Seventy years ago Britain was fighting for her survival against Nazi Germany. The consequence of defeat at the hands of the criminal regime running that country would have been appalling; thanks to the Royal Air Force  victory in the battle over Britain it never had to be faced. Instead, the possibility of an eventual Nazi defeat remained open .

After the fall of France Hitler’s army and navy needed air superiority if they were to embark on an invasion of the British isles with any chance of success. To do that the Luftwaffe would have to eliminate their ‘most dangerous enemy’ -the RAF. So the summer of 1940 saw a ferocious airbattle of the south of England as the Germans struggled to crush the RAF and terrorise the British people  into capitulation. Failing that, they would invade. Thanks to the pilots and ground crew of the RAF, radar (“RDF”) and the leadership of men like Dowding (head of fighter command) and Keith Park (commander, 11 group which took the brunt of the attack) that never happened. The outnumbered RAF inflicted unsupportable losses on the Luftwaffe bombers and fighters. The Germans then  turned to the bombing of the cities, at first by day and then by night. They did enormous damage, but they didn’t break the people’s spirit. Britain hung on, undefeated.

My family lived in Southampton, and as (bad) luck would have it the  Supermarine Spitfire works were at the end of the garden. While Southampton, and especially the docks, were getting regular attacks, the place where the Spitfires were made was a special target of the daylight raids. My father remembered seeing formations of Luftwaffe bombers and fighters (he remembered the characteristic ‘weaving’ flight path of the latter) coming up Southampton water and being engaged by RAF fighters. He and his mates seem to have been standing outside the shelter -bravado perhaps, in the earlier days of the battle.

My mother recalled being in the shelter during raids, and in particular she remembered the enormous racket the AA gun positioned just outside the house, was making. What they didn’t know was that a specialist precision bombing group was targeting that very spot -the Woolston Supermarine Spitfire works. They were supposed to be ‘precise’ but nothing much in 1940 bombing was that accurate, so they were lucky to survive unscathed She and her young daughter – my eldest sister – were later evacuated out of harm’s way, and my father went back to preparing for the invasion of Europe – which didn’t come until 1944. But without victory in 1940 it wouldn’t have come at all.

Below are  a series of maps showing the stages of the battle, and some photographs dating from those desperate weeks in the summer of 1940.

The maps are reproduced from the excellent Battle of Britain Tactics web page, part of a site devoted to aviation. The best books on the battle that I’ve read are The Most Dangerous Enemy (Stephen Bungay) and The Battle of Britain (Richard Overy). Both well written and authoritative. If you found this of interest you might like to look at my post on D-Day and the Battle of Normandy.

(Keep scrolling down past any gaps in the picture sequence)

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 “There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”
— Walter Benjamin (and see also here for more on Benjamin’s ideas about history and meaning)

 

“That whenever any form of government…”

In essence, it argues that the American people have a right to make up a new form of government, of whatever sort they like, any time the old forms of government seem like they aren’t working. Needless to say, this is an incredibly bold and incredibly dangerous proposition to put forth. Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of the document, was — along with his colleagues — perfectly aware that he was opening a massive can of worms with this principle of revolution and self-rule.

More at:
The Smart Set: Independent Streak

Some Second Thoughts

Americans do love their founding fathers, and their founding documents. And they publish lots of books and articles about them, like the one above. And with reason.

But..

I’m reminded of the remark to the effect that all the documents of civilisation are also documents of barbarism.

The Declaration of Independence is an inspiring document, with its roots in the radicalism of English revolution -Locke, The Putney Debates and so on -and with the ability to stir thoughts of resistance to our current masters (whether American, British or whoever..)

But it’s also a bit of cover – ideology – that suited people who wanted retrospective justification for insurgent militias who had killed Crown troops. They also wanted ‘Indian’ land, not to pay taxes for a war they had done well out of, AND of course,  they wanted to keep their slaves. What injustices had these prosperous white men put up with, compared to the death and oppression they were intending to unleash on certain unlucky others?

Truly, the document has many meanings!

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival….

Frederick Douglass, 1852

 

 

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 From Winston Churchill’s speech to the House of Commons:

[...]

The enemy attacked on all sides with great strength and fierceness, and their main power, the power of their far more numerous Air Force, was thrown into the battle or else concentrated upon Dunkirk and the beaches. Pressing in upon the narrow exit, both from the east and from the west, the enemy began to fire with cannon upon the beaches by which alone the shipping could approach or depart. They sowed magnetic mines in the channels and seas; they sent repeated waves of hostile aircraft, sometimes more than a hundred strong in one formation, to cast their bombs upon the single pier that remained, and upon the sand dunes upon which the troops had their eyes for shelter. Their U-boats, one of which was sunk, and their motor launches took their toll of the vast traffic which now began. For four or five days an intense struggle reigned. All their armored divisions-or what Was left of them-together with great masses of infantry and artillery, hurled themselves in vain upon the ever-narrowing, ever-contracting appendix within which the British and French Armies fought.

