<a href="https://archive.ph/YRcLr" rel="nofollow">https://archive.ph/YRcLr</a>
Hard to see how this could be solved, outside of Haiti being "lucky" enough to get one gang leader who defeats the others and tries to establish a stable government.<p>A serious international intervention is basically a non-starter. Rich countries would be accused of colonialism and sharply criticized for any mistake, other countries in the region don't have the money or force capability, and nobody has a real motivation to pursue such a thankless task. If I remember right, Haitians themselves are pretty iffy on even wanting security provided by foreigners (due to history).
Western countries are fundamentally confused about how democracy works, and they actively harm developing countries in their ignorance. Democracy in modern Europe was preceded by centuries of "the divine right of kings." European countries had functional <i>states</i> long before they had democracies.<p>But the west today tries to build democracy in countries that lack any state to begin with (e.g. Afghanistan) or in countries where they have destroyed the state (Iraq, Syria). They hassle or intervene in developing countries with authoritarian governments (e.g. Bangladesh, Philippines, etc.) while overlooking their own histories.
Democracy in its current form of universal suffrage has only existed for a relatively short period of time and has a very different character to the long histories of democracies which had restricted suffrage.
I wonder if there's a cultural element to it: do people support democratic processes in their families, neighborhoods, companies, etc? If not, I imagine it might be hard to top-down enforce democracy.
There's definitely a cultural element to it! Many of my family members--college educated people from Bangladesh, many of them living for decades in Canada and Australia--have been celebrating the overthrow of the democratically elected government in Bangladesh. The result of that was replacing a somewhat authoritarian, but legitimately elected and quite popular,[1] government with a military-backed government nobody elected,[2].<p>Democracy doesn't come from reading books, it starts with what parents say to their small children. I'm a Bangladeshi married to a founding stock American. My wife was steeped in democracy from the beginning. As a kid, she attended mainline Protestant churches run by elected members of the congregation, and her dad participated in local government and civic organizations. This is so different from the relationship Bangladeshis have with their communities.<p>[1] About 70% approval according to one western organization's polling from 2023: <a href="https://www.cfr.org/blog/new-bangladesh-survey-hasina-remains-popular-opposition-support-and-public-discontent-are" rel="nofollow">https://www.cfr.org/blog/new-bangladesh-survey-hasina-remain...</a>.<p>[2] <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/02/05/bangladesh-interim-government-protests-reform-hasina/" rel="nofollow">https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/02/05/bangladesh-interim-gove...</a>
> I wonder if there's a cultural element to it: do people support democratic processes in their families, neighborhoods, companies, etc?<p>I don’t think that’s right - although some on the left have advocated “industrial democracy” or “workplace democracy”, it has by and large failed to take off - many democratic countries it doesn’t really exist (beyond rare exceptions), and even those which have some semblance of it (e.g. works councils in the EU) it is in practice rather toothless, comparable to the powerless “advisory” legislatures established by some Middle Eastern monarchies<p>Families don’t function democratically-the parents negotiate things between themselves and the children don’t really have a choice in it until they get old enough to leave the family home and fend for themselves.<p>My neighbourhood isn’t a democracy - yes we have an elected local government but it covers a much larger population and territory than just our neighbourhood. Even if one’s neighbourhood has something like a “homeowners association”, that’s usually timocratic (government by property owners) not democratic (government by the people) since renters don’t get to vote, adult dependents of homeowners don’t get to vote, a couple may jointly own a home but they get only one vote not two, some wealthy person owns five homes so they get five votes, etc (and sometimes even weighted voting, so rather than one property one vote, more expensive properties may give you more votes than cheaper ones)
While I agree that many organizations, families, and communities don't have strict direct, one-person-one-vote democracies, I do think countries that have more democratic governance tend to have behaviors that are more involved and participatory and not strictly top-down command-and-control hierarchies.<p>For example:<p>> Families don’t function democratically-the parents negotiate things between themselves and the children don’t really have a choice in it until they get old enough to leave the family home and fend for themselves.<p>Not all families operate this way. If a family is choosing where to go eat dinner, sometimes the father (or mother) always makes a decision and no one else gets to choose. Sometimes the father and mother negotiate. Sometimes the kids are the ones who almost always make the decision. Sometimes the parents consult the kids and have a group discussion and decision. Sometimes there's actually a vote amongst all family members and majority rules.<p>I believe a similar pattern happens in communities. Maybe a little less so in companies, as they tend to be the most top-down structures I think in even the most democratic societies, and yet even there, I think there are culturally varying levels of involvement in the decision making process.
