It seems like we've intervened and helped numerous times, and every time we hand the place back to the Haitian people, we have to intervene again soon after.
I keep saying that if you want us to fix it, it's our territory once we've done so.
Otherwise we gain nothing but grief from it.
I also add that if you don't want us owning when we're done, then don't expect us to fix it.
Just think of how the same the middle east would be if we'd never spent any blood or treasure there.
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Not to put too fine a point on it, but if you traded the population of Haiti with the rural white population of any state in the Union, at the end of a year all the trash in Haiti would have been picked up and placed in landfills, the sewage problem would have been resolved, the crime would be minimal, and steps taken to reforest the country and begin agricultural restoration. Meanwhile, the Haitians would be well on the way to turning their new home into a 3rd world shithole and would be demanding handouts and reparations from the US government.
ReplyDeleteLIke the Somalians in Minnesota?
DeleteVery like. Minneapolis used to be a city I'd have loved to live in. These days, not so much.
DeleteSadly, part of the reason that Haiti is a horrible place is it was a French colony. The French treated their colonies worse than most of the other colonial powers. They didn't make a lot of investments in infrastructure like good roads, railways, education, power, phones, etc. And they didn't install good local governments. Their colonial governments were done largely remotely and were generally systematically corrupt. But worse, they ripped out and took back home everything they could when they pulled out. The Spanish weren't great to their colonies either, but better than the French -- witness the other half of Hispanola, the Dominican Republic, is a $#!+#013, but significantly less than Haiti. The Brits and Dutch generally did a little better, and it's the reason why for the most part if you look at their former colonies they tend to be (slightly) less disfunctional. India for example, Britain built a fairly decent rail and educational system, albeit still taxed by the massive population there. South Africa was a pretty modern country up until the vestiges of Dutch colonial control went away and they've gone downhill.
ReplyDelete-swj
None of the "sugar islands" of the Caribbean were exactly treated well. Slavery there was rough enough to make Simon Legree turn Abolitionist. And in Haiti, the French were kicked out in 1804, after an absolutely cataclysmic slave rebellion, which the Frogs had brought on themselves. There wasn't much wealth about in Haiti afterward---the rebelling slaves had destroyed almost everything. They've also had almost nothing but misrule afterwards. About the only time Haiti had a government that actually did any good was when it was under the control of the US Marine Corps, after Woodrow Wilson blew his stack at the latest excesses and sent the USMC in to kick asses, take names and make things work or else. The Haitian elites hated it for various reasons, but the ordinary peasants loved it because for the first time, they had some security from bandits, terror and endless pointless revolutions.
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