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A podcast focusing on issues related to nonviolence, and a member of the Kingdom Outpost.
Welcome back to the Fourth Way podcast. I've lived in Romania for about 6 years now, and I only finally made it to visit Bucharest this last week. I mean, I've been to the airport there before, but I had never really gotten to visit the city. And, honestly, I didn't care all that much about visiting Bucharest. It's not like Paris where they have the Louvre or Napoleon's tomb, the Eiffel Tower, or other awesome things like that.
Derek Kreider:As far as architecture goes, the city is pretty, of course, but it's not like Madrid or Barcelona or these other really beautiful places that you think of. Bucharest is just a big city with crazy drivers and cold people, just like most other big cities in the world. It just so happens to
Derek Kreider:be situated in Eastern Europe. But a
Derek Kreider:few days ago, we took my wife's parents back to the Bucharest airport, and we decided to stay a few days to see a little bit of the city. The main event for us would be to visit the Palace of Parliament, otherwise known as the people's house or the people's palace. Now I wouldn't be surprised if nobody here has ever heard of this place. I hadn't until I moved to Romania, but I have to say that this place was worth the price of admission. I've been to other castles and palaces before.
Derek Kreider:I visited Versailles when I was in, like, 6th grade. I remember the palace there was impressive, and the gardens were especially magnificent. But the People's Palace, it just blew my mind. The palace is the heaviest building in the world and the 2nd largest administrative building in the world. There are plenty of other buildings that cover a larger surface area or have
Derek Kreider:a greater volume, but a
Derek Kreider:lot of those places are like warehouses or airplane factories where there's a lot of open and empty space. The Palace of Parliament covers a good bit of surface area and has a good amount of volume, and all of that space is actually filled up with stuff. The palace has over 3,000 rooms and more than 28 100 chandeliers. And I don't just mean tiny chandeliers either. Like, all the chandeliers I saw were pretty big, and one of them that I saw was mind blowingly big.
Derek Kreider:It was situated in one of the first halls that we saw. The guide said that it was so large that they had planned a unique way for it to be cleaned. In the middle of the chandelier, there was a room big enough for 4 small people to stand inside and clean the chandelier. A chandelier with a room inside it big enough to hold 4 people. That's just insane and made a real crystal, mind you.
Derek Kreider:We saw 600 pound curtains. We saw a several ton carpet, velvet, satin, and silk drapes inlaid with real gold, and, of course, marble galore, which is in part what makes the building so massive. Now if you look at the building from the outside, it certainly looks big, but it honestly doesn't look nearly as impressive as the stats declare. That's partly because there's a good portion of the building that's underground. There's supposedly 8 underground levels, including a nuclear bunker, as well as 20 kilometers of tunnels.
Derek Kreider:In fact, if you go to YouTube and you look up Top Gear, you can watch an episode where they actually race their cars in the tunnels underneath the people's palace. The whole time I was walking to the palace, I held on to 2 conflicting emotions. One emotion was a feeling of awe at the size and splendor of this amazing feat of architecture. The other emotion was one of disgust and anger. This building estimated to have cost around 4 or being worth €4,000,000,000 in today's money, was built at a time when many of the people were starving or, you know, malnourished and and hungry.
Derek Kreider:And while the palace cost an estimated 6,000,000 for utilities, like electricity and heating, many of the people during the time the palace was being built went without heat and had to deal with scheduled electrical blackouts. Money was not only being diverted from being spent on the people or infrastructure, but it was also being taken directly from them in the form of taxes to build a palace that was ironically or cruelly called the people's palace. How many of the people, I wondered, were ever served in their palace or had the opportunity to eat and sleep there? Calling the palace the People's Palace is, of course, some pretty overt propaganda, but it wasn't the only piece of propaganda I observed while touring the palace. Early on in the tour, we were introduced to a painting that hung on the wall, a painting by artist Sabine Balasha, which I'll link in the show notes.
Derek Kreider:But the painting is entitled Apotheosa, and it depicts the masses of people ascending up into heaven to be united with God. Next to this painting is another one by Bellascha. In that painting, 2 people, a man and a woman, are depicted as flying against the background of the blue sky, along with the dove who's accompanying them. The imagery is similar to another painting by Bellagio, who was dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu's right hand painter. And in this painting entitled, Nicolae Chi Elena Ceausescu, we can see the dictator and his wife in the foreground while masses of happy people are in the background, and droves are flying around.
Derek Kreider:All this floaty imagery, the happiness, the serene blue backgrounds, they're all characteristic of Bellas' work. And there's another work besides Apotheosa in which a man, a woman, and a dove are all flying up to the heavens against the blue background,
Derek Kreider:of course. I can't for the
Derek Kreider:life of me find the name of this painting or the year in which it was made, unfortunately, but I do have a picture of it, which I'll link in the notes. And the point is that the the foremost painter of Ceausescu's dictatorial reign was someone who created propaganda. He created images of a happy, contented, provided for people, and he did so using images and terms of the divine, terms like apotheosa or apotheosis. The whole consolidation of wealth and glory was awe inspiring.
