Or,

Historians Say The Verdict Is In On Haiti: “It Was Partly Our Fault!” (and that’s mighty white of them…)


Back in December of 2005, Joe Bageant, that rare example of a man who transcends the narrow confines of the culture in which he was raised (Eastern Appalachia, Cracker-Land, USA) wrote an essay called The Simulacran Republic in which he put forth the notion that our concept of ourselves as citizens of a democratic society is really an illusion. Now, we all know that politics—especially at election time—is a surreal landscape of meaningless sound-bytes, polarizingly provocative "issues" and empty promises, but Joe (whose essays are an exercise in the opposite: stark descriptions of what’s real and what dreams should be) takes our quiet cynicism and extrapolates a world as processed as the cheese-whiz in our collective refrigerator.

Intrigued by Joe’s premise, I began to wonder how the simulacran was constructed. I mean, how deep do its roots grow: what about history? Can the facts of the past be altered to fit the present illusion? Wouldn’t anyone notice? What about those Guardians of the Past, the historians who, like some priest class of a forgotten empire, preserve and protect the bones of our ancestors?

Since there’s a lot of attention being paid to one of our illustrious forefathers in particular—Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, arguably the best known statement on the guiding principles of American democracy, you know, equality & freedom & justice for all men—I thought I might poke around in this founding father’s bones a little myself, just to make sure the priests were still doing their job.

Turns out I was in luck. One, no two, of those priestly historians have recently released "official" verdicts on old Tom’s actions—not just the pretty words for which he’s so revered today. In each case they even went so far as to connect what happened 200 years ago with what’s going on in the world today.

Mr. Bageant’s theory of a Simulacran Republic would be put to the test, the test of time itself.

In addition to all those wonderful words about egalitarianism that Jefferson wrote in that most famous Declaration which have withstood the ravages of time by being carved into the stone arches of our courthouses, memorable mention was also made of “the pursuit of happiness.” How amazing then that both of our historians chose to discuss the connection between America and Haiti—the richest and the poorest, the most happy and the most miserable…at least according to today’s most widely accepted standard, the dollar (how many you have, that is).

But what do the actions of Thomas Jefferson have to do with Haitian unhappiness today? Let’s start with the harsher of the two realities I found existing side by side. In America's Historic Debt to Haiti which first appeared on February 10, 2006 at consortiumnews.com, Robert Parry writes:

As Haiti intrudes again on the U.S. consciousness with a new round of troubled elections, Americans see a violent, backward, poverty-stricken country run by descendants of African slaves. There are feelings of condescension mixed with a touch of racism.

But what few Americans know is that they owe this Caribbean nation a profound historical debt. Indeed, perhaps no nation has done more for the United States than Haiti and been treated as badly in return.

If not for Haiti – which in the 1700s rivaled the American colonies as the most valuable European possession in the Western Hemisphere – the course of U.S. history would have been very different. It is possible that the United States might never have expanded much beyond the Appalachian Mountains.

What altered this early American history was the Haitian slave uprising against France near the end of the 18th Century. This second great anti-colonial revolution in the New World both alarmed and ultimately benefited the leaders of the newly born United States.

At the time, Haiti – then known as St. Domingue and covering the western third of the island of Hispaniola – ranked as perhaps the richest colony in the world. Its carefully cultivated plantations produced nearly one-half the world’s coffee and sugar, and its profits helped build many of the grandest cities of France.

But the human price was unspeakably high. The French had devised a fiendishly cruel slave system that imported enslaved Africans for work in the fields with accounting procedures for their amortization. They were literally worked to death.

The American colonists may have rebelled against Great Britain over issues such as representation in Parliament and arbitrary actions by King George III. But the Haitians took up arms against a brutal system of slavery. One French method for executing troublesome slaves was to insert explosives into their rectums and detonate the bomb.

So, when revolution swept France in 1789, the Jacobins’ cry of “liberty, equality and fraternity” resonated with special force in St. Domingue. African slaves demanded that the concepts of freedom be applied universally, but the plantation system continued, leading to violent slave uprisings.

