DURING THE NIGHT of August 22, 1791 , a wave of fire engulfed the French West Indies colony of St. Domingue (present-day Haiti), as hundreds of thousands of slaves set fire to plantations, torched cities, and massacred a terrified white population. The slave rebellion that started that night--the most successful slave rebellion in history-- lasted 12 long years. It culminated in the founding of the second independent nation in the Western Hemisphere and its first black-governed republic.
Over the past ten days much has been written about Haiti’s troubled past, the ramifications and causes of it’s crushing poverty and political instability, and the historical role many nations have played in perpetuating it’s suffering.
Of course coupled with these lessons in colonial, and post-colonial geo-political history have been the expected wingnut assertions like those of Pat Robinson about Haiti’s “pack with the devil”
But now, thanks to Mark Krikorian, of the Center for Immigration Studies, a far-right “think tank” opposed to immigration, we get this little tidbit of neo-colonial/white-man’s burden analysis of why Haiti remains the poorest nation in the hemisphere:
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