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Default Why Haiti Is So Hopeless; And A Very Modest Proposal

Why Haiti Is So Hopeless; And A Very Modest Proposal

By Steve Sailer

"Does President Barack Obama have any more idea what to do with Haiti after the horrific earthquake than did President Woodrow Wilson when he sent the Marines in back in 1915? Obama has put his byline on the January 15 Newsweek cover story Why Haiti Matters, but he can’t seem to come up with an answer to his headline question beyond typical Obamaesque self-absorption: “We look into the eyes of another and see ourselves”.


(He has seized the opportunity to amnesty a lot of Haitian illegals in
the U.S... But increasing Haitian immigration has been a little-noted
Obama preoccupation for some time.)

If we’re looking for something to do for Haiti that will help it in
the long term, it’s just not at all clear how. (I do make a very
modest proposal at the end of this article). The 1915-1934 U.S.
occupation built some infrastructure, but isn’t exactly remembered as
ranking up there with Iwo Jima as the Corps’ finest moment. The long
run effect of U.S. rule through mulatto surrogates seems mostly to
have paved the way for Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier’s disastrous
1957-1971 black power government.

Other suggestions I’ve heard over the last week: handing Haiti back to
France; handing it over to the Dominican Republic, with which it
shares the island of Hispaniola (but little else besides deep mutual
antipathy); and to Canada. I personally might choose to make it a
protectorate of an independent Republic of Quebec.

But, truthfully, all these suggestions are fanciful. There’s no chance
that the international community will declare the first-ever black
republic an official failure.

So, Haiti will nominally keep on keeping on—under the purview of the
U.N. and the U.S. taxpayer.

Haiti’s Malthusian poverty is the default state of mankind. Its
rapidly growing population is kept fed by the more than 10,000 foreign
charitable organizations active in the country.

Commentators have been competing to come up with ever more complex
explanations for “Why Haiti Is So Poor”. The single most important
cause is probably that Haiti attained its independence as early as
1805, culminating in a massacre of the remaining whites, before the
end of the slave trade. Despite theoretically being a French-speaking,
Roman Catholic, Western Hemisphere country, Haiti remains culturally
rooted in Africa. Wikipedia’s article on the History of Haiti notes
[January 17, 2010]:

“At all times, a majority of slaves in the colony were African-born,
as the brutal conditions of slavery prevented the population from
experiencing growth through natural increase. African culture thus
remained strong among slaves to the end of French rule, in particular
the folk-religion of Vodou, which commingled Catholic liturgy and
ritual with the beliefs and practices of Guinea, Congo, and Dahomey.”

Indeed, Haiti isn’t even particularly poor for a country with an
African cultu 22 sub-Saharan African countries have lower per
capita GDPs than Haiti’s $1,300, with Zimbabwe last at $200.

Most Haitians speak Haitian creole rather than French. Although the
creole features many French words, the grammar is more African, so
most Haitians are cut off from French literary culture.

Similarly, voodoo, with its black magic curses, makes up much of the
substance of Haitian religion, with West African deities, such as the
stylish and ominous loa “Baron Samedi”, demanding placation.

Thus Duvalier, a brilliant black doctor and sociologist turned
maniacal dictator, used his study of voodoo and his resemblance to the
popular depiction of Baron Samedi to convince the black masses that he
was a powerful sorcerer and take power from Haiti’s mulatto elite.

Unfortunately, Duvalier began to believe his own propaganda about the
power of voodoo. For instance, as Time Magazine reported in 1963, when
Duvalier had a falling out with Clement Barbot, the head of his
notorious goon squad, the Tonton Macoutes:

“But in voodoo-entranced Haiti the whisper went around that no one
could kill Barbot. He had the strange power, they said, to change
himself into a black dog and escape at will. In Port-au-Prince,
Duvalier's policemen went around shooting black dogs on
sight.” [Haiti: The Living Dead, July 26, 1963]

Much of the educated classes emigrated, leaving Haiti brain-drained.