Derek Kreider:Yet I knew that this divine palace came at the expense of the people that it was supposedly for. Wealth was consolidated in the palace, but misery was consolidated everywhere else. It would be
Derek Kreider:a whole lot of fun right now to spend the rest of this episode looking at the obvious propaganda and atrocities of communist dictators, but you probably already know that that's not where we're headed. We've spent our season going deeper and deeper into the weeds, so we're not about to jump out now. We're ready to see some large scale, hard to see propaganda. So get your weed whackers ready because here we go. I told you earlier that there were a number of measures for building size and that the People's Palace weighs in as the heaviest building in the world.
Derek Kreider:But in terms of square footage, there is one other administrative building that ranks higher. Any guesses?
Derek Kreider:That building is the Pentagon. Now
Derek Kreider:while the Pentagon building is estimated to be only a quarter of the cost of the People's Palace, close to a $1,000,000,000,000 passes through their hands every single year. I guess an optimist might argue that at least the Pentagon gets used to do stuff rather than sit mostly empty like the people's palace does, but it seems a bit ominous that the largest administrative building in the world is used to plan war. And less than 3 miles away at the US Capitol building, there is housed a similar painting to Bellacha's apotheosa. It is a mural entitled the apotheosis of Washington. In the picture, Washington or mural, huge mural, Washington is depicted as having risen unto the gods, perhaps to become one.
Derek Kreider:Washington becoming divine. Now if Washington doesn't suit your fancy, you can hop over to the Lincoln Memorial instead, which is halfway between the Pentagon and the Capitol. At the Lincoln Memorial, you can find a larger than life statue of Lincoln upon whose statue is written, quote, in this temple, as in the hearts of the people for whom he saved, the union, the memory of Abraham Lincoln is enshrined forever.
Derek Kreider:This temple, people he saved, enshrined forever. And not merely enshrined in a temple. He's enshrined as a savior. Wow. A giant statue of the people's savior enshrined in a temple.
Derek Kreider:Interesting. Now see, it's not just Eastern Communist blocs that fleece the people and spend exorbitantly. It's not just these ignorant and blind communists who can't see through obvious propaganda
Derek Kreider:and corruption. It's us too. We have our propaganda, our myths.
Derek Kreider:But what's in a myth? A myth by any other name our countrymen would give it is called history. Myth, or what's often called history, is a phenomenal tool for attacking injustice. Injustice, of course, is something that a nation can't survive very long with. It can't harbor it for long without consequence.
Derek Kreider:It's something that the Bible rails against, and it's a grave sin for which Israel is sent into exile and Sodom and Gomorrah condemned. The book of James talks about unjust labor practices and heaps judgment upon those who engage in such things. Injustice doesn't sit well with the people, and the people consent to be governed or not. But a populace who demands justice will not be a populist that can be fleeced and coerced, and divvying out true justice doesn't allow for buildings like the people's palace or the Pentagon to be built. It's in this way that myth or pseudo history comes in handy.
Derek Kreider:What is myth but false justice? It's bark without bite. It's the narrative of justice without the effects of it. When you steal from the people to build a $4,000,000,000 building, the Palace of Parliament or the People's Palace, and then hire armed guards to keep all the people out, That's not very just. But if you call
Derek Kreider:it the people's palace, that myth might give them pride about this building that they built for their nation. When you elevate Washington to the status of divine and praise his fight for some ethereal notion of freedom that was withheld from the colonists, well, Washington could have done just about any other evil, and we'd forget about it. And that's exactly what we do. Forget that Washington rebelled against the government for a tax rate that's a pittance of what we pay today. Forget that Washington was a self interested land speculator, which the revolution provided with the ability to keep his lands and obtain more from potential westward expansion that had been prohibited under the British government.
Derek Kreider:Forget Washington's extirpation of lands from the Native Americans. Forget Washington's slave holding. Forget Washington's bemoaning of a weak central government when he sought to put down Shays' Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion, 2 tax rebellions which made Washington guilty of the same supposed sins he fought against
Derek Kreider:the in the revolution. Forget. Yes. That's what we do. Forget.
Derek Kreider:But forgetfulness is most assured when it has a placeholder. Myth.
Derek Kreider:Forgetting is kind of like trying not to have the YMCA song stuck in your head now that I've mentioned the YMCA song. It's there now, and you can't really do anything about it. The same thing holds for facts. You can't just forget things that have happened, but your memory can push those thoughts further and further to the side as you're inundated with other ideas, with more thoughts, with more facts or myths. The myth of Washington is large, and it's large because it has to be in order to cover over the injustices.
Derek Kreider:And, of course, this is true elsewhere with other leaders or nations or anything. I mean, Abraham Lincoln is a prime example. He's enshrined in a temple as our nation's savior, yet he never sought to save the slaves. He wanted to preserve the union. The Emancipation Proclamation only freed slaves in rebel states.
Derek Kreider:I mean, he was very clearly not some leader looking to free everyone, though I'm thankful he made a lot of headway there. So he's not the greatest hero, but he's also not just the most horrendous guy you can think of. Why is the mythology surrounding him so big then? It's big because racism is one of America's greatest sins. If we can elevate Lincoln and the Civil War as this great celebration of freedom for the slaves, as this day the North fought so hard to bring about and that Lincoln championed, something that we actually obtained, it's kinda tangible, in 18/65.
Derek Kreider:And racism and oppression ceased then. Look at what we
Derek Kreider:did. America. That's freedom. There's that freedom again. But this myth covers over so much evil and so much sin.
