. That's just not true. France piled on, and the conflict with France helped set things up, but the colonies had legitimate beef with Britain and walked the path toward revolution without having to be nudged by the French.
Agreed. It's also my impression that Britain didn't take the war seriously at first. Not until after maybe Trenton did they allocate real resources (as much as they had anyway).
The irony from the US perspective is we're taught the superior force was defeated by guerilla tactics and unconventional warfare. Then we completely forgot that when we went to Vietnam. Oops.
France had maybe 10% of the actual battle losses, relative to the Americans, and less than 1% of the total war-related deaths, which includes disease and starvation.
I always wonder, if there had never been a trans-Atlantic slave trade, would modern opinion in the West be that slavery is perfectly fine?
After all, the West still doesn't really care about slavery - there's more slaves today than ever in history. They also do not care about benefitting from slave labour or they would boycott the top countries in the Global Slavery Index: https://www.globalslaveryindex.org/2018/data/maps/#prevalenc... Slavery continues to be a thriving industry in Africa and the Middle East for example, and for the most part concern about this only comes from a few Western NGOs.
It largely seems to be a matter that at some point became politically useful in the US and elsewhere, rather than an actual concern. I wonder if it will ever stop being in political vogue.
>It largely seems to be a matter that at some point became politically useful in the US and elsewhere, rather than an actual concern.
It's diabolical. The ruling class, who benefitted the most from slavery, have figured out how to use it to keep people from uniting against them. According to them, it was white people who enslaved black people, not rich people who enslaved poor people, and we should all be upset the former and never think about the latter.
The global elimination of slavery, to whatever incomplete extent that happened, was primarily a British and Christian moral crusade. Christian morality plus the feasibility of replacing slavery with industrialization is what made the global reduction of slavery possible. I say this as a non-Christian. I don’t think it’s reasonable to say the West “doesn’t really care” about slavery.
But he's not talking about the Transatlantic Slave Trade, he's talking about the bad-faith right-wing talking point of "There are slaves all around the world today!!!" None of the groups that OP professes to care about are part of the transatlantic slave trade.
Haitians also continued using slavery - ah, excuse me, forced labor according to academic sources - after their revolution. They don’t really have the moral high-ground there either.
Slavery and forced labor are not necessarily the same thing; thought the former usually implies the latter.
Being forced to work 8-12 hours a day, but free to go about your business the rest of the time is a very different scenario to being owned and having your offspring becoming another persons property.
Chattel slavery goes way beyond forced labor - both are terrible, but not equally so.
Yeah, the "worker" conditions that followed were more like serfdom than chattel slavery. A serf's offspring is still tied to the land like their parents, so the practical difference probably wasn't that great, but it's still an important distinction.
“The revolution ended slavery in Saint-Domingue but not forced labor. Louverture and several of the early governments of independent Haiti used the army to impose forced work on the plantations”
Thanks, the citation I was hoping for would be a published, peer reviewed paper with listed authors rather than a summary from what looks to be a departmental public outreach project, the grunt work of which are typically farmed out to grad students or RAs.
nonetheless I'm disappointed; the assertion looked so juicy and worthy of a deep dive. you made it sound like "academia" was conspiring to demote slavery to forced labor under specific conditions. yet no evidence of this is to be found in the linked text.
rather, the summary makes a point of distinguishing slavery from forced labor. granted, it doesn't define either term (as a proper paper would) but it doesn't pretend they are interchangeable either.
It was less an assassination and more the beginning of a full genocide (a specifically French genocide, not against whites in general) around the country.
Dessalines went around the county killing all (fully white) French males. A lot of powerful Haitians opposed this, especially those of mixed racial background who had white family. The crimes that followed were really pushed forward by Dessalines the man, not the Haitian people in general.
Transatlantic slavery was incredibly cruel, but persecution by "the French" doesn't excuse a genocide of all French people on the island. Ironically, the people most responsible for the crimes against enslaved Africans (the "grand blanc") were largely back in France and so escaped personal harm.
That's not what the article you linked says, actually:
"A contingent of Polish defectors were given amnesty and granted Haitian citizenship for their renouncement of French allegiance and support of Haitian independence."
Update: I generally agree with your revised point, but for the sake of history I believe it's important not to needlessly exaggerate historical events. Let the events themselves stand on their own. My country has an ongoing problem with propagating accurate history, so I am aware of the need to get things correct.
>Philippe Girard writes "when the genocide was over, Haiti's white population was virtually non-existent."
That seems pretty in-line with what OP stated, I'm not familiar enough to know if Philippe Girard is a reliable source but the reference seems legitimate.[1]
Well sure, but they left to escape being murdered. Their main beef was with specifically French white people though. They spared a group of Poles and worked with many white German and USA American traders in the following years.
Would you please stop taking HN threads further into flamewar? How we ended up with an argument about competing genocides is a case study in how threads end up in internet hell. Now it's headed toward the bombing of Japan.
This is not what this site is for. No more of this please.
I'm sorry, but what you posted were obviously flamewar comments. "I have simply posted a historic fact in a neutral way" is a misleading description for two reasons: (1) "facts" is a red herring (see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... for explanation of that); and (2) a drive-by one-liner on an extremely inflammatory topic is not at all "neutral". (Also, (3) what you posted appears not to have been a fact, and when someone pointed that out you responded with "I'm not here to nitpick or defend genocide" - more flamewar behavior.)
It's not at all surprising that this made the flamewar worse—a neutral observer would expect precisely that, and that means you're responsible for the effects, whether it was your intent to produce them or not. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
If you don't see how that's the case, I can understand why you might feel like a victim, but such perceptions have a lot of cognitive bias in them. It's hard for people (all of us) not to underestimate the provocations contained in our own comments (by at least 10x!), and all too easy to see the negative contributions of others. Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
As for downvoted comments, which ones are you talking about specifically? When users do the kind of thing you're describing, we often remove downvoting rights from them. I didn't see it when I took a quick look, though.
I posted a Wikipedia article about an historically established genocide (the use of the term is not mine) against the white population. That population was wiped out.
