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Today's
Stories
March 17, 2004
Peter Linebaugh
Bush: Blanc Blanc
March 16, 2004
Lenni Brenner
James
Madison: the Anti-Clerical Father of the Bill of Rights
Scott Boehm
Madrid
Diary: How to Change World Order in Four Days
Alexander Lynch
From Franco to Aznar: the History
Behind the Spanish Elections
Sam Hamod and Alfredo
Reyes
The Truth About the Spanish Elections: Aznar Was Going Down Anyway
Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg
You Wouldn't Do a Dog This Way:
Executing David Clayton Hill
Mike Whitney
The Case for a Nuclear Iran
Robert Fisk
The Bloody Price of the "War
on Terror"
Bill Christison
The
Aftershocks from Madrid
CounterPunch Photo Wire
The Passion of St. Teresa
Website of the Day
Join the War on Art!
March 15, 2004
Harry Browne
Terror Nothing New to Europe
Mike Whitney
Justice
Not Murder: the Tragic Symmetry of Terrorism
Lidice Valenzuela
Haiti: a Coup without Consultation
Greg Moses
Lessons
from the Texas Primaries: Looking for a Coalition with Legs
Mickey Z.
Depraved Indifference: C-Sections, Patriarchy & Women's Health
Asaf Shtull-Trauring
AWOL
in New York: From Refusenik to Organizer
CounterPunch Wire
Gen. Gramajo Executed by Bees!
March 12 / 14, 2004
Gabriel Kolko
The
Coming Elections and the Future of American Global Power
Saul Landau
Oh, Jesus...It's the Movie!
William Blum
Neo-Con(tradictions)
William S. Lind
Why They Throw Rocks
Rahul Mahajan
The Meaning of Madrid: War on "Terrorism" Makes Us
All Less Safe
Neve Gordon
Demographic Wars
Kurt Nimmo
Kerry and the Progressive Interventionists
Mickey Z.
The "New" UN Blames the Poor
Mike Whitney
War Games: the American Media Leads the Charge
Helen Scott and Ashley
Smith
Aristide's Fall: What Led to the Coup?
Justin E.H. Smith
Loïc Wacquant: Against a Sociodicy
of the American Prison
Brandy Baker
Him Again? Al Gore Needs to Move On
Robin Philpot
Nobody Can Call It a "Plane Crash" Now: the Report
on the Assassination of Rwandan President Habyarimana
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Meat Monopoly Takes a Rare Pounding
Dave Zirin
She Turned Her Back on the War: an Interview with Toni Smith
Daniel Wolff
The Lord's Pier
March 11, 2004
Ron Jacobs
Bedtime
for Democracy
Bill Kauffman
Hey,
Ralph! Why Not Another Party of the People?
James Hollander
Slaughter
in Madrid: Consolidating an Ally?
Norman Solomon
They
Shoot Journalists, Don't They?
Patrick Gavin
The Salvation of Dan Quayle: Family Values Return
Becky Burgwin
You're
Messing with the Wrong Generation
John Sugg
The FBI is on My Trail
March 10, 2004
Hammond Guthrie
Read
This Book!: "Who the Hell is Stew Albert?"
Chris Floyd
Operation Enduring Sweatshop: Another
Bush Brings Hell to Haiti
Elizabeth Corrie
Remembering the Death of Rachel Corrie
Mike Whitney
US Press Torpedoes Aristide
M. Junaid Alam
An Anti-Civilizational War?
Bob Feldman
The Occupation of Haiti: Recalling 1915-1934
John L. Hess
An Overload of Crises
Gary Leupp
On Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi and the Uses of al-Qaeda "Links"
March 9, 2004
Greg Weiher
The
Zarqawi Gambit, Part 2
Ben Tripp
Word Up! Let's Have a Conversation
Tom Barry
Neo-Cons Target Syria
Sharon Smith
The Hypocrites in the Catholic Church
Robert Fisk
The Same Old Iraq
Doug Giebel
The Bush Strategy: Laughing All the Way
Ralph Nader
Pension Rights, the Trail of Broken Promises
Daniel Estulin
In Memory of Ricardo Ortega: a Great Journalist, Killed in Haiti
Dave Lindorff
Martha Stewart's Cloudy Day
Saul Landau
Will the Filthy Rich Dump Bush?