Derek Kreider:It covers
Derek Kreider:over the KKK, the lynchings in the North as as well as the South, covers over fiber firebombings and unjust housing practices, covers over vagrancy laws and convict leasing, covers over sharecropping and de facto slavery, It covers over anti miscegenation laws. It covers over police brutality and an unjust criminal system and criminal legislation. It covers over redlining, Superfund sites, and minority communities, and inequities in schooling. Slavery may have been ended, de jure, but de facto slavery and horrendous suppression and its results continue even through today. But it's easy to look the other way when it comes to racial injustice because one's eye is drawn more to the temples of the gods than it is to the oppressed languishing in the streets.
Derek Kreider:Look to Washington, the divine, or to Lincoln, the savior. Don't avert your eyes the other way.
Derek Kreider:Don't peer behind the curtain. If you do catch a glimpse, you'll find myth pulling the levers of what you have,
Derek Kreider:up until now, called history.
Derek Kreider:Today's episode is going to be dealing with a lot of history, which means that we'll be dealing with a lot of myths. And not just myths of the good kind, you know, like elevating leaders as gods. We'll also see how myths are used to to play up the badness of our, or inability of others. It will be important for you to keep this understanding of myth that we've laid out so far, that myth is often a mask for injustice. Before we get into the meat
Derek Kreider:of the episode, I wanna recap and clarify the concept of conspiracy here. What is a conspiracy? There are a
Derek Kreider:lot of ways that we could define what a conspiracy is, and really, it can be something extremely simple that we go with. I mean, if you listened to my interview with Robert Meeropol, you know that his parents were executed for conspiracy to commit espionage. They were murdered by the state, the United States, for supposedly thinking about and planning to spy. That's conspiracy. 2 or more people secretly planning to do something illegal or nefarious.
Derek Kreider:A conspiracy is generally thought of as a small group of people who work together to accomplish something through secret means. But there are a lot of questions that arise from this. How small is a small group of people? If 49.9% of people plan to do something nefarious, is it still a conspiracy because they're conspiring without the knowledge of the majority? Can we add or take away members from this group and it still be the same conspiracy?
Derek Kreider:Can the conspiracy be handed off across generations to new members? That's sort of like a ship of Theseus question here. Right? Must there be ill intent for it to be conspiracy, or is the conspiracy determined by outcome regardless of intent? All these questions are going to come into play in today's episode, and I don't really plan on answering most of them.
Derek Kreider:The conspiracy that I'm putting forward today might be something you don't really consider a conspiracy, depending on how you define it. I'm gonna be taking, a look at a conspiracy that involves many actors across several centuries with changing methods and objectives and with different intents. And I'm okay if you wanna disagree with my categorization of this as conspiracy. That's fine. My goal in this season has been to get larger and more complex as we go along to show you how muddled the waters get while simultaneously giving you the tools to wade through the mud.
Derek Kreider:So I guess there's no time like the present. Let's jump into the episode. Let's wade in the water. The famous Negro spiritual song, Wade in the Water, is uncomfortably beautiful, depending on what tradition you listen to. The song has a note of happy expectation, and there's also a feeling you get of longing and sadness.
Derek Kreider:That expectation and longing are, I think, wrapped up in the line, God's gonna trouble the water. If you know your Bible, there might
Derek Kreider:be any number of images that come into your mind. You might
Derek Kreider:initially think of the New Testament pool of Siloam, where the man who was paralyzed for decades waited for the angel of the Lord to come and stir up the waters so that he might be healed. Perhaps you think of Naaman dipping in and disturbing the river to cure his leprosy. Probably, most obviously, you'll think of Moses leading Israel to the reed sea and God parting the waters for them to move towards the promised land. I think the Moses line of thinking fits best here because Moses and the promised land were such common themes for those who were enslaved. Wherever there is oppression and injustice, God will trouble the waters.
Derek Kreider:Babylon the great, the oppressor of all, will eventually fall. It may take 400 years, but the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice, as Doctor. King once said, quoting Theodore Parker. If we were to search the globe for troubled waters, we'd find plenty of them. But for this series, I wanna focus on the troubled waters of what many consider the 2nd independent state in the Western Hemisphere, securing its independence 20 years after the United States secured her independence with the ending of the revolutionary war.
Derek Kreider:Now that's quite a legacy to have, and it seems like such a history of independence would sow seeds of greatness that would grow and bloom over time. But such has not been
Derek Kreider:the case with the island nation of Haiti. Haiti has
Derek Kreider:a long and complicated history, most of which I'm not really gonna get into, some of which I'll probably get wrong, and a lot of which I'll mispronounce because there's so much French. So please know in advance that you'll want to check out my reading list and my pronunciations. Follow some of the links
Derek Kreider:in the show notes and dig in. And please, please pardon my French.
Derek Kreider:Haiti was one of the first places discovered by Christopher Columbus on his infamous first voyage across the sea. Of course, the islands were inhabited with natives when he got there, but that wouldn't last long with the diseases and injustices brought about by European rule. Within 20 years of contact with Europe, the native population of the Taino people were just a fraction of what they were when Columbus first arrived. The Europeans didn't care too much what happened to the indigenous population, though, save for the fact that this meant they had no laborers to produce the goods, which would make them there and their empire rich. The promise of vast new lands, and fertile ones at that, jump started the transatlantic slave trade, bringing millions of Africans across the ocean to work in the Americas and the Caribbean.
