The Heart of the Beast

Of all the illegal and dishonest misadventures that the Bush administration got away with, the least criticized of all might be the 2004 overthrow of Haiti's democratically- elected government.

Peter Hallward's new book is a welcome corrective to the false impressions and historical amnesia about Haiti afflicting most of the English-speaking world. Jonathan Kozol called it, "A brilliant politically sophisticated and morally infuriating work on a shameful piece of very recent history that the U.S. press has either distorted or ignored. The most important and devastating book I've read on American betrayal of democracy in one of the most tormented nations in the world."

Hallward, a UK-based philosophy professor, was teaching a course in 2003, which involved daily reading of Le Monde and other newspapers when he noted a systematic demon-ization of President Aristide and his Lavalas movement. He subsequently wrote one of the best articles about the 2004 coup ("Option Zero in Haiti," New Left Review 27, May-June 2004) shortly after it happened. Ever since, he seems to have been collecting information for a bill of indictment against the U.S., France, and Canada, the coup's principle backers. In the process he has also put together a damning critique of liberals and self-described radicals who either through intellectual laziness or lack of cross-class solidarity accepted Bush-approved PR on Haiti.

In his research, Hallward used mostly public sources. He appears to have read everything written about Haiti in the past ten years, as well as much earlier work. Interviews with principles—ranging from Aristide to several key coup players, and both pro- and anti-Aristide figures—buttress his scholarship. Hallward puts the country's recent violence in the context of 200 years of "great power" hostility toward Haitian sovereignty, beginning with the 1804 revolution, the only successful slave revolt in world history.

Hallward excels at showing the means by which Haiti's ultra-rich minority worked hand in glove with right-wingers in Washington and Paris to create a case for "regime change." After the first U.S.-backed coup against Aristide in 1991, when public opinion in the U.S. was still largely sympathetic to Lavalas, Hallward notes, "Jesse Helms spoke for much of the US political establishment when on 20 October 1993 he denounced Aristide as a ‘psychopath and grave human rights abuser.'" But "neither Helms nor anyone else could pin a single political killing on the 1991 [Aristide] administration. In the run up to the second coup, incomparably more insistent versions of the same charge would resurface at every turn."

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# posted by Crooked : 6:45 PM