Website of the Day
Imperial Armies in the Garden
March 8, 2004
Amy Goodman
An
Interview with Aristide
Eric Ruder
An Interview
with Robert Fatton on the Coup in Haiti
Robert Jensen
The Presidential Library Terrorist
Connection
Mike Whitney
Expel the US from the Security Council
Jason Leopold
How Cheney Helped Cover Up Pakistan's
Nuclear Proliferation
Mazin Qumsiyeh
Why is Apartheid Touted as a Solution?
Kevin Alexander Gray
The Legacy of Strom Thurmond
Derek Seidman
Radical Continuity: an Interview with Paul Buhle
Steve Perry
Kerry Fiddles While He Could be Burning Bush
Website of the Day
Patriot
Act Game
March 6 / 7, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Understanding the World with
Paul Sweezy
Robert Pollin
Remembering Paul Sweezy
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Politics of Timber Theft
Tom Reeves
Bush's Mass Deportations: 63,000 and Counting
Charles Lewis
Who Mugged Howard Dean in Iowa:
Kerry, Torricelli and a Mysterious Frontgroup
Tom Jackson
My Breakfast with Sen. Judd Gregg
Kurt Nimmo
Is Venezuela Next?
Alan Cisco
A Report from Caracas
Jack Random
Haitian Democracy be Damned
Colin Piquette
Oh, Canada: the Coup Coalition
Lee Sustar
Labor's State of Emergency
William D. Hartung
Iraq and the Costs of War
David Sally
Rebuilding
Amérique
Mark Scaramella
When God Mooned Moses: Test Your Bible Knowledge
Mickey Z.
What We Can Learn from Ashcroft's Gallbladder
Ron Jacobs
Politics and Baseball
Dave Zirin
The Longest Jump: the Blackballing of Phil Shinnick
Poets' Basement
John Holt and Larry Kearney
Website of the Weekend
National Day of Action for Rachel Corrie
March 5, 2004
Chris Floyd
Uncle
Sugar: How the WMD Scam Put Money in Bush Family Pockets
Ron Jacobs
Chaos
Reigns: Haiti and Iraq
Lisa Viscidi
Guatemalan
Refugees: a Difficult Return
Yves Engler
Canada and the Coup in Haiti
Mike Legro
Those Bush Ads: Some Dead Bodies Are Worth More Than Others
Javier Armas
A Night of Inspiration: Oakland Benefit for Grocery Workers Strike
Bennett Hoffman
"Who Cares About Haiti, Anyway?"
Bill Christison
Faltering Neo-Cons Still Dangerous
Website of the Day
Haiti Support Group
March 4, 2004
Diane Christian
Sex
and Ideals
Sen. Robert Byrd
Stop the Stonewalling, Mr. President: Fairy Tales, Bush and the
9/11 Commission
Norman Solomon
Assuming the Right to Intervene: The US Press and Haiti
Jack Brown
A Fragrant Saga of Mexico's Greens
Hal Cranmer
The
John Kerry Experience
David Lindorff
Greenspan's Pension
Sam Smith
The Election is Over, We Lost
Christopher Brauchli
Goin'
to the Chapel: The Gay and the Dead
Brian D. Barry
The "Perfect" World of E-Voting: A Computer Scientist
Reports from the Polling Booth
Richard Oxman
Arsonists for Haiti?
Peter Phillips
Haitian
Fantasies: Mainstream Media Fails Itself, Again
Tariq Ali
Notes on Anti-Semitism, Zionism and
Palestine
Website of the Day
What If Boeing Ads Told the Truth?