Hundreds of white plantation owners were slain as the rebels overran the colony. A self-educated slave named Toussaint L’Ouverture emerged as the revolution’s leader, demonstrating skills on the battlefield and in the complexities of politics.
Despite the brutality on both sides, the rebels – known as the “Black Jacobins” – gained the sympathy of the American Federalist Party and particularly Alexander Hamilton, a native of the Caribbean himself. Hamilton, the first U.S. Treasury Secretary, helped L’Ouverture draft a constitution for the new nation.

Conspiracies

But events in Paris and Washington conspired to undo the promise of Haiti’s new freedom…

Parry goes on to tell us that Jefferson, who “feared that the example of African slaves fighting for their liberties might spread northward,” made a secret deal with Napolean to help crush the slave rebellion. Jefferson furnished US Navy ships to bring a French army to Haiti in return for Napolean’s help in preventing any example of a successful slave uprising from reaching the ears of America’s slaves (including his own).

When you make a deal with the Devil, however (or any deal done in secret), your “partners” have a way of making other plans that you might not like so much. Turns out that Napolean had another phase to his plan:

Once a French army had subdued L’Ouverture and his slave army, Napoleon intended to move his forces to the North American mainland, basing a new French empire in New Orleans and settling the vast territory west of the Mississippi River.

In May 1801, Jefferson picked up the first inklings of Napoleon’s other agenda. Alarmed at the prospect of a major European power controlling New Orleans and thus the mouth of the strategic Mississippi River, Jefferson backpedaled on his commitment to Napoleon, retreating to a posture of neutrality.
Still – terrified at the prospect of a successful republic organized by freed African slaves – Jefferson took no action to block Napoleon’s thrust into the New World.

In 1802, a French expeditionary force achieved initial success against the slave army in St. Domingue, driving L’Ouverture’s forces back into the mountains. But, as they retreated, the ex-slaves torched the cities and the plantations, destroying the colony’s once-thriving economic infrastructure.

L’Ouverture, hoping to bring the war to an end, accepted Napoleon’s promise of a negotiated settlement that would ban future slavery in the country. As part of the agreement, L’Ouverture turned himself in.

Napoleon, however, broke his word. Jealous of L’Ouverture, who was regarded by some admirers as a general with skills rivaling Napoleon’s, the French dictator had L’Ouverture shipped in chains back to Europe where he died in prison.



Foiled Plans

Infuriated by the betrayal, L’Ouverture’s young generals resumed the war with a vengeance. In the months that followed, the French army – already decimated by disease – was overwhelmed by a fierce enemy fighting in familiar terrain and determined not to be put back into slavery.

Napoleon sent a second French army, but it too was destroyed. Though the famed general had conquered much of Europe, he lost 24,000 men, including some of his best troops, in St. Domingue before abandoning his campaign…

Parry concludes with an outline of the modern day consequences of Jefferson’s covert actions in Haiti:

By 1803, a frustrated Napoleon – denied his foothold in the
New World – agreed to sell New Orleans and the Louisiana territories to Jefferson. Ironically, the Louisiana Purchase, which opened the heart of the present United States to American settlement, had been made possible despite
Jefferson’s misguided collaboration with Napoleon.

“By their long and bitter struggle for independence, St. Domingue’s blacks were instrumental in allowing the United States to more than double the size of its territory,” wrote
Stanford University professor John Chester Miller in his book, The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery.

But, Miller observed, “the decisive contribution made by the black freedom fighters … went almost unnoticed by the
Jeffersonian administration.”

The loss of L’Ouverture’s leadership dealt another blow to Haiti’s prospects, according to Jefferson scholar Paul Finkelman of Virginia Polytechnic Institute.

“Had Toussaint lived, it’s very likely that he would have remained in power long enough to put the nation on a
firm footing, to establish an order of succession,” Finkelman told me in an interview. “The entire subsequent history of Haiti might have been different.”

