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Message: <blockquote data-quote="rickyb" data-source="post: 3656703" data-attributes="member: 56035">..."his reference to Napoleon’s savage assault on Haiti , leaving it in ruins, in order to prevent the crime of liberation in the world’s richest colony, the source of much of France ‘s wealth. But perhaps that undertaking too satisfies the fundamental criterion of benevolence: it was supported by the United States , which was naturally outraged and frightened by “the first nation in the world to argue the case of universal freedom for all humankind, revealing the limited definition of freedom adopted by the French and American revolutions.” So Haitian historian Patrick Bellegarde-Smith writes, accurately describing the terror in the slave state next door, which was not relieved even when Haiti ‘s successful liberation struggle, at enormous cost, opened the way to the expansion to the West by compelling Napoleon to accept the Louisiana Purchase . The US continued to do what it could to strangle Haiti, even supporting France’s insistence that Haiti pay a huge indemnity for the crime of liberating itself, a burden it has never escaped – and France, of course, dismisses with elegant disdain Haiti’s request, recently under Aristide, that it at least repay the indemnity, forgetting the responsibilities that a civilized society would accept.The basic contours of what led to the current tragedy are pretty clear. Just beginning with the 1990 election of Aristide (far too narrow a time frame), Washington was appalled by the election of a populist candidate with a grass-roots constituency just as it had been appalled by the prospect of the hemisphere’s first free country on its doorstep two centuries earlier. Washington ‘s traditional allies in Haiti naturally agreed. “The fear of democracy exists, by definitional necessity, in elite groups who monopolize economic and political power,” Bellegarde-Smith observes in his perceptive history of Haiti ; whether in Haiti or the US or anywhere else.</blockquote>

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