March 3, 2004
Heather Williams / Karl
Laraque
Marines
Retake Haiti
Jack McCarthy
Guy's
Our Guy: "I am the Chief. My Hero is Pinochet."
Robert Sandels
The
Purloined Label: The Struggle Over the Havana Club Trademark
Juliana Fredman / James Davis
Israeli Organized Crime
JG
The Yuppie Silence on Haiti
Emilio Sardi
The
Colombia/US Free Trade Deal: It's About More Than Trade
Alan Farago
Swimming in Sewage
Mike Whitney
"Blood
Will Have Blood": 143 Murdered in Liberated Iraq
CounterPunch Wire
Nader's Legislative Record in the 1960s
Steve Perry
Kerry
Advisory: Remember Lena Guerrero
Nelson George/ Marcus Miller
Miles Davis & Hip Hop: a Conversation
Website of the Day
$10,000 Is Yours for the Taking: The USS Liberty Challenge
March 2, 2004
William Blum
If Kerry's
the Answer, What's the Question?
Conn Hallinan
Haiti:
the Dangerous Muddle
JoAnn Wypijewski
The Bravo
H-Bomb Test: One WMD They Couldn't Hide
Mike Whitney
Regime Change in Haiti: the Bush Dominos Keep Falling
Ra Ravishankar
Afghanistan, the Liberation That Isn't: an Interview with Mariam
from RAWA
Dan Bacher
Merle Haggard & the Politics of Salmon: "Clearcutting
is Rape"
Greg Moses
Oscar White
Brandy Baker
Mel Gibson's Minstrelsy Show
Little Tucker Carlson
What I Did on My Vacation
Robert Fisk
All This
Talk of Civil War, Now This
Merle Haggard
Kern River
Website of the Day
Rebel Edit
March 1, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Morris
Thanks War Criminal in Front of Billions
Richard Oxman
Oscar's
Obit: Thanking Bob McNamara
Elaine Cassel
Writing and Reading as "Terrorism"
Mickey Z
Thomas Friedman's Education
Mike Whitney
George Will and Anti-Semitism: a Cul-de-Sac of Prejudice
Heather Williams
Haiti
as Target Practice: How the US Press Missed the Story
Cathy Crosson
Chanson d'amour haïtienne
Website of the Day
God Hates Shrimp
February 28 / 29, 2004
Stephen Green
Serving
Two Flags: Neo-Cons, Israel and the Bush Team
Gary Leupp
Another Senseless Bush Battle: Defining and Protecting Marriage
William A. Cook
Israel:
America's Albatross
Ron Jacobs
Kucinich: Good Fight; Wrong Battlefield
Ben Tripp
A Nosegay of Posies: Queer Weddings at Last!
Leilla Matsui
Dances with Crucifixes
Mike Whitney
Dismantle
the Military Goliath
Yoel Marcus
Down and Out in the Hague
Uri Avnery
The Dancing Bear
Linda S. Heard
Britons and Americans Condemned to a Hobson's Choice
Al Krebs
Unmasking a Secret American Empire: Land, Water & Cotton
Stan Cox
Life (Pat. Pend.): Genetic Commandeering
JG
The Haiti Boomerang: "After The Looting & Pillaging,
Your Hunger Will Remain"
Rick Giombetti
Censorship at the Seattle P-I on Forced Psychiatry
Keith Hoeller
The Bankruptcy of Mental Health Insurance Parity
Dave Zirin
Colorado Football: Buffalo Swill
NADERAMA
Alan Maass
Nader and the Politics of Lesser
Evils
Michael Donnelly
Regime
Rotation: Anybody But Bush...Again?
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Exeunt Serenaders; Enter Nader
Doug Giebel
So Nader's Running? Get Over It
Bruce Jackson
An Open Letter to Naderites
CounterPunch Wire
Stalinists for Kerry! and Other Roars from the Crowd
Poets' Basement
Davies, Scarr, Kearney & Albert
February 27, 2004
Thomas C. Mountain
A
White Jesus During Black History Month?