Papa Doc died in 1971, making his somewhat less sinister son, Baby
Doc, the 19-year-old President-for-Life. This playboy squandered his
popularity with the black peasants in 1980 by marrying a daughter of
the mulatto elite, a stylish Lena Horne-lookalike with expensive
tastes. By 1986, Baby Doc was in exile in France.

Since then, American Presidents have spasmodically hired and fired
Haitian dictators. At the request of the Congressional Black Caucus,
Bill Clinton invaded Haiti in 1994 to restore the black radical
defrocked priest Jean-Baptiste Aristide, who had been overthrown in
1991 by mulatto military leaders. The Bush Administration apparently
more or less kidnapped Aristide in 2004 and sent him into exile in
South Africa. Bush turned nominal power over to a shadowy band of
“rebels”. UN peacekeepers were brought in to occupy the country and
keep the gangs from running quite so amok. Now the Obama
Administration appears to be the main de facto power in Haiti.

A new book edited by Jared Diamond, Natural Experiments of History,
focuses heavily on the comparison of Haiti and the neighboring
Dominican Republic that Diamond began in his last bestseller,
Collapse. Diamond, the author of the Pulitzer-winning Guns, Germs, and
Steel, is both smart and about 90 percent honest. That makes him the
one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind that is contemporary
intellectual discourse.

Diamond’s January 15th article in the leftwing U.K. Guardian, A
Divided Island: The forces working against Haiti, summarizes his
thinking on how Haiti’s quantity and quality of population have hurt
Haiti compared to the D.R., which has a moderate per capita GDP of
$8,200. It’s dry, but more frank than most of what you’ve heard:

“But Haiti's area is only slightly more than half of that of the
Dominican Republic so that Haiti, with a larger population and smaller
area, has double its neighbour's population density.”

(Economist Tyler Cowen blogged yesterday that until a decade ago, when
kidnappings became routine, he hadn’t been afraid of crime when he
visited Haiti because the population density was so extraordinary:
“There's just not enough room for anyone to mug you, at least if you
exercise due caution. Nor, for that matter, were there very many
beggars, since usually there was no one to beg from.”)

Diamond goes on:

“The combination of that higher population density and lower rainfall
was the main factor behind the more rapid deforestation and loss of
soil fertility on the Haitian side.”

In Collapse, Diamond praised the D.R.’s old megalomaniacal dictator
Rafael Trujillo (1891-1961) for stealing much of the forestland and
exploiting it cautiously in a rational manner. Dominican kleptocracy
helped avoid the tragedy of the commons that contributed to the
ecological ruin of Haiti, where the common folk chop down all trees
for cooking fuel.

Diamond goes on to point out,—cautiously!—another advantage the D.R.
has over Haiti: it’s whiter.

“A second social and political factor is that the Dominican Republic –
with its Spanish-speaking population of predominantly European
ancestry – was both more receptive and more *attractive to European
immigrants and investors than was Haiti with its Creole-speaking
population composed overwhelmingly of black former slaves.”

The relative whiteness of Dominicans isn’t widely understood in the
U.S. because we are mostly familiar with the largely black Dominican
baseball players, such as Sammy Sosa. But Dominicans generally tend to
look more like the American-born Dominican mulatto slugger Alex
Rodriguez than the black slugger Manny Ramirez. The current president
of the D.R. looks like the fat guy in the Laurel and Hardy movies
crossed with Muhammad Ali, and he’s the only one of the last five
presidents with any clear black ancestry.

Trujillo had an explicit policy of whitening the Dominican Republic’s
population through immigration from Europe—and expelling Haitian
illegal immigrants. He was the only national leader actively to
recruit Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany during the 1930s.

Diamond continues:

“Hence European immigration and investment were negligible and
restricted by the constitution in Haiti after 1804 but eventually
became important in the Dominican Republic. Those Dominican immigrants
included many middle-class businesspeople and skilled professionals
who contributed to the country's development.”

To summarize Diamond, Haiti has more people per fertile acre of
farmland and less human capital per capita.

That human capital can be purely cultural. Thus another former sugar-
growing black Caribbean country, Barbados, independent since 1966
although Queen Elizabeth II remains the official head of state, has a
per capita GDP of $18,900, an average life expectancy of 74 years.

