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Comment by DANK_YACHT | Hacker News Reader

The two main points of contention are:

1) While "wall street" did want the U.S. to invade Haiti to increase profits, there were other reasons for the U.S. to invade as well. Specifically, there was a worry that Germany would invade (Germany was 80% of Haiti's trade). This was during WWI where there were fears about Germany's Latin America business dealings. After the invasion, it appears Citibank (aka "wall street") lost out due to increased competition.

2) Haiti had a number of structural differences that would have prevented it from developing even if France didn't force Haiti to pay for its freedom. One example is that Haiti tore down their plantations and distributed land among individual farmers. These farmers were not economically productive and prevented Haiti from adopting new technology as it became available. The other example is that Haiti had extreme instability even before France demanded payment. Leaders were frequently assassinated and the government even split in two for some time.

The author of this post feels the NYT glossed over the facts in order to paint a narrative.

View on HN

The larger point, to my reading, is how NYT has published ahistorical, ideology first products and presented and pushed them as history. Even in the face of criticism from historians who are experts in the covered subject matter.

"Criticism from historians" is normal for everything. Historians criticize work that they even revere. The presence of academic criticism is not evidence that the NYT piece is an "ahistorical, ideology first product".

In fact, the majority of criticism from the academic community (as mentioned in the article) is the fact that the historians that were consulted on this piece weren't named in the text.

I think the GP means that the NYT has a recent history of peddling journalistic rags as academic papers, without the approval of the academic experts they've consulted. One of those fact checkers even wrote an article about how they were ignored by the NYT:

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/06/1619-proje...

And I'm saying that your portrayal is foolish.

From the very article you link

> Overall, the 1619 Project is a much-needed corrective to the blindly celebratory histories that once dominated our understanding of the past—histories that wrongly suggested racism and slavery were not a central part of U.S. history.

The 1619 Project contained historical errors that the authors should have avoided. But historians working in this area do not consider it to be a "journalistic rag" even as they criticize it. As I mentioned in my post, academic criticism is not evidence that a piece is devoid of merit.

You're misrepresenting that article.

That article was not some random historian offering an academic criticism. That person was hand-picked by the NYTimes to "fact-check" their article. They undoubtedly chose her because of her ideological background, thinking that she would be okay with revisionary history. She wasn't. So they ignored her.

I do not believe that I am misrepresenting the article. The reason I do not believe that is because I am personal friends with an unusual number of historians who work in early US history and the history of race in the US. The quote I pulled from the article very neatly sums up their opinion of the 1619 project.

The NYT made fairly basic and preventable factual errors in the 1619 project. They should not have done this. This is not new or interesting or controversial information among relevant historians. What is controversial among relevant historians is the conclusion that therefore the 1619 project is ideological bullshit that shouldn't be seen as anything other than garbage. The author of the article you link was indeed correct - factual errors became a lightning rod for reactionaries to dismiss the work as propaganda. But that's not actually how criticism of historical writing works in the academic community.

I suspect that if I spoke with the author of this piece, as I have spoken to many people who I suspect she would call colleagues, she'd be more likely to agree with my presentation than yours.

All historical writing is "revisionist history." This term is not actually a slur in the academic community because each historian is almost necessarily writing on a topic that many historians have written on before and their work is in dialogue with the work that came before. Presenting a historical narrative from another perspective or through a different methodological lens is not bad nor does it attack or destroy the work that came before.

Braudel has claims that are outright wrong but The Mediterranean is heralded as a triumph. Said has claims that don't hold up today but Orientalism is a critical step forward for the field. Heck, even fucking Foucault is seen as essential writing for historians despite him having all sorts of factual errors in his work. Historical writing should seek to be based in fact. But fucking up (even very badly) is not a reason to declare a work to be propaganda.

>>I do not believe that I am misrepresenting the article. The reason I do not believe that is because I am personal friends with an unusual number of historians who work in early US history and the history of race in the US. The quote I pulled from the article very neatly sums up their opinion of the 1619 project.

I have no idea what you are personally told or what views your friends, whatever their qualifications, have. The article's author is generally favorable to revisionist interpretations and even she has serious doubts. As a historical matter one of the central claims of the 1619 project is false and is mostly asserted without evidence. Now, if you produce a work with a thesis and one of the most important (as asserted by the work itself!) test cases of that thesis is false the credibility of that work is clearly undermind.