Jefferson’s Blemish

For some scholars, Jefferson’s vengeful policy toward Haiti – like his personal ownership of slaves – represented an ugly blemish on his legacy as a historic advocate of freedom.

Even in his final years, Jefferson remained obsessed with Haiti and its link to the issue of American slavery.

In the 1820s, the former President proposed a scheme for taking away the children born to black slaves in the United States and shipping them to Haiti. In that way, Jefferson posited that both slavery and America’s black population would be "phased out."

Eventually, Haiti would be all black and the United States white.

Jefferson’s deportation scheme never was taken very seriously and American slavery would continue for another four decades until it was ended by the Civil War. The official hostility of the United States toward Haiti extended almost as long, ending in 1862 when President Abraham Lincoln finally granted diplomatic recognition.

By then, however, Haiti’s destructive patterns of political violence and economic chaos had been long established – continuing up to the present time. Personal and political connections between Haiti’s light-skinned elite and power centers of Washington also have lasted through today.

Recent Republican administrations have been particularly hostile to the popular will of the impoverished Haitian masses. When leftist priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide was twice elected by overwhelming margins, he was ousted both times – first during the presidency of George H.W. Bush and again under
President George W. Bush.

Washington’s conventional wisdom on Haiti holds that the country is a hopeless basket case that would best be governed by business-oriented technocrats who would take their marching orders from the United States.

However, the Haitian people have other ideas, much as
they did two centuries ago. Their continued support for the twice-ousted Aristide reflects a recognition that the Big Powers often don’t have the interests of Third World countries at heart.

Also, unlike most Americans who have no idea about their historic debt to Haiti, many Haitians know this history quite well. The bitter memories of Jefferson and Napoleon still feed the distrust that Haitians of all classes feel toward the outside world.

Amazing stuff. Haitians feeling distrust toward America? “The decisive contribution made by the black freedom fighters” going “almost unnoticed’ by an American administration?

Really?

I was listening to Colin Powell a few weeks ago explaining to a very trusting NPR reporter how it was that George Bush’s Freedom Plan works—that it’s not really a political or moral contradiction that our allies in spreading democracy through defeating terrorism do not themselves practice Jeffersonian democracy (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, etc)—because those countries “aren’t ready for it and have the right to choose their own form of government.”

I think Powell may have misspoken here: it seems to me that this is Jeffersonian democracy at its finest. Maybe not the variety that our schools teach, but the real thing. You know, secret deals with anti-democratic forces, crushing indigenous attempts at self determination…what’s changed?

Of course, not everyone sees it this way. According to the Official Story (Joe Bageant’s Simulacran Reality), Thomas Jefferson was the physical embodiment of the Liberal Democrat. Our second historian/high priest of historical circumcision, Thomas Fleming, very much belongs to that school of thought and his account of the very same events 200 years ago in Haiti is documented proof that Joe is, sadly, exactly right about where we live.

In Why We Are Partly Responsible for the Mess that is Haiti, which appeared in George Mason University’s popular History News Network (History News Network Because the Past is the Present, and the Future too!) blog on Februaury 26, 2004, Fleming has a very different set of facts.

Fleming doesn’t just spin those facts—he’s got his eraser out and his PhotoShop FactWare. When you read Fleming’s version of events, you can see the air-brushing, the pruning shears and the all the other tools of the Truth redactors. Despite the appearance of the admission of American guilt in the title of Fleming’s Haitian historical face-lift, he spends the entire article white-washing the truth which, like a stubborn spot, refuses to be entirely erased, if only the reader retains some minimal skepticism. There’s even a clue in the opening line, a road sign telling us that we’re not dealing with the facts so much as the artist’s memory of them:

As Haiti reels toward civil war, my mind is gripped by an historical memory.