Derek Kreider:In 16/97, the French finally wrested control of Haiti from the Spanish, leaving the Spanish with modern day Dominican Republic, which is, if you don't know your geography, which is actually part of the same island as Haiti. Like, it's the same island, that's just separated by mountain range. Now, at this point in history, the French were at the top of their game. France pumped so many resources into Haiti that the island soon became its most lucrative territory. Haiti was producing so much wealth for the French, coffee, sugar, plumber, that it came to be known as the Pearl of the Antilles.
Derek Kreider:New products to trade could have been good news, added value to the market. However, whenever exorbitant amounts of profit are to be made, it usually comes at a great cost to someone. Now sometimes that's the consumer who pays more than they should for cheap materials, but oftentimes, as is still true today, profits are made on the exploitation of labor. For the enslaved Africans who had been imported to Haiti, this exploitation and abuse was a bitter reality. Not only were they cheaper to replace than to take care of, but in order to deter uprisings and to keep good order, terrible forms of abuse, tortures, and executions were implemented.
Derek Kreider:Horrific and grisly displays of barbarity that won't go, well, in this episode, we don't need to dig into that and be graphic, but things that are well documented, and you can pursue on your own time. Just prior to securing Haiti from the Spanish, the French signed into legislation the Code Noir or what came to be known as the Black Code. In theory, this document limited the injustice to those who were enslaved, but what it really ended up doing was codifying the system of slavery into the very fiber of the nation, making it actually more difficult to excise. It's doubtful how much protection the code noir gave to those who were enslaved. I mean, we know how this kind of thing works in much more modern times.
Derek Kreider:Right? There were laws against murdering and lynching black men and women, but how many juries in the Jim Crow South ever convicted someone on those charges? And right now, the movie Till or Emmett, just came out recently, and and that's that's a prime example. This, this lady who was still alive, at least up until recently, never got charged with with, making up her lies that led to
Derek Kreider:the death of Emmett Till. Nobody gets convicted.
Derek Kreider:Of course, it worked out the same way in Haiti, right, under the in the French Republic because the people who codified the laws were the people who owned the slaves, and the people who owned the slaves were the ones who enforced the laws or had influence over those who did. So when it came to the code noir, there were forced conversions to Christianity, forced baptisms, prohibitions of intermarriage, and all that good stuff, which was actually enforced. But as far as any real protection for the enslaved, not so much. The code noir simply baked slavery deep into the French empire and secured the labor force needed to keep raking in the dough. For 100 years, Haitians struggled under the rule of the French empire.
Derek Kreider:There were slave revolts here and there and occasional poisoning of a plantation owner and their families, but nothing ever seemed to get going, enough to really provide any hope of freedom. But on the evening of August 21, 1791, 232 years ago today, the waters were troubled in Haiti. Slaves rose up and began to kill their masters and their master's families. The uprising spread so quickly and was attempted by so many of the enslaved that it didn't take long for them to gain control of most of the island. The fighting for Haiti would last 13 years.
Derek Kreider:In that time, France would abolish slavery in an attempt to quell the rebellion, of course. Right? But then they reinstituted slavery again only a few years few years later. The Haitians knew that any promises given to them by the by France or whites would not be kept. They had to fight their for their own freedom and could trust no one in that struggle.
Derek Kreider:Eventually, the Haitians won. An enslaved people, a supposedly inferior people of a small island nation, rose up and fought one of the most powerful empires of the time. The Haitian Revolution makes the American Revolution look like a joke. While researching the Haitian Revolution, I wanted so badly to find a revolutionary to latch on to as good. I mean, we talked about Washington already, and, you know, I'm disillusioned with him and and other founding fathers and everything.
Derek Kreider:But Haiti, I had so much hope because of the oppression that was there. I mean, the story is so epic and the bad guys are so bad. It's like watching an anti Nazi movie today. You just don't feel too bad for the Nazis getting pummeled, and you understand a bit of the violent excess that the protagonists tend to divvy out. I sort of feel that way about the Haitian Revolution too.
Derek Kreider:The French, or any imperialists for that matter, were just as bad as the Nazis. Bartolome de las Casas was writing already in the early 1500 about how bad the brutality towards the natives and slaves were in the territories. The tortures and travesties were no less brutal than what occurred under the Nazi regime. And actually, at least it seems to me at times that they were often more evil in the sense that imperialists seem to derive pleasure out of the suffering of their victims. I've read enough Holocaust literature to know that the Nazis weren't gentle executioners.
Derek Kreider:They weren't caring, but their violence often seems a lot more like indifference. Not always, but, a lot of times. They might shoot a prisoner like they would a stray dog without a second thought. They may not care too much about the the suffering of others. They might choose not to, in their minds, waste resources on those that they deemed subhuman.
Derek Kreider:But even Mengele's brutal experiments, as far as I've read, weren't done out of a sadistic desire to bring about pain in victims. He had scientific curiosities and just kind of cold and in a cold and calculated manner, just kind of did them because he thought it might benefit him. He might not have cared too much about the victim's pain, but he didn't pursue the pain of victims for his own enjoyment as much as it seems that the slaveholders seemed to do. The type of thing that imperialists were doing in the Caribbean was just as sadistic as what the Nazis were doing with the added elements that the violence was more often done with an aim towards creating suffering. This added element probably came from the fact that while the Nazis were mostly interested in eradication, imperialists were interested in utilization.