Support for democratic institutions and the rule of law has gone down in USA thanks to the MAGA movement. Is that cultural?
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No, it's not, it's a weakness of democracy, otherwise you can 'democratically' enable any act, including aborting democracy. There have to be guardrails.
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Yes, like sustaining democracy. I'm not a moral relativist, and don't condone allowing democracy to be wielded against itself. Nor would I tell the truth to an axe-wielding murderer asking me for directions, pace Kant. There is no grand philosophical paradox here; you just have to apply some commonsense.<p>Would you be okay living in a democracy whose majority voted to harm you?
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Taxation is not theft, it is an obligation of living in a civilized society. Without a government funded by taxes, your country won't even be long for this world. Another country that has its act together will take over yours and you'll be having this philosophical debate from the comfort of your new country.
I'm not trying to debate the merits of various government. We're just discussing definitions.<p>It you take my property via threat of violence (coercion), that is thievery. School children understand this. So I'm sure you do as well. Taxes aren't voluntary and if you do not pay them, you will be jailed. If you resist being jailed, you will be violently detained. If you respond with violence in kind, you will be killed.<p>I don't care if you think that the ends justify the means. We're just discussing definitions.
> It you take my property via threat of violence (coercion), that is thievery. School children understand this. So I'm sure you do as well. Taxes aren't voluntary and if you do not pay them, you will be jailed.<p>If your landlord demands you pay your rent, is that thievery? Because that’s essentially what tax is<p>I own a house. I bought it off someone else who bought it off someone else who… go back 40-50 years ago, a property developer bought a farm and subdivided it… and the farmer bought it from another farmer who bought it from another farmer… and it all goes back to this massive farm which was subdivided into smaller farms… and that massive farm was originally a government land grant… and before that the government owned it… and the government got it by stealing the land from the indigenous people<p>The government land grant was made subject to the condition that the recipient paid taxes. And since you can’t give better title than you have, the same condition passes on to all subsequent purchasers. If the government has no right to my taxes, then I have no right to my house<p>If taxation is theft, then property is too. But if property is theft, then calling taxation “theft” is like a small time crook complaining a bigger crook robbed them
You're heavily indoctrinated by the State. There's no way I'm undoing all the damage they've done to you in a comment thread on a message board, so I'm not going to try. But I will plant this seed and maybe you'll take it upon yourself to dig out of the hole in which you currently are buried.<p>When the first ape walked upright, which government was there to tell them what land they could have?
property doesn't even exist without government
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I don't think so; democracy can mean many things. I don't live in, or want to live in a direct democracy, if that's what you're thinking of: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Types_of_democracy" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Types_of_democracy</a>
Democracy only works if there is a shared belief in things like upholding the rule of law, respecting the separation of powers, not using government power for political purposes, etc. Without those shared beliefs democracy can fall apart quickly. After all, Hitler was elected democratically.
You have to admit, the track record for international intervention is extremely spotty. When was the last time that a rich country went into a poor country, for non-self-serving motivations, and fixed most big issues? I freely admit that I'm not a good student of history, but I can't actually think of one.
> for non-self-serving motivations<p>That's a gotcha if I've ever seen one. Why would self serving motivations be a disqualifier? Not to mention, you can basically argue that it's always self serving motivations no matter what.<p>That said, yeah things are more likely to go badly than to go well. Nation building is hard; the allies were able to reform Japan and (West) Germany because while they had evil states, the states were at least functioning. It seems easier to improve governments morally than functionally.
Germany and Japan had highly functional states for centuries--in the case of Japan, over a millennium--before the allies installed democracy. Not only that, those places had <i>cultures</i> that had long internalized administration and rule of law even if people couldn't vote on those systems.