Meanwhile, the Royal Navy, with the willing help of countless merchant seamen, strained every nerve to embark the British and Allied troops; 220 light warships and 650 other vessels were engaged. They had to operate upon the difficult coast, often in adverse weather, under an almost ceaseless hail of bombs and an increasing concentration of artillery fire. Nor were the seas, as I have said, themselves free from mines and torpedoes. It was in conditions such as these that our men carried on, with little or no rest, for days and nights on end, making trip after trip across the dangerous waters, bringing with them always men whom they had rescued. The numbers they have brought back are the measure of their devotion and their courage. The hospital ships, which brought off many thousands of British and French wounded, being so plainly marked were a special target for Nazi bombs; but the men and women on board them never faltered in their duty.

Meanwhile, the Royal Air Force, which had already been intervening in the battle, so far as its range would allow, from home bases, now used part of its main metropolitan fighter strength, and struck at the German bombers and at the fighters which in large numbers protected them. This struggle was protracted and fierce. Suddenly the scene has cleared, the crash and thunder has for the moment-but only for the moment-died away. A miracle of deliverance, achieved by valor, by perseverance, by perfect discipline, by faultless service, by resource, by skill, by unconquerable fidelity, is manifest to us all. The enemy was hurled back by the retreating British and French troops. He was so roughly handled that he did not hurry their departure seriously. The Royal Air Force engaged the main strength of the German Air Force, and inflicted upon them losses of at least four to one; and the Navy, using nearly 1,000 ships of all kinds, carried over 335,000 men, French and British, out of the jaws of death and shame, to their native land and to the tasks which lie immediately ahead. We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations. But there was a victory inside this deliverance, which should be noted. It was gained by the Air Force. Many of our soldiers coming back have not seen the Air Force at work; they saw only the bombers which escaped its protective attack. They underrate its achievements. I have heard much talk of this; that is why I go out of my way to say this. I will tell you about it.

This was a great trial of strength between the British and German Air Forces. Can you conceive a greater objective for the Germans in the air than to make evacuation from these beaches impossible, and to sink all these ships which were displayed, almost to the extent of thousands? Could there have been an objective of greater military importance and significance for the whole purpose of the war than this? They tried hard, and they were beaten back; they were frustrated in their task. We got the Army away; and they have paid fourfold for any losses which they have inflicted. Very large formations of German aeroplanes-and we know that they are a very brave race-have turned on several occasions from the attack of one-quarter of their number of the Royal Air Force, and have dispersed in different directions. Twelve aeroplanes have been hunted by two. One aeroplane was driven into the water and cast away by the mere charge of a British aeroplane, which had no more ammunition. All of our types-the Hurricane, the Spitfire and the new Defiant-and all our pilots have been vindicated as superior to what they have at present to face.

When we consider how much greater would be our advantage in defending the air above this Island against an overseas attack, I must say that I find in these facts a sure basis upon which practical and reassuring thoughts may rest. I will pay my tribute to these young airmen. The great French Army was very largely, for the time being, cast back and disturbed by the onrush of a few thousands of armored vehicles. May it not also be that the cause of civilization itself will be defended by the skill and devotion of a few thousand airmen? There never has been, I suppose, in all the world, in all the history of war, such an opportunity for youth. The Knights of the Round Table, the Crusaders, all fall back into the past-not only distant but prosaic; these young men, going forth every morn to guard their native land and all that we stand for, holding in their hands these instruments of colossal and shattering power, of whom it may be said that Every morn brought forth a noble chance And every chance brought forth a noble knight, deserve our gratitude, as do all the brave men who, in so many ways and on so many occasions, are ready, and continue ready to give life and all for their native land.

I return to the Army. In the long series of very fierce battles, now on this front, now on that, fighting on three fronts at once, battles fought by two or three divisions against an equal or somewhat larger number of the enemy, and fought fiercely on some of the old grounds that so many of us knew so well-in these battles our losses in men have exceeded 30,000 killed, wounded and missing. I take occasion to express the sympathy of the House to all who have suffered bereavement or who are still anxious. The President of the Board of Trade [Sir Andrew Duncan] is not here today. His son has been killed, and many in the House have felt the pangs of affliction in the sharpest form. But I will say this about the missing: We have had a large number of wounded come home safely to this country, but I would say about the missing that there may be very many reported missing who will come back home, some day, in one way or another. In the confusion of this fight it is inevitable that many have been left in positions where honor required no further resistance from them.

