[Peace-discuss] A neoliberal account of Haiti?

[C. G. Estabrook]

'...[Jared] Diamond’s ... book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005), was a fitting companion to the previous one. If Guns, Germs, and Steel played to the racial liberalism of upper-class professionals, Collapse flattered their environmental concerns. It purported to illuminate the dark side of the story told in the earlier book. If the haves acquired wealth through geographic accident, Diamond claimed, the have-nots lost it by squandering their own natural resources. He told tales of ecocide by indigenous people of the North American Southwest and of Easter Island, of postemancipation Haiti and of modern China. Here again the publicity machine clicked in, producing uncritical review ... Civilizational collapse made a good story, especially if it could be shown to be the fault of the native populations themselves.

'In Collapse, the ignorance of history and the neglect of power relations were even more apparent than in Guns, Germs, and Steel—so apparent that it provoked a volume of critical essays by anthropologists and historians called Questioning Collapse (2009). The book made it clear that Diamond was out of his depth. A leading historian of China, Kenneth Pomeranz, posed the question “What Chinese collapse?” with respect to the fifteenth-century Chinese and answered that there was none. Other critics took Diamond to task for ignoring the role of Western conquest and its aftermath in bringing about the catastrophes he described.

'The case of Haiti provided the most egregious example. After a successful slave rebellion formally freed the Haitians from their French masters, the French still managed to bully the Haitians into paying them the huge indemnity for “lost property”—that is, freed slaves—in exchange for diplomatic relations. By 1900, 80 percent of Haiti’s annual budget was consumed by these payments, which did not end until 1947. By then, Haiti had paid France about $21 billion in contemporary US dollars. In explaining Haiti’s social collapse, Diamond ignored 120 years of illegitimate debt payments as well as the long history of US interference in Haitian affairs, including America’s decades-long support of dictatorship under the Duvalier regime.

'Diamond’s blindness to imperial power was of a piece with the assumption embedded in his subtitle: Failed societies (a reified abstraction) have somehow chosen to fail. In the wake of the earthquake that devastated Haiti in 2010, the New York Times columnist David Brooks revealed his attachment to the same point of view: Haitians’ attachment to voodoo and other primitive superstitions, Brooks believed, had immeasurably exacerbated their suffering in the wake of the disaster. Once again, Diamond’s work revealed its resonance with neoliberal conventional wisdom. As the anthropologist Frederick K. Errington wrote, Diamond’s two books constituted a “‘one-two punch.’ The haves prosper because of happenstance beyond their control, while the have-nots are responsible for their own demise.” One could hardly imagine a more comforting account of global inequalities...'

http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/019_04/10583
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace-discuss/attachments/20130110/1f9e3f77/attachment.html>