Germany as a single state emerged only at the second half of XIX. You may argue that those multitude of German states which existed before still count, but how more functional each of them were compared to e.g. Khmer Kingdom is an open question. What is 'functional' to begin with? I probably would agree that there should be some sort of pre-requisite for a working democracy, but your theory of a 'functional state' (at least as I can derive it from your commentaries) feels a bit too raw so far
Functional means it has some form of bureaucracy that can collect taxes from the population and use that to do state things, usually provide for the defense of that population against internal and external threats. The actual system of government is irrelevant and in many cases the state itself survives even radical political change. What matters is whether it has the resources to actually exert authority.<p>Haiti lost its functional state when the French colonialists fled en masse after the 1804 massacre. Due to racism, they were the only ones allowed in administrative positions in the bureaucracy so when they left Haiti, it was left with no one qualified to run the state apparatus. Since the population were transplanted slaves, they had no tribal traditions to fall back on. Without a continuity of bureaucracy it was left hobbled to this day. Since the state can’t afford to police the population, these gangs fill the void because they can use force to collect taxes (in the broadest sense because usually this takes the form of business shakedowns and roadblocks that they use to extract money from the population).
Unified Germany was a direct outgrowth of the Prussian state, which was an efficient, centralized modern state. Most of Germany was also within the holy roman empire, which had a sophisticated government with an elective monarchy (though the electors were a handful of princes).<p>Of course German elements of democracy goes back to pre-Christian times: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thing_(assembly)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thing_(assembly)</a>
Thanks for the answer, but we haven't moved anywhere. Prussian state became a 'modern' (to its time) state not long before. HRE wasn't a state at all, and I'm not sure one can really call an assembly of princes 'a sophisticated government'. It didn't have direct power over anything for the most time of its existence, and to tbomk never had functional executive bureaucracy. Pre-Christian Germanic 'ting' is as irrelevant to the problem of modern representative democracy as qurultay (which existed arguably for longer periods, but most Turkic countries are not democracies). Practically all significant tribes had a period when heads of clans had their gatherings to reduce amount of internal violence. Long story short there's a tradition (starting from Marx, if I'm not mistaken) to call it 'military democracy', but once you look at it closer, it's a clear case of misnomer. In addition, I dare to say, centralization doesn't really correlate with democracy.
What? This is totally ahistorical. The Meiji era (the beginnings of what we might call a modern Japanese state) didn't start until 1868. Before that, Japan was feudal with wars happening all the time. Quoting from Wikipedia about the infamously-chaotic Sengoku period in the 1400s [1], which was just one of <i>many</i> turbulent times prior to the Meiji period:<p>> The period saw a breakdown in the traditional master-servant relationship between a lord and his vassals, with many instances of vassals rebelling against their lords, internal dynastic conflict over lordships within noble families (in which vassals would take sides), and the installation of figurehead lords by cadet branches of noble families.[3] The period was also marked by the loosening of samurai culture, with people born into other social strata sometimes making a name for themselves as warriors and thus becoming samurai.<p>> [W]eariness of war, socioeconomic unrest and poor treatment by aristocrats provoked the wrath of the peasant class. Farmers, craftsmen, merchants and even villages would organize uprisings (known as "ikki") against the ruling class. An extraordinary example is the Kaga Rebellion, in which the local ikki had staged a large-scale revolt with the support of the True Pure Land sect (thereby establishing the term ikkō ikki) and assumed control of the entire province of Kaga.<p>Whatever post-Heian, pre-Meiji Japan was, it was not an orderly, harmonious society.<p>[1]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sengoku_period" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sengoku_period</a>
Rayiner is using the word “state” in a subtly different manner than you are. You’re talking about concrete polities, but he’s talking about the state apparatus which generally survives between republics, dynasties, and even empires. It’s the bureaucracy (in a broad sense) used by the feudal lords to collect taxes, raise retinues, etc. that was transformed into the modern state. Tax collectors that are familiar with how much everyone owns in an area, agronomists who are familiar with farming and irrigation techniques suited for the area, judges or local chiefs that have the trust and authority to settle disputes, recordkeepers and their records, that kind of thing. After a revolution or conquest, any of these people that survive are usually recruited to help run the new state, just under new instructions from up top.