The article says "By the end of April 1804, some 3,000 to 5,000 people had been killed and the white Haitians were practically eradicated, excluding a select group of whites who were given amnesty.". Someone else posted a link to an academic article that states that former slaves "eradicated Haiti's white population in 1804".
Pointing out that a few polish troops were spared in order to try to discredit me and my summary of the article that all the white population was massacred (which is accurate on the whole and not a "drive-by one-liner") is a nitpick to prevent discussion, and it worked.
It's disappointing that you're siding with that behaviour and that you're accusing me of flamewar, or even of provocation. That's a sad testament to how much the scope of possible discussion has narrowed. As mentioned, I really only posted it for historical purposes on the messy past, and present, of Haiti as part of, I thought, a mature discussion. I didn't even think that this was an inflammatory topic, and in fact I still don't that's why I'm very unpleasantly surprised.
> As for downvoted comments, which ones are you talking about specifically?
All my comments that were downvotable (so less than 24h old, no matter what discussion) were downvoted in a matter of minutes, if not seconds, some time after I posted the comments in this thread.
That type of behavior is a consequence of war. It happens, and the victors define who is worthy of punishment or praise.
Using World War 2 as an example, the Army Air Forces immolated Japanese cities with white phosphorus and napalm before the atomic bomb was available. In Tokyo alone, hundreds of thousands of people were reduced to ash, and the glow of the firestorm was visible from hundreds of miles away. Those actions, followed by the atomic bombing, are marginally controversial today but largely accepted as “ok”.
Because the allies won, those actions are rationalized, and those rationalizations have merit. Had Japan won, events like the rape of Nanking would have been rationalized by their standards, and actions of the US Army Air Forces would have been viewed very differently.
With respect to Haiti, the colonialist mindset focuses on the individual tragedy of slaughtered Europeans living their life in the colony. But from the perspective of the rebel slaves, those individuals were complicit in systematic barbarous conditions in the cane fields that killed thousands of slaves horribly, every month for a century or more. The wife of the banker who financed or leased slaves is the same as the overseer. Those rebels won the battle, but ultimately did not win the war nor write the history.
Generally very different standards are applied when speaking about actions during a war against belligerents and those actions taken after a war against a subjugated people.
I would respectfully disagree. I called out WW2 because it’s more approachable and known that some obscure colonial outpost.
War by its nature breaks the norms of morality and civilized behavior. When Lincoln called for Americans to embrace the “better angels of our nature”, he did so knowing that war is where you break the glass and do whatever is necessary to prevail.
With respect to civilian victims of war, that’s just reality.
Post US Civil War military doctrine is that the whole of a mobilized society is part of the war effort. That’s why Sherman burned everything in his March to the sea. That’s why the meat grinder of WW1 continued until German society collapsed. That’s why open bombardment of cities was the WW2 norm. The era of field armies duking it out for king and country died with Napoleon.
We can argue about definition or scope of genocide is. But I think at the end of the day the tragedy of Haiti from 1493 on speaks for itself, and looking for good guys and bad guys is a waste of time. I’m naive, but I think Lincoln’s appeal is more relevant than ever, and doing the hard work of settling differences without warfare is how we all improve.
> Acts of war, like military bombings, are obviously not on the same level as genocide. There's a very crucial difference.
What's the difference when the target is the civilian population, as was the case with the bombings of Japan (and many of the cities in the European theatre of the war as well)? Other than the fact bombing cities from a B-29 flying high is more impersonal for the perpetrators.
Actually, when conducting the firebomb missions, the B-29s flew at low level. Their after action reports clearly mentioned the smell of smoke etc. It was far from impersonal.
"
In January 1945, General Curtis LeMay arrived in the Mariana Islands to take over the problem-plagued B-29 command. For two months, his crews flew similar high-altitude missions over Japan with little more success. His job on the line, General LeMay decided on a risky new strategy: his pilots would fly daring, dangerous bombing missions at altitudes as low as 5,000 feet, low enough to be within range of anti-aircraft weapons. Robert Rodenhouse was shocked:
"We thought they could throw the kitchen sink up there and hit us. Can you imagine flying a big four-engine bomber at 5,000 feet? Why that was just unheard of, absolutely unheard of. And like my crew says, I think those generals lost their marbles. They weren't thinking straight."
The low-altitude bombing runs turned out to be highly successful. The planes carried much larger bomb loads. Crews flew at night to avoid enemy fighters. And flight personnel were kept to a minimum. Most of the gunners were removed to make room for still more bombs -- incendiary bombs."
Are you sure you understand the argument the OP was making?
They didn't claim only the Allies engaged in this behavior, nor that Japan was blameless. Their claim was in the first sentence, and let me quote it verbatim:
> "That type of behavior is a consequence of war. It happens, and the victors define who is worthy of punishment or praise."
And it goes on to elaborate:
> "Because the allies won, those actions are rationalized, and those rationalizations have merit. Had Japan won, events like the rape of Nanking would have been rationalized by their standards, and actions of the US Army Air Forces would have been viewed very differently."
To spell it out, the argument is that it's silly to single out the Haitians when they murdered their oppressors (and people in the same social caste as their oppressors), because this kind of stuff tends to happen in war regardless of who the involved parties are. Western powers engage in it in their own wars and conflicts, it's just that since they are usually considered the victors, this behavior is less often singled out as barbarous (it is, but less often). Conversely, nobody identifies the former Haitian slaves as part of a victorious West -- especially since Haiti is a failed state and decidedly not part of "us" -- and therefore it's easier to single them out as barbarous and genocidal.
Things not claimed in the other post:
- That Japan wasn't guilty of similar crimes.
- That it was just Allied behavior.
- That the US was worse than Japan or viceversa.
"Using World War 2 as an example, the Army Air Forces immolated Japanese cities with white phosphorus and napalm before the atomic bomb was available. In Tokyo alone, hundreds of thousands of people were reduced to ash, and the glow of the firestorm was visible from hundreds of miles away. Those actions, followed by the atomic bombing, are marginally controversial today but largely accepted as 'ok'."
How else would you deal with an enemy that would not give in? Most people fail to understand that the axis was all in, in every way, shape and form. When it comes to the Japanese, they flat out were not going to give up. Their will had to be broken, somehow, someway.