>>Braudel has claims that are outright wrong but The Mediterranean is heralded as a triumph. Said has claims that don't hold up today but Orientalism is a critical step forward for the field. [...] Historical writing should seek to be based in fact. But fucking up (even very badly) is not a reason to declare a work to be propaganda.

The difference is that those works advanced the field even where they had shortcomings. They did so by rigorously supporting claims and providing evidence. The 1619 project does neither.

> The NYT made fairly basic and preventable factual errors in the 1619 project

Like that the revolution was to preserve slavery.

That is a fundamental mistake that undermines the whole project.

Not according to many historians nor the author of the linked piece.

Facts are the foundation that such writing is built upon. If a piece of historical analysis contains a number of basic factual errors, that foundation is shaky at best. How can you or anyone go on to claim that the conclusion of the piece has any value at all, given that?

What is "a number"? What is the threshold at which it becomes appropriate to distrust the entire work?

Most of the critique from the right seems to start with the point of view that the 1619 Project should be distrusted and works backwards from there, rather than determining its trustworthiness based on a good-faith reading of the work itself.

When I did my thesis, the attitude was a factual error of significant magnitude brought the whole thesis into question.

What field was your thesis in? Would your committee have considered the entire contents to be propaganda?

Says you?

Historians should seek to make their writing based on as firm of factual footing as possible and make it clear when they are making an inference due to limitations of the archive. But historians constantly work with material that has factual errors and they do not tend to consider this to be a death sentence for a particular work.

I find that a huge number of people have very strong opinions about how historians work and have never actually spoken to one.

The large bulk of historians I speak to, whether tenured or tenure track or at various different institutions, do not arrive at the same conclusion that you do.

EDIT: We've hit the depth limit but I do not believe that I am more qualified here. I believe that professional historians are and that people should go speak to a bunch of them before developing very strong opinions about historical writing. I do not believe that this is a clubby toxic attitude but instead is valuing expertise and experience.

Excuse me, but there's an enormous difference between working with erroneous source material, and making factual errors when the correct data are already and widely available.

And, I reject your repeated assertions that because you have historian friends, you are somehow more qualified to speak on the topic than one who does not. That type of clubby gatekeeping is frankly toxic to society and you should abandon that sort of thinking immediately.

I do not believe that it is toxic gatekeeping to suggest that the people who are most qualified to have opinions about historical writing are history professors.

But a big part of why people aren’t using stronger language to criticize it is they doing so is a guaranteed path to being called a racist and getting calls for your firing.

> The larger point, to my reading, is how NYT has published ahistorical, ideology first products and presented and pushed them as history[...]

That reads like a misrepresentation of TFA: the author conceded that the historical facts reported by the NYT are accurate, but they disagree with the tone and conclusion.

The author's angle is a weird one: author thinks that the article(s) should be read as an academic paper (no reason given), and then lobs criticism at it for not being a good academic paper.

You can use any series of truths to weave a lie, this has been known since antiquity.

"Ahistorical" has a specific meaning, which does not apply here.

The NYT article was not “ahistorical”, something that the author points out was the facts were mostly correct.

The problem here is the narrative that is built based on the facts is not accurate and conclusions weren’t scientifically drawn.

> The problem here is the narrative that is built based on the facts is not accurate and conclusions weren’t scientifically drawn.

Yeah, I think you always have to read things like the NYT with an eye towards their demonstrated institutional biases. I think they can be trusted to get the facts right (even if that fact is "ABC made claim XYZ," when XYZ turns out to have been wrong), and I don't really see a better alternative for getting facts about current events.

That said, I don't think journalists at the NYT are the right people to be writing revisionist histories of events that are very much not current. If they want to publish stuff like that, it would better if the hired some actual historians to do these projects (instead of just trying to use them as QC).

Historians have ideology too. In fact the field of history is not an exact science...

If I accept the premise that "the field of history is not an exact science" (which, to be clear, I do), it does not logically follow that this makes historians particularly ideological.

Both may certainly be true (which I believe), but it's not a very good argument.

I get the feeling your definition of "ideology" is a very specific, politically-motivated one, and not the one that most philosophers and social scientists have concurred is an appropriate default definition over the last 50-70 years.

Everyone carries ideology with them. It is the source of subjective interpretations and judgments. And unfortunately for your position, we have more or less come to the consensus that all language and communication is fundamentally subjective: this means that no statements or actions are without ideology.