Against this loss of over 30,000 men, we can set a far heavier loss certainly inflicted upon the enemy. But our losses in material are enormous. We have perhaps lost one-third of the men we lost in the opening days of the battle of 21st March, 1918, but we have lost nearly as many guns — nearly one thousand-and all our transport, all the armored vehicles that were with the Army in the north. This loss will impose a further delay on the expansion of our military strength. That expansion had not been proceeding as far as we had hoped. The best of all we had to give had gone to the British Expeditionary Force, and although they had not the numbers of tanks and some articles of equipment which were desirable, they were a very well and finely equipped Army. They had the first-fruits of all that our industry had to give, and that is gone. And now here is this further delay. How long it will be, how long it will last, depends upon the exertions which we make in this Island. An effort the like of which has never been seen in our records is now being made. Work is proceeding everywhere, night and day, Sundays and week days. Capital and Labor have cast aside their interests, rights, and customs and put them into the common stock. Already the flow of munitions has leaped forward. There is no reason why we should not in a few months overtake the sudden and serious loss that has come upon us, without retarding the development of our general program.

Nevertheless, our thankfulness at the escape of our Army and so many men, whose loved ones have passed through an agonizing week, must not blind us to the fact that what has happened in France and Belgium is a colossal military disaster. The French Army has been weakened, the Belgian Army has been lost, a large part of those fortified lines upon which so much faith had been reposed is gone, many valuable mining districts and factories have passed into the enemy’s possession, the whole of the Channel ports are in his hands, with all the tragic consequences that follow from that, and we must expect another blow to be struck almost immediately at us or at France. We are told that Herr Hitler has a plan for invading the British Isles. This has often been thought of before. When Napoleon lay at Boulogne for a year with his flat-bottomed boats and his Grand Army, he was told by someone. “There are bitter weeds in England.” There are certainly a great many more of them since the British Expeditionary Force returned.

The whole question of home defense against invasion is, of course, powerfully affected by the fact that we have for the time being in this Island incomparably more powerful military forces than we have ever had at any moment in this war or the last. But this will not continue. We shall not be content with a defensive war. We have our duty to our Ally. We have to reconstitute and build up the British Expeditionary Force once again, under its gallant Commander-in-Chief, Lord Gort. All this is in train; but in the interval we must put our defenses in this Island into such a high state of organization that the fewest possible numbers will be required to give effective security and that the largest possible potential of offensive effort may be realized. On this we are now engaged. It will be very convenient, if it be the desire of the House, to enter upon this subject in a secret Session. Not that the government would necessarily be able to reveal in very great detail military secrets, but we like to have our discussions free, without the restraint imposed by the fact that they will be read the next day by the enemy; and the Government would benefit by views freely expressed in all parts of the House by Members with their knowledge of so many different parts of the country. I understand that some request is to be made upon this subject, which will be readily acceded to by His Majesty’s Government.

We have found it necessary to take measures of increasing stringency, not only against enemy aliens and suspicious characters of other nationalities, but also against British subjects who may become a danger or a nuisance should the war be transported to the United Kingdom. I know there are a great many people affected by the orders which we have made who are the passionate enemies of Nazi Germany. I am very sorry for them, but we cannot, at the present time and under the present stress, draw all the distinctions which we should like to do. If parachute landings were attempted and fierce fighting attendant upon them followed, these unfortunate people would be far better out of the way, for their own sakes as well as for ours. There is, however, another class, for which I feel not the slightest sympathy. Parliament has given us the powers to put down Fifth Column activities with a strong hand, and we shall use those powers subject to the supervision and correction of the House, without the slightest hesitation until we are satisfied, and more than satisfied, that this malignancy in our midst has been effectively stamped out.

Turning once again, and this time more generally, to the question of invasion, I would observe that there has never been a period in all these long centuries of which we boast when an absolute guarantee against invasion, still less against serious raids, could have been given to our people. In the days of Napoleon the same wind which would have carried his transports across the Channel might have driven away the blockading fleet. There was always the chance, and it is that chance which has excited and befooled the imaginations of many Continental tyrants. Many are the tales that are told. We are assured that novel methods will be adopted, and when we see the originality of malice, the ingenuity of aggression, which our enemy displays, we may certainly prepare ourselves for every kind of novel stratagem and every kind of brutal and treacherous maneuver. I think that no idea is so outlandish that it should not be considered and viewed with a searching, but at the same time, I hope, with a steady eye. We must never forget the solid assurances of sea power and those which belong to air power if it can be locally exercised.

I have, myself, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once again able to defend our Island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone. At any rate, that is what we are going to try to do. That is the resolve of His Majesty’s Government-every man of them. That is the will of Parliament and the nation. The British Empire and the French Republic, linked together in their cause and in their need, will defend to the death their native soil, aiding each other like good comrades to the utmost of their strength. Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.