> “the vast destruction wreaked by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the loss of 135,000 people made little impact on the Japanese military.”
- Plaque hanging in the National Museum of the US Navy
> In its one paragraph, it makes clear that Truman’s political advisers overruled the military in determining how the end of the war with Japan would be approached.
> "the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan"
- Truman's chief of staff
> “the Japanese position was hopeless even before the first atomic bomb fell, because the Japanese had lost control of their own air.”
- Commanding general of the US Army Air Forces
> “[Byrnes] was concerned about Russia’s postwar behavior…[and thought] that Russia might be more manageable if impressed by American military might, and that a demonstration of the bomb might impress Russia.”
- Manhattan Project scientist Leo Szilard, talking about Secretary of State James Byrnes
It doesn't seem like dropping the bombs served any military purpose.
The military capability being broken was not the goal, and it also not what decided the war.
> made little impact on the Japanese military
That would matter if the goal of the bomb or impact had been about 'material' but it wasn't, and its not how the war was decided.
> the Japanese position was hopeless even before the first atomic bomb fell, because the Japanese had lost control of their own air
Again, that doesn't matter. Their position was hopeless literally the second they started the war. They literally started the war knowing they couldn't win.
The bomb was not there for military impact as militarily japan had already been beaten along every possible measure of such things. Japan was surrounded, had no food import its navy and air force were done.
> It doesn't seem like dropping the bombs served any military purpose.
The military purpose was ending the war. And in fact it did exactly that. You can actually go read about the highest level of Japan decision making. This is well researched now. Not a single member of the high highest decision council was for ending the war or even negotiation. Literally nobody. Despite starvation, fire bombings and military defeat.
After first bomb fell the they were starting to have meeting where they discussed the situation and the waste majority of them still were absolutely against ending the war.
After the second bomb the mood shifted, multiple members changed there position and with support from the emperor managed to overrule the still considerable opposition to peace from many of the military leaders.
The idea that this would have been possible without the bomb is simply not historical. Some people claim the Soviet invasion was the deciding factor, but just like losing territory to the East and South, losing territory in the West would not have changed them.
Here are the alternative options:
- Surround Japan for extended period of time
- Full invasion of Japan
The first option would have been essentially a 10+ year genocide of much of Japans population and transforming it back into an agricultural society. The government would simply not have given up, they knew about the starvation that would happen in Japan and they were perfectly willing to endure that.
The second would have cost the US 10s to 100s of men, and the Japanese likely 10x as much.
There were 1000s of civilians suicides even in some of the outer islands, and 10-100s of soldiers who essentially committed suicide by attack. What do you think would happen when a US army went from village to village, city by city threw Japan following a retreating Japanese army and government north right across all of Japan.
The Japanese army was willing to turn every city int Stalingrad. Endless bonsi charges where US soldiers would have to basically mass execute 1000s of Japanese soldiers who had run out of ammo.
The sum was intentionally impossible (equivalent to about 18 billion dollars),
Assuming this figure in today's money - we have a country of more than 10 million people who can't afford to pay 18 Billion, and we have at least two individuals who are worth at least 10 times that amount (at least on paper)!!
Yes, I am aware it is a weird and useless comparison. Still, it is kinda astonishing.
Interesting book until 1/2 of the way through it finally drops the point of it: debt is slavery and exclusively exists to perpetuate this form of slavery.
Perhaps, but credit markets also provide critical benefit. 500 pages of such a singleminded dismissal of nuance was too much for me.
I would not really recommend Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber as a good source.
While there are sometimes good historical nuggets, it mostly concerns itself with interpreting ever possible situation in the last 5000 years according to Graebers ideology and confirming that it is correct while constantly claiming anybody else that worked on these same topics and didn't share his interpretations are idiots (while often not actually seeming to know what they actually wrote).
This is just state policy if they don't like other states. Its just legal justification for states to do what they want to do. States have found a billion way to justify hostile action against other states. Claiming reparations of one kind or another is very common for a very long time.
Even had they been able to pay that money, its very questionable if that would have changed the disposition of the other stats towards it. Cartage managed to pay Rome back in full, and Rome then decide to destroy it anyway.
They might just have a different excuse for the same policy.
>Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other's garages.
That's an impressive amount of wrong to pack into one sentence! So much wrong, that I would not trust anything based on Graeber's word.
> After the Haitians gained independence from French colonial rule in the Haitian Revolution of 1804, the French returned in 1825 and demanded that the newly independent country pay the French government and French slaveholders the modern equivalent of US$21 billion for the theft of the slaveowner's property and the land that they had turned into profitable sugar and coffee-producing plantations.
> Haiti’s legacy of debt began shortly after a widespread slave revolt against the French, with Haitians gaining their independence from France in 1804. President of the United States Thomas Jefferson – fearing that slaves gaining their independence would spread to the United States – stopped sending aid that began under his predecessor John Adams and pursued international isolation of Haiti during his tenure. France had also pursued a policy that prevented Haiti from participating in trade in the Atlantic. This isolation on the international stage made Haiti desperate for economic relief.
His excuse is about as plausible as, "My dog ate my homework." Yes dogs do sometimes eat homework, but most of the time that claim is a lie.
First, it's odd how such a garbled sentence managed to be perfectly understandable English. If it was garbled, what was the original intention? I don't know of any major tech company founded in SV in the 1980s by ex-IBM engineers who were mostly Republican. I can't recall any famous company or organization that was known for forming democratic circles of 20-40 people with laptops in garages (regardless of the decade). Any sort of elaboration or clarification on the intended meaning would have gone a long way toward convincing me. The original sentence is simply too coherent to be "garbled" without further elaboration.
Second, book drafts are read and reread by teams of professional editors. Excerpts are circulated among colleagues and domain experts. It is practically impossible that such a "garbled" sentence could sneak by all of them.
I agree that DeLong behaved despicably, but Graeber can't be trusted.
