[Peace-discuss] Another racist liberal on Haiti

[C. G. Estabrook]

	Voodoo, Development and the Culture of Haiti
	Marty Peretz
	February 8, 2010

There are many factors which have determined and over-determined the
miserable history of Haiti, to which almost everybody had become
accustomed. The recent plague, however, provoked a moment of pity ...
and also of self-pity, which manifested itself by Haitian anger
against the aid providers who did not act fast enough or did not bring
the right equipment or did not bring sufficient aid-workers. Or
imported clothing when they should have brought water or food. This is
the understandable petulance of people who usually expect nothing and
then suddenly become the cause of the moment, the recipients of a
largesse that will not last.

The very issues of development and underdevelopment are heavily laden
with ideology. Not just prescriptive of ideologies of left and right.
But utilitarian models, supposedly neutral. Like a United Nations
administration of help and reconstruction, as if anything sponsored by
the U.N. would be anything but corrupt, inefficient, confused, and
racialist.

I myself proposed what would in effect be a mandate for Haiti overseen
by the United States. The model could be the American occupation and
reform of Japan. But, of course, Japan was already a very advanced
country. So the analogy is at best flawed. To tell the truth, whether
Japan or not, Haiti would be lucky to be a protectorate (against
nature and against its own large-scale criminal elements) of America.
No one in the U.S. is eager for such an encounter. It would be costly.
It would induce resentment among the hemisphere's "progressives" like
the buffoon Hugo Chavez, who is leading his oil-rich country into
poverty and has already led it into despotism and worse. And the
American left would denounce an American mandate for Haiti as
imperialism, regardless of the processes or the outcomes. And what
about the American imperialists, the Republicans? They would think it
nothing less than insane.

And insane it may seem.

The Haitian narrative is interlaced with the spooky charms of voodoo:
fright, inference, faith, mystery. These are not traits that are
conducive to sound plans for economic development or rational
political discourse. Lawrence Harrison, who once ran USAID in Haiti
and now is professor at the Fletcher School of Diplomacy at Tufts, has
written a short but challenging essay on the role of voodoo in Haiti's
past and the dreadful mortgage it has carried over into Haiti's
future. It is not a topic politicians and others who are charged with
the good of Haiti are eager to touch.

But Harrison makes the point that voodoo is not a racialist
explanation. But it is a cultural explanation. Cultural explanations
may not explain all. But they always explain much.

<http://www.tnr.com/blog/the-spine/voodoo-development-and-the-culture-haiti>


-- 
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.