Laura Carlsen
Americans
Abroad: Bush is Persona Non Grata
John B. Anderson
Nader's Campaign Brings Back Memories: Creating an Open Electoral
Process
Jason Leopold
Spying
on Kofi Annan
John Chuckman
Nader,
Risk and Hope
Standard Schaefer
An
Interview with Michael Hudson on Putin's Russia
Ray McGovern
Punished
for Honest Intelligence
Saul Landau
The
Haiti Redux
Website of the Day
Bush: Why I'm Running for Re-election
February 26, 2004
Brandy Baker
Is Nader
on to Something?
Jacques Kinau
AEI
to Colombia: "Can't Give You Anything But Guns, Baby"
Norman Solomon
Bugging Kofi Annan: UN Spying
and the Evasions of US Journalism
Greg Weiher
A Purloined Letter: the Zarqawi Gambit
Walt Brasch
Janet Jackson, Bush & No. 542: There are No Halftime Shows
in War
Shadi Hamid
The Music World Explodes in Anger
Norman Madarasz
As Canadian as Corruption
Chris Floyd
Bullets and Ballots
Virginia Tilly
The
Deeper Meaning of the Wall
Amy Goodman / Jeremy
Scahill
Haiti's
Lawyer Says US is Arming Haiti's Anti-Aristide Paramilitaries
Website of the Day
Clear Channel Sucks
February 25, 2004
Dr. Susan Block
Saddam's
Sex Therapist and the Rape of Free Speech
Bruce Anderson
Treacherous Bastards: The Greens and the Dems and Nader
Ron Jacobs
Our Power is on the Streets and
in Our Hearts
Mike Whitney
Bush
and Gay America: the Politics of Duplicity
Sam Husseini
Jesus in 100 Words
John L. Hess
Kick Off or Flub?
Sam Hamod
Bush's Newest Red Herring
Cockburn / St. Clair
Winning
with Nader
Website of the Day
VotePact
February 24, 2004
Ralph Nader
Why
I'm Running for President
Greg Moses
Rally
the Mob! Bush, Gay Marriage and the Constitution
Douglas O'Hara
The
Merchants of Fear: Smearing Nader
Phillip Cryan
Frozen in Time: The WSJ's Paranoid
Lens on Latin America
David Lindorff
John Kerry's China Connection
Jason Leopold
Cheney's Shame: Halliburton Faces New Charges
Gary Younge
Haiti: Throttled by History
Kromm, Masri & Purohit
Why No Democracy in Iraq?
Steve Perry
Tangled Up in Red and Blue: Beware the Electoral College
February 23, 2004
Neve Gordon
Israel's Apartheid Wall on Trial
at The Hague
Kurt Nimmo
Richard Perle, Executioner: "Heads Should Roll"
Jonathan Franklin
US Soldier Seeks Refugee Status in Canada
Al Krebs
The Liberal "Intelligentsia" v. Nader
Josh Frank
Nader's Nadir? Not a Chance
Bruce Jackson
Nader, Another View: "He's as Evil as Bush"
Gary Leupp
A Misguided
Attack, The Passion, Rabbi Lerner and the Gospels
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
St.
Patrick's Day Edition
March 17, 2004
Spirits of Haiti
Bush:
Blanc Blanc
By PETER LINEBAUGH
Following the opening of the Mark Lombardi exhibit
of conspiratorial drawings at the Yerba Buena Center for the
Arts in San Francisco we repaired to North Beach for a grand
dinner, our motley crew led by the inimitable Iain Boal, the
geographer activist, convenor of Retort gatherings, and people's
art critic who had just explained the drawings to us: the penciled
constellations, or networks of high and low finance and how they
were connected to the parcel of rogues of international power
which were on view at the gallery. We raised our glasses to commemorate
the two hundredth anniversary of the black republic.