Edit: I've tracked down previous excuses by Graeber. Initially, he blamed incorrect information from an unpublished study by a student of the Marxist economist Richard Wolff. Annoyingly the Twitter thread is totally broken, but individual tweets are still there:
Around six months later he blames a copyeditor[1]:
> The endlessly cited Apple quote was not supposed to be about Apple. Actually it was about a whole of series of other tiny start-ups created by people who’d dropped out of IBM, Apple, and similar behemoths. (Of them it’s perfectly true.) The passage got horribly garbled at some point into something incoherent, I still can’t completely figure out how, was patched back together by the copyeditor into something that made logical sense but was obviously factually wrong. I should have caught it at the proofreading stage but I didn’t.
Good luck trying to track down the startups that Graeber says he was referencing, or the report that he claims he got the information from. The much more likely explanation is that he wrote some nonsense, got called on it, and refused to own up to his mistake.
If everyone is to be judged by the worst sentence they've written then literally everyone ends up in the junk pile. This is not a substantive argument, and it's completely off topic. Please don't take HN threads further down lame generic tangents.
>If everyone is to be judged by the worst sentence they've written then literally everyone ends up in the junk pile.
I disagree.
I have no doubt written things that are wrong, including things that are very wrong. But I very much doubt that I have ever packed that amount of wrongness into one sentence.
Weird escalation on this comment. I asked an honest question. I read the book and I mostly enjoyed it, but based on Graeber's comment it sounds like he blames someone else for writing that sentence. If someone else wrote it, does it mean that he just gave a general idea for the book and there are parts he didn't write? If he had written and had taken responsibility for it, I wouldn't have to ask that question and your comment would be his answer. But that's not what his comment says.
Why can I not ask that question, without the fanbase turning this into an ideological war?
Has any other author ever been so consistently dismissed over one errata-worthy, not-particularly-crucial, sentence in a first edition of one book? Why is that brought up as some kind of "gotcha" every time he comes up? You could dismiss most any author with any significant amount of published material over similar trivia.
Graeber was a good writer but a bullshit merchant, and that sentence is his oeuvre's purest distillation: It sounded good and right to him when he wrote it, so nobody bothered to check if it was true or not.
Could you point me to some good criticism of him? I've sought it before because he does feel that way to me, reading him, but what I've found has mostly been low-quality.
The book is so wide range and meta narrative with a bunch of really specific examples. Some of those have been addressed but nobody seem to want to address the book as a whole.
The basic idea of the book is very old and not original. Social science and philosophy has been arguing about the definition/meaning/origin of debt, money, property right for a long time. He takes a very clear position on it that is clearly based in his ideological believes and then does a running narration of 5000 years of history that all proves his point crossing every social science in the process.
From my perspective as somebody that knows economics, its blatantly clear that he has no respect for economist and has not bothered with history of economic thought beyond finding a few quotes to slander. At the same time its totally clear he has never seriously read the works he seems to despise. It seems that it is his serious believe that economist and apparently the whole history of economics is simply justification for imperialism and slavery.
Not to mention that he is incredibly rude and response with personal attack when people point out that he made some very basic factual errors.
Some of his claims are so incredibly wrong that even somebody who only did the simplest online '101 History of Economic Thought' should not make.
Let me give you an example. Consider this text:
> Voluntary as well as compulsory unilateral transfers of assets (that is, transfers arising neither from a ‘reciprocal contract’ in general nor from an exchange transaction in particular, although occasionally based on tacitly recognized reciprocity), are among the oldest forms of human relationships as far as we can go back in the history of man’s economizing. Long before the exchange of goods appears in history, or becomes of more than negligible importance…we already find a variety of unilateral transfers: voluntary gifts and gifts made more or less under compulsion, compulsory contributions, damages or fines, compensation for killing someone, unilateral transfers within families, etc.*
This was written by an economist in 1892 who according to Graeber only improved on Adam Smith work "by adding various mathematical equations".
The text above was from Carl Menger, one of the most well known economist of the century and one of the founders of modern economics. Not just that, even on that wrote precisely on many of the questions Graeber book addresses. So exactly the kind of person Graeber seems to be wanting to debate and dismiss. The perfect pillar of modern (as in Post-Marginal) economics to shoot down.
Why then would Graeber claim that he only "adding various mathematical equations"? I seems that the only explanation is that he look up the wrong person on wikipedia, as there is another person with the same name who was a mathematician. Nobody who read even an introduction to modern history of economic thought would make that mistake.
He clearly doesn't have a clue who Carl Menger was and clearly has hasn't read his works. He clearly didn't actually study history of economic thought when writing his book. Rather he had preconceived notion and all he needed was a few selective Adam Smith references and dismiss the rest.
At the same time he proudly reference the 1925 'The Gift', to prove how much smarter anthropologists are as they understood the importance of the Gift economy. Compared to economist who according to him only believe in the "Mythical Land of Barter".
He speaks with equal authority about some almost unknown tribal societies, 5000 year old city states that we only have very basic data on and 2000s century politics and modern central banking (that he has borderline no understanding off). Given his very clear and explicit bias and he evident willingness to do selective reading and misinterpretation I much rather read on these topics from actual experts without such a clear bias and explicit political message.
To someone unfamiliar with anthropology, perhaps it would seem that there is only very basic data on the ancient societies that were touched upon by the book, but in reality the data is fairly robust and is almost certainly accurate.
Beyond that, I don't see how the Carl Menger quote you cited is proof that economists have a robust understanding of gift economies - and indeed it really doesn't.
Graeber is correct that mainstream economics pretty much only cares about market economies, and he is correct that modern economics is a highly ideological discipline where schools that did not align with imperialism.
Now, does Graeber overstate his claims? Perhaps. Is he wrong on the history of economics? Yes, though I can tell you I never heard of Carl Menger by name until I already had a pretty solid understanding of marginal utility theory.
Most importantly, is that a solid argument against the core thesis of the book? No. And yes, economics as a discipline is incredibly politically charged and has very poor predictive ability, assumes way too much, and is largely unaware of its issues.
My point was not that anthropologies don't have good data, rather I was referring to some of the specific examples in the book for witch we don't have.
> Beyond that, I don't see how the Carl Menger quote you cited is proof that economists have a robust understanding of gift economies - and indeed it really doesn't.