>NYT has published ahistorical, ideology first products and presented and pushed them as history

Well, isn't that the whole business of the NYT since forever, only with "history" usually replaced with "news", and "ideology first" sometimes being "the government says so"?

The primary criticism was that historians did not get enough credit.

They are just copying the kinds of clickbait though see all over the internet and highly upvoted on HN.

People love it when their biases are confirmed.

Like how an article titled 'The NYT is wrong about Haiti' is upvoted by hundreds of people who (likely) have never been to Haiti? And maybe 1-2 people who had ever heard of the economist who wrote it before?

Pretty much!

I pretty much assume everything I read online is a lie unless proven otherwise.

Oh the larger point is an attempt to discredit the newspaper of record for the USA. Thanks for clarifying that you're trying to spin colonial slavery as a good thing because of "liberal media bias".

That "newspaper of record" doesn't need a lot of outside help to discredit itself given the state of it in the last decade and a half.

How was Tucker Carlson tonight, did he own the libs to your satisfaction ?

I don't have cable and don't watch Tucker, but good attempt at a burn nevertheless.

Right! Being wrong is the larger point

Haiti had a number of structural differences that would have prevented it from developing even if France didn't force Haiti to pay for its freedom.

So the robber who says: "If hadn't stolen your paycheck, you would have drunken it all away" is perfectly in their rights.

From the article:

> Haiti has been the victim of injustice. The indemnity was immoral, and France should be ashamed of it. The US Occupation of Haiti abused many Haitians, and I, an American, am ashamed when I see photos of Charlemagne Peralte nailed to a door.

> But these projects are trying assign greater moral weight by claiming exaggerated economic consequences. I can condemn the Haitian indemnity for the injustices they were. But I worry that unnuanced articles like what the NYT has been publishing will cheapen those past injustices by attracting critics who believe that disproving some of the articles' claims then disproves all of them

I can condemn the Haitian indemnity for the injustices they were. But I worry that unnuanced articles like what the NYT has been publishing will cheapen those past injustices by attracting critics who believe that disproving some of the articles' claims then disproves all of them.

The thing about this is he's not challenging the bare facts - that France was the force taking resources from the Haitian people. That agreed. He's challenge the conceptual framework; "if France hadn't done this, someone else would have". Whether one agrees or disagrees with this change, it's not a factual question and so his hand wringing about disproofs seem basically disingenuous.

Or, the point is addressed to adults, who are interested in understanding history per se, and assessing the veracity of specific claims (like, "Haiti's underdevelopment is attributable to these reparation demands").

It's not addressed to the simpletons who can't escape childish black-and-white thinking in which reality doesn't exist outside of the ammunition it provides for taking sides.

Tldr: it's ludicrous to hear the claim "reparations weren't responsible for Haiti's underdevelopment" and conclude "OH so you think the reparations were good??"

The GP I replied (summarizing the artice): "Haiti had a number of structural differences that would have prevented it from developing even if France didn't force Haiti to pay for its freedom."

This is not saying, "reparations weren't responsible for Haiti's underdevelopment". Money paid is economic opportunities lost. France was benefiting from the payments and Haitians were suffering.

The argument being made is that this is either insignificant or OK because if France had not done this, Haiti would have been underdeveloped some other way.

It's pretty exactly analogous to thief that steals from you on Friday and when confronted on Monday says "I'm not responsible for you being broke, you would have lost the money some other way". That's sort reprehensible even if it's true. Let I repeat even if it's true.

It doesn't change the morality of the theft, but it is relevant when determining how the thief should make the victim whole. To use your paycheck analogy - consider these two situations:

1. The thief steals from you on your way to the bank, where you have a history of making on-time loan payments. The theft causes you to default on your loan and lose your car which leads to you losing your job.

2. The thief steals from you on your way to the tavern, where you have a history of drinking your paycheck.

Wouldn't you agree that in scenario 1, the thief owes you more compensation than just the money he stole?

Imagine if I said "If France hadn't forced Haiti to pay for its freedom, Haiti would have become a world leader in semiconductor manufacturing, like Taiwan". Do you have any evidence against that claim? Can you see why the extent of the damage is relevant for determining how France should make up for it?

To use your analogy here, France should determine how much they should pay back to Haiti for taking their wealth after long hardship as a colony? I'm just trying to make sure I don't build a strawman here.

