Haiti’s President Is Assassinated
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
This is peculiar. Might just be too early for the dust to have settled, but both tagesschau.de [1] and Le Monde [2] report both Spanish and English for to be spoken by the attackers.
Edit: The Guardian [3] also quotes only Spanish, but later speaks of an English-language announcement on a megaphone. Guess we'll have to wait for a bit until things converge to The Truth™ here.
[1]: https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/amerika/haiti-praesident-m...
[2]: https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2021/07/07/hait...
[3]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/07/haiti-presiden...
Spanish is spoken throughout Central America, including across the land border on the divided island in the wealthier Dominican Republic, and English is used by travelers and tourists. With a comparable economic disparity and ongoing immigration dispute, it would be analogous to an attack in Mexico by a group of unidentified individuals, some of them speaking English - the implication seems to be that the group is not native to Haiti.
(Note that I did some fact checking, but I have no special or particularly recent knowledge here; this is speculation based on historical demographics - I haven't paid attention to Caribbean politics much at all in the past decade).
Here's a bit of context from what I recall.
* The Dominican Republic is the second poorest nation in the northern hemisphere. Haiti is the poorest. (so yes, technically wealthier, but not exactly swimming in the dough).
* From what my sister describes, the people of the DR HATE the Haitians.
* The DR itself is filled to the brim with corruption.
I have never been to Haiti but I will tell you what. The DR is one of the few Caribbean islands I travelled to where I saw kids on the side of the road begging. I was take a back given the number of huge resort there.
I also met someone whose wife was promised to him but her family because he was in a better financial state than they were. He said this kind of thing happens there.
And it is usually used that way: as colorful summary.
Pure and wild speculation - but Spanish and English is what one would expect from graduates of the school of Americas/Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) or CIA/DEA training programs. Although I suppose at this point former graduates are running their own training under various cartels etc.
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas...
I'm just curious because all four outlets I checked marked the "Spanish" or "English and Spanish" as direct quotes so I'm not sure if they got different sources or what happened.
The speaker definitely has a Southern American accent. The caption under the video makes it sound like the speaker was part of the security(?) team responding to the intrusion/assassination which is perhaps why there is confusion about the assailants speaking Spanish/English.
Are you referring to the southern United States or the South America continent? I live in the southern Mississippi and it doesn't really sound much like how people typically talk here, so I suspect you might be referring to the continent. But also, the accents can vary widely across the southern United States so I'm not really sure.
I think it could be Dominican Spanish accent, but I could be wrong. I suppose it would make sense to hire mercenaries from Dominican Republic to something like this.
Could the megaphone be a pre-recorded recording designed to delay identification of the perpetrators?
Could there be some kind of DEA SWAT team or something that was stationed there that may have been called?
> Could the megaphone be a pre-recorded recording designed to delay identification of the perpetrators?
Could be. One possibility is that is there were Americans involved, but they were private mercenaries (e.g. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/aramroston/mercenaries-...). It sounds like there are also similar private Latin American mercenaries (e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/26/world/middleeast/emirates...). The Miami Herald article says the Haitian government is saying these were mercenaries, not DEA agents. It also sounds like this president was highly unpopular and arguably illegitimate, so he likely had a lot of enemies. It's not inconceivable that some those may have decided to hire a mercenary group for an assassination. Maybe they hired a mixed group, which would explain the use of Spanish and English.
Maybe this unlucky guy in the floor was one and just nobody care enough about them to mention them?.
Someone that follows Haitian politics could tell us the power struggle inside the country.
I have never seen a semi-presidential federation, and my intuition has become that in a semi-presidential system, the president is holds the responsibilities of a prime minister/president of a federal government, whereas the prime minister is holds the responsibilities normally given to the premier/governor of state - as if there's only a single state and a single legislature for the state and the federation. Of course, as with federations, the exact boundaries will depend on the country concerned.
Whether Haiti works that way, I cannot say.
I grew up in the USA and this is exactly how those terms were defined for us in school.
The head of state is the leader of the country. They deal with other heads of states, and typically are in control of the military.
The head of government is the top bureaucrat. They do governmenty bureaucratty stuff like meet with their cabinet and manage the executive branch.
This isn't true, at least in Western states. E.g in the Netherlands and Germany the king and the President respectively are head of state, but neither of them controls the military, which is done by respectively the Prime Minister and the Chancellor.
It's really hard to make a universal definition for heads of state and government, since they fulfill different roles in forms of government. However, generally, the head of state is a more ceremonial role while the head of government actually governs. But there are exceptions.
The oddity to me is the position of the Speaker of the House, which is a weird amalgam of the role of the Speaker of Parliament and also acting as a de facto Prime Minister although there really isn't an explicit equivalent role in the US.
Usually such a role is a literal figurehead, or a de facto figurehead who de jure has power but culturally is not supposed to exercise them, (such as the aforementioned Queen, or the Irish President). Attempts by such a de facto figurehead to use powers they officially have have led to controversy, such as the 1975 incident with the Australian Governor General (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Australian_constitutional...)
Both of these fall to me under "refusing to exercise powers" rather than exercising powers though.