Its not the primary study of economists and not what they are primarily interested in and there is nothing wrong with that. Its also just one example, you can find other references to such things from Smith on.
However, Graeber consistent accusation is that economists had no understanding of its existence and therefore they are fundamentally wrong everything as the whole discipline is built on false foundation.
In fact, I would argue Graeber critic is basically built on a moral judgment. He seems to be unable to accept that even while knowing of these things, people would not consider it very relevant. Because for him it lays the foundation for everything about how the world today SHOULD work.
> Graeber is correct that mainstream economics pretty much only cares about market economies
This is pretty clearly wrong. You can go back to even Adam Smith, if you look at his 2 relevant books, one is pretty clearly not about market economics.
Economists have pretty much always been interested in institutions as well. In fact, when the discipline started 'Political Economy' was the term and that included a mix of economics and political science.
And even after those were split, Political Economy, Economics&Law, Institutional Economics and other were all still within the discipline. Now of course if you simple define 'mainstream' as excluding all of that is just an incredibly narrow definition and view of economics.
But of course if we accept that the definition of discipline as an explicit critic then I not sure what the counter argument is. Its basically just saying "I don't like what these people do because I think markets are evil, therefore if you study them you are evil.
> and he is correct that modern economics is a highly ideological discipline where schools that did not align with imperialism
I disagree that its highly ideological. This is of course hard to measure. However if we just look at political divide you will see that inside of economics you have people from all over the political spectrum while some other social disciplines are far more left, some almost exclusively so.
Honestly common from people like Graeber, the accusation of other disciplines being ideological is highly unconvincing.
I'm not sure what the second part of sentence means? Are you trying to say people who were against imperialism got removed from economics? Because that would be very wrong.
> Yes, though I can tell you I never heard of Carl Menger by name until I already had a pretty solid understanding of marginal utility theory.
Its pretty much universally accepted that there were 3 economists who lead the marginal revolution in economics.
They are mentioned in any history of economic thought class.
I understand that in general economics education doesn't put much interest in history of economic thought and so I do not fault people for not knowing. It is only surprising in one who implies he is an expert in history of economic thought and seeks to fundamentally critic it.
> Most importantly, is that a solid argument against the core thesis of the book? No. And yes, economics as a discipline is incredibly politically charged and has very poor predictive ability, assumes way too much, and is largely unaware of its issues.
Anthropology is less politically charged because most people are not interested in it and they don't try to make any predictions. Nor are they asked to make accurate predictions years in advanced in a world of 8 billion people.
I would argue the attack against economics as a social science is incredibly unfair, no social science in the complex real world can accurately predict, even if you assume perfect models, you wouldn't have the access to the needed data in real time.
There is a large difference between economics as a discipline and the reality that social scientists (most often economist) have been used by states and are forced to come up with recommendation. Jet somehow in economics such mistakes are seen as a reflection of economics as discipline itself.
Saying things like economist as displine failed to predict 2008 is about as useful as saying sociologist failed to predict the opcode epidemic. You can argue that Political Scientists failed to predict the Arab Spring. And we can play these games for all disciplines. Now you can likely go back and find individuals working in these discipline pointing at warning signs but that's not the same thing.
You seem to follow the popular outside economics view of economics where they as dispine are all totally arrogant and fundamentally un-reflective, rather then what most actual economists actually write and believe in.
I really just pointed at one example of a problem in the book. The book also ignores a whole bunch of very important questions that are very relevant in order to tell a very tight narrative about the things he wants to talk about. Most of all his conclusion about how these 'facts' should inform the world today.
This post was really helpful, thanks. I've had an actual academic text on the history of economic though on my-to read list for years, at this point—you've prompted me to bump it up the queue.
Author gets dismissed because the follow on editions are still a detail-packed journey through ancient anthropology that all cleanly lands as “see, debt is slavery and always has been.” I don’t know how someone can take such a un-nuanced view of credit markets seriously.
I read it, and recall there being a bit more to it than that. For one thing—of many—the book treats extensively of debt as a kind of social glue, fundamental to human relationships & societies, which isn't compatible with: "see, debt is slavery and always has been."
One consistent problem I've had trying to take in criticism of the book (and I have looked for it!) is that it rarely seems to have been written by people who read the same book I did. It's bizarre.
First, the lengthy slog through ancient African societies which then suddenly ~lands at very on-the-nose messaging and what feels like the “real point” or basically a total revamp of the book’s themes up to that point. But this occurs when you’re already pretty deep into the book.
Second, If I had to guess, and I don’t say this with snark, the
Book’s timing is another factor. There’s this sense that a bait and switch occurred where an interesting, nuanced book in the post ‘08 era is started in good faith, and an Occupy WS diatribe suddenly shows up halfway through.
Fair - the author was very involved in Occupy, so sure buyer beware. But it was published at a time when many of the book’s readers, and the US at large, had had it with Occupy and it’s themes. But, readers still tried to make an effort to absorb ideas from that side of the house, as ‘11-12 was no economic Cakewalk. Regardless, that honest effort lands squarely back in Occupy territory, but it took 200 pages to get there.
Lots of the 1-star reviews of it on Amazon, for instance, are by people who seemed to have skimmed it, because they'll level complaints like "the book said X, which is ridiculous because Y!" when the book explicitly identifies and addresses exactly Y within a paragraph or two of introducing X. It's like they're not familiar with that form of writing[0] and, on reading something they think may have problems, just skip ahead to the next argument.
Longer-form criticism I've read of it tends to exhibit similar, if less egregious, problems with reading comprehension. Which is frustrating because I suspect the book actually does have issues and oversights that would be nice to read about from a person with the right background who actually closely read & understood the book.
[0] I do have my suspicions about what kind of economic/political writing these folks are used to reading, that's (evidently) conditioned them not to expect anything resembling a sincere and thorough attempt to address problems with an assertion or argument to follow close on the heels of same assertion or argument, so may incline them toward skipping ahead or skimming heavily on reading something they immediately think of an objection to....
First I had heard of it. But I was surprised to see how he waved it away as simply "garbled" and then moved immediately to threats of lawsuits claiming libel.