All over the world people with the least
historical sense were doing the same, because it was the disgraceful
week following the coup d'état of democratic Haiti and
the kidnapping of Jean Bertrand Aristide by the USA and its nefarious
creatures among the private security forces, the CIA agents,
the DEA thugs, the hitmen of the tontons macoute, or the Haitian
Fraph: all those demons who used to only inhabit the gothic imagination
or the voodoo nights of Zora Neale Hurston. Now, alas, they were
summoned by Bush blanc blanc against the former liberation theologian,
friend of the poor, and advocate of jubilee.
The Haitian constitution of 200 years
ago eliminated distinctions of color: all Haitians were to be
"black." All who embraced the struggle against Napoleon
and the slave masters were henceforth, if they chose, black.
Of special honor were the Poles and the Germans who defended
the country in its mighty struggle against the empires of Europe.
Other whites were naturalized as "among the children of
Haiti." In  the Haitian vernacular today,
however, there are the petits blancs (ordinary white folk) and
then the blancs blancs (the big ones). This we learn from the
excellent account by Laurent Dubois, Avengers
of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Harvard
University Press, 2004).
An English soldier of twenty-five years,
Marcus Rainsford, was captain in the Third West India Regiment,
when he went to Haiti in 1799. He provided the first account
in English of the first successful slave revolt in all of history.
"The rise of the Haytian empire is an event which may powerfully
affect the condition of the human race," he wrote, expressing
a sentiment which surely qualifies the petit blanc as "black."
And now two centuries later, surely the human race can affect
the condition of Haiti!
C.L.R. James taught us to honor the Haitian
struggle in its victories against the Spanish emperor (a dolt),
the English king George III (a mad man), the French emperor Napoleon
(a short fellow). The first-generation Congo American troops
defeated them all. In 1938 James recollected this struggle as
Italy invaded Ethiopia. James wrote to prepare the African Service
Bureau for the liberation struggles led by Kenyatta, Nkrumah.
He wrote the script for the anti-fascist drama of Toussaint played
by Paul Robeson, later to be destroyed by the anti-communism
of the U.S.A. So, victorious against three empires. James did
not, however, dwell on the fourth. (Did he mention it?)
1803 was the year of Hegel's Phenomenology,
as well as the year of Beethoven's great piano sonatas. At breakfast
Hegel read The Wealth of Nations with the news from Haiti. Thus,
the placid periods of Adam Smith's rhetoric, entrancing to the
pompous and avaricious alike, were mixed with the atrocity stories
designed to hammer bloody nails into the coffin of the European
abolitionists separating them from the slaves themselves. For
Hegel classical liberalism and Napoleonic terror went together
as naturally as sugar in the morning coffee. Hegel thus had to
know that the struggle for freedom was a world history, and it
was from below. Rainsford wrote that the cause of the Haitian
revolution was "the spirit of liberty." This most carnal
of revolutions drew the most 'spiritual' response from poets
as well as philosophers. Take Wordsworth for example.
"Toussaint, the most unhappy Man
of Men!"
begins Wordsworth's sonnet published
in January 1803. It then continues with an image central to the
era of dispossession from the commons,
"Whether the rural Milk-maid by
her Cow Sing in thy hearing,"
The image in this context calls for several
comments. First, Toussaint had a way with animals. He was a horse
whisperer, Rainsford tells us, and the very cows trusted him.
Second, what was to revolutionize European music was its urban
composers began actually to listen to the singing all around
them. Third, it had been this image which had described the whole
essence of the French Revolution in the famous passage of The
Prelude when Wordsworth, shortly after having marched with the
soldiers from Marseilles singing their call to arms, came across
the young woman with a cow on the verge of the road, her common
of herbage, "'Tis against that which we are fighting,"
his comrade explained, leaving it deeply ambivalent whether it
was poverty or commoning that he opposed. In the latter he would
ally with Babeuf, the founder of communism, in the former his
ally would be the enclosing developer.