France doesn't care. They're not going to pay. They still have colonies for that matter. Their museums aren't going to be losing plundered artifacts any time soon. But it's interesting that the argument against Haiti being able to ever rise out of its colonial mire was the fact they nationalized the plantations where they had been enslaved and doled them out to Haitians.

Maybe the fact the US sent marines to seize assets from the Haitian treasury (to ensure France got those payments) impacted their ability to adopt new technologies as they became available. Who's to say?

"If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there's no progress. If you pull it all the way out that's not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they haven't even pulled the knife out much less heal the wound. They won't even admit the knife is there." — Malcolm X

I don't think anyone has ever asserted that stealing can be justified if the casual outcome for the victim is insignificant and it is certainly isn't a justification here. It is a valid historical question of the impact of the indemnity. Pointing out that haiti's economy was unable to develop should be relevant and certainly not reprehensible. There are a lot of cases of historical injustice including other instances that involved Haiti in the first place. Justice will be harmed if we can't fairly judge the outcome of these injustices.

> The argument being made is that this is either insignificant or OK

This is my point. Nobody is saying it's "okay". Facts are _upstream_ of the normative claims people use them to support, and don't always lead to conclusions that you can predict from kneejerk, nonsensical assumptions of the sort you're making.

A historian can object to the NYT (allegedly) explicitly making an incorrect _factual_ claim; that's practically his damn job! The only person rushing to project an agenda onto it so that you can get high off of outrage is you. Before we can make detailed normative decisions about reality, we need to understand the facts that underlie them.

> That's sort reprehensible even if it's true. Let I repeat even if it's true

Even the assumption that this exonerates the French doesn't make any sense! It's trivial to frame this as "the French further damaged an economy that was already at a disadvantage relative to its peers"! You're throwing away the truth for a "benefit" that doesn't even make any sense!

I apologize for the pointed language, but I can't think of anything in modern discourse that I loath more than this revolting focus on what factual claims _sound_ like instead of what they actually mean and how they contribute to our picture of the world. The world is _complicated_. Facts don't always lead you to the conclusions that this childish kneejerk style of analysis assumes they do. There are a lot of decent, serious people trying to understand the world and make it better, and it is _precisely_ this alternative-facts approach that is poisoning our modern discourse.

France actually sent Haiti a lot of humanitarian help and cancelled some of the country's debts.

Now, looking at the series of instable and corrupt regimes the country had since independence, the more apt analogy would be that it was smart from the bank's (France) point of view to foreclose the property before thieves broke in and stole the TV and copper wire. If you're looking for the TV by the way, there's a man called Duvalier who knows exactly where it is.

Even recently, Wyclef Jean's humanitarian foundation (the same person who tried to ran for presidency in Haiti) was found to be diverting an impressive amount of funds to... Himself!

The issue is cultural. But that's certainly not a position that will be popular with the NYT's readership.

I think the fallacy that the author misses in all this is that problems compound (something I notice that academics often ignore because their narrow focus.)

Sure, Haiti was not at the cutting edge of technology but the staggering amount of debt they owed France certainly didn't help them catch up

Sure, the US didn't want a German puppet in the Caribbean but it's mostly because the US liked the profit margins of being the sole puppet master

To make matters worse, he makes a case for a more nuanced portrait, but then titles the thing The New York Times is Wrong About Haiti

In general, I'm surprised this article is getting so much traction here when it combines two much maligned (by HN) rhetorical styles, but I think it's because of some emerging culture war against the NYT.

You're falling into the same trap the author asserts the NYT has fallen into. You're right, debt to the French didn't help Haiti's situation, but that doesn't mean that the debt to France caused Haiti's situation, which is essentially what the NYT article was implying. I think this resonates not because of an emerging culture war against the NYT, but because the NYT has chosen sides in an existing culture war, namely whether or not the imperialist past of Europe and the U.S. can be reconciled with the modern day world.

Is anything in history as simple as "Action A CAUSED Outcome B"?

What caused Japan to bomb Pearl Harbor? Was it wanton imperial ambitions? Or was it the US oil blockade.

What caused US to bomb Hiroshima/Nagasaki? Was it a desire to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of US soldiers? Or was it a desire not to have to split the islands with the Soviets who were lining up to invade, and intimidate them with the new weapon the US developed?

There are always multiple angles to every historical narrative. Noone is purely good or purely evil.