-Churchill (June 4th 1940)

If this was of interest see also here for what happened next

Winston Churchill – We Will Fight On The Beaches.

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Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2010/05/17/100517crat_atlarge_pierpont#ixzz0nouFKFUY

 by Claudia Roth Pierpont May 17, 2010

Duke Ellington and race in America : The New Yorker.

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Napoleon Crossing the Alps (also known as Napoleon at the Saint-Bernard Pass or Bonaparte Crossing the Alps) is the title given to the five versions of an oil on canvas equestrian portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte painted by the French artist Jacques-Louis David between 1811 and 1815. Initially commissioned by the king of Spain, the composition shows a strongly idealized view of the real crossing that Napoleon and his army made across the Alps through the Great St. Bernard Pass in May 1800.

Read more about David’s five versions of the painting via Napoleon Crossing the Alps – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

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These excerpts  are from a review in the LRB of David Knyaston’s Family Britain, the second installment of his social history of Britain in the post war period.  The article is exemplary: it takes the subject of the book under review in a critical though not unappreciative manner and expands the analysis to the state of Britain today. I think these excerpts give some of the flavour. Do read the whole  article.

…. the basic configuration of power relations in Britain has changed remarkably little across the last half-century. The route to power lies much where it always lay, while access to that softly carpeted and gently inclined path is scarcely more open today than it was in the 1950s. According to the report of the Panel on Fair Access to the Professions, published last year, ‘the typical doctor or lawyer of the future will today be growing up in a family that is better off than five in six of all families in the UK.’[†] Only 7 per cent of children are educated at private schools, but half of all professionals in Britain have been to one, a proportion that rises to 56 per cent for solicitors, 70 per cent for finance directors and 75 per cent for judges. The cost of sending a boy to Eton or Winchester is currently around £30,000 a year – that’s £50,000 of pre-tax income. Average annual pre-tax income in the UK stands at just over £25,000. The Institute for Fiscal Studies reports that 80 per cent of the population earns less than £35,000. Meanwhile, according to a study by the New Policy Institute and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, there are now 13.4 million people in Britain living in low-income households earning less than 60 per cent of the national average. For a couple with two children this translates into a net disposable income of £15,000 a year, once all benefits and allowances have been taken into account – half, then, the income needed to send a boy to Eton or Winchester for a year. Only 1 per cent of the population have annual gross incomes above £100,000. And this, of course, says nothing of inherited wealth.The Institute for Fiscal Studies concludes that education and skills – or rather their absence – are the ‘main drivers’ behind the rise in inequality in contemporary Britain. And what the figures indisputably make clear is that elite formation in our society is still powered by a small but formidable educational engine, fuelled by wealth that only a few possess, and since access to the elite means access to wealth, the cycle of elite formation is essentially self-sustaining and closed to outsiders.

[...]

Seven years after the end of the period covered by Family Britain, Granada Television screened the first of that extraordinary series called Seven Up, the original and most remarkable experiment in reality TV, in which 14 children from across all social classes were brought together for a day and interviewed about this experience and about their lives, for the cameras. The idea was that these 14 representative citizens of the future Britain would be revisited every seven years and interviewed again – which is what, more or less, has happened (there have so far been seven such programmes). The first programme is little short of astonishing for the insight it gives into the class structure of Britain in 1964. Although they are only seven years old, the degree of social differentiation in the children is extreme. The sense of radical disjunction between lives and fates is shocking, precisely because each of the children seems unique, while all have evidently already been moulded by the system. Being children, none of them has yet thought that they might be ‘ordinary’ and all are startlingly authentic, not least the three little posh boys. ‘I read the Financial Times,’ lisps one of these delicate angels, while another talks of his destined journey via Charterhouse to the City of London. They seem like little aliens, at the very least mere curiosities from an age long superseded. Yet, while watching them, I had to remind myself that they were actually slightly younger than I was in 1964, and that I too went to a school such as theirs, and that David Kynaston did too, and David Cameron and George Osborne. All of us will, of course, protest that, as Cameron likes to say, where we came from doesn’t matter, it’s where we are going that counts. And, in one sense, this is true. But in another it isn’t, which is why Gordon Brown’s quip about Eton struck such a nerve. Whatever we have become, our most impressionable and formative years were spent in the company of the elect, in a milieu that was continuous with the milieu in which the three little boys in Seven Up sit cosseted. Some of us grew up to write history books, some to review them. Others, to travel first class by train every morning from the Home Counties to the City to collect their bonuses. Yet others became politicians. They are about to form our next government.

via LRB · Nicholas Spice · Don’t Look Down.