No such ambivalence distorts the classic
Haitian novel, Masters of the Dew by Jacques Roumain, translated
by Langston Hughes. It too takes up the issue of cooperation
and commoning. "Formerly the water had flowed freely there
in the sun, its rippling and its light mingling like the sort
laughter of cutting knives In those days when they had all lived
in harmony, united as the fingers of the hand, they had assembled
all the neighborhood in collective coumbites for the harvest
or the clearing." "Today I work your field, tomorrow
you work mine. Cooperation is the friendship of the poor."
Marcus Rainsford found the same spirit two hundred years ago--the
coumbite and the fertility of the forest. He found that "the
productive system of the earth seemed to be founded on original
principles. Every individual employed a portion of his time in
labor, and received an allotted part of the produce for his reward,
while all took the field, from a sense of duty to themselves.
A perfect combination appeared in their conduct, and every action
came directly from the heart."
Roumain explained that "this water
problem is life or death for us." "When she comes out
of the stream, cool bracelets rippled from her legs. She places
the gourds in a wicker basket that she places upon her head."
Thus the Haitian revolt stirred deep capacities of the "human
race" including the cooperative nature of labor, the commonages
permitted to the poor in the midst of neo-liberal privatization,
the possibility of shared water resources, and far different
gender division of labor. These were some of the issues that
I believe lay at the trans-Atlantic base of struggle during the
Age of Revolution. It is easy to see that they failed. And, frankly,
Toussaint had little faith in them; his project was to rebuild
the sugar plantation and the export sector. On the other hand,
in economics as in war, nothing is inevitable. Back to Toussaint.
" or thou liest now Pillowed in
some deep dungeon's earless den,"
Betrayed by Napoleon, Toussaint lay shivering
in a Jura dungeon in the Alps where he expired in April 1803.
Boom! we hear the awesome, painful bass C# chord which darkly
announces the beginning of Beethoven's piano sonata, opus 27,
the "Moonlight" sonata. The man who freed music is
going deaf while the man who freed the slaves freezes to death--"deep
dungeon's earless den" Indeed! Wordsworth continues.
"O miserable Chieftain! Where and
when Wilt thou find patience! Yet die not; do thou Wear rather
in thy bonds a cheerful brow: Though fallen Thyself, never to
rise again, Live, and take comfort"
Marcus Rainsford found himself under
a sentence of death. Having departed Le Cap, he was apprehended
further along the coast--his passport was not in order and he
was masquerading as an American. He was freed by a letter from
Toussaint with whom he had played billiards a few times in Le
Cap and where he also observed Toussaint refusing to sit at the
head of the table. Rainsford found "a real system of equality."
Rainsford was made welcome at a laborer's cottage, thirteen children,
and he noticed a copy of one of Volney's volumes lying on the
table. Rainsford was impressed by revolutionary Haiti, not only
for equality; but "crimes were by no means frequent, and
those rather attributable to accident than vice" and "health
became prevalent throughout the country with its attendant, cheerfulness,
that exhilarator of labor."
" Thou hast left behind Powers that
will work for thee: air, earth, and skies;"
These "powers" are woefully
attenuated, ethereal, and disembodied. Now of course they have
become commodities, no longer common to mankind, but subject
to privatization, poisoning, and Ronald Coase-like calculations
for 'rational choice' or that 'voodoo economics' with which George
Bush senior taunted Ronald Reagan. Actually, the earth was pretty
much gone in England, at least as an agrarian proposition to
feed the nation by means of common lands. The Parliament of landlords
had seen to that with the Enclosure Acts.
"There's not a breathing of the
common wind That will forget thee; thou hast great allies; Thy
friends are exultations, agonies, And love, and Man's unconquerable
mind."
What was the breathing of the common
wind? Who were his allies according, not to romantic poetry,
but to history and political science? For he had very few in
England. In Ireland none, at least not officially, as Ireland
was expunged from the political page of history by the Act of
Union the year earlier, creating instead the United Kingdom.