Understand that the NYT isn't writing this in a vacuum. None of the discussions of colonialism are. Discussions of colonialism are responding to DECADES of commonly accepted stereotypes that "Shucks darn, Haiti/Africa are just fundamentally worse at economics, peace and prosperity than the rest of the world. Must be because black people are inherently stupider/more violent/insert other racist justifications". It is only in the last couple of decades that we've openly started to acknowledge that maybe centuries of oppression had something to do with creating the violent/unstable environments we scoff at at the west, AND that the impact didn't end overnight when the colonial powers left - such as in the case of Haiti's ongoing debt repayments to France.

> Or was it a desire not to have to split the islands with the Soviets who were lining up to invade

I don't think that anyone, the Soviets the first ones, ever seriously envisioned a Soviet invasion of the US mainland; I'm not even aware of serious Soviet plans and/or preparation for it. Which is understandable given (i) their absence of fleet, (ii) their inexistent experience in full-scale amphibious invasions, (iii) the semi-failures that their smaller-scale amphibious operations were along the war, from the Crimea to the Kurils.

GP is talking about the bombs forestalling a possible Soviet invasion of Hokkaido.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_Soviet_invasion_of_...

and I meant: “concerns were raised within the Soviet high command that an invasion of Hokkaido would be impractical and unlikely to succeed”

Sure, there was a huge political part at play and I don't deny it, but even abstracting the US, purely militarily speaking, the Soviets would have been hard-pressed to succesfully invade Japan mainland.

I'm struggling to parse your definition of causality here.

If I have a pre-existing condition that wouldn't have killed me this year, then I get COVID and die, what caused my death?

EDIT: And let's be clear here, the author blithely ignores the problems that slavery causes and acts as though the debt and the slavery are unique concepts.

If a society is poorly structured for economic growth AND has debts that hamper economic growth, how do you say that the later caused the lack of economic growth but not the former? In your COVID example, had you not got COVID, you'd still be alive. In terms of Haiti, had they not had French debt, they may still have been in a similar situation economically.

You were alive prior to having covid, so we can assume had you not become infected, you'd still be alive. Haiti wasn't economically prospering before the debt, so we can't assume they would have prospered without the debt. That's not to say it's impossible for Haiti to prosper without the debt, but you can't just definitively state that Haiti would prosper as if it were a fact. There isn't enough evidence to say.

>If a society is poorly structured for economic growth AND has debts that hamper economic growth, how do you say that the later caused the lack of economic growth but not the former? In your COVID example, had you not got COVID, you'd still be alive. In terms of Haiti, had they not had French debt, they may still have been in a similar situation economically.

It's sort of wild that we live in a world where Singapore was kicked out of Malaysia in 1965 for being too poor and violent, yet you think that the organizational structure of Haiti's farmland in the 19th Century is what doomed it.

I'll concede that they were in bad shape in the 19th Century, but I challenge you to tell me that Haiti in 1890 was significantly worse in organization than Chile at the same time. One of those two countries was able to benefit from its resources and is in the OECD and the other had to pay debt to France and is one of the poorest countries in the world.

> yet you think that the organizational structure of Haiti's farmland in the 19th Century is what doomed it.

You're putting words into my mouth. I didn't say what caused Haiti's lack of economic growth. I was pointing out that there isn't enough evidence to say French debt caused the lack of economic growth. It's totally possible to French debt did in fact cause the lack of economic growth. But it's also possible other issues caused the lack of economic growth. Or perhaps it was a combination. Maybe Haiti could have prospered economically had it been better structured even with French debt, or it could have prospered with poor structure without French debt.

I don't mean this to be offensive, but I think you believe that the French debt caused Haiti's issue. I'm not convinced of this by the evidence, and I think you're taking my lack of conviction personally because it contradicts something you believe. Or perhaps we have different thresholds on the amount of evidence needed before we're convinced of something.

You’re trying to speak as some sort of dealer of fact about a topic, which with due respect, you don’t really understand.

“French debt” wasn’t just some unpaid loan. Haiti went through a variety of trevails through a long an vicious period of fighting for independence. At the end, they ended up where they were not diplomatically recognized by the US or Europe - Haiti went from a land of plenty to a pariah, unable to trade, and the only way out was to pay a steep indemnity, helpfully financed by the French on usurious terms.