I agree the sentence is a small one. The author's reaction however only succeeds in drawing even more attention to it.
IIRC, whatever else you think of Graeber's reaction there, "moved immediately to threats of lawsuits claiming libel" does not accurately describe what he did, as that post is part of a much larger exchange.
... So let me get this straight: you disregard something because the person who wrote it had a since-corrected editor error in the first edition of an unrelated work. Is that it?
I'm open to the idea (though have yet to see what I'd consider strong evidence for it) that Graeber was, generally, full of shit—his public presentation and the kind of books he wrote incline me to believe it, in fact, even if the books themselves have, so far, surprised me by having a lot more substance than I expected—but the way people harp on that sentence makes me think they're not familiar with the way broad-reaching books like this are researched, written, and edited. Getting a handful of details wrong, even very wrong, is downright normal. Failing to acknowledge and fix them when they're pointed out might be a problem, but... did that happen, with that book? Not just there, but anywhere else?
I'd be much more interested in criticism that addresses the core ideas, evidence, and arguments of the book, or that illustrate a pattern of presenting incorrect information, especially if it's left that way once it's made known, or if it's something the arguments presented by the book hinge on. Bringing this one bit up over and over and over doesn't really prove anything, and isn't helpful.
> "Let us not white-wash the Haitian revolution..."
let's also make sure not to miss the misdirectional, identity-based non sequitur, focusing exclusively on a few colonizing europeans and a singular incident over the shackled lives of millions of slaves and their prolonged casualties over literal centuries. with one being the consequence of the other, no less.
“Fighting oppression is more just than committing oppression” is a norm that has an incredibly long history. What also has an incredibly long history is trying to elevate the importance of the marginal consequences of those fights, over what was being fought against.
Because enslsavers created the situation in the first place. They wronged themselves by taking people who could have been educated and empowered and instead taught them violence and ignorance.
The same reason we don't get too hung up on American soldiers slaughtering SS officers after liberating concentration camps. Two parties can both be in the wrong while at the same time one is way more in the wrong.
Because violence begets violence. If you violently abuse, maul, and kill a group of people, then they are loosed, you don't need to think in terms of anything more than "what else did you expect"? I don't know if you've ever watched someone you love beaten to death, or been maliciously mauled yourself, but I bet the person that came out on the other side would not be someone you would recognize. Violence has consequences beyond the immediate victims and it takes time and effort to undo. Everlasting economic sanctions certainly won't help.
I'm not saying it's not evil, I'm just saying that if A enslaved B and B's family, it's perfectly normal for B to kill A and A's family. Is it legal? Is it good? I mean do you really think slaves care about laws or moral? It's brutal reality that we better avoid in one way or another in the future.
Murdering infants is barbaric. It's impossible to corroborate now, but many reports at the time suggested they used impaled French infants for a battle standard. I don't have a word strong enough to condemn that depravity. "That's what you get from revolutions by slaves, bro." comes across as extremely flippant. Slavery is wrong. Murdering innocent people is also wrong, bro.
Singling out acts of violence to try to say that both sides are equally evil or that one side is more moral because of that one act of evil is stupid.
The greater picture is this: Haitians were slaves and had every right to fight against their oppression. The "white Europeans" belonged back home in France. They brought it on themselves.
I always like to use this thought experiment: which of the two sides had power to change the situation?
The Haitians couldn't help being slaves until they rebelled. The French could from the very start choose not to be slavers.
I don't see how being brought to Haiti matters. Imagine some white settlers brought as children who have just become young adults. Do they need to go back to France?
It does matter if they were brought as slaves and against their will, and made by force to call Haiti their home. I hope you see the difference between this and the children the settlers brought with them. Comparing children to slavery is nonsense.
The point is not that they were in Haiti. The point is that they were engaging in slavery, and they had the freedom not to.
I was not making any statements on settler colonialism which is a separate issue entirely. I was just saying, the French cannot claim be victims when they were the ones engaging in slavery.
Let's say when you do wrong X to someone, it's quite possible that they return the "favor" someday. I don't know what we are arguing here. Are they evil? For sure, but do you really expect them to be gentlemen revolutionaries who only kill those "should be killed"?
Actually Europeans did the same in not so long ago, not as slaves, but as slavers (or some more fancy words), so people can go down much further IMHO.
Well in this case, B killed everyone that looks like and shares an ethnicity with A. And if C enslaved B and B's family, but C had 1/4 of the same racial ancestry as B, he was spared. So not really a 1:1 comparison.
One of the tragedies of slavery - like other severe forms of oppression - is that it doesn't ennoble the oppressed. In fact, it makes the enslaved person accustomed to cruelty, violence, iniquity, tyranny; and is likely to result in individuals who tend to be possessive, anxiety-prone, vengeful, violent etc. A bit like the adage about abused children growing up to become abusive parents.
Genocide was committed on both sides, and from a purely numerical standpoint the Haitian slaves had it worse. Why shouldn't France have been forced to pay back Haiti for the enslavement and genocide that it committed? Or should we just forget about the Vicomte de Rochambeau and his attack dogs?
"Convinced that the crisis in Hispaniola could only be resolved by mass murder, Rochambeau undertook to massacre much of the non-white civilian and military population. Under his direction, the French imported hundreds of attack dogs from Cuba, which were used both in counterinsurgency operations and in grotesque public spectacles in which unfortunate prisoners and servants were eaten alive. Rochambeau also displayed exceptional cruelty in a number of other ways, such as massacring enemy troops after they had surrendered to his forces, burning men and women alive, and executing many soldiers and civilians by torture and drowning." [0]
Treaty of Versailles which asked Germany to pay for world war 1 is what restored in world war 2. I don’t think Germany was stick with an invoice after world war 2
> According to the Yalta Conference, no reparations to Allied countries would be paid in money. Instead much of the value transferred consisted of German industrial assets as well as forced labour to the Allies.
> Later the Western Allies softened their stance in favour of the Marshall Plan, while Eastern Germany continued to deliver industrial goods and raw materials to the Soviet Union until 1953
Yes it was, technically. GPs point about not repeating the post-WWI mistake still stands though. Germany also received huge help as part of the Marshall plan.