When the Queen dissolves parliament she's just going through the motions, it's a formality. If she had refused, say, Theresa May's request for a general election in 2017, saying that there was no need as the Government had a clear majority and Brexit needed to be the focus (and she did this by either hiding down the countryside, not answering her phone or by shooting down the idea preemptively) that would be a huge deal. That would be her exercising her power.
All of these former British territories are 1 terrorist attack and 1 ambitious politician away from a political crisis.
Roll the dice 10 times, each time one of these monarchs could make a play for power.
Although I'm not even sure how to handle the dissolution of the monarchy without executing everyone. Taking their property only means a foreign state would prop them up.
Not quite true, at least not in limited constitutional monarchies, like the UK and Canada (I'm Canadian): The Queen is the Head of State for both the UK and Canada (and for many other countries) and her role is almost exclusively ceremonial (without getting into the role of the Governor General, who represents Her Majesty when she is out of the country).
In both the UK and Canada, the head of government is the Prime Minister, that is, the leader of the party that controls the House of Parliament. In both countries, they do far more than "bureaucratty stuff" since, among other things, they choose and chair the cabinet, set the overall government agenda, etc. The military reports to cabinet through the appropriate minister(s).
(Mitchell Sharp once wrote a book on Canadian government in which he rightly asserted that ours is government-by-cabinet, more than government by parliament....)
In both countries, the PM is effectively head of the executive branch, but definitely not head of state, as well as sitting atop the legislative branch.
* The speaker of parliament is responsible for nominating and dismissing the prime minister (who appoints the prime minister? the parliament as a whole appoint the prime minister? does the king get to, but is compelled to appoint whoever the speaker nominates? does wikipedia mean "appoint" when it says "nominate"?)
* The king is not part of parliament, and bills do not need royal assent to become law.
* The king is not part of an executive council like the UK privy council. Formerly there was a Council of State.
However the king does have royal immunity from criminal prosecution. If the Swedish King killed you, they would probably have a crisis over whether the absolute immunity the king possesses is in fact not absolute.
So the king is clearly a special person in Sweden, but it does seem they are almost powerless according to the constitution, unlike say the British queen.
Prime minister is whoever gets the majority of the parliament behind them in a vote. In practice in Sweden’s case the leader of the biggest party in the coalition that makes the majority.
(Due to how the voting system works in Sweden more than 2 parties exist in the parliament and thus coalitions of parties make up the government as no party manages to get 50% if the seats)
Parliament votes on whoever the speaker nominates. If that person is tolerated (<50% of parliament votes against the nominee) they become prime minister.
If the vote fails the speaker gets to nominate someone else. After 4 failed such votes, an extra election is called.
In the US, head of state and head of gov are the same (the President).
In Russia, the head of state is Putin. He's not officially head of gov, but c'mon, we all know who controls the show there.
In Canada, the Head of State is Queen Elizabeth II. But for all practical purposes, Justin Trudeau holds both rows. It's not like the Queen is handling Canada's foreign policy. She technically has the power to dissolve Canada's parliament, but it would be hard to imagine her exercising this power. When foreign leaders visit Canada, they aren't going to see the Queen, whereas they might if they visit the UK.
The person who is president get 2x the vote in case a vote is tied (abstention is permitted). Also the high honer of being the first to shake hands with foreign presidents when they arrive.
The Federal Council is both head of state and head of government.
Seems to be a pretty good system, the idea is to actually share this between different parties at all times. It always seems strange to me when in countries like the US there is the constant massive power shift back and forth every couple years.
Does Canada not have a Governor General, like other countries where Elizabeth II is the absentee monarch? The Governor General performs most of the functions of the head of state and technically has the power to appoint or dismiss the Prime Minister, but much like the Queen the role is mostly ceremonial.
The Governor General is mostly ceremonial, but is mostly a case of Chesterton's Fence. The Crown is an important safety value for when things are abnormal. For example, the Governor General of Canada in 2008 essentially chose who would be prime minister (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008%E2%80%932009_Canadian_par...). The issue that arose was that, during a hung parliament, the opposition announced that they would vote non-confidence in the government at the next opportunity and intended to form a coalition. The prime minister at the time instead went to the Governor General to request prorogation, ending the parliamentary session.
This was a crisis that required judgement by the governor general. The prime minister clearly no longer held the confidence of the House, but not officially. On the other hand, the governor general is constitutionally required to follow the advice of the prime minister. She chose to follow the prime minister and prorogue Parliament for better or for worse. I'm not a legal scholar and I think the Governor General got it right, but having an independent individual make these decisions is a feature, not a bug.
I don't have one in mind, I don't think there's a likely one - there's an argument that it brings a sort of long-term stability that makes an actual application of its powers unnecessary, like a nuclear deterrent - I just think if there was some sort of unrest or rising dictatorial power in a state with ER as monarch 'we' would pay (even) more attention than otherwise?
The Governor-General of Australia has forcibly dissolved Australia's parliament before back in 1975, causing a constitutional crisis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Australian_constitutional...