On the contrary, there ended up being not much continuity between pre-Meiji Japan and Meiji Japan--the daimyo's domains were replaced with prefectures and the daimyo themselves were largely forcibly retired. This was intentional on the part of the Meiji oligarchy, in order to prevent the daimyo from retaining enough power to be able to rebel [1]. The Meiji Restoration was an enormous change in Japan's government, really from top to bottom.<p>[1]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolition_of_the_han_system" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolition_of_the_han_system</a>
The abolition of the han system is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. The majority of daimyos first became government employees, eventually becoming the governors of the prefectures, responsible for their administration with funding from the central state. The Meiji government even paid stipends so that the daimyos could pay their former samurais to disarm. The subsequent reforms (which took years) did transform the state away from the hereditary system but there was a continuity in the administrative apparatus. Likewise when the US occupied Japan after WWII it kept much of that apparatus and slowly reformed it further.<p>Contrast that with Haiti where the vast majority of Haitians weren’t allowed to hold administrative positions in the colonial government so when the remnants of the French bureaucrats fled after the 1804 massacre, Haiti was left with very few people who knew how to run any part of the government. They were left with post offices but without anyone with the experience to actually run a postal system. No officers capable of training and disciplining a police force or military. And so on. They had to build up their bureaucracy entirely from scratch which is an incredibly hard thing to do and usually turns into situations like in Haiti, as opposed to outcomes like Japan where the state isn’t violently wiped clean. It’s hard to overstate how big a roll that continuity plays when a new polity forms in its success or failure.
I didn’t say it was an orderly, harmonious society. I said it had a highly functional centralized state. Which it did: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edo_period" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edo_period</a>.
Feudalism is the literal opposite of a highly functional centralized state! And you said 1,000 years, which extends well before the Edo period, even if you consider the Edo period a centralized state (which I would not--the establishment of a centralized state is what characterized the Meiji Restoration).
I think that Edo was centralized to a similar degree as medieval England - not that it necessarily had a central bureaucracy that we'd associate with a modern state (although I believe in actuality that the samurai-staffed bureaucracy in Edo was on a similar level to contemporary states in Europe, if not as sophisticated as China), but that it was never under any serious doubt that one government had legitimacy to rule over the entire country. There were no daimyo, as far as I know, that ruled territories that the Edo government struggled to control, after the foundation of the Tokugawa Shogunate. By contrast, France had powerful independent duchies until at least the 1500s.
Yeah, that's basically what I'm saying. Building a state/civic society is extremely hard and generally takes a long time to sink in. In contrast, taking an existing evil state and making it less-evil seems a lot easier, as you can see with Japan and Germany.
Japan had a limited democracy where only tax-paying males could vote until their prime minister got assassinated. Way before WWII.
You’ve made the requirements impossible to satisfy when you added “non-self-serving motivations”. The world is relatively small and disasters have ripple effects. Almost any action a country takes will either help or hurt them. Since the people in charge will mostly try to take actions that help their country, they look self serving now.<p>A sibling comment mentioned the Australian intervention in East Timor. I can easily dismiss that by saying “well the Australians have a vested interest in a stable neighbourhood. They’re just self pricks looking out for themselves”. This statement would be technically correct but also pretty meaningless in this discussion.
Taiwan, Philippines, Egypt, South Korea. Arguably India, but there was so much bad mixed with the good.<p>The Caribbean is a special case though where there are lots of miraculous turnarounds because tourism is so lucrative.
What are these examples? Taiwan and South Korea could be argued that Japanese colonialism and authoritarian states are the reason they are successful today. Philippines was an important Spanish trade colony for a few hundred years. None of these were non self serving. As for Egypt are you talking about the Ptolmaics?
> South Korea<p>The West supported an brutal military dictatorship in South Korea for decades. South Korean democracy is the result of internal struggle by the South Korean people.
> The West supported an brutal military dictatorship in South Korea for decades. South Korean democracy is the result of internal struggle by the South Korean people.<p>I mean, the US was a huge supporter of Suharto in Indonesia as the "less bad" option to the thread of communism, and Mubarak in Egypt as an alternative to the worse option of a Islamic Brotherhood run state, or possibly something even more deeply Soviet aligned. I don't think there is any "lesser evil" warlord to pick in Haiti right now and prop up above any of the others.
Arguably some self-serving motivations can be good. Again, look at Japan and West Germany. It was very self-serving for the US/West, but in a good way: they wanted strong states as allies, so they made sure to fund, protect, and rebuild those societies, even though they had recently finished an extremely terrible war with those countries. This is different from the blatant colonialism/exploitation that was more typical in earlier decades and centuries.