Derek Kreider:It's kind of like a a double objectification of the person. They wanted to maintain a labor force and protect themselves from revolt, which meant that fear and submission were important to them. And those things they thought could be brought about through the infliction of severe pain. Now my point here isn't to have a contest of sufferings between Hitler's Holocaust and
Derek Kreider:the imperialist slave system. Right? The point is more to counter a group of people who tend to, underplay how bad imperialism and
Derek Kreider:the slave system was, where, you know, you have paternalists who are like, well, you know, they they cared for their slaves and all that kind of stuff, and it's just not true. It was atrocious. Imperialists and slaveholders go in the same category as Nazis. If they're not worse, they're at least the same. So the French or any imperialist at this time doesn't garner any sympathy for me.
Derek Kreider:Nevertheless, we've discussed a lot in this series how polarization is often an indication of being propagandized and not viewing the full truth. So I noticed that as I dug into the history of Haiti, this abject hatred that I felt towards imperialists also manifested as absolute affection for the Haitians. In fact, one of the culminating moments in selecting this episode was when I saw Black Panther 2. That was the moment I decided to do this episode because I just started delving into the history of Haiti. I was familiar with this important figure named Toussaint L'Overture.
Derek Kreider:I know I butchered that. Toussaint. Right? Well, the whole Black Panther movie was pretty awesome for a comic book movie anyway that generally don't have any plots. But this, I really liked because it was really anti imperialistic.
Derek Kreider:And I especially loved the complexity of the villain whose cause really resonated with me. And he was a bad guy, but you kinda, in some ways, wanted him to win or understood where he was coming from at least. But at the end of the movie, you discovered that the Black Panther had a son who'd been hidden away in the Caribbean.
Derek Kreider:And what was his son's name? Toussaint. And when they revealed this name, I was ecstatic. I don't think anybody else in that movie theater, especially in the the Romanian movie theater, because they don't really have
Derek Kreider:a Haitian population over here. I was like, nobody else is gonna get that reference, but I got it, and I thought it was brilliant. Brilliant. This anti imperial movie dropped a huge hidden message at the end
Derek Kreider:of the film, and I loved it.
Derek Kreider:Yet as I've done a lot more research on Haiti since then, I've come to recognize that even the heroes are villains themselves. Toussaint's cause may resonate with me, and I may understand why he did what he did, but he made some terribly oppressive decisions. He declared himself ruler for life. He implemented de facto slavery in removing certain rights and implementing certain restrictions in between the the property holding class and and those who had once been slaves enslaved. He betrayed fellow enslaved people in neighboring islands for good standing with some of the non French empires.
Derek Kreider:He mandated that Catholicism be followed. I mean, I'd rather have Toussaint win than any of the imperialists, but Haiti's George Washington is just like the US's George Washington in a lot of ways. He's overshadowed by his own set of compromises and evils. I guess the point of going on that little rabbit trail is that this episode is really about the complexity of motives and actions. Right?
Derek Kreider:I'm not saying that the US is the only bad country, and George Washington, the founding fathers, are terrible people, and all these Haitians and all the oppressed people that we ever talk about are good. Like, that's propaganda. That's not the way that that the world works. And you've got bad people, terrible, horrendous Nazi people fighting other people who do really bad things. And so that's just kind of how it works.
Derek Kreider:You have to be okay with the complexity of of you don't have to be okay with the complexity. You can choose to be propagandized and, and believe simple narratives. Anyway, while I'm going to end up picking on the US a lot, I just want to make sure that you, as a hearer, don't fall into the trap of thinking that I'm simply untangling a narrative and restructuring the good guys and bad guys. There's almost always complexity all around. But since the US has had the power to assert its will in the world and it has had the means to propagandize the world more effectively, my goal in this episode is going to be to focus on uncovering that truth about the US and its propaganda, throughout this episode and, also, because I'm a part of that group, and I believe strongly in internal critique way before, you ever really think about considering
Derek Kreider:outward. So anyway, back to the story of Haiti, sort of, because Haiti began its revolt right in the
Derek Kreider:middle of the French Revolution. So I wanna zoom over to France for just a
Derek Kreider:few minutes here. There's a lot that
Derek Kreider:we could discuss in regard to the French Revolution, the legal system, the Empire, the humanist sentiment carried by some, and a bunch of other things which could all influence our discussion on Haiti. But you can read all about that, listen to resources, whatever. I'm not gonna dig too much into that. I actually wanted to focus on a more off the beaten path, story guy here, a man by the name of Nicolas Condorcet. I'm hopeful that his story will reinforce and expound on some of the concepts that we've discussed this season.
Derek Kreider:But before we get to his story, you need to understand, some basics about the French Revolution that will bring him onto the scene. The French Revolution started fresh on the heels of the American Revolution. Less than a decade after the American Revolution ended, and a year before the last of the 13 colonies ratified the constitution. So the US is still ratifying the constitution when when, France begins its revolution. The revolution was perhaps inspired in part by the American Revolution, and was certainly influenced by the debt that France took on from aiding the Americans in fighting Great Britain.