But yes, the current monarch strongly adheres to conventions of not exercising her devolved(?) powers.
Though they would typically be hosted by the Queen's representative in Canada, the Governor General (as of yesterday, R.H. Mary Simon). The Queen would never directly exercise her head-of-state powers in Canada. However, the GG does have to make some controversial decisions about choosing governments from time to time.
The exception here is that the US President is both head of state and head of government, so Churchill meeting Roosevelt is actually a meeting between two heads of government.
No head of state is in control of the military. Head of state is a ceremonial role. They may be the ceremonial "head" of the military, as in "her majesty's ship".
In the U.S. the office of the President unifies the roles of head of state, head of government, and Commander in Chief of the military. This is not merely a ceremonial role.
As the saying goes, the exception proves the rule false.
In France the President, the head of state, commands the military, and not the Prime Minister, the head of government.
In France (source: I'm French) the President is typically extremely strong despite it being nominally a semi-presidential system, in some respects even stronger than his US counterpart. Also note that this depends a lot on practical details, like political customs — former President Nicolas Sarkozy famously publicly called his Prime Minister his "collaborator", for instance — and electoral timings. There was a reform in the early 00s to sync Presidential elections and Parliamentary elections, meaning that even though the Prime Minister is accountable to the Parliament, in practice the latter tends to be of the same majority as the President (whereas before, we had cases of Presidents and Primes being of opposing parties, which is known as 'cohabitation'), which gives him enormous power.
This is like Ireland. The head of government is responsible for running the country day to day. While the president is responsible for representing the country in a ceremonial way (far less powerful but often more popular). Often they rubber stamp some legislation but often have little power. In the US the roles are combined in to the Presidency. In the UK the Queen is the head of state and Boris Johnson is head of government.
The Taíno, the original inhabitants of the island, were wiped out / assimilated by the Europeans who settled the island. Years later the Spanish and criollo settlers relocated to the east of the island leaving the west free for the French to develop.
The French and the Spanish had different cultures and radically different strategies on how to develop their colonies and thus the island ended up with two different cultures and governments and languages and political systems and with people of different (but overlapping) racial composition.
A lot of people wrongly assume that Caribbean is an ethnic group but that couldn't be farther from the truth. I'm a Puerto Rican and I have a lot in common with Dominicans and Cubans because the three territories are former Spanish colonies. But I have little in common with Haitians, Jamaicans or the inhabitants of the smaller islands of the archipelago. To illustrate my point, I have an archipelago 40 miles east of where I live and we have no ferry between the islands and no connection of any sort beyond the fact that we're both US territories. I've been there as a tourist but nothing more.
Plenty of countries do very well without shared ethnic seeds, whatever that means, including the wealthiest country in the world.
Edit: Thanks for explaining what you meant, below. That makes sense.
I explained that they're different because they're comprised of different people with different histories.
This might be obvious to you but in my experience a lot of people assume that the inhabitants of the Hispaniola came from the same seed, as in they were the same group of people who later split when that was not the case. One country was seeded by the Spanish and the other one by the French.
My comment was not meant to be a thorough analysis on their respective economies.
Simply put, Haiti was highly dependent on international trade for the resources it needed, which meant that the embargoes from major powers crippled the nation.
Mike Duncan has an excellent series on the Haitian revolution in his Revolutions podcast series, which includes a final episode that summarizes the history of the nation up to the mid-20th century.
http://latinamericanscience.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/H...
"It has been widely reported that in 1923 over 60% of Haiti's land was forested; the source of this assertion remains unknown but may be linked to the U.S. Marine Occupation in Haiti. In 2006, the country was claimed to have less than 2% forest cover."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_in_Haiti#Estimat...
For fun I ran the numbers, at 4% real interest which is realistic for a developing country, that's 2.55 trillion dollars in lost interest.
Haiti was indebted to France for over 100 years after the revolution. They were forced to pay the losses sustained by the French, which included slaves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiti_indemnity_controversy
It doesn't get more unjust and wrong than that. To say they have no one to blame for their country's condition is misguided.
Spain colonized the East of the island and government and power remained in the hands of European settlers.
Haiti was also occupied by the US in the early 20th century, which was not exactly a glorious episode, either, and certainly did not help.
(You might hope that that quote exaggerates what was done to Haiti, but if anything it underplays it.)
What stopped Hati from growing was 20 years after independence, the arrival of France with warships demanding 150 million gold francs as "reparations" for the slave-holders losing their "property".
An absurd demand which was still being repaid until almost the 1950s. That's what screwed the country over.
Similarly for Haiti the summary is: post independence country was in debt as most are. 20 years later France demands payment. By late 1800s 80% of GDP is going to paying back that debt and loans taken out to cover the debt. Top holders of the debt are France, Germany, USA. Early 1900s US businesses (mainly banks) want to ensure they'll be repaid, so convince govt to invade Haiti. US occupies Haiti for 20 years. Takes over the national bank, takes the national gold reserves moves it to Wall St for "safe keeping".
