Two hundred years after declaring independence and being the first in this hemisphere to end slavery of Africans, Haiti has absolutely nothing to celebrate. Its history has been total chaos — assassinations, military coups, invasion and occupation of Santo Domingo, a long line of leaders as emperors and lifetime dictators, and continuous abject poverty. How can this be?


Haitians were indoctrinated by Spanish and most notably the French — let alone memory of their ruthless tribal culture. Had they the English culture of constitutional law, things might have been different, despite Britain’s siding with France to break the back of the liberation for the sake of continuing profitable slavery. There were no true founding fathers educated by the English and Classic studies. Haiti’s leaders knew only the tyranny and reign of terror of the French and simply institutionalized terror and Hobbesian power of sovereignty. Even after twenty years of US Marines’ occupation, initiated by Wilson, the tiny country returned to a series of military junta , ending in the corrupt and brutal dictatorship of Duvalier, one of the worst terrorists in the history of the hemisphere. The lesson here is that revolutions do not give power to the people, but rather the transition of one set of criminals to another.


The American Revolution was not a revolution at all — admittedly revolutionary — but it kept in place the stalwart culture of Britain’s aristocracy, with important modifications, in order to avoid mobocracy, and preempted what later the French Revolution proved. Moreover, the young nation was primarily agrarian which meant that most of the commoners were occupied by their land and sense of pride to own a piece of the country and with untold opportunity to expand to other virgin territories. That the founding fathers did not include the slaves in its theme was not oversight but a deliberate thrust to protect the infrastructure of the South — could they have had a crystal ball and looked into the slave rebellion of Saint Dominique and its negative results?


This is not to say that slavery is condoned; rather, the point is that any people under authoritarianism that denies the natural expanse of the human mind, find under freedom total confusion, mobocracy and are susceptible to the power play of the brute Leviathan, if it is not guided by an a priori sense of freedom under law of justice conceived by a rational consortium.


Copyright © 2004 Richard R. Kennedy All rights reserved. Revised: January 4, 2004.