You have to have <i>some</i> self-serving motivation to make it worthwhile.<p>If you're just intervening because you're charitable and nice, then things will be mismanaged and messed up.<p>Like the UN peacekeepers raping and spreading cholera in Haiti.
Big issues are by nature hard to fix, but perhaps major UN peacekeeping efforts count, like Rwanda or Kosovo?
UK intervention in Sierra Leone in 2000.
Aus intervention in East Timor.
> A serious international intervention is basically a non-starter.<p>Yes because Haiti already has plenty of examples of the United States and other first world countries intervening, and it made things worse.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Claude_Duvalier" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Claude_Duvalier</a>
To me the core lesson here is the incredible value of stable political and economic institutions.<p>(even after adjusting for the incredible injustice of all the external actors, and nature itself).<p>If you are lucky enough to get such a stable system, it's a high priority to defend it. Don't weaken it for marginal improvements for your cause.
that was more or less Jared Diamond's take in his book "Collapse". Both countries have struggled historically but the DR made better decisions when it came to environment conservation, which can be seen as a product of having more stable institutions
You're burying the lede, which is that "stable political and economic institutions" are that way because of <i>the people</i>. Not just the people in the institutions, but the people served by the institutions. Try reading the constitutions of some of these dysfunctional places sometime--there's nothing wrong with the words on the paper.<p>So your point about whether "you are lucky enough to get such a stable system" is inaccurate. It's not luck. People created those systems. You can even see how that processed happened, deliberately, in recent history in places like Singapore.
The US is on their <i>second republic</i> because the articles of confederation failed, and is looking down the barrel of a second dissolution as we speak. France is on their <i>fifth republic</i>, because <i>the previous four republics failed</i>. If France’s latest success is due to their people, wouldn’t that contradict their previous failures?<p>Sure, the people have an outsized influence on the success of a nation, but the institutions also shape the people and empower some people over others. Can you imagine how much differently the US would look if it wasn’t founded on slavery and oppression? If women didnt have to wait 150 years to vote? If we didn’t institutionalize a gerrymanderable legislative system?<p>The institutions matter AND people matter, but bad institutions empower terrible people.
> France is on their fifth republic, because the previous four republics failed.<p>I don’t think that is really fair on France - many of those failures were due to defeats in war - for example, the Third Republic didn’t “fail”, it was conquered by Nazi Germany - and when it was liberated, the French decided to take the opportunity to rewrite their constitution, but I think that was a choice rather than something they were forced into.<p>And the Fifth Republic was engineered by de Gaulle given the opportunity of the 1958 coup attempt. If de Gaulle had unexpectedly died of a heart attack in 1957, the Fourth Republic might have survived. Probably the 1958 coup attempt would still have occurred even absent de Gaulle - but neither its success nor failure would have <i>necessitated</i> a rewrite of the constitution (as opposed to maybe just some tweaks), although certainly it could have resulted in one. Even de Gaulle <i>didn’t have to</i> rewrite the constitution, he decided he wanted to and was handed the opportunity to get what he wanted, but maybe in some alternative timeline he didn’t feel as strongly about that and so the constitutional rewrite never happened<p>Why didn’t the American Civil War result in a rewrite of the US constitution? Probably because the Union had a clear and convincing victory. If the Union had lost, or if the war had turned into a stalemate, much greater odds the US constitution would not have survived it - a less-defeated Confederacy might have negotiated reintegration into the Union subject to a constitutional rewrite; if the Confederacy had won and retained its independence, the Union might well have decided to write a new constitution in response.
> The US is on their second republic because the articles of confederation failed, and is looking down the barrel of a second dissolution as we speak.<p>The US constitutional system has arguably been reconstituted at least 3 times (in order of plausibility): US Civil War and Reconstruction amendments, FDR and New Deal, LBJ and Civil Rights Act of 1964. The latter two were not even primarily accomplished via formal Constitutional amendment, just a reinterpretation of what the Constitution allowed and compelled. What makes Trump different than those? Just the fact that, unlike the first three, it's more right-wing than progressive?<p>I’m not saying that whatever is happening now is necessarily good, but will it lead to the collapse of the US Constitution?
