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The Lesson of Haiti
History; Posted on: 2004-03-01 10:45:34 [ Printer friendly ]

by Dr. William L. Pierce

As Haiti collapses into savagery -- and as American soldiers and money
flow southward and the savages flow northward once again -- it is good
to review what we were promised the last time, and learn from the
founder of the National Alliance, Dr. William Pierce, the lessons of
that cursed land. Herewith we present his American Dissident Voices
broadcast on the subject, from the December 1997 number of Free Speech
magazine. -- K.A.S.

THIS MONTH the last of the United Nations "peacekeeping" troops in
Haiti will leave, and the Haitians will be given yet another chance to
try to govern themselves. The "peacekeepers" occupied Haiti, along
with 23,000 U.S. troops, three years ago, in order to force the
government of General Raoul Cedras to resign so that a Clinton
favorite, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, could be installed as president. The
reasons presented to the American public for this interference in
Haiti's affairs were that General Cedras was a "dictator" and that he
didn't respect the "human rights" of the Haitians. Mr. Clinton's
friend Aristide, on the other hand, was said to be a "democrat" and a
respecter of human rights.

Actually, Aristide is a former priest turned Marxist whose idea of
respecting human rights is to incite mobs of his supporters to murder
his political opponents by breaking their arms, wiring a
gasoline-soaked tire around their necks, and burning them to death --
a procedure known as "necklacing." Well, that's about par for making a
country safe for democracy the United Nations way!

However, the Haitians didn't care much more for Mr. Clinton's Marxist
buddy Aristide than they did for General Cedras, and Aristide is out
of office again and the Haitians are about to be allowed to run things
themselves once more. Well, almost. Five hundred U.S. troops will
remain in the country to keep an eye on things. They will call for
more help if the need to "make Haiti safe for democracy" arises again.


The Clintonistas aren't bragging very loudly about the success of
their latest effort in that direction, because the situation in Haiti
is just about as grim today as it was before the United Nations stuck
its nose into things three years ago. About the only significant
change is that the flood of Haitian "boat people" washing up on
Florida's beaches has slowed somewhat, but that flood was caused in
the first place by an embargo imposed on Haiti by the U.S. government
in an unsuccessful attempt to force General Cedras out, and the
consequent damage to Haiti's already pitifully weak economy. When the
embargo was removed, many Haitians decided to stay at home and share
in the new goodies brought to them by the Clinton administration.

The U.S. troops built roads, schools, and clinics and pumped a few
billion U.S. dollars into the Haitian economy, but a survey of the
results of all this effort is not encouraging. The streets of
Port-au-Prince still reek of garbage and human waste, political
corruption is as bad as it ever was, and violent crime is on the rise.
The new roads and clinics built by the United States merely add a
superficial appearance of improvement, so that the tourist industry is
able to begin making a little money again, but the basic situation of
Haiti and the lives of most Haitians remain unchanged.

This sort of thing has happened over and over again in Haiti. It seems
that we would have learned something from it. In the 18th century
Haiti, then called Saint-Domingue and ruled by the French, was the
most prosperous colony in the New World. Its enormously fertile soil
produced a great abundance of crops and drew thousands of White French
settlers. Unfortunately, Black slaves from Africa were imported to
help with the work.

In the late 1700's the madness of the French Revolution, with its
truly nutty doctrine of racial equality, infected many Frenchmen, and
the Black plantation workers were encouraged to revolt. When they did
they brutally murdered every White man, woman, and child in the colony
and declared Haiti a republic. What had been the richest and most
productive part of the New World promptly sank back to an African
level of squalor, misery, and poverty. The roads and cities built by
the French fell into ruin. A peculiarly African mixture of anarchy and
despotism took the place of French law and order.

A little over a century later, in 1915, following an especially
chaotic and bloody period, U.S. Marines were sent into Haiti to force
a semblance of order on the country. The reason for sending them was
to safeguard American business interests in Haiti, although President
Wilson told Americans that the Marines were being sent to "bring
democracy to Haiti." The Marines remained in Haiti for 19 years. They
not only enforced governmental stability there, but they also built
schools and hospitals, a modern telephone system, and more than 1,000
miles of paved roads with 210 bridges. The U.S. government trained
Haitian teachers and doctors. We really gave the Haitians the basis
for a fresh start. As soon as the U.S. Marines pulled out in 1934,
however, the Haitians returned to their own way of doing things, which
is to say, to indolence, corruption, and Voodoo. Everything the
Americans had built for them gradually returned to the jungle.