Derek Kreider:France was in a great deal of debt for a number of reasons and had been having some agricultural difficulty, and all of that came to a head here. A lot of the revolutionaries, or revolutions that were that you can look at throughout history, they revolve around food when there's a lack of it, and money. And the French Revolution was no different. When the masses are having trouble getting food to eat or paying their bills, especially when this is a result of inequity and injustice, they get pretty upset. So King Louis knows that things aren't looking too good for him if he doesn't appease the vast majority of the population.
Derek Kreider:So he calls for a tax that goes against custom and actually requires the aristocracy and nobles to put some skin on the game. Gasp. Yeah. Rich people paying taxes. How dare he?
Derek Kreider:Of course, the rich people are also the ones who are used to having a lot of the power in government, so they're not particularly worried. They've got control of government. Right? They'll just convene the special session of government and make sure that they remain exempt from taxes. The masses don't need their bread, but the rich need their caviar, funded by the taxation of the masses, of course.
Derek Kreider:But to the surprise of the rich, there's a lot more commoner influence in government now than there used to be, and the aristocracy are outnumbered. Not to worry, though, because France's government was modeled just like the UN. You know, you've got a 100 countries that get a vote, but 5, the original nuclear powers, which I guess makes you special, they get to veto what everyone else says. One veto cancels out all the other countries. Well, it was the same thing with France.
Derek Kreider:It didn't matter what all the more numero numerous commoners wanted. Did just didn't matter. The 1% could veto it all. Now a veto of the masses in a revolutionary climate, however, is kind of a death wish. It didn't take long for the aristocracy to recognize that they had to cede ground to the commoners and maybe go without caviar at every meal so that the peasants could have some bread.
Derek Kreider:And that right there, that's what finally clicked for me in regard to the French revolution. See, the American revolution didn't change much at all. If you're an American before the revolution and after, your life didn't change much at all. In fact, if you talk to Daniel Shays or to those involved in the Whiskey Rebellion, they might argue that it was a bit better under the British because they were taxed less. The government functioned the same before and after.
Derek Kreider:Overall, the economic and social lines remained the same after the American Revolution. He just handed power to different rich people. The aristocracy still ran the show immediately following the American Revolution, and they still do. Just look at the education of our presidents since Theodore Roosevelt, and you can see that over half of our presidents since then have attended one of the 8 Ivy League Colleges. Many others have attended prestigious universities like Stanford, Duke, and others.
Derek Kreider:You could look at the net worth of each of the presidents. Less than 20% of our 46 presidents have had a net worth under $1,000,000 adjusted for inflation. Our most recent president before Biden, Donald Trump, eclipsed the net worth of all the other presidents at $3,000,000,000 But the runner-up in net worth is actually our first president, George Washington, coming in at a close to $1,000,000,000 net worth. So as far as revolutions go, the American Revolution wasn't too revolutionary. Power changed hands from 1 aristocrat to another, from 1 taxer to another.
Derek Kreider:The French Revolution, on the other hand, was not just a political revolution, but a social one. The masses were demanding that they gain some equality in their representation. Of course, the Haitian Revolution was like the second type. It was like the French Revolution. It wasn't just seeking for power to change hands, but for society to be reformed.
Derek Kreider:While there were many reasons different individuals and factions chose to support or not support each of these revolutions, there were certainly some who took issue with the social aspect of the revolution. Some Americans refused to support the French Revolution because they viewed a social upheaval as a loss of order. The masses couldn't possibly be able to make appropriate decisions. The United States never lost its class of aristocracy or experts who ran the show. Electoral College is a prime example of this safeguard against the masses.
Derek Kreider:People don't vote for president, but rather for experts who will hopefully represent us in selecting the president that we wanted them to represent us for. The electoral college that picks president, not the people. So the idea of a social revolution for some Americans, it wasn't very pleasant. We have a similar case with the Haitian revolution. The social revolution there was particularly unsavory for slaveholders in the United States.
Derek Kreider:A successful rebellion in Haiti could influence and inspire slaves in the states to revolt, and, in fact, it ended up doing just that. A rebellion known as Gabriel's rebellion had the opportunity of being the largest uprising of its time had it gotten off the ground, but it was hampered by an informant. Gabriel, the mastermind of the insurrection, was inspired in part by the Haitian revolution. So the fears of slaves being influenced by observing the social revolution in Haiti weren't unfounded at all, or the masses of people in
Derek Kreider:the United States being influenced by the French revolution. That that's very conceivable.
Derek Kreider:Both the French and Haitian revolutions were of a different substance than the American revolution, and that they had the potential to impact the the, the new country, the United States. And that history of despising social revolutions by the United States, it continues into today, and it's really important to understand how the United States has just not liked social revolutions from the very get go. In an article written by Noam Chomsky, entitled The Threat of a Good Example, he details how a tiny country like Grenada can be a threat to the US merely by its example of a successful social revolution. It's important to note that by a successful or good example, we don't mean that it's without significant moral problems or that it's an ideal example, that nothing bad happened. What is meant is rather that the example demonstrates a social change where the will of the masses is actually better represented as control is rested out of the aristocracy's hands.
Derek Kreider:Speaking of this idea, the power of a good example, Chomsky writes, quote, the weaker and poorer a country is, the more dangerous it is as an example. If a tiny poor country like Granada can succeed in bringing about a better life for its people, some other place that has more resources will ask, why not us? End quote. Now researching the Haitian revolution then helped me to understand a lot more about US history. It helped me to understand why we weren't all gung ho and helping the French during their revolution, why we didn't like the Haitian revolution, and why we have some of these seemingly random conflicts, coups, and wars with small countries like Granada.