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Boston’s was brewed up by wealthy merchants. Now corporate interests wind up the people with spurious talk of freedom

Disguised as Indians, they poured out of the Old South Meeting House  At a packed meeting to condemn the Tea Act, out of the Old South Meeting House and headed down Hutchinson Street for Griffin’s Wharf. At a packed meeting to condemn the Tea Act, Samuel Adams declared “they had now done all that they could for the salvation of their country”. And this was the excuse the patriots needed as they smashed their way through the East India Company chests, dumping some 90,000lb of tea worth nearly £10,000 into Boston harbour.

Read more:

The Tea Party: lofty ideals, grubby facts | Tristram Hunt | Comment is free | The Guardian.

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Buck-Morss’ book seems to gaining an ever wider readership: good. See my post on it from last year here (CH). Here’s a more recent post from an interesting blogger:

I very belatedly (it was published in 2000) got round to reading Susan-Buck Morss’s essay ‘Hegel and Haiti’ (available through the usual sources). This is also well worth a read. And I see no strong reason why her thesis can’t be true, that Hegel’s ‘Master-Slave Dialectic’ was inspired in part by the revolution in Saint-Domingue occuring whilst Hegel was writing the Phenomenology. Pretty strong evidence is adduced by Buck-Morss via details of the political journal Minerva, which Hegel read, and which was covering the uprising for a European audience. With this interpretation Buck-Morss seeks to ‘rescue’ this famous theme in Hegel from being solely philosophical (though in criticism I’d say it’s undeniable that Hegel did have Aristotle, Hobbes and Fichte also in mind when writing it; philosophy and politics were inextricable for him) and in so doing radicalises our picture of Hegel, who is now seen to treat an empirical event which for all their humanitarianism few other Aufklaerer touched. For Buck-Morss the dialectic of Master and Slave needs to be rescued from the appearance of concerning only feudal social relations and seen as a critique of the enslavement of Africans which had created the very ‘wealth of nations’ which the Aufklaerer now enjoyed. It should be said that such a particular inspiration, if true, would not detract from the wider resonance, a relevance to any relation of dependence and independence which Hegel clearly intended, and this is no doubt the enduring appeal of the passage. Again one could criticise Buck-Morss for downplaying precedents for the critique of slavery amongst les Lumières themselves – her reading of Rousseau’s silence on the Code Noir is unsympathetic, as she herself acknowledges. In Rousseau’s defence the point of asserting freedom as a universal right was that the reader would see the injustice of particular unfreedoms; these didn’t need to be named. It was arguably the very generality of Rousseau’s claims which made them incendiary – they could be applied to any form of inequality, whether in Old Europe or the New World. These fine points aside, I think Buck-Morss’s thesis holds much water.

Tagged with: Hegel, Haiti, Susan Buck-Morss

via The Philosopher’s Haiti « Box 3, Spool 5.

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Think of what this country would have been like if those ordinary people had never bothered to fight and sometimes die for what they believed in. Mr. Zinn refers to them as “the people who have given this country whatever liberty and democracy we have.”

Our tendency is to give these true American heroes short shrift, just as we gave Howard Zinn short shrift. In the nitwit era that we’re living through now, it’s fashionable, for example, to bad-mouth labor unions and feminists even as workers throughout the land are treated like so much trash and the culture is so riddled with sexism that most people don’t even notice it. (There’s a restaurant chain called “Hooters,” for crying out loud.)

I always wondered why Howard Zinn was considered a radical. (He called himself a radical.) He was an unbelievably decent man who felt obliged to challenge injustice and unfairness wherever he found it. What was so radical about believing that workers should get a fair shake on the job, that corporations have too much power over our lives and much too much influence with the government, that wars are so murderously destructive that alternatives to warfare should be found, that blacks and other racial and ethnic minorities should have the same rights as whites, that the interests of powerful political leaders and corporate elites are not the same as those of ordinary people who are struggling from week to week to make ends meet?

via Op-Ed Columnist – A Radical Treasure – NYTimes.com.

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Every medium of communication in the world is now overrun with pronouncements about Haiti. Many have been ill-informed, and a few maliciously intemperate. The extreme comments have the effect of making those that are mildly reasonable in tone seem more reliable; some, more so than they deserve. The New York Times, for instance, editorializes about Haiti’s “generations of misrule, poverty and political strife,” as if those nouns were enough to explain the history of Haiti.

Nations have beginnings, and then national histories, and the history of each is unique. I know how obvious that is. But the penchant among journalists and political scientists for creating phony categories such as “kleptocracies,” “developing nations,” and “failed states,” and then using these categories to obstruct serious talk, in this case about Haiti, immobilizes us and conceals the need to uncover the weight of local and particular history.