US puts in place propped up presidents from the mulatto elite vs the black majority population. Causes more economic issues, introduces things like Jim Crow - all of this leads to more racial and class strife. Great depression hits. US and and mulatto elites still controlling the country in the 1940s. This eventually causes the backlash and revolution of 1946 of which Estime then is the first elected on a platform of helping the working class and supporting the poor. Papa Doc rides this same platform of resentment of external intervention particularly in finances, and the poor and black working class being ignored and takes over. He's incredibly corrupt and horrible, but raises to power given the circumstances. Their family rules until the mid 1980s.
The country shows some growth, then a massive earthquake hits and it hasn't fully recovered economically.
Summary, US banks wanted to be ensured they'd get paid back so convinced US govt to take over the country. The violence and racism of the US occupation along with poor economics lead to a growth of populism in the country, which set the stage for Papa Doc whose family was a disaster. And there hasn't been much time since then to get back on track.
So while not the same, a story that rhymes with the US propping up the Shah of Iran and setting the stage for a worse govt, and Batista in Cuba and then getting a worse govt. Here post the US occupation it took longer to develop, but the movement that Papa Doc rode was born out of the US occupation of Haiti.
Ballparking a proxy number, for example annual FDI net inflows circa 2010: KOR=10B, ISR=10B, LTU=1B, DOM=2B, HTI=0.1B. Per capita, 20x-100x investment levels.
Why? Like you said, a complex equation.
Will the D.E.A. (audio of the event being shared has a clip of someone yelling "this is a DEA operation, stand down" in a southern american accent) be expected to make some sort of statement regarding this? Should we believe them without a formal investigation and evidence?
I don't expect a random American to know any of the various countries that the USA invaded and occupied, apart from Vietnam, but I sure expect a big newspaper to give this basic context.
In English, "America" unambiguously refers to the United States. I say that as a non-American.
A continent consisting of North+Central+South America would be considered a "Super-Continent".
And no one says "I live in America" when they live in Canada. Do you refer to yourself as American? I've never heard anyone refer to a Canadian citizen as "American". Or someone from Mexico as "American".
You can link any dictionary definitions you want, but in 99% of cases when people say "America" they mean the US.
[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/America
[1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/america
[2] https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/americ...
Edit: you've completely changed your comment.
Regulatory moats are a thing.
> Moïse says he is entitled to another year in office. Legal experts agree that his interpretation of the law requires twisting it beyond recognition, but there’s an old Haitian saying that the constitution is paper and guns are steel, and Moïse has the backing he needs from the OAS and the USA. At a press conference on 5 February, the State Department took Moïse’s side in the end-of-term argument. Perhaps this was mere expediency from the White House – Haiti is a small country and the Biden administration has inherited a myriad messes – but Moïse saw a green light.
> American ignorance and blitheness was on full display this month during a hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. When one of the Haitian witnesses, Guerline Jozef, urged legislators to examine the root causes of Haiti’s predicament, going back to the indemnity Haiti was forced to pay in 1825 to compensate France for its slaves,Congressman Brian Mast (R-FL) cut her off. He mansplained:
> > Haitians individually within Haiti [need to] look in the mirror and say: ‘We can’t rely on America, we can’t rely on France, we can’t rely on others. We’re hopeful for their assistance. But we have to look in the mirror and say, how do we do this?’ And that’s what I hope we can really really get to the root of, is ... what is it that they can look in the mirror and do to correct what is missing there?
> A few minutes later, the Haitian activist Emmanuela Douyon tried to set Mast straight. ‘Haiti is not waiting for the US, France or any other country in the international community,’ she said:
> > We’ve already decided what we want to do. What we’re asking is for the international community to listen and respect our choice. We have a president whose term ended last February. He has benefited from the support of the OAS [and] the US State Department, despite the fact that most of Haitian civil society acknowledges that his term has ended, according to the constitution ... This is what we’re facing now. And this is a perfect example of how when we don’t listen to Haitians, we can’t blame them later for the outcome. We want to end with all this corruption and impunity, we want to end with the old practices. [But] so many people do not want to give us a chance to decide for ourselves.
And the problem in Mali is in large part because of totally idiotic over-confidence just a few years ago.
The French I think have a much more accurate understanding of their abilities. The reversals they suffer have been far fewer and less disastrous than those the Americans face. For example, in Chad, the FACT is now certainly on the back foot—even the opposition media who previously seemed to think that the FACT had a good chance of taking N’Djamena have stopped suggesting that that’s a possibility and now focus on ructions between Déby fils et frères. Meanwhile in Afghanistan, the Taliban’s hold on its strongholds is pretty much secure, and they may even retain some cities.
You point at some things the media believes and that is of course a different question compared to what the government itself believes.
> The French I think have a much more accurate understanding of their abilities.
Funny then that they thought they can overthrow Gadafi only then to literally begged the US to intervene as they totally failed.
>The reversals they suffer have been far fewer and less disastrous than those the Americans face.
Well if you try far less you can lose less. But of course also if you have far less, even those much smaller loses are just as big a deal as the much larger loses for the US.
I must admit I am not all that informed on the details of French wars in different African countries. So I can not speak on those details.