Derek Kreider:Social revolutions are dangerous because the US has never really had one. The same people, or at least the same type of person, has been running the show since the colonial days under Great Britain. Good examples are a threat, not only to the national security, to, to those who hold power, but also on the individual level. One thing that's true of all revolutions, whether social or political, is that it's difficult to find a moderate. You're all in one way, or you're all in the other way.
Derek Kreider:Nobody likes a moderate. If you're on the far right, a moderate looks like they're on the left. If you're on the far left, a moderate looks like they're on the right. So being a moderate means you're fighting on 2 fronts. You're everybody's enemy.
Derek Kreider:Yet every revolution has those who try to allow reason to prevail. They keep their heads, which often means they end up losing them. 1 of those moderates who kept his head in the French Revolution, at least for
Derek Kreider:a little while, was named Nicolas Condorcet.
Derek Kreider:I actually came across his name while reading a book on conspiracy entitled What to Believe Now. Now, Condorcet developed an important theory that we'll get into in a moment, a theory referenced in the book that I was, I just mentioned. But I didn't know anything about the guy until I was actually talking with my cousin. We're having a conversation about how we felt like we were both moderates and just couldn't identify with any of the political polls that that exist now, at least in the states, if not across the world. And, of course, it's usually the moderates who get pummeled on both sides as we've already mentioned.
Derek Kreider:And then I referenced this guy, Condorcet, and his his theorem is what I mentioned to make a point in our discussion. Well, my cousin looked up Condorcet's story, and once you know it, he lost his head in large part because he was more of a moderate. He was revolutionary, but not revolutionary enough for the extreme revolutionaries who took over, and he ended up getting killed by the the extreme end of of his political party. So Condorcet lost his head in the French Revolution exactly because he kept it. Anyway, Condorcet ended up developing this theorem that's extremely helpful in understanding the threat that propaganda poses to democracies and why I think it's easy to argue that an effective moral democracy can't possibly exist.
Derek Kreider:His theory is also going to help us to understand why there's a lot of power in a good example. So Condorcet had this idea known as a jury theorem. It has a number of points, but the main idea is that if you have a group of rational and independent actors, and that word right there is really important, independent, then you'll end up with a greater than 50% chance that a decision based on a large group's vote will result in the best possible decision. The idea is that because people are rational, they have a better than 5050 chance of choosing the right or the best answer. Now if you only have 3 people voting, it's possible that you end up getting 2 Trump's who are either nefarious characters or ignoramuses who get you a bad majority.
Derek Kreider:Just like you could flip a coin 3 times and end up with 2 tails or even 3, and it wouldn't be absolutely crazy to think that that's possible. But the more people you get involved, the more coin flips you have, the more you're gonna approximate to the true mean, which for rational people should be, Condorsi Condorsi thought, higher than 50% to make the good choice. Now you can see this jury theorem in a more real world example when we look at Francis Galton's identification of the wisdom of crowds. Galton attended a farmers fair and had a group of about 800 people guess the weight of a bull when it was butchered. And many of these people were farmers and experts in that kind of thing.
Derek Kreider:So when, he got the results in for a 1,198 pound bull, the mean of the collective was less than 1 pound off of the true weight, and this collective mean was closer to the real weight than to the actual winner. Now this scenario is a little different than the jury theorem as there's less than a 5050 chance of getting the answer right. But all of the actors were independent, making their own decisions without outside influence, and all were rational. They had certain ideas about weight and farm animals and all that kind of stuff. So, collectively, the group was able to do better than the individual at approximating the best answer.
Derek Kreider:There's a very significant wisdom in crowds. But with these caveats, crowd must remain rational and independent. That's exactly where crowds don't remain. Gustave Le Bon, the Frenchman writing a century after the revolution, composed what I think is a brilliant book entitled The Crowd. When I read that book, I expected that it was gonna be dated and cumbersome.
Derek Kreider:It was actually one of the best pieces I've read in regard to propaganda and crowd psychology. Turie had some abrasive views, like the idea that women were much more easily swayed, but overall, it was a very insightful read. Le Bon talks about how easily crowds manipulated and explains that it isn't reason and explanation that will stir a crowd up or calm a crowd down. Rather, it's imagery and key phrases. It's a particular form of speech and presentation.
Derek Kreider:An individual may be rational and independent, but put him or her in a crowd, and they become malleable to what whoever the authority figure is, or as Le Bon puts it, the one with prestige. So a crowd will throw off rationality and that they cling to key ideals and abstracts rather than logical argumentation. They will also throw off independence and that they will look to leading figures in the crowds and follow them. The work of Condorcet and Le Bon have a lot to teach us then in regard to propaganda here. We may adore a democratic form of government for the theoretical good that it could be if Condorcet's ideals held, but Le Bon helps us to see that the masses or the crowds tend to be just like a school of fish or a flock of birds.
Derek Kreider:They move in unison. All the actors may individually move, but they move in response to and in tandem with the others. Understanding how crowds function and how democracy can be controlled by those who know how to properly manipulate people, you can understand more why there are so many abstract, undefined, and assumed ideals used to make a point rather than rational argumentation whenever we get to political debates and commercials and stuff. Just think about how this works in regard to wars and conflicts. We're sending aid to freedom fighters who are fighting terrorists.
