Horner's Corner

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.

Defeating the French

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

By Rebecca Solnit

Soon after almost every disaster the crimes begin: ruthless, selfish, indifferent to human suffering, and generating far more suffering. The perpetrators go unpunished and live to commit further crimes against humanity. They care less for human life than for property. They act without regard for consequences.

I’m talking, of course, about those members of the mass media whose misrepresentation of what goes on in disaster often abets and justifies a second wave of disaster. I’m talking about the treatment of sufferers as criminals, both on the ground and in the news, and the endorsement of a shift of resources from rescue to property patrol. They still have blood on their hands from Hurricane Katrina, and they are staining themselves anew in Haiti.

Within days of the Haitian earthquake, for example, the Los Angeles Times ran a series of photographs with captions that kept deploying the word “looting.” One was of a man lying face down on the ground with this caption: “A Haitian police officer ties up a suspected looter who was carrying a bag of evaporated milk.” The man’s sweaty face looks up at the camera, beseeching, anguished.

Another photo was labeled: “Looting continued in Haiti on the third day after the earthquake, although there were more police in downtown Port-au-Prince.” It showed a somber crowd wandering amid shattered piles of concrete in a landscape where, visibly, there could be little worth taking anyway.

via Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics.

The American-led mission in Port-au-Prince, Peter Hallward writes, has put military stability before humanitarian needs in a painful echo of Haiti’s past.

One week after the devastating earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, it’s now clear that the initial phase of the US-led relief operation has conformed to the three fundamental tendencies that have shaped the more general course of the island’s recent history. It has adopted military priorities and strategies. It has sidelined Haiti’s government and ignored the needs of the majority of its people. And it has proceeded in ways that reinforce the already harrowing gap between rich and poor. These three tendencies aren’t just connected, they are mutually reinforcing – and they look likely to continue to govern the imminent reconstruction effort unless determined political action is taken to avoid them.

Read more: via Securing disaster: The US repeats past mistakes in Haiti – The National Newspaper.

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.

Fast Tube by Casper">watch?v=zPoWOw8Jm5w]

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.

In her book, “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,” Naomi Klein explores the myth of free market democracy, explaining how neoliberalism dominates the world with America its main exponent exploiting security threats, terror attacks, economic meltdowns, competing ideologies, tectonic political or economic shifts, and natural disasters to impose its will everywhere.

As a result, wars are waged, social services cut, public ones privatized, and freedom sacrificed when people are too distracted, cowed or in duress to object. Disaster capitalism is triumphant everywhere from post-Soviet Russia to post-apartheid South Africa, occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, Honduras before and after the US-instigated coup, post-tsunami Sri Lanka and Aceh, Indonesia, New Orleans post-Katrina, and now heading to Haiti full-throttle after its greatest ever catastrophe. The same scheme always repeats, exploiting people for profits, the prevailing neoliberal idea that “there is no alternative” so grab all you can.

More via Haiti Watch.

It’s .. time to stop having a conversation about charity and start having a conversation about justice–about recovery, responsibility and fairness. What the world should be pondering instead is: What is Haiti owed?

Haiti’s vulnerability to natural disasters, its food shortages, poverty, deforestation and lack of infrastructure, are not accidental. To say that it is the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere is to miss the point; Haiti was made poor–by France, the United States, Great Britain, other Western powers and by the IMF and the World Bank.

Now, in its attempts to help Haiti, the IMF is pursuing the same kinds of policies that made Haiti a geography of precariousness even before the quake. To great fanfare, the IMF announced a new $100 million loan to Haiti on Thursday. In one crucial way, the loan is a good thing; Haiti is in dire straits and needs a massive cash infusion. But the new loan was made through the IMF’s extended credit facility, to which Haiti already has $165 million in debt. Debt relief activists tell me that these loans came with conditions, including raising prices for electricity, refusing pay increases to all public employees except those making minimum wage and keeping inflation low. They say that the new loans would impose these same conditions. In other words, in the face of this latest tragedy, the IMF is still using crisis and debt as leverage to compel neoliberal reforms.

via IMF to Haiti: Freeze Public Wages.

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.

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.

The Bois Caiman, August 14th 1791: the gathering of the Haitian slaves at the ceremony that marked the beginning of the Haitian Revolution.

Inspired by the tall figure of Boukman (a slave who could read? = bookman?) the slaves struck for freedom – and won, in the first great successful slave uprising. Armies sent against them were all defeated: when French troops were sent against them under Napoleon the Haitians sang La Marseillaise to tell their opponents that they were on the wrong side. The black slaves freed themselves under Toussaint L’Ouverture, and others – making the principles of revolutionary freedom truly universal as nothing else could.  Overthrowing Kings and Slave owners was only the start. Those principles amount to more than being ruled by elites, who deign sometimes to have their rule over us ceremonially reaffirmed in elections.  What came to be known as the  ‘Tennis Court Oath’ – when the ‘Third Estate’ (the commoners) swore an oath not to allow themselves to be dissolved until they had forged a free constitution for the French people – shares its world-historical importance with the uprising in Haiti. [1]

The Tennis Court Oath 1789: the assembly of the representatives of the French people refuse to be dissolved by the King.

What was  the true beginning of the French Revolution? for more on the events discussed here, see CLR James The Black Jacobins (the history of the Haitian revolution) and Susan Buck-Morss Hegel, Haiti and Universal History (for the philosophical significance). James’ book was a pioneering work of black history while Buck-Morss’ is a new (2009), erudite yet concise intervention.  It’s a significant book in that it draws together the kinds of ideas in implicit in this post, and takes the discussion onto a whole other level. I don’t agree with everything she says in the book but was very glad I’d read it. I’ll never think about slavery,  or the ‘Age of Revolution’ the same way again.

We must fight the tendency to think of events like the Haitian revolution as ‘off shoots’ or mere side effects of the real action in Europe or North America. The Haitian revolution had a powerful  impact on Europeans of the day (including Hegel: Buck-Morss argues  that he must have been aware of the events across the Atlantic, and that he developed his ‘master -slave’ dialectic  with that revolution in mind).

Haiti is a poor country, and it is one that has lately been pulverised by an earthquake. But it is more than the basket case of the metropolitan imaginary: it stands for something inspiring in the history of the struggle for human emancipation. Where Haiti led, others followed.

The Tennis Court Oath 1789 - (David)

 [1] For more on the contemporary signficance of these issues, see Slavoj Zizek’s First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (2009)

Jean-Baptiste Belley, Deputy for San Domingue, a.k.a. Haiti (1797)

by Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson

Find out more about this man and why he is significant by reading The Black Jacobins by CLR James. See also The Bois Caiman and the Tennis Court Oath elswhere on this site.

TO TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE

TOUSSAINT, the most unhappy man of men!
Whether the whistling Rustic tend his plough
Within thy hearing, or thy head be now
Pillowed in some deep dungeon’s earless den;
O miserable Chieftain! where and when
Wilt thou find patience? Yet die not; do thou
Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow:
Though fallen thyself, never to rise again,
Live, and take comfort. Thou hast left behind
Powers that will work for thee; air, earth, and skies;
There’s not a breathing of the common wind
That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;
Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
And love, and man’s unconquerable mind.

William Wordsworth

Toussaint led the slaves of Haiti in their revolt, inspired by the  the French Revolution. It was the first great successful slave revolution in modern history. Although captured by the French and imprisoned by them, he was a hero to all those inspired by the same ideals – as Wordsworth here indicates. See also my posting ‘The Bois Caiman and the Tennis Court Oath’