I think this is somewhat in tension with the tenor of your claims above, e.g.—
> Well if you try far less you can lose less. But of course also if you have far less, even those much smaller loses are just as big a deal as the much larger loses for the US.
Of course Gaddafi is a reasonable example in the other direction, but I’d point out that Françafrique is still entirely under Francophile dictatorial rule—even the CNSP is content to permit French forces to remain; it was Macron who threatened to pull out. Contrast this to Iraq (lost to a great extent to Iran). I suppose there is increasing CAR-Russia coöperation, but given Françafrique’s scale, the CAR is much less important than Iraq.
He comes from the political elite as a member of the popular Tet Kale party where he eventually won 55% of the vote to become president. He wasn't a dictator, he didn't emerge from a military junta, or as a foreign backed darkhorse candidate. He was just your typical, center-right, Caribbean politician who had to make unpopular choices after taking office.
Until something emerges there is nothing that says this guy deserved assassination. And that is the worrying bit, by all accounts he was popular which means his replacement will be under a great deal of scrutiny.
The word “rule” is not the same as “dictate”. Have you ever heard the phrase “ruling party”?
A president presides but never rules.
A dictator (or absolute king) rules not dictates.
A public speaker dictates but only occasionally speaks.
Ruling party is an English term, Americans using majority/minority parties to describe in power and out of power.
Perhaps if it were one flamewar amid a bunch of on-topic, thoughtful replies, that could be called a coincidence, but in this case it's painfully clear that your comment set off the whole thing. Please don't ever do anything like this on HN again.
Edit: I think I could have modulated this comment a bit better. Sorry! More downthread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27776445.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
Edit: really? There's a whole other thread making these exact same points that didn't get flagged https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27761847
(Btw, I've partly answered your other questions in a different comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27776445)
Here are some principles that have emerged over the years here, as supports for the kind of discussion we're hoping for:
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Intent doesn't communicate itself on the internet, so the burden is on the commenter to disambiguate. - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
The value of a comment is the expected value of the subthread it forms the root of. - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
Trolling can only be measured by effects, not intent. - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
Scorched earth is not interesting. - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
> Trolling can only be measured by effects, not intent.
While I hope that principal helps you do your job, I also hope I never encounter it anywhere else. It's a free backdoor to deplatform anyone at anytime. Brigade the discussion and suddenly they're the troll. Yikes.
If such brigading occurs, obviously that trumps the other principle and needs to be dealt with strictly.
> permanent debt peonage
> the temerity not only to rise up in rebellion, amidst grand declarations of universal rights and freedoms
...all seem like ideological rhetoric, and barely "facts".
See, I read that in a sarcastic "how dare they" tone. Maybe that's why I don't think it's controversial.
> But debt is not just victor's justice; it can also be a way of punishing winners who weren't supposed to win.
Are you saying the debt/embargoes weren't meant to be punitive? "Weren't supposed to win" being the prevailing attitude of global economic powers of the time.
Please ban me from the orange hellsite so that I'm never tempted on commenting something ever again, while you reflect on why you're defending such garbage people
Yes, commenters do bear some responsibility for the subthreads that come from their comments. These things are pretty predictable, after all. (To be fair, I probably came down on cryptohacks a little too harshly—it's an occupational hazard, especially after hours of cleaning up shit—sorry, cryptohacks. But the principles hold good.)
I don't agree that it's cowardice to go for substantive discussion rather than people screaming at each other and losing their minds off-topically. I'd say it takes some courage to do that. What strikes me as closer to cowardice (not the best way to put it, but we'll go with your word) is defining one side of these bloodbaths-in-a-teacup as virtuous and the other side as "garbage people", instead of facing the truth that they are co-creations.
Btw, I like Graeber. I personally protected his account on HN and made sure he got to say everything he wanted to here. I think his death was a loss for intellectual life—he may not have been a meticulous scholar but his creativity is not the sort of thing that comes along very often. I think making a big deal out of that one lame sentence about Apple is an example of the stupidest sort of internet battle. At the same time, of course he was an ideological writer and of course that paragraph is ideological rhetoric. That it also contains facts doesn't change that; that's what good rhetoricians do.
Nor is there anything wrong with that paragraph in its original context in a book—a genre where the volume knob needs to be turned up quite a bit at times, and generally wielded with a lot of variation. But McLuhan got it right, the medium is the message, and copy-pasting that paragraph into an internet thread on an inflammatory topic is definitely flamebait. We're trying to learn how to avoid that here because the threads it produces are repetitive, and therefore tedious, and therefore turn nasty. That's really all I'm saying—anything else people are adding onto it (such as secret political agendas, positions on Haitian history, or whatever) is imaginary.
Also, of the first leader of “liberated” Haiti, Dessalines:
“Dessalines marched into Port-au-Prince, where he was welcomed as a hero by the 100 whites who had chosen to stay behind. Dessalines thanked them all for their kindness and belief in racial equality, but then he said that the French had treated him as less than human when he was a slave, and so to avenge his mistreatment, he promptly had the 100 whites all hanged.”