Debt was used as an implement of control. I’m not sure what you’re looking for, but those are not conditions that will allow a nation or a economy to flourish.

Maybe what is different between you and I is that I see the following situation:

1) There were dozens of countries in Latin America that had various levels of disfunction and poor organization

2) One of those countries had to pay a debt to Europe as protection money

3) That one country is by far the poorest in Latin America

It is my baseline that the unique thing about Haiti is the reason it had the worst outcome. This article supposes "No, there were plenty of other problems with Haiti" while ignoring that fact that there were plenty of other problems with nearly every Latin American country.

The author does this by ignoring other historians' views on the matter (see my other comment) and most importantly doesn't propose alternate reasons why Haiti is different vs. other Latin American countries.

Was it the land distribution? Why did Mexico do better in their 1910 campaign then? If not that, then what?

At least the NYT makes a cogent argument.

It's ok to point out that there isn't enough evidence for a particular argument without presenting a counter argument. We should strive to believe the truth. If the truth can't be determined, we should accept that consciously rather than grasp on to an idea that fits our predefined belief system.

There are many differences between Haiti and the rest of Latin America. One big one is that Haiti was French, whereas much of Latin America was ruled by Spain and Portugal. We don't really have much evidence on how France's colonies handle independence as they are either still French territory or got absorbed by other countries, e.g. French Louisiana. Perhaps something in the Spanish model led to better outcomes for former colonies. Another difference is that that Haitian revolution was a successful slave revolt that resulted in a purge of the ruling class. Compare this to America where many of the founding fathers were members of the colonial government, meaning they had governing experience. Haiti's government was also unstable after the revolution, further hindering its ability to form a cohesive economic plan. Haiti's primary source of domestic energy is charcoal, which has lead to near total deforestation of the country. Perhaps that played a role. These are just some differences off the top of my head, and I'm not an expert in Haiti.

Again, the debt to France certainly didn't help. But to me, it feels a little too convenient of an excuse to lay the blame solely at France's feet.

>Again, the debt to France certainly didn't help. But to me, it feels a little too convenient of an excuse to lay the blame solely at France's feet.

Just to restate 'It feels too convenient to blame the country that forced these people into slavery, cut them off from the world economic system and then forced them to pay a tax to remain free?'

Damn just say what you mean at a certain point (I won't put the words in your mouth but...)

This thread reminds me of high school. A kid tries and fails to argue with a teacher, so they resort to trolling in order to "win". Meanwhile the rest of the students are just rolling their eyes and hoping the kid gets over their fragile ego.

Listen, fragile ego or not, it's probably worth examining why you think your high school teachers were universally correct, especially on the topic of colonialism.

> world where Singapore was kicked out of Malaysia in 1965 for being too poor and violent

Absolutely false. Singapore was kicked out of Malaysia for wanting its Chinese citizens to have equality with Malayan citizens. Which the Malaysian government responded to by stirring up race riots.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Singapore#Racial_te...

The GP is making a good faith attempt to educate you, but you're trying to "win" by asserting facts without a second of googling.

Cool Wikipedia link

[0]https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03086534.2013.7...

Although the Malaysian economy and population were much larger than Singapore's, as the international financial and commercial centre for the Malaysian peninsula and with per capita income more than twice that of Malaysia, we might expect ex ante that Singapore would be in a strong position to determine the arrangements. But contemporary views were more optimistic about the development of the Malaysian economy than that of Singapore in the late 1960s. In addition, Malaysia had already developed a central bank, which placed it in a more powerful position to lead the discussions on monetary reform. Ultimately, Singapore's distrust of the Malaysian administration led to the abandonment of the efforts at continuing the monetary integration of the two territories.

And Singaporean GDP per capita was almost twice that of Malaysia during 1963-1965 when they were one country https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?end=1970...

[0]https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03086534.2013.7...

wrt. land reform - century and a half later Zimbabwe did pretty much the same with about the same result. The USSR famine of 1932 had while not exactly the same yet similar reasons - destruction of the successful private farmers and transfer of those lands into collective farms.

>wrt. land reform - century and a half later Zimbabwe did pretty much the same with about the same result

Recent history of Zimbabwe <http://imgur.com/a/VdQdD>

> The USSR famine of 1932 had while not exactly the same yet similar reasons

Partly only. The 1932 famine was much more complicated, and a conjunction of what you said, a weak economy a few years after WWI and the civil war, Stalin pushing on exporting massive quantities of grain to pay for industrial imports, bad weather, lack of information due to the fear within the state apparatus of being the shot messenger, and failure in resources allocation.