The New World’s second republic has indeed known political strife, bad leadership, and poverty. But to judge Haiti fairly, it is essential to remember that the country won its independence under the worst imaginable circumstances. The Haitians declared their freedom in 1804, when the New World was mostly made up of European colonies (and the United States) all busily extracting wealth from the labor of millions of slaves. This included Haiti’s neighbors, the island colonies of France, Great Britain, Denmark, and The Netherlands, among others. From the United States to Brazil, the reality of Haitian liberation shook the empire of the whip to the core. Needless to say, no liberal-minded aristocrats or other Europeans joined the rebel side in the Haitian Revolution, as some had in the American Revolution.

The inescapable truth is that “the world” never forgave Haiti for its revolution, because the slaves freed themselves.

via Boston Review — Sidney Mintz: Whitewashing Haiti’s History

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The response by some commenters to Peter Hallward’s essential piece on Haiti shows once again why The Guardian’s Comment Is Free is so often one of the most depressing sites on the net. In a swamp of middle mass complacency like CiF, you’d expect the howls of “Half-witted pseudo-marxist gibberish”, but what of the staggering: “You can’t bring history into this.” Then there’s the crushingly predictable: “Are you absolutely sure that this is a good time to be scoring political points?” This liberal commonplace needs to be completely overturned. What is the implication here? That to confront the real, long-term causes of why so many died is somehow not “respecting” them? Needless to say, the idea that politics should be suspended in the face of suffering is the very hallmark of contemporary ideology. Now is not the time for political discussion, we’ll look at the long-term causes later …. But, since Band Aid this “emergency” temporality has become a permanent state of affairs, allowing neoliberalism to further strengthen its hegemony under the cloak of “post-politics”.

Of course some even claim that the concept of “neoliberalism” itself is “gibberish” spouted by only by “half-witted Marxists”. What this kind of claim establishes is the depressing reach and power that capitalist realism has over large areas of the British middle class. The real capitalist realists are not those working in neoliberal think tanks, who know full well that neoliberalism is a political project that has to be ruthlessly, continually enforced, but those who deny the existence of neoliberalism itself; they are the liberal dupes who, in the name of a “realism” that routinely ignores facts and evidence while pretending to appeal to them, propagate a “commonsense” which takes place inside the reality system instantiated by neoliberalism.

One irony of this squeamishness about “bringing politics” into situations of mass human suffering, of course, is that, as Naomi Klein consummately demonstrated in The Shock Doctrine, the neoliberal project has depended on its ability to rapidly helicopter into just these situations and exploit them. It is ready to do so again. Witness, for instance, the initial pronouncements of the Heritage Foundation – the text was subsequently changed, but here is what it originally said:

Amidst the Suffering, Crisis in Haiti Offers Opportunities to the U.S.

In addition to providing immediate humanitarian assistance, the U.S. response to the tragic earthquake in Haiti earthquake offers opportunities to re-shape Haiti’s long-dysfunctional government and economy as well as to improve the public image of the United States in the region…

While on the ground in Haiti, the U.S. military can also interrupt the nightly flights of cocaine to Haiti and the Dominican Republic from the Venezuelan coast and counter the ongoing efforts of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to destabilize the island of Hispaniola. This U.S. military presence, which should also include a large contingent of U.S. Coast Guard assets, can also prevent any large-scale movement by Haitians to take to the sea in rickety watercraft to try to enter the U.S. illegally.

Meanwhile, the U.S. must be prepared to insist that the Haiti government work closely with the U.S. to insure that corruption does not infect the humanitarian assistance flowing to Haiti. Long-term reforms for Haitian democracy and its economy are also badly overdue.

Needless to say, I’m not of course suggesting that people shouldn’t give to humanitarian relief. As one of the most perspicuous CiF commenters – thank goodness, there are some – notes, it is those who object to politics being mentioned who are imposing a stupid binary. Contributing to humanitarian aid, which we all must do – and I’m told that this is one of the best charities – in no way precludes a political explanation. Conversely, renouncing the political (or restricting it to where it “properly belongs”) doesn’t mean that it will go away – it just means that, with the unwitting assistance of the CiF general anti-intellect, the powerful and wealthy will continue to impose a politics that serves their interests.

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via k-punk.

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Why does the U.S. owe Haiti billions? Former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell stated his foreign policy view as the “Pottery Barn rule.” That is, “If you break it, you own it.”

The U.S. has worked to break Haiti for over 200 years. We owe Haiti. Not charity. We owe Haiti as a matter of justice. Reparations. And not the $100 million promised by President Obama either – that is Powerball money. The U.S. owes Haiti Billions – with a big B.

