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Editorial:
Witnesses to the Brutality of Empire
In Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, Madame Defarge strikes a memorable pose as a historical witness. She and other revolutionary women constantly weave an ever-growing tapestry that details all the players in the historical struggle for power and the exact roles they played. Madame Despite Dickens’ choice to demonize Defarge at the end of the story, her coldly passionate dedication to preserving the historical record is one of the book’s most striking aspects, and one that feels especially relevant in today’s political world.
For anyone who was watching the US engagements in Iraq and Haiti over the past months, the drama to record in our own mental tapestries is clear: US actions in both countries show a love of force over democracy, despite rhetorical claims to the service of peace and the rule of law. These claims have now lost their last tattered shreds of believability.
Many Advocate readers will no doubt shake their heads at this last sentence, feeling that this believability evaporated with the fall of Allende in Chile, if not long before. And those readers will be right, in part. However, certain lessons have to learned again and again. The willingness of the many in the state and press to portray US involvement in other countries as pro-Democracy show that this is a lesson that still needs to be learned.
What happened in Haiti? Just as in Iraq, violations of international law of the grossest sort have been cloaked with a sort of wrestling-mat logic that argues “Aristide had to go because he was a bad man.” This argument, which happens to be much less valid in Haiti than Iraq to begin with, attempts to boil all international politics down to a wholly ahistorical contest of personalities. Educated thinkers such as students at the Graduate Center should reject such arguments from the very outset and insist that the relevant history and politics be discussed. Remember, the US has successfully has successfully blocked all foreign aid to Haiti since the year 2000, ostensibly over seven contested congress seats. The pattern of Haiti-Cuba-Iraq would seem to suggest that US imposes trade barriers whenever it seeks regime change. Also, continuous reports have documented mysterious arms and soldiers smuggled across the Dominican border.
At this point, Haiti’s first and only elected President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, has left his post, despite repeated statements that he would rather die than do so. He was subsequently flown in US military custody to an undisclosed location in the Central African Republic. Just a few hours later, President Bush said that these soldiers had escorted Aristide out of the country at his own request. But US Congresswoman Maxine Waters spoke with Aristide on the phone the next morning, March 1, and reported that he claims to have been “kidnapped” against his will. According to Waters, Aristide was forcibly accosted by American diplomats from the US embassy in Port-Au-Prince, who were backed by armed soldiers and told the President that he must leave to preserve his life.
US Media will hijack the idea of a popular revolution in this case. They will try to make what was in fact an organized coup, funded and supported by the United States as well as France, seem to be a people’s uprising. The headlines already speak of the crowds of cheering Haitians who are so happy to be delivered from democracy back into the hands of military rule. Earlier reports spoke of massive “opposition” demonstrations in Gonaive; meanwhile, New York Haitians were calling WBAI and asking why pro-Aristide demonstrations many times larger were not reported on at all.
If we are to believe this is a popular insurrection, then what should we make of the fact that one of its leaders, Andre Apaid, is a US citizen? What about the fact that many of its other leaders, most notioriously Louis Jodel Chamblain and Jean Tatoune, are butchers convicted of the murder of many of their own people? And those who believe that the US merely turned a blind eye to a native uprising should take note that the US has been deeply interested in Haiti for at least a century, including the occupation of 1915-34.
What happened in Haiti this week is an atrocity against democracy, and American involvement in it is reprehensable. At the same time as the US invades oil-rich nations claiming to bring democracy, it stands by and whistles as a gang of murderous thugs topple an elected leader, then send in the troops after the dirty work is done. The only positive thing to come from this is that it gave John Kerry a chance to publicly denounce the Bush administration’s callous disregard for democracy. The Advocate urges its readers to send letters to all levels of elected representation. But even more than that, we ask our intellectual readership to weave into their mental records the roles played by each of the actors in this struggle for power, and to articulate that record whenever the US claims to be a defender of democracy abroad.
For more information, see the following websites:http://www.zmag.org
http://www.antiwar.com
http://www.house.gov/waters/pr.htm
http://www.haiti-progres.com/