Off to a great start…
You also have a history of posting flamebait to HN. Please review the site guidelines and take a lot more care with this place. The ecosystem here is fragile. I'm sure you wouldn't drop lit matches in a dry forest or at a gas station, or toss Molotov cocktails into crowds at parks. So please don't do the equivalent here.
How does that sound to you?
I made no such claim. Also "founding myth" is a term with a distinct meaning separate from "mythology" in that it is not necessarily untrue - romanticizing the truth and excluding any unflattering details is usually enough.
I really wish more people read biographies, especially by multiple people who where belligerents in the same conflict. When you hear the same story told from different perspectives, you begin to question if the history your were taught was in fact, the objective "reality".
What you called "reality" was just a perspective from a single point of view, which I can safely assume was European.
One of my high school history classes presented this view; we used A People's History of the United States as a textbook.
What role did France play in the Boston Tea Party? I'm not aware of any at all. Certainly France jumped in once they saw the opportunity happening, but the idea that the revolution was really part of the conflict with France is just wrong.
The "American" studies class was about the Constitution, various laws, major Lobbying groups (ACLU, NAACP, FOP, NRA), how primaries work, etc. etc. American history was left to grade school.
Without France as a belligerent to England in the years up to the war, the latter would have been far better equipped to defend the colonies.
The David versus Goliath mythology that tells of feisty upstart democratic republic felling the great monarchy taught in school typically doesn't get into a Great Britain heavily depleted and indebted from years of war with France.
The irony from the US perspective is we're taught the superior force was defeated by guerilla tactics and unconventional warfare. Then we completely forgot that when we went to Vietnam. Oops.
Kinda odd you left that part out...
After all, the West still doesn't really care about slavery - there's more slaves today than ever in history. They also do not care about benefitting from slave labour or they would boycott the top countries in the Global Slavery Index: https://www.globalslaveryindex.org/2018/data/maps/#prevalenc... Slavery continues to be a thriving industry in Africa and the Middle East for example, and for the most part concern about this only comes from a few Western NGOs.
It largely seems to be a matter that at some point became politically useful in the US and elsewhere, rather than an actual concern. I wonder if it will ever stop being in political vogue.
It's diabolical. The ruling class, who benefitted the most from slavery, have figured out how to use it to keep people from uniting against them. According to them, it was white people who enslaved black people, not rich people who enslaved poor people, and we should all be upset the former and never think about the latter.
Being forced to work 8-12 hours a day, but free to go about your business the rest of the time is a very different scenario to being owned and having your offspring becoming another persons property.
Chattel slavery goes way beyond forced labor - both are terrible, but not equally so.
“The revolution ended slavery in Saint-Domingue but not forced labor. Louverture and several of the early governments of independent Haiti used the army to impose forced work on the plantations”
nonetheless I'm disappointed; the assertion looked so juicy and worthy of a deep dive. you made it sound like "academia" was conspiring to demote slavery to forced labor under specific conditions. yet no evidence of this is to be found in the linked text.
rather, the summary makes a point of distinguishing slavery from forced labor. granted, it doesn't define either term (as a proper paper would) but it doesn't pretend they are interchangeable either.
Dessalines went around the county killing all (fully white) French males. A lot of powerful Haitians opposed this, especially those of mixed racial background who had white family. The crimes that followed were really pushed forward by Dessalines the man, not the Haitian people in general.
Transatlantic slavery was incredibly cruel, but persecution by "the French" doesn't excuse a genocide of all French people on the island. Ironically, the people most responsible for the crimes against enslaved Africans (the "grand blanc") were largely back in France and so escaped personal harm.
Assuming this figure in today's money - we have a country of more than 10 million people who can't afford to pay 18 Billion, and we have at least two individuals who are worth at least 10 times that amount (at least on paper)!!
Yes, I am aware it is a weird and useless comparison. Still, it is kinda astonishing.
Perhaps, but credit markets also provide critical benefit. 500 pages of such a singleminded dismissal of nuance was too much for me.
It wouldn't have 500 pages if it was just "debt = slavery" :p
While there are sometimes good historical nuggets, it mostly concerns itself with interpreting ever possible situation in the last 5000 years according to Graebers ideology and confirming that it is correct while constantly claiming anybody else that worked on these same topics and didn't share his interpretations are idiots (while often not actually seeming to know what they actually wrote).
This is just state policy if they don't like other states. Its just legal justification for states to do what they want to do. States have found a billion way to justify hostile action against other states. Claiming reparations of one kind or another is very common for a very long time.
Even had they been able to pay that money, its very questionable if that would have changed the disposition of the other stats towards it. Cartage managed to pay Rome back in full, and Rome then decide to destroy it anyway.
They might just have a different excuse for the same policy.
>Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other's garages.
That's an impressive amount of wrong to pack into one sentence! So much wrong, that I would not trust anything based on Graeber's word.
> After the Haitians gained independence from French colonial rule in the Haitian Revolution of 1804, the French returned in 1825 and demanded that the newly independent country pay the French government and French slaveholders the modern equivalent of US$21 billion for the theft of the slaveowner's property and the land that they had turned into profitable sugar and coffee-producing plantations.