Here are some of those "exultations,
agonies." Haiti hosted the liberator, Simón Bolívar,
who abolished slavery in independent Latin America. Haiti inspired
Gabriel's 1800 Richmond, Virginia, revolt. In Rio de Janeiro
in 1805 the soldiers honored Toussaint. It inspired Aponte's
revolt in Cuba in 1812. The Haitians inspired Denmark Vesey's
conspiracy in South Carolina in 1822. In the abolitionist movement
on the ground, that is, among the plantation workers, such a
breathing may be felt in the sighing, in the heaving. It was
inhaled in Barbadoes in 1817, Demerara in 1823, Jamaica in 1833
that immediately prepared the way for the abolition of slavery
in the British dominions.
Nat Turner and William Lloyd Garrison
took a deep breath of this common wind. It blew with hurricane
force during the war of liberation against slavery in the U.S.A.
where the 13th, the 14th, and the 15th amendments to the constitution
provide a confirmation of victory only to exhale in a flatulent
burst of betrayed aspiration, because one of these amendments
became the excuse for prison labor while another became the charter
of irresponsibility for U.S. corporations.
Aghast at the murderous lies fumbling
from the White House and State Department, we tried to find some
truth in the reflection that could be provided by Lombardi's
art. Lombardi pencils in the circles of power. The paranoid instinct
of American political science at its best is ever on the look-out
for the smoking gun or the tell-tale spots on the laundered money
or the lipstick on the collar, or the pulleys and levers behind
the smoke and mirrors. Conspiracies, James Kellman writes, are
the stuff of history. The vévés of the unseen Haitian
powers--Damballah, Agwé, Erzulie, &c. - are drawn
on the ground to consecrate a particular area where with music,
libations, etc., these powers or loas may be summoned.
Granted we can compare Aristide to Toussaint,
who then do we compare Bush to? It is a case of plus ça
change, plus c'est la même chose. We do not have far to
go. It is not that mysterious. The name was Thomas Jefferson.
The point concerns the continuity of the American empire and
Jefferson's founding fathering of it. In addition to Bush blanc
blanc we add Jefferson blanc blanc. Two hundred years ago in
April Dessalines proclaimed that "these implacable enemies
of the rights of man have been punished for their crimes."
The people of Haiti were "mutilated victims." It is
a phrase of special importance to the republic to the north whose
constitution had notoriously counted slaves as three-fifths of
a human being for the purpose of assessing the number congressional
representatives. Thus, a population of the virtually mutilated
determined the character of Congress. It was this Congress which
selected Thomas Jefferson third president of the USA after a
tie in the electoral college. Thus the title of Gary Wills' book
"Negro President."
"Yes, we have paid these true cannibals
back crime for crime, war for war, outrage for outrage. I have
saved my country. I have avenged America," said Dessalines.
Pause for a moment to consider his meaning of the geographic
expression "America." It does not include the U.S.A.
They chose the name 'Haiti' because it was the name given the
land by the indigenous Taino people who were destroyed by the
dogs of Christoper Columbus. The memory of Dessalines was deep.
In 1802 he called his forces the "Army of the Incas"
then a year later the "Indigenous Army." His knowledge
of America was profound.
The president, Thomas Jefferson, excluded
the black republic, using it indeed to expand the sway of King
Cotton, via the Louisiana Purchase. To Dessalines the meaning
of America is anti-slavery, to Jefferson it was pro-slavery;
to Dessalines Haiti is an independent country, to Jefferson the
U.S.A. an expansionist one. Dessalines swore "Never again
shall a colonist, or a European, set his foot upon this territory
with the title of master or proprietor;" while Jefferson
asked the British to help to "confine this disease to its
island."
A Haitian admirer of Jefferson drafted
the Haitian declaration of independence but Dessalines flatly
rejected it. One of his assistants remarked, "In order to
draw up our act of independence, we need the skin of a white
to serve as parchment, his skull as an inkwell, his blood for
ink, and a bayonet for a pen."