The U.S. has worked for centuries to break Haiti. The U.S. has used Haiti like a plantation. The U.S. helped bleed the country economically since it freed itself, repeatedly invaded the country militarily, supported dictators who abused the people, used the country as a dumping ground for our own economic advantage, ruined their roads and agriculture and toppled popularly elected officials. The U.S. has even used Haiti like the old plantation owner and slipped over there repeatedly for sexual recreation.

Here is the briefest history of some of the major U.S. efforts to break Haiti.

In 1804, when Haiti achieved its freedom from France in the world’s first successful slave revolution, the United States refused to recognize the country. The U.S. continued to refuse recognition to Haiti for 60 more years. Why? Because the U.S. continued to enslave millions of its own citizens and feared recognizing Haiti would encourage slave revolution in the U.S.

After the 1804 revolution, Haiti was the subject of a crippling economic embargo by France and the U.S. U.S. sanctions lasted until 1863. France ultimately used its military power to force Haiti to pay reparations for the slaves who were freed. The reparations were 150 million francs. (France sold the entire Louisiana territory to the U.S. for 80 million francs!)

Haiti was forced to borrow money from banks in France and the U.S. to pay reparations to France. A major loan from the U.S. to pay off the French was finally paid off in 1947. The current value of the money Haiti was forced to pay to French and U.S. banks? Over $20 Billion – with a big B.

The U.S. occupied and ruled Haiti by force from 1915 to 1934. President Woodrow Wilson sent troops to invade in 1915. Revolts by Haitians were put down by U.S. military – killing over 2,000 in one skirmish alone. For the next 19 years, the U.S. controlled customs in Haiti, collected taxes and ran many governmental institutions. How many billions were siphoned off by the U.S. during these 19 years?

From 1957 to 1986 Haiti was forced to live under U.S.-backed dictators “Papa Doc” and “Baby Doc” Duvalier. The U.S. supported these dictators economically and militarily because they did what the U.S. wanted and were politically “anti-communist” – now translatable as against human rights for their people. Duvalier stole millions from Haiti and ran up hundreds of millions in debt that Haiti still owes. Ten thousand Haitians lost their lives. Estimates say that Haiti owes $1.3 billion in external debt and that 40 percent of that debt was run up by the U.S.-backed Duvaliers.

Thirty years ago Haiti imported no rice. Today Haiti imports nearly all its rice. Though Haiti was the sugar growing capital of the Caribbean, it now imports sugar as well. Why? The U.S. and the U.S. dominated world financial institutions – the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank – forced Haiti to open its markets to the world. Then the U.S. dumped millions of tons of U.S.-subsidized rice and sugar into Haiti – undercutting their farmers and ruining Haitian agriculture. By ruining Haitian agriculture, the U.S. has forced Haiti into becoming the third largest world market for U.S. rice. Good for U.S. farmers, bad for Haiti.

In 2002, the U.S. stopped hundreds of millions of dollars in loans to Haiti which were to be used for, among other public projects like education, roads. These are the same roads which relief teams are having so much trouble navigating now!

In 2004, the U.S. again destroyed democracy in Haiti when they supported the coup against Haiti’s elected President Aristide.

Haiti is even used for sexual recreation just like the old time plantations. Check the news carefully and you will find numerous stories of abuse of minors by missionaries, soldiers and charity workers. Plus there are the frequent sexual vacations taken to Haiti by people from the U.S. and elsewhere. What is owed for that? What value would you put on it if it were your sisters and brothers?

U.S.-based corporations have for years been teaming up with Haitian elite to run sweatshops teeming with tens of thousands of Haitians who earn less than $2 a day.

The Haitian people have resisted the economic and military power of the U.S. and others ever since their independence. Like all of us, Haitians made their own mistakes as well. But U.S. power has forced Haitians to pay great prices – deaths, debt and abuse.

It is time for the people of the U.S. to join with Haitians and reverse the course of U.S.-Haitian relations.

This brief history shows why the U.S. owes Haiti Billions – with a big B. This is not charity. This is justice. This is reparations. The current crisis is an opportunity for people in the U.S. to own up to our country’s history of dominating Haiti and to make a truly just response.

For more on the history of exploitation of Haiti by the U.S., see Paul Farmer, “The Uses of Haiti”; Peter Hallward, “Damming the Flood”; and Randall Robinson, “An Unbroken Agony.”

via Haiti Watch: Why the U.S. owes Haiti billions: The briefest history.

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More people should know this:

… before withdrawing in 1825, France .. demanded reparations for the loss of its economic and human property of 150 million francs – about $21 billion in today’s money.

Twenty-one billion dollars . . . a crushing debt which, though later reduced, Haiti would not pay off until 1947. As a result, the young country never really got on its feet.

More via Haiti’s History: Revolution, Subjugation – CBS Sunday Morning – CBS News.