>Partly only.

of course. Though for precision sake:

>a weak economy a few years after WWI and the civil war

that wasn't really an issue as food production has been pretty much restored during 192x "New Economical Policies"

>lack of information due to the fear within the state apparatus of being the shot messenger, and failure in resources allocation.

in many senses that was exactly the consequences of the transfer of control from successful private farmers ("kulaks") to collective farms

>bad weather

one can argue that private farmers would have fared much better through it than collective farms exactly due to management issues you mentioned. As far as i remember agriculture in USSR had always had a lot of production issues and officially blamed "bad weather", and USSR had to import grain. Interesting that after end of USSR, Russia and Ukraine has again (like before 1917 Revolution) become large exporters of grain - as if "bad weather" magically disappeared :)

> that wasn't really an issue as food production has been pretty much restored during 192x "New Economical Policies"

Fair point; I meant that many efforts were devoted to the industrialization of the country, depriving the agricultural sectors from those – especially regarding resources allocation in brainpower and machinery.

> in many senses that was exactly the consequences of the transfer of control from successful private farmers ("kulaks") to collective farms

I disagree; it seems to me it was the consequences of Stalin's purges profiling at the horizon, and noone – especially among the low-rankers of the party hierarchy – wanting to find themselves on the wrong side of a Nagant for announcing a failure to fill the quotas.

> as if "bad weather" magically disappeared :)

Bad weather is a problem if (i), as you mentioned, the whole incentives for production are screwed up, and (ii) the agricultural infrastructure of the country is miles behind the state of the art. Imperial Russia was still relying mostly on human work for agricultural tasks in the 1910's, and 1930's USSR was miles behind 1950's-1980's USSR w.r.t. agronomical methods & knowledge, equipment, irrigation, mechanization, etc.

So if bad weather would only be an inconvenience more recent USSR, it would become a compounding factor for a generalized famine in 1932.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31471067 (I clarified here that a cartel of Haitians of German origin controlled the ports which added up to 80% of Haitian trade)

> The author of this post feels the NYT glossed over the facts in order to paint a narrative.

It also omits the incredible amount of wealth stolen by the Duvalier regime

Which happened 5-7 decades later.

And which was not visited upon Haiti from some higher plane; but rather, was structurally enabled by the events of 1915.

I think the most important point is that addressing inequality in this way feeds into the lie that exploitation is zero sum and those who benefited from it must now sacrifice to balance the scales.

In truth, inequality makes everyone poorer, because we share the same world, and we all suffer when opportunity is hoarded. The richest often live the worst lives trying to maintain their advantages. Consider Putin spending decades obsessing over television news.

Addressing inequality isn’t about punishing those who benefitted unfairly, it’s about making the world better for everyone.

“But these projects are trying assign greater moral weight by claiming exaggerated economic consequences. But these claims can weaken the morality of the original crime. Take slavery as an example. Many journalists and even some historians claim that American economic prosperity would have been unattainable without slavery. If you truly believe that, and you look at the billions of lives that have been lifted out of poverty thanks to this prosperity, then a callous calculus could conclude that the abuses of slavery were a cost we had to pay. But economists do not believe this claim. In fact, economists believe at best slavery did not provide any growth benefits over free labor and at worst it impeded America's economic development. To me, this is a much stronger moral claim because not only was slavery terrible, it was unnecessary.”

> The author of this post feels the NYT glossed over the facts in order to paint a narrative.

They must be new on planet earth.

It is not even about right or wrong. The question is, what does the NYT narrative serve? Is it anti-french? The last time the U.S. had an official anti-French attitude was before the invasion of Iraq. Perhaps they are trying to give the French Globalists something to browbeat against the French Nationalists.

>The question is, what does the NYT narrative serve? Is it anti-french?

It serves the same narrative as a long Reddit comment waxing on and off about the America's imperialism in South America. While it's technically true, I think it just makes the writer feel more intellectual while being morally superior to some powerful status quo. These ideas travel from serious intellectuals, to pop-sci nerds, to reddit comments then ultimately to mainstream.

Not to say that they are wrong, I'm just saying I don't think there's some nefarious conspiracy (not to say they don't exist), but this could be just a case of a writer making a name from himself.

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