> Haiti’s legacy of debt began shortly after a widespread slave revolt against the French, with Haitians gaining their independence from France in 1804. President of the United States Thomas Jefferson – fearing that slaves gaining their independence would spread to the United States – stopped sending aid that began under his predecessor John Adams and pursued international isolation of Haiti during his tenure. France had also pursued a policy that prevented Haiti from participating in trade in the Atlantic. This isolation on the international stage made Haiti desperate for economic relief.
First, it's odd how such a garbled sentence managed to be perfectly understandable English. If it was garbled, what was the original intention? I don't know of any major tech company founded in SV in the 1980s by ex-IBM engineers who were mostly Republican. I can't recall any famous company or organization that was known for forming democratic circles of 20-40 people with laptops in garages (regardless of the decade). Any sort of elaboration or clarification on the intended meaning would have gone a long way toward convincing me. The original sentence is simply too coherent to be "garbled" without further elaboration.
Second, book drafts are read and reread by teams of professional editors. Excerpts are circulated among colleagues and domain experts. It is practically impossible that such a "garbled" sentence could sneak by all of them.
I agree that DeLong behaved despicably, but Graeber can't be trusted.
Edit: I've tracked down previous excuses by Graeber. Initially, he blamed incorrect information from an unpublished study by a student of the Marxist economist Richard Wolff. Annoyingly the Twitter thread is totally broken, but individual tweets are still there:
https://twitter.com/chumpchanger/status/141218501024157696 "David Graeber,Debt,p96: Apple was founded by engineers from IBM who formed little democratic circles of 20-40 with laptops in garages.-HUH?!"
https://twitter.com/davidgraeber/status/141581278880346112 "yeah I know I think Wolff was just kind of wrong about a lot of this; I tried to check with him but he didn't answer the email"
https://twitter.com/davidgraeber/status/141536818398113792 "no I mean Richard Wolff the Marxist economist whose student did a study of the origins of Apple and never published it"
Around six months later he blames a copyeditor[1]:
> The endlessly cited Apple quote was not supposed to be about Apple. Actually it was about a whole of series of other tiny start-ups created by people who’d dropped out of IBM, Apple, and similar behemoths. (Of them it’s perfectly true.) The passage got horribly garbled at some point into something incoherent, I still can’t completely figure out how, was patched back together by the copyeditor into something that made logical sense but was obviously factually wrong. I should have caught it at the proofreading stage but I didn’t.
Good luck trying to track down the startups that Graeber says he was referencing, or the report that he claims he got the information from. The much more likely explanation is that he wrote some nonsense, got called on it, and refused to own up to his mistake.
1. https://crookedtimber.org/2012/04/02/seminar-on-debt-the-fir...
Are you making a larger point?
The basic idea of the book is very old and not original. Social science and philosophy has been arguing about the definition/meaning/origin of debt, money, property right for a long time. He takes a very clear position on it that is clearly based in his ideological believes and then does a running narration of 5000 years of history that all proves his point crossing every social science in the process.
From my perspective as somebody that knows economics, its blatantly clear that he has no respect for economist and has not bothered with history of economic thought beyond finding a few quotes to slander. At the same time its totally clear he has never seriously read the works he seems to despise. It seems that it is his serious believe that economist and apparently the whole history of economics is simply justification for imperialism and slavery.
Not to mention that he is incredibly rude and response with personal attack when people point out that he made some very basic factual errors.
Some of his claims are so incredibly wrong that even somebody who only did the simplest online '101 History of Economic Thought' should not make.
Let me give you an example. Consider this text:
> Voluntary as well as compulsory unilateral transfers of assets (that is, transfers arising neither from a ‘reciprocal contract’ in general nor from an exchange transaction in particular, although occasionally based on tacitly recognized reciprocity), are among the oldest forms of human relationships as far as we can go back in the history of man’s economizing. Long before the exchange of goods appears in history, or becomes of more than negligible importance…we already find a variety of unilateral transfers: voluntary gifts and gifts made more or less under compulsion, compulsory contributions, damages or fines, compensation for killing someone, unilateral transfers within families, etc.*
This was written by an economist in 1892 who according to Graeber only improved on Adam Smith work "by adding various mathematical equations".
The text above was from Carl Menger, one of the most well known economist of the century and one of the founders of modern economics. Not just that, even on that wrote precisely on many of the questions Graeber book addresses. So exactly the kind of person Graeber seems to be wanting to debate and dismiss. The perfect pillar of modern (as in Post-Marginal) economics to shoot down.
Why then would Graeber claim that he only "adding various mathematical equations"? I seems that the only explanation is that he look up the wrong person on wikipedia, as there is another person with the same name who was a mathematician. Nobody who read even an introduction to modern history of economic thought would make that mistake.
He clearly doesn't have a clue who Carl Menger was and clearly has hasn't read his works. He clearly didn't actually study history of economic thought when writing his book. Rather he had preconceived notion and all he needed was a few selective Adam Smith references and dismiss the rest.
At the same time he proudly reference the 1925 'The Gift', to prove how much smarter anthropologists are as they understood the importance of the Gift economy. Compared to economist who according to him only believe in the "Mythical Land of Barter".