In 1958 the United States sent the Marines to Haiti again, this time
with the aim of rebuilding the country's economy and infrastructure so
that it would not succumb to Communist influences. We propped up the
regime of "Papa Doc" Duvalier, who had been trained in medicine during
our first incursion into Haiti, but who was a practitioner of Voodoo
as well. He was a brutal and bloody dictator. Again we spent hundreds
of millions of dollars rebuilding what the Haitians had wrecked and
training thousands of them in the skills needed to keep the country
running. But when we pulled out again, the country immediately
returned to its old ways: its African ways.

And in 1994 we tried the same foolishness all over again, claiming
that we were "restoring democracy" to Haiti.

Why can't we accept the plain and simple truth that it is as
impossible to make democrats out of the Haitians as it is to teach
them how to maintain their own roads? Why can't we understand that the
Haitians are fundamentally different from us, that they are Africans,
not Europeans like us: that they are Negroes, and that left to
themselves they must do things in the way Negroes always have done
them, with indolence, corruption, and Voodoo?

I have in front of me a book on Haiti written by a British scholar, a
fellow of the Royal Geographic Society, following his extended travels
in Haiti at the beginning of this century. The book was published by
Thomas Nelson and Sons, with offices in London, Edinburgh, Dublin, and
New York. The author is Hesketh Prichard, and the title of his book is
Where Black Rules White: A Journey Across and About Hayti. Prichard
chose his title because he was especially interested in the fact that
Haiti was a country ruled entirely by its Black population, without
the White colonial domination that was present nearly everywhere else
in the non-White world at that time. The only Whites in the country
were a few hundred businessmen and their agents in the coastal cities.
These Whites were not treated well by the government or people of
Haiti.

Prichard was basically sympathetic to the Blacks and wanted to see how
they lived when they had been introduced to civilization by Whites but
were then left completely free to do as they wished, without White
control. He writes of Haiti in the first chapter of his book: "There
the law of the world is reversed, and the Black man rules. It is one
of the few spots on earth where his color sets the Negro upon a
pedestal and gives him privileges. The full-blooded African is
paramount; even the mulattos and half-breeds are disliked and have
been barbarously weeded out as time has passed."

One of the first things Prichard notes about Haiti is the pervasive
filth. He was not expecting sanitation to be up to European standards,
of course, but he was stunned by the degree of filth he actually
encountered, not just in the villages but also in the capital city,
Port-au-Prince. And he was struck by the caricatures of finery and
elegance which thrived in the midst of this filth. For example, he
noticed that every Haitian of any importance at all bore the title of
"general" and was equipped with a gaudy general's uniform, replete
with gold braid and all the other trimmings. When he inquired into the
military establishment in Haiti, where the total population at that
time was under two million, he discovered that the Haitian Army
boasted 6,500 generals, 7,000 regimental officers, and 6,500 privates.


Prichard recounts a conversation he had one evening with three Haitian
generals. It is a conversation with a surrealistic quality, as are
many other things in Haiti. At one level the Black generals are able
to converse with a semblance of knowledge of military matters, but at
another level it is clear that they are completely out of touch with
reality. One is reminded of the classical stereotype of the African
cannibal wearing an opera hat and a loincloth.

Prichard's book is filled with fascinating anecdotes and with detailed
descriptions of his personal experiences with various facets of
Haitian life. He remarks on the good-natured, open-hearted character
of the people, who could nevertheless commit the most blood-curdling
atrocities at the least provocation. The extreme degree of corruption
of the Haitian bureaucracy elicits special attention from Prichard, as
does the utterly capricious way in which it operates. The dispensing
of justice, in particular, is a caricature of European systems, in
which many of the same outward forms are observed.

Prichard also comments on the religious beliefs and practices of the
Haitians. The official religion, which they inherited from their
former French masters, is Roman Catholicism, but the true religion of
the people is Voodoo, a peculiarly African religion with Catholic
touches. In religion as in other aspects of Haitian life there is a
bizarre blending of White forms with Black substance.

Later in his book Prichard generalizes from many of his observations
to reach a fundamental conclusion about life in Haiti: namely, that in
all matters regarding their connections with the White world, with
White civilization, the Haitians are more concerned with show than
with substance, and their ability to mimic the characteristics of
White people, both individually and collectively, persuades many
people who observe them only superficially and who want to believe
them equal that they really are equal.

Prichard writes: "What most astonishes the traveler in Hayti is that
they have everything there. Ask for what you please, the answer
invariably is, 'Yes, yes, we have it.' They possess everything that a
civilized and progressive nation can desire. Electric light? They
proudly point to a [power] plant on a hilltop outside the town.
Constitutional government? A Chamber of Deputies elected by public
vote, a Senate, and all the elaborate paraphernalia of the law: they
are to be found here, seemingly all of them. Institutions, churches,
schools, roads, railways . . . . On paper their system is flawless. .
. . If one puts one's trust in the mirage of hearsay, the Haitians can
boast of possessing all desirable things, but on nearer approach these
pleasant prospects are apt to take on another complexion.