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I get so tired of hearing that Haiti is un pays maudit, as if God designated particular geographical regions for exceptional hardship, as if having enough money to build to earthquake code were a question of theodicy. I heard this exact phrase, that Haiti is a damned country, from my French neighbor just this morning, who served as a UN peacekeeper for two years in Port-au-Prince. I hear exactly the same thing from the many Haitians I know, or only briefly encounter in the back of their taxis, in Montreal. They are proud of the fact that Haiti was the first Black republic anywhere, and one of the first republics in the western hemisphere, but are resigned to what they take as a simple fact, that the legacy of Toussaint Louverture was doomed to failure from the outset. In fact, Pat Robertson’s senescent account of Haiti’s plight –an account that happened to go viral, but was really only meant for the ears of elderly, bedridden Americans who lack the initiative and the computing skills to check these things out for themselves– is really just a slightly more crude version of what almost everyone says about Haiti. Even Haitians say it.

Most Haitians are probably better able to get their facts straight, though. In his brief summary of the circumstances of the purported deal with the devil, Robertson notes that at the time of the revolution, the Haitians “were under the heel of the French, uh, you know, Napoleon III, or whatever.” In fact, Napoleon III was not born until four years after the Haitian Revolution, in 1808. When Haiti revolted, it was against a France still very much under the reign of Napoleon I (in the course of transitioning from consul to emperor). But maybe this sort of knitpicking is irrelevant, since that ‘or whatever’ is likely meant to signal that facts are not really what is at issue here. Pat Robertson deals with a higher order of truth.

One curious implication of Robertson’s account of things is that he would seem to wish that France had maintained a greater colonial presence in the Western hemisphere: an unusual point of view for so respected a member of the American religious right. Haiti’s independence in 1804 comes less than two decades before the introduction of the Monroe Doctrine, which declared the United States the only global power with any right to interfere in the internal affairs of the many burgeoning republics of the Americas. France kept St. Pierre and Miquelon (2009 population: 7,050) and a few other inconsequential clods of earth, but from then on the US had control over everything that mattered.

While popular wisdom, which Robertson is only echoing, has it that the Haitian Revolution was doomed from the start, in fact it was a glorious revolution, and based on many of the same values that motivated the American revolution 28 years earlier. What then could have made things go so wrong, if not a pact with the devil? The short answer is that even though the American and Haitian (and French) revolutions were motivated by the same values –liberty, equality, and so on– these were values that were never meant to be extended quite so far: they were universal, but only in a local sort of way. The US, still based on a slave economy, was not ready to have a Black republic, sharing in its democratic ideals, so close by. Two centuries of meddling followed, with interventions, puppet governments, anti-communist cronyism, and so on (I’m not going to attempt to summarize the history with names and dates here; for that you have Google), with the result that Haiti is now a fully contained ghetto of the extended United States. Like any ghetto, building codes are different there, and that is why more people died in their earthquake yesterday than would have died in an earthquake of comparable magnitude in Connecticut.

My usual cynicism about the efficacy of charity still prevails, so I would like to make a different sort of plea: do not give money to the William J. Clinton Foundation to distribute as it sees fit for earthquake relief and recovery efforts. US presidents have had Haiti in their budget for quite some time, and have been expert at sustaining the country in near perfect misery since the early 19th century. Instead, text a $5 or $10 donation by cellphone at www.yele.org. Yéle is a respected humanitarian foundation with a long track record of promoting health, education, and well-being in Haiti. What’s more, they have Wyclef Jean as their spokesman, whom I always considered a bit of a buffoon and a showman, and even the Fugees’ weakest third, but whom I trust infinitely more than Bill Clinton to get your generous donations where they need to go. I’ve already texted in $10, which is more than I’ve given to any cause not motivated by rank nepotism, or by my inordinate concern for non-human animals, in quite some time.

via Haitian Earthquake Relief – Justin Erik Halldór Smith.

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HISTORICAL NOTE (IRONY DEPARTMENT): In the late 1940s, when the question of a homeland for the Jewish people had passed from being a dream to a serious possibility, the philosopher Hannah Arendt broke ranks with the conventional (Zionist) wisdom. She suggested that the very worst model the Jews could emulate was the German one: the racial nation state. Only a state in which Palestinians and Jews had equal rights and recognition as citizens would hold out a hope for a conflict free future, based on justice.  She went on to make the following proposal: instead of an Israel based on race (Jewishness), carved forcibly out of Arab lands, why not found an independent state for Jews and Palestinians and make it part of the British Commonwealth of Nations? The Commonwealth would ensure both ethnic groups got a fair deal.

The idea found little support.

A wacky proposal, bound to fail? Maybe.

I wonder, though, if it was such a bad one, given what happened afterwards…

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