Julius Scott, the Afro-American and Caribbean
historian at the University of Michigan, tells, an amazing detail,
prefiguring it all. Jefferson would not send an ambassador, instead
he dispatched Tobias Lear as commercial attaché to the
new Haitian republic. He came to present his credentials on 4
July 1801, the 25th anniversary of Declaration of Independence.
He was dismayed to learn the people in the streets of Port-au-Prince
however were celebrating Haiti's new anti-slavery constitution.
The credentials did not include a personal letter of congratulations
from the new president of the U.S.A. Lear wrote that Toussaint
"immediately returned my Commission without opening it,
expressing his disappointment and disgust in strong terms, saying
that his Colour was the cause of his being neglected, and not
thought worthy of the Usual attentions."
Meanwhile, Jefferson was receiving an
ambassador from Napoleon Bonaparte who intended to send his brother-in-law,
Leclerc, to San Domingue in order to restore slavery. Jefferson
assured him the French fleet would receive clear passage from
American vessels. "Rid us of these gilded negroes,"
Napoleon wrote Leclerc, "and we will have nothing more to
wish for." The United States refused diplomatic recognition
to the black republic until 1862. Poor Tobias Lear committed
suicide, but over "other issues" Professor Scott tells
me.
The only book Jefferson published in
his life-time was his study by stratigraphy of the mysterious
burial mounds, or tumuli, that used to dot the American landscape.
Disturbing the dead in this way was part and parcel of taking
the land. It was Vico who found that burial customs were human.
Unquieting the graves, thus, was a precondition of genocide.
Perhaps Gary Wills next book on Jefferson will be a study of
Jefferson and the zombies.
George Washington Williams was the first
African American Ohio state legislator. He also edited a short-lived
journal called The Commoner which may remind us of the unfinished
business started two hundred years ago. Freedom from slavery
was part of the struggle; access to water, to land, to a common
life was the other. Against them imperialism and its handmaiden
terrorism arose. George Washington Williams was not able to write
the biography of Toussaint that he planned. He did, however,
coin the expression "crimes against humanity" and it
is these which the blancs blancs commit and which are described
by the arts of Lombardi.
Peter Linebaugh
teaches history at the University of Toledo. He is the author
of two of CounterPunch's favorite books, The
London Hanged and (with Marcus Rediker) The
Many-Headed Hydra: the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic.
He can be reached at: plineba@yahoo.com
FURTHER READING
Susan Buck-Morss, "Hegel and Haiti,"
Critical Inquiry (summer 2000)
Laurent Dubois, Avengers
of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Harvard
University Press, 2004)
C.L.R. James, The
Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution,
second edition (1963)
James Kellman, Some Recent Attacks: Essays
Cultural & Political (AK Press, 1992)
Marcus Rainsford, An Historical Account
of the Black Empire of Hayti (1805)
Gary Wills, "Negro
President:" Jefferson and the Slave Power (Houghton
Mifflin, 2003)
Weekend
Edition Features for March 12 / 14, 2004
Gabriel Kolko
The
Coming Elections and the Future of American Global Power
Saul Landau
Oh, Jesus...It's the Movie!
William Blum
Neo-Con(tradictions)
William S. Lind
Why They Throw Rocks
Rahul Mahajan
The Meaning of Madrid: War on "Terrorism" Makes Us
All Less Safe
Neve Gordon
Demographic Wars
Kurt Nimmo
Kerry and the Progressive Interventionists
Mickey Z.
The "New" UN Blames the Poor
Mike Whitney
War Games: the American Media Leads the Charge
Helen Scott and Ashley
Smith
Aristide's Fall: What Led to the Coup?
Justin E.H. Smith
Loïc Wacquant: Against a Sociodicy
of the American Prison
Brandy Baker
Him Again? Al Gore Needs to Move On
Robin Philpot
Nobody Can Call It a "Plane Crash" Now: the Report
on the Assassination of Rwandan President Habyarimana
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Meat Monopoly Takes a Rare Pounding
Dave Zirin
She Turned Her Back on the War: an Interview with Toni Smith
Daniel Wolff
The Lord's Pier
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