This is nonsense. Germany was not 'asked to pay for WW1'. To cost imposed on Germany would only just cover repairing Northern France and Belgium. Even just including pentions for French war widows was not fully paid for.
And they of course never paid for the utter deforestation they forced on much of Eastern Europe.
And this debt payment was not the reason for WW2. By the time Hitler came to power Versailles was a dead document. The financial terms had been revised multiple times and in those negotiations Germany got a pretty good deal and a number of additional benefits and access to a gigantic amount of US loans and trade deals.
And after WW2 Germany still had to pay some debt but because of financial restructuring after WW2 those were not as large. Part of why this was possible however was because the US actually promised a great deal to nations who accepted debt restructuring. Including economic and military aid, and trade deals.
I would say so. You attempted to use sarcasm in a community of people who dis-proportionally don't pick up on sarcasm, using a medium that notoriously doesn't transmit sarcasm well.
It isn’t that people here don’t pick up sarcasm it’s that sarcasm as an entire comment isn’t really welcome here. This isn’t Reddit and comments are supposed to have substance.
Yes but I laughed and maybe a couple others. The OP comment was by a crypto throwaway account, the subtle message was there anyway, I just blew it up. Graeber is completely correct about Haiti getting screwed over by debt but I wanted the Bitcoin message underlying it to be exposed and have more substantial conversation about financial policies that could help. Did it work? Maybe.
Amazingly, that's a real quote from the book[1] (according to that source David Graeber blames bad editing), and it does raise questions about the credibility of anything else in that book.
But that story about Haiti's debt can be found in better sources.
Having worked with former US military and three-letter-agency translators, I have to disagree. They undergo large amounts of cultural competence training, and when working, they are expected to translate not just the language, but also the cultural expectations. Even low-level grunts are given basic cultural competence training. "Cultural blindness" is considered a threat to safety, and especially in recent years, there's a lot of effort to reduce it as much as possible.
I cannot imagine this sort of flagrant "cultural blindness" coming from the US military. I also cannot imagine what sort of benefit this sort of operation would gain the US, or why a country with the most highly-trained stealth operatives in the world would pick such a loud, public way of assassinating an enemy.
This reeks of a false flag to me. Are there particular reasons you think differently?
> While the Clintons in their respective roles clearly had a say over where some of the quake relief cash flowed, their political enemies have wrongly claimed the family foundation directly controlled all the billions in funds.
> The foundation itself raised a relatively modest $30m for aid projects in Haiti.
Please don't take HN threads on offtopic flamewar tangents. You started a doozy with this provocation. You also have a long history of doing things like this, unfortunately. Would you please review the site guidelines and stop posting destructive things to HN? We've had to ask you and warn you and cajole you many times, and we're going to have to ban you if you don't fix this.
While I understand why people tend to put all of South America under the same umbrella, saying that all South American countries are failed states is a bit too much. Uruguay in particular is doing really well.
> While I understand why people tend to put all of South America under the same umbrella
The only explanation is rampant ignorance. How could one consider that, say, Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil and Bolivia are all "under the same umbrella" except by simply failing to pay attention in school?
It's like saying that every country in North America is more or less the same.
Rampant ignorance is right. At least in my subjective experience as an American, public education about South America pretty much stopped after the beginning of Europe’s colonial expansion.
Unless you studied it in college or on your own time, the only people who know much of anything about South American countries are people who’s social circles contain people from South America.
You mean the 2 North American countries? Yes, the U.S. and Canada are similar in that they have functioning economies, and citizenry that is not desperately trying to flee.
I expect more than this kind of ignorance from an HN reader.
The US and Canada are not the same just because they both have functioning economies.
Even worse, "South American countries" in general don't have their populace "desperately trying to flee". Some might, many don't. The phrase "South American countries", as if Brazil and Argentina for example were a single entity, is so stupid it boggles the mind.
Here's my suggestion to you: educate yourself, learn about other countries, and stop making blanket, incorrect and offensive statements.
I think you can use some enlightenment, as well. You should visit the US/Mexico border to see the "some".
Generalizations are never 100% complete (by definition). But so much poverty and corruption, and so much desperate migration, sustained for such a long time (decades) is a picture of overall failure.
Mexico has the fewest excuses. It is perfectly positioned in the middle of the earth, with coasts on both the Atlantic and Pacific, and with abundant resources. They could be an economic _powerhouse_, with trade relations with the entire world (thing manufacturing, shipping, ...) if they could get it together (and I hope they do). But, history seems to show that isn't likely for a long time, if ever.
You're encountering trouble in this thread because your understanding of geography appears to be very different from most people's, e.g. writing that Canada and the US are the only to countries in North America (while common definitions would include Mexico), or writing "South America" where you (I think?) mean what most would call "Central America".
That's ignorant bullshit. Venezuela is the only SA country one can call a failed state. The rest is doing well. No first world countries nor the highest HDI but call them failed states it's just stupid.
South American countries are not doing well. The region is one of the places with more inequality "Of the 20 most economically unequal countries in the world, eight are in Latin America"[1]. So maybe the rich in latinamerica are doing well. Also is a political polarization scenario
between left and right extremism some countries close to a conflict or war.
[1] https://blogs.worldbank.org/developmenttalk/inequality-and-s...
Earning potential is simply better in the US. It’s not just Mexicans that figured it out, but immigrants worldwide did. People with decent lives all over the world fly here and overstay their visas because the earning potential is just greater. The truth behind the ‘all immigrants are desperate’ narrative is most are not desperate, but ambitious, and literally making a business decision.
How many of those are from South America? My understanding was that most of that migration was from Central America, largely Guatemala and Mexico itself.
Among other things walking (or traveling in any way, really) through the border area between Colombia and Panama, including southern Panama, is tough-bordering-on-impassable, even relative to crossing the US border in the desert.
Are you proposing that it is possible to travel by land from South America to USA without entering Mexico? Or perhaps the impoverished South Americans are buying yachts and tourist visas to bypass Mexico?
Mexico might qualify, in that the de jure government comes nowhere near having 100% de facto control of its territory, and doesn't appear to be on a path to reaching such a point, either.