The first phantasm we meet is Fleming’s attempt to make Jefferson’s actions open & honest, when in fact these were secret negotiations:

A smiling President Thomas Jefferson, barely ensconced in the White House, invited Louis Andre Pichon, the French charge d'affaires, for a visit and cheerfully informed him that if the French wanted to regain the island of St. Domingue, the Americans were ready and eager to cooperate.

Which Americans? Congress? The man on the street…why doesn’t Fleming come right out and say those interests in whose interests it lay to protect the institution of slavery? Further, regain from what? To whom had the French lost control of this richest colony in the world? The only explanation we get is this ‘background’ information:

…sugar, coffee and indigo plantations made it France's most valuable overseas possession until the 1789 revolution triggered a civil war that wrecked the island's economy.

Civil war? It was a slave rebellion—that rarest and hardest won struggle for freedom, where men living as beasts, in chains and subject to whippings, beatings and summary execution at the whim of their “owners” rise up, against all odds and throw off the most vicious yoke in mankind’s cruel inventory. No, the only concern here is that this violence “wrecked the island's economy.”

And what was that economy? Where is the explanation that Haiti’s wealth was the result of a French system that was cruel even by the abomniable standards of American slavery, that the kidnapped Africans had a lifespan of 2 to 3 years and that this “amortization” was part of this fiendish system? What about the French method for executing troublesome slaves that Robert Parry told us about? (That the French would insert explosives into their rectums and detonate the bomb.)

That violence doesn’t enter into Fleming’s “historical memory” for the same reason that it didn’t enter the calculus of Jefferson and the other slaveholders: slaves (which is to say Africans, although there is a much longer list…), weren’t really human. That’s why it’s always an “economic argument,” that’s why Jefferson’s secret, or, in a democratic society, illegal dealings aren’t considered with any sort of moral compass. We’re told that we have to remember that these men were the result of their times, that we can’t judge them by our moral standards, etc, etc.

Two problems with such excuses. First, how is then that we say that Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers were such brilliant, visionary geniuses that they were able to transcended the narrowness of their times by conceiving of such a perfect political union, such wonderful institutions that they endure to this day, and yet, when they see former slaves who’ve learned their language & culture (a feat which none of the superior white men seemed capable of), they (and we) are supposed to believe that our illustrious Founding Fathers couldn’t recognize them as human?

This brings us to the second problem: when old Egalitarian Tom was fucking Sally Hemmings, was he engaging in bestiality? Since this was a very widespread behavior among slave “owners,” are we to assume that all these fine, leading lights of their day were having sex with animals, in their own and the general public’s eyes, or was there something else going on there?

Luckily, Fleming gives us a clue when he tells us Jefferson’s philosophical reasons for this dirty, dirty deal:

The president wanted to show his undying enthusiasm for the French Revolution, in spite of the way it had turned into an orgy of mob violence and then morphed into a military dictatorship under Napoleon Bonaparte.

Now that is one hell of an acrobatic feat with words! Jefferson is going to show his support for libertie, equalitie & fraternitie by helping a military dictatorship to crush a revolt by a people seeking… libertie, equalitie & fraternitie?! Of course it makes sense. So, Roosevelt could have shown his support for the democratic institutions of the Weimar Republic by giving aid to the Third Reich it “morphed into”?

Brilliant.

Makes perfect sense.

I’m thinking that Fleming probably wishes he hadn’t written such an asinine piece of double-speak, but I’m glad that he did because it illustrates the whole point of this incredibly stupid, openly racist con job (he goes on to denigrate the heroism & intelligence and the humanity of Toussaint L’Ouverture and those who fought with him, saying that it was the mosquitoes that killed Napolean’s best troops, not the Haitian economic units which had no right to give American economic units “dangerous dreams of glory.”