> and is looking down the barrel of a second dissolution as we speak.<p>Where is there evidence of this?
Singapore didn’t have any democracy for decades. You can’t build a nation and a democracy at the same time.<p>You need the benevolent dictator, then the stability, then the slow introduction of government by the people over decades.
Sure, there were people who created those systems, but most didn't really get a choice in how it happened. Singapore seems like a pretty good example of that, too?
What about the people in the DR are/were fundamentally different from the people in Haiti? and why did these people change so dramatically around 1960?
It's hard to create a stable state when the US, England, and France have spent well over a hundred years actively undermining your country.<p>The first half of Behind The Bastard's episode on Baby Doc has a pretty good summary: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTEEokXizd8" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTEEokXizd8</a>
Relevant: TIL that Haiti has had 23 constitutions since 1801, with the most recent being enacted in 2012. At least two have declared the country to be an empire. <<a href="https://np.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3t5wzt/til_that_haiti_has_had_23_constitutions_since/" rel="nofollow">https://np.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3t5wzt/til_th...</a>>
This is called conservatism. It also shows that Trump and his court are not conservatives at all.
Hispaniola is the most excellent way to remove environmental factors explanations.
There are uncomfortable truths in the world, and Haiti's story is one of them.<p>After the slaves revolted and gained independence in 1804, the state was embargoed. Haiti's first president, Alexandre Pétion, offered paying the value of the lost <i>land</i> to the French government.<p>Simultaneously, they reached out to the British and offered favorable trade terms to them. But a slave revolt was seen as untenable at the time and the British agreed to allow France to pursue "whatever means possible, including that of arms, to recover Saint-Domingue and to subdue the inhabitants of that colony."<p>Around the same time, Haiti tried to ally itself with the US, offering its ports + favorable trade. The US also sided with the French against the former slave colony.<p>Facing military invasion, in 1825, they agreed to pay indemnity for the value of the slaves lost by the French government for a total of 150 million francs. As they couldn't pay the amount in lump sum, Haiti was forced to enter into unfavorable loans with the United States and France to pay the slavery debt. Around 80%+ of GDP was used to pay foreign debt<p><pre><code> By the late 1800s, eighty percent of Haiti's wealth was being used to pay foreign debt; France was the highest collector, followed by the German Empire and the United States
</code></pre>
Non-payment wasn't an option. In 1903, Haiti accused the capital institutions France had set up for debt extraction within Haiti of fraud. That threat led a coalition of private entities who owned the bonds, working with the US State Department, to use the US military to invade the former state. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_occupation_of_Haiti" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_occupation_of_Ha...</a><p>Haiti didn't pay off its debts until 1947. For reference, Joe Biden was 5 years old when Haiti finally paid off this slavery debt.<p>As the overwhelming majority of the state's economic output was sapped by this debt, Haiti lacked the ability to invest in itself until the end of WW2.<p>Post-WW2, Haiti went through decades of political turmoil and never achieved political stability.<p>Haiti's present cannot be judged without the weight of this past. And it's future cannot be charted without accounting for it.<p>Of course, the place that was invaded at the drop of a hat and deprived of resources never learned to build civil institutions and non-corrupt governance. Fixing this probably requires a lot of close study to develop very specific interventions to change Haiti's culture and help it prosper.
You omitted perhaps the most uncomfortable truth: CIA political intervention and USA investment in the Dominican Republic. Whether its legal or not, this helped and this is contrary to the standard view of USA involvement in the Caribbean and Middle and South America.
I'm glad that finally someone pointed this out. Debt slavery for a country that dared to fight back.
thank you so much for this, it is surprising that i have never heard this part of history. the big mighty France, the land of "Liberty, equality, fraternity", could be so cruel, so stingy. it breaks my heart to hear the story like this....
No paywall:
<a href="https://archive.is/DkjIV" rel="nofollow">https://archive.is/DkjIV</a>
I follow this guy <a href="https://www.instagram.com/sean_haiti" rel="nofollow">https://www.instagram.com/sean_haiti</a><p>I'm in the DR right now and some locals are worried about the violence in Constanza spreading but most are just going about their lives. The DR is the least stressful country int he world after all.
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