I travel to Mexico somewhat frequently and although some things work differently then in the U.S by and large everything works. The power is on, the roads are decent, there are a very large number of fully stocked stores (including chains you would see in the U.S like Walmart and Home Depot).
Is it corruption and crime? Well by that definition many areas of the U.S are failed states. Or is it just politicians getting killed that makes a failed state?
IT is an open question if Mexico will remain like that. They have been reforming, if those reforms stick and continue they are no longer a failed state. There are many who don't want the reforms to stick (it is better for them personally even though it is worse for the country as a whole), if they win the country is still a failed state. Your guess is as good as mine as to what the future will hold.
A failed state is one which has lost an effective monopoly on violence over part of its claimed territory. Stable, functional states have occasional illegal violence but the state security forces are still fundamentally in control. But in Mexico there are large regions under de facto control of organized crime where the official government has been evicted.
By your definition of a "failed state", then the USA has been a "failed state" in the past. Since there have been a couple of assassinations of US presidents.
I’m Danish, I don’t really follow American politics outside of what impacts Azure and AWS, and privacy in general.
So it was actually a question, but I can see it’s a touchy subject and I’m sorry for poking something. It’s just that this is what has been portrayed in our news.
They didn't. They occupied the legislative building, but they didn't seize the government because they made no attempt to exercise power, and if they had it wouldn't have been taken seriously.
No, a handful of Trump supporters walked around taking selfies for a few minutes inside a building because they mistakenly believed the election was fraudulent. They did not hold any power at any point and were not right wing nor driven by a left/right idealogical divide, they were fools mislead about vote integrity.
That said, left wing extremists did actually seize and hold a section of Seattle for an extended period of time, which would be a more genuine example of a failed state- violent rebels holding territory inside a major city.
If you're referring to Officer Sicknick, he died of two strokes a day after being attacked with bear spray by Julian Khater and George Tanios and being subjected to the most stressful day of his life. Medically, he may have died of natural causes, but those strokes were the result of the riot, whether because he was sprayed with bear repellent [1] or because of the stress of the day.
it wasn't "Impromptu execution station" it was literally some redneck who spun couple meters of paracord into a noose shape.
>doesn't really sound much better
>sound much better
>sound
This is the problem. It isn't enough that "they made a noose and yelled for Pence to be hung" now it has to be "execution station" or "gallows" which are way different things.
I am not saying that that is OK either, but it is like saying "they had full-automatic rifles and anti-personel granades" when they really had couple of hunting rifles. Still terrifying and fucked up. No need to spread lies.
> It was an attempted coup of a democratic government.
I find it humorous how the same people who say the 2nd Amendment is useless because the US has tanks and nuclear bombs simultaneously believe that we were ->this<- close to having the government overthrown on January 6th without a single shot fired.
I don’t have a horse in this race, but from the WSJ article I read it sounds like the dead president was a Trump-style wannabe dictator who was narrowly elected in 2016 and then refused to leave office when his term was up. When people don’t respect the law and democratic process it shouldn’t be a surprise when others also choose to disregard the law and take matters into their own hands.
Surprised China has not stepped in here and offered to provide the Haitian government with funding and security. Seems the perfect situation for them to establish a foothold similar to how they have done in Africa.
I agree with you in general theory but not sure how it would play out in real life. China would claim they are stepping in to help a country that clearly needs it. Would the US be willing to go to war over that? Taiwan would be a Chinese colony the next day. Lots of complicating factors.
Given that the U.S. has already been involved in Haiti, and that the President was arguably not legal (i.e. there is no current valid President), I have little doubt.
The Taiwan precedent makes sense in the abstract, but militarily the prospect of potentially being in conflict over Taiwan makes it all the less likely the U.S. would let China get a foothold that close to it.
Perhaps because they believe they are killing a drug lord, and didn't do their research to find out this was the address of the president (who also may be the drug lord)?
HN has been gradually colonized by Trump truthers, anti-science, antivaxx, conspiracy theorist, uneducated individuals, trolls, and people outside startups who can't out down irrationality or their egos.
This sounds like an action-comedy. I imagine the new guy was the one who blurted it out, and the others gave him shit for it the whole ride back home in the chopper. Later they went out for beers, and the night ended with some fistfights in a parking lot and a bit of male bonding.
Entire GDP of Haiti was ~14 billion last year. Seems like the entire nation could be stood on its feet if world nations provided a grant of ~100 billion. Very important it be a grant and not a loan. A lot of money for sure but not that much in the grand scheme of things. If that money is administered by non corrupt foreign entities and spent on infrastructure you could have a brand new country in a decade.
what if it was just a single trillionaire ? What would you think of them becoming a benevolent dictator ? If the people could agree to an election where buying votes was allowed, how much would it cost to win the election if the people believed in such a dictator's benevolence ?
There are 11 million people living there. It would cost 3 trillion dollars to give each about $300,000 or about the mean wealth of an american. It would probably cost less than 3 trillion to win such an election.
There are no trillionaires.
I mean in reality I am pretty sure you could get every vote you wanted for $5,000 each. Average annual income in Haiti is $500. So 10 years of salary.
Also only about 6 million voters in Haiti and you only need half of them so you could be president for $15 billion. Likely most people would sell their vote for their annual income, that means a total of $1.5 billion. I would not blame them either, extreme poverty is a terrible thing and for many the adage 'any port in a a storm' is likely true.
This assumes that people would agree to sell their votes.
With that said, I am very much against dictators, benevolent or otherwise. But I would understand.
And finally, the ProPublica Peter Thiel $5b USD ROTH IRA is worth *double what Forbes thought Thiels entire net worth is per the 2020 Forbes Billionaire List* (he is on page 3... look at the massive jump in the animated graph!): https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/
That said, the IRS had 20 years of tax returns stolen from it which would detail the richest Americans, and so it is unlikely anyone in the USA is a trillionaire.
Tax returns don’t give you any clue (upper bound) about how much wealth anyone has.
But yeah, so many countries are so tiny (economically), I’d be shocked (from my afterlife in heaven looking down with god) if most of them aren’t really indirectly controlled by some centi billionaires.