No, it’s not really about what happened then, it’s about the illusion we’re gorging ourselves on right now. This is precisely how we can continue to do what Martin Luther King scolded & warned us about in his truly far-sighted Beyond Vietnam speech.
Thomas Fleming will be forgotten, or possibly remembered as the boot-licking apologist for slavery & empire who tried to “morph” wrong into right, but Martin Luther King’s words are already haunting us. In Beyond Vietnam MLK warned us that if we continued to support “the wrong side” in every conflict around the globe—whenever any nation tries to win its independence, to determine its own course, and worst of all, to make the lives of its people better through equality and freedom, Mr. Jefferson’s magic memes—then we would suffer a fate worse than death. We would experience a spiritual death.

As long as we continue to keep our eyes so tightly shut, to accept our share at the winner’s table while our brothers overseas(and in our backyards) unnecessarily starve, we are dying, inside. As long as we continue to accept compromises which are morally indefensible, we are snuffing out the light within us.

This isn’t just about white folks, either: the Illusion is served by all races, creeds and “constituents:” Obama (our best hope in the current pretend election[?!]) kissing mainstream ass by praising Ronald Reagan and the “direction he took the country in”!!...Colin Powell for all that he has done to help the empire...(God go easy on that tattered soul!...) but, obviously, the biggest losers are those who appear now to be the biggest winners.

So maybe on this Martin Luther King day we can all drop out of all pretense for a while, put our masks down and listen to some unprocessed Truth.

Part II

Maybe it's an impossible quest to try to imagine how things might have been if certain events had not taken place; even attempting to re-create the web of events which did occur assumes a sort of after-the-fact omniscience--can we truly say that we know all the threads which tie together life right now, as we're experiencing it? Obviously not. We no more "understand" history than we do the trajectories, accidents & synchronicities of our own lives.

That said, however, the deeper, tectonic shifts of history can be discerned, if only we can focus on what happened (and could have happened), but in order to do this for ourselves, we have to throw off the blanket that the caretakers of history have woven over its still living body.

Prof. Fleming is hardly alone, nor even especially to blame for the role he plays in "managing" history. It's an extremely large undertaking that involves not only historians and reporters and speechwriters and other such professional "propagandists" but also everyone of us, in that we all translate our experience into the narrative of our existence.

We humans make sense of existence by making stories. We have convenient, if inaccurate labels for these stories (fable, myth, fairy tale, fantasy, science fiction, speculative fiction, contemporary fiction...self-help, how-to, biography, non-fiction, history, etc), but the very categories of narrative we've created are themselves flimsy things which only serve to convince us that the world as it is really is as it is.

That, for example, the world (and, most subtly and importantly Nature itself) is a dangerous place where survival is something we have to work, indeed fight for and that as a result, the problems we face--war, poverty, disease, etc--are somehow inevitable, even inherent in our life on earth. Resources are scarce and "the poor will always be with us"...right?

As long as we accept this foundation of our worldview, we will be subject to the manipulation that I lay at the door of the illusion makers. If one were to merely consider the following two points, however, the seams in the fabric of "history" suddenly become visible:

• we have the means to give every person on earth a comfortable, even meaningful existence

and

• someone or some group, ideology, organizational framework and/or hierarchical system profits from both the "inevitable evils"--war, poverty, disease, etc--and from our belief in their inevitability
  

So, armed with the willingness to consider these tectonic historical shifts in the light of these new and very much alternative assumptions, we can look at these pivotal points in a very different light.

Thomas Jefferson gave voice and eloquence to an ancient dream: that all men might enjoy the fruits of the earth and of their labors, free from the dominion of the overseer, the boss, the warlord/duke/king/repressive regime. Further, that this dream is nothing more than their birthright, by virtue of being human.

And yet, do we imagine that equality and freedom rang in the new nation that so loudly proclaimed this dream? Is it really possible that liberty existed side by side with extreme poverty, prejudice, indentured servitude and slavery-for these were the economic and political realities for the great mass of "Americans" in Jefferson's day.

(More, in what's become my daily webblog, as soon as I can sit here again. This whole thing has been prematurely and inadvertantly launched--many thanks for your interest, patience and contributions.

IC
January 24)