He speaks with equal authority about some almost unknown tribal societies, 5000 year old city states that we only have very basic data on and 2000s century politics and modern central banking (that he has borderline no understanding off). Given his very clear and explicit bias and he evident willingness to do selective reading and misinterpretation I much rather read on these topics from actual experts without such a clear bias and explicit political message.
Beyond that, I don't see how the Carl Menger quote you cited is proof that economists have a robust understanding of gift economies - and indeed it really doesn't.
Graeber is correct that mainstream economics pretty much only cares about market economies, and he is correct that modern economics is a highly ideological discipline where schools that did not align with imperialism.
Now, does Graeber overstate his claims? Perhaps. Is he wrong on the history of economics? Yes, though I can tell you I never heard of Carl Menger by name until I already had a pretty solid understanding of marginal utility theory.
Most importantly, is that a solid argument against the core thesis of the book? No. And yes, economics as a discipline is incredibly politically charged and has very poor predictive ability, assumes way too much, and is largely unaware of its issues.
One consistent problem I've had trying to take in criticism of the book (and I have looked for it!) is that it rarely seems to have been written by people who read the same book I did. It's bizarre.
First, the lengthy slog through ancient African societies which then suddenly ~lands at very on-the-nose messaging and what feels like the “real point” or basically a total revamp of the book’s themes up to that point. But this occurs when you’re already pretty deep into the book.
Second, If I had to guess, and I don’t say this with snark, the Book’s timing is another factor. There’s this sense that a bait and switch occurred where an interesting, nuanced book in the post ‘08 era is started in good faith, and an Occupy WS diatribe suddenly shows up halfway through.
Fair - the author was very involved in Occupy, so sure buyer beware. But it was published at a time when many of the book’s readers, and the US at large, had had it with Occupy and it’s themes. But, readers still tried to make an effort to absorb ideas from that side of the house, as ‘11-12 was no economic Cakewalk. Regardless, that honest effort lands squarely back in Occupy territory, but it took 200 pages to get there.
And it is incredibly unannounced because that is very clearly his view.
It wouldn't have 500 pages if it was just "debt = slavery" :p
Longer-form criticism I've read of it tends to exhibit similar, if less egregious, problems with reading comprehension. Which is frustrating because I suspect the book actually does have issues and oversights that would be nice to read about from a person with the right background who actually closely read & understood the book.
[0] I do have my suspicions about what kind of economic/political writing these folks are used to reading, that's (evidently) conditioned them not to expect anything resembling a sincere and thorough attempt to address problems with an assertion or argument to follow close on the heels of same assertion or argument, so may incline them toward skipping ahead or skimming heavily on reading something they immediately think of an objection to....
I agree the sentence is a small one. The author's reaction however only succeeds in drawing even more attention to it.
I'd be much more interested in criticism that addresses the core ideas, evidence, and arguments of the book, or that illustrate a pattern of presenting incorrect information, especially if it's left that way once it's made known, or if it's something the arguments presented by the book hinge on. Bringing this one bit up over and over and over doesn't really prove anything, and isn't helpful.
But that story about Haiti's debt can be found in better sources.
1: https://braddelong.substack.com/p/on-april-fools-day-we-reme...
We don't need mainstream news, politics, geopolitics, or conspiracy theories here.
The Taiwan precedent makes sense in the abstract, but militarily the prospect of potentially being in conflict over Taiwan makes it all the less likely the U.S. would let China get a foothold that close to it.
The same guy pushing a change to the Haiti constitution that the US strongly opposed...
And the US has a history of getting rid of leaders it doesn't like...
Although US clandestine operations at least usually have some level of plausible deniability... Which this does not.
HN has been gradually colonized by Trump truthers, anti-science, antivaxx, conspiracy theorist, uneducated individuals, trolls, and people outside startups who can't out down irrationality or their egos.
There are 11 million people living there. It would cost 3 trillion dollars to give each about $300,000 or about the mean wealth of an american. It would probably cost less than 3 trillion to win such an election.
This assumes that people would agree to sell their votes. With that said, I am very much against dictators, benevolent or otherwise. But I would understand.
As support, I would point you to this 10 year old article on Moammar Gadhafi, where he was estimated to actually be worth roughly $200b USD - an unheard of number in 2011. https://www.forbes.com/sites/edwindurgy/2011/10/25/did-moamm...
This week, if Bezos were not divorced, he would be worth $300b USD: https://www.celebritynetworth.com/articles/billionaire-news/...
And finally, the ProPublica Peter Thiel $5b USD ROTH IRA is worth *double what Forbes thought Thiels entire net worth is per the 2020 Forbes Billionaire List* (he is on page 3... look at the massive jump in the animated graph!): https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/
That said, the IRS had 20 years of tax returns stolen from it which would detail the richest Americans, and so it is unlikely anyone in the USA is a trillionaire.
But yeah, so many countries are so tiny (economically), I’d be shocked (from my afterlife in heaven looking down with god) if most of them aren’t really indirectly controlled by some centi billionaires.