As Lawrence Harrison, head of the Cultural Change Institute at Tufts
University, told me in 1999:

“The culture of slavery, as well as zero-sum traditional African
culture, powerfully sustained by a religion (Voodoo) without an
ethical code, are palpable to any foreigner who has lived [in Haiti],
as I did for two years. Barbados, which I have visited several times,
remained a British colony until 1966, by which time it had
substantially absorbed British values, attitudes, and institutions.
The Barbadians are sometimes referred to as Black Englishmen or Afro-
Saxons.”

(Still, that raises the question of why Barbados has a lower crime
rate and a higher literacy rate than some other ex-British colonies
like Jamaica. The late Robert MacNeil’s PBS series The Story Of
English suggested that selection played a role: “[Barbados] was the
first main port of call for the slave ships. It is said that unruly
slaves from the least domesticated tribes were progressively shipped
up the ‘claw’ of the West Indies until they reached Jamaica.” [p.
220])

Barbadian blacks were cut off from fresh infusions of African culture
when the British Parliament voted the end of the slave trade in 1807.
Sugar plantation owners could no longer afford to work their slaves to
death and replace them with new slaves from Africa. The British
government carried out an orderly emancipation, with compensation for
slaveowners, in the 1830s.

Although 90 percent of Barbados’ population is said to be “Afro-
Bajan”, Barbados has a fairly large mixed race middle class who
typically call themselves “white” (for example, the Barbadian pop
singer Rihanna, who is considered black in America, recently
complained “I Was Bullied At School For Being White”.) and espouse
traditional white standards.

Ironically, more than few of these West Indians who call themselves
white in the Islands have gone into the civil rights business as black
leaders in the U.S. For example, President Obama’s “African-American”
Attorney General Eric Holder called America “a nation of cowards” last
year for not talking enough about race, is a light-skinned Bajan-
American.

Economist Thomas Malthus’s insights are severely out of fashion in the
Industrial Age. But what else is Haiti going to do besides subsistence
farming?

There has been some growth in manufacturing jobs in Haiti. But the
Chinese industrial juggernaut makes that unpromising.

Call centers for France? Perhaps, but Parisian French isn’t all that
widely spoken. (In contrast, Barbados has begun to compete with India
in the offshore call center business.)

Tourism? Back in the day, Bill and Hillary Clinton honeymooned there.
But almost nobody goes to Haiti anymore. The poverty is just too
depressing for tourists. As Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. famously
pointed out in President Obama’s favorite sermon, The Audacity to
Hope:

"It is this world, a world where cruise ships throw away more food in
a day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see in a year, where white
folks' greed runs a world in need, apartheid in one hemisphere, apathy
in another hemisphere ...”

Sadly, therefore, much of the logic of Malthus applies to Haiti. Only
outside charity and emigration keep it from starvation.

One obvious step that could help Haiti in the long run has,
unfortunately, dropped almost into the realm of the unmentionable
these days: increased funding of population control efforts. (Full
disclosu I’m a Catholic).

Third World birth control used to be a fashionable progressive cause.
When I was a kid, Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, made
about 20 guest appearances on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. The
Rockefellers and George H.W. Bush were strong advocates of the need
for Third Worlders to reduce their fertility.

But today, it’s hard to find much on Google about Haiti and
contraceptives. According to a 2001 World Health Organization report:
“Among sexually active women, 13% used a modern method of
contraception and 4% relied on traditional methods”.

And the other 83 percent?

It appears that Haitian women now wisely want to reduce the number of
children they have—Haiti’s total fertility rate is said to be down to
3.8 babies per lifetime, the same as Saudi Arabia’s. But Haitians need
to bring their fertility down to European below-replacement rates for
a couple of generations to allow the land to recover—and the people,
hopefully, improve their “human capital”.

Let’s make long lasting Depo Provera contraceptive injections free to
Haitian women.

Anyone got any better ideas?"


http://www.vdare.com/sailer/100117_haiti.htm
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