"For instance, you are standing in what was once a building, but is
now a spindle-shanked ghost of its former self. A single man, nursing
a broken leg, sprawls on the black, earthen floor; a pile of wooden
beds is heaped in the north corner; rain has formed a pool in the
middle of the room, crawling and spreading into an ever wider circle
as the last shower drips from the roof. Some filthy sheets lie wound
into a sticky ball on two beds, one of which is overturned. A large,
iron washing tub stands in the open doorway.

"Now where are you? It would be impossible to guess. As a matter of
fact, you are in the Military Hospital of the second most important
town of Hayti, a state-supported concern in which the soldiers of the
Republic are supposed to be cured of all the ills of the flesh. . . .

"It was the same with the electric light. The [power] plant was here,
but it did not work. It was the same with the [Army's] cannon. There
are cannon, but they won't go off. It was the same with their
railways. They were being 'hurried forward,' but they never
progressed. It was the same with everything."

There are many more examples. What had dawned on Prichard is that the
Haitians really don't care. To them the imitation of civilization is
as good as the real thing. They believe that if they are able to dress
like White men and speak the White man's language and mimic the White
man's institutions, then they are as good as White men. And I believe
what Prichard observed of the Haitians applies equally well to Blacks
in the United States today.

Prichard ends his book with a chapter titled "Can the Negro Rule
Himself?" And he answers his question:

"The present condition of Hayti gives the best possible answer to the
question, and, considering the experiment has lasted for a century,
perhaps also a conclusive one. For a century the answer has been
working itself out there in flesh and blood. The Negro has had his
chance, a fair field, and no favor. He has had the most beautiful and
fertile of the Caribbees for his own; he has had the advantage of
excellent French laws; he inherited a made country, with Cap Haitien
for its Paris . . . . Here was a wide land sown with prosperity, a
land of wood, water, towns and plantations, and in the midst of it the
Black man was turned loose to work out his own salvation. What has he
made of the chances that were given to him?"

Prichard then summarizes the century of Haiti's independent existence,
running through a list of Black rulers and strongmen, of revolutions
and massacres and disorders. He winds up his survey with these words:

"Suffice it to say that . . . [Hayti's] best president was Geffrard, a
mulatto, and that the dictatorship of her Black heads of state always
has been marked by a redder smear than usual upon the page of history.
The better, the wiser, the more enlightened and less brutalized class
has always been composed of the mulattos, and the Blacks have
recognized the fact and hated the mulatto element accordingly. But to
pass from the earlier days of independence to more recent times: we
had not long ago the savage rule of President Salomon, a notorious
sectary of snake worship, beneath whose iron hand the country groaned
for years, and public executions, assassinations, and robbery were the
order of the day. And at the present time? Today in Hayti we come to
the real crux of the question. At the end of a hundred years of trial
how does the Black man govern himself? What progress has he made?
Absolutely none."

That's the way it was a century ago, when Prichard wrote, and that's
essentially the way it is today, despite three large-scale efforts by
the United States during this century to improve the lot of the
Haitians.

Why is all of this important to us? A century ago Prichard was by no
means an unusual man of his class. He went to Haiti, he carefully
observed life there in great detail over an extended period, and he
drew logical and reasonable conclusions from his observations. Other
scholars of his day could have done the same thing. But it is
unimaginable that a scholar today, whether from Britain or America,
could make observations like Prichard did, draw similar conclusions,
and then publish his conclusions in a book by a mainstream publisher.
It is simply not possible.

In the first place, one would be hard pressed to find a scholar from
any university in America or Britain today who would have the courage
to write honestly about Haiti, because he knows that if he did he
would be condemned as a "racist" by a numerous and noisy faction of
his colleagues and would be drummed out of the academy. And even if
someone did write a book with observations and conclusions similar to
Prichard's, no mainstream publisher would touch it. That's how far
downhill our civilization has slid in a century.

The Haitians have their Voodoo, with all of its disgusting and bizarre
beliefs and practices. And we have our cult of Political Correctness,
our cult of egalitarianism. It is a cult based as much on superstition
and as devoid of reason and logic as the Voodoo of the Haitians. And
it exercises as strong a hold on its adherents. A Haitian would as
soon offend a Voodoo witch doctor and risk having a curse put on
himself as one of our modern scholars would risk being labeled a
"racist!"

This article originally appeared in Free Speech magazine for December
1997, Volume III, Number 12, and was a transcription of Dr. Pierce's
American Dissident Voices radio program of the same name.