Derek Kreider:There's no argument there. Right? You just use words freedom fighters and terrorists. It's just a cut and dry good versus evil. And this was the story of Afghanistan several decades ago when we sent money and weapons to help the Taliban fight off invaders.
Derek Kreider:About 5 to 10 years ago, we assassinated an Iranian general named Soleimani who was giving money and weapons to Iraq to fight the US. Yet Soleimani was a terrorist for doing the exact same thing that the US did in Afghanistan, giving Iraqi freedom fighters assistance in defending their homeland and in part exacting revenge on the US for the destabilizing coup and oppressive dictator that we installed in Iran in the 19 fifties. Yet Soleimani was a a terrorist, not a freedom fighter, like we were when we helped Afghan. Right? Afghanistan.
Derek Kreider:Nobody talked about that. Nobody dealt with the history of Iran and why they hated us. Nobody dealt with the fact that the US were insurgents in Iraq and that by our own definitions, we were terrorists fighting freedom fighters. We just threw out keywords and immediately secured buy in from the masses. In a democracy then, propaganda and groupthink undermine rationality and independence.
Derek Kreider:When you have the vast majority of Americans polarized into 2 competing parties, 2 competing masses, 2 competing crowds, Nobody is thinking for themselves. Therefore, the nation won't come to a rational and good conclusion. They'll come to manufactured conclusions. Because they're able to vote, they'll think they got to choose for themselves. In a sense, everyone in the crowd does choose for themselves just like a fish or a bird each moves independently, but they all move as one as a result of the influence of others on them.
Derek Kreider:With a little background on the French Revolution, Condorcet's Jury Theorem, and Le Bon and the Wisdom of Crowds, let's return to this idea of a good example, and that a good example can be a threat. Even though the events of the French and Haitian revolutions were occurring a 100 years before Le Bon's research on crowds, most people seem to understand how crowds functioned, even if they never really developed a primer on how that worked. They understood that a free black nation who gained their freedom through violence could easily incite the people that they enslaved to be influenced towards violent uprising. And slavers have long relied on the systems of fear, like real fear, to control their slaves. You know, a lot of times today, politicians will use false fears to, or overblown fears to control the masses, but there wasn't any need for slaveholders to restrain their coercion.
Derek Kreider:Their slaves were property by law, and they could do pretty much as they pleased de jure. And, certainly, they could do what they wanted de facto. It didn't matter whether there were laws against excessive abuse or murder of a slave if you knew that you'd never be convicted for such
Derek Kreider:a thing. So terror,
Derek Kreider:real terror, was driven into the enslaved, and being in fear of something that is truly fearful is the only rational response. You do whatever you can do to avoid that which is fearful. Avoid the whip. Avoid the dogs. Survive.
Derek Kreider:The slave response of compliance was the rational response to the system of slavery. Interestingly, most of what Le Bon points out in the crowd is how the crowd can be manipulated for evil and mindless actions. But he does also note several times how the crowd can be moved to do something more heroic and more unimaginable than any individual can. It may be hard to get a single person to run headlong to their grisly death, but it's often much easier to get a whole crowd of soldiers to do so. Charge.
Derek Kreider:Right? The crowd amplifies the bad, but it can also amplify the noble. It can make one irrational unto despicable feats or irrational unto honorable ones. In a system of slavery where real fear was present and rationality declared compliance as the answer for most people, only the thinking of a crowd can incite the enslaved to embrace that which was irrational, rebellion. The Haitian Revolution, merely by being attempted, was enough to inspire the enslaved in the
Derek Kreider:United States. Gabriel's rebellion, which was inspired by
Derek Kreider:the events in Haiti, occurred 4 years before the Haitian independence was ensured. If the mere example of irrational rebellion could inspire the enslaved to rise up even before they knew what the outcome of that rebellion would be, what would a successful example be able to do in showing not only that rebellion was an option, but that it wasn't as irrational as everyone thought? Success was possible. Overall, United States was not too keen on Haiti's success in becoming a good example. There were trade benefits and a and a few other minor positives for the US in regard to Haiti's rebellion, but its threat as a good example was too problematic to embrace the revolution.
Derek Kreider:It didn't take too long for the US to issue an embargo on Haiti, and Haiti was not recognized by the United States as a nation until July of 1862. 18/62. Bravo, president Lincoln. Bravo. Right?
Derek Kreider:Well, the recognition of Haiti came just 2 months before the issuing of the emancipation proclamation, which, by the way, only freed the enslaved in the rebellious states. But, hey, better late than never.
Derek Kreider:Right? Well, at the very same time
Derek Kreider:that Lincoln was recognizing Haiti and drafting the Emancipation Proclamation, he was planning for the colonization of free blacks. Lincoln was not at all someone who adhered to the equality of the races, so his pet idea was that the US would relocate as many freed blacks as they could to other parts of
Derek Kreider:the world. And once you know it, Haiti would serve as a test case for this. On December
Derek Kreider:31, 1862, just 6 months after recognizing Haiti's sovereignty and less than 24 hours until the Emancipation Proclamation went into a full effect, Abraham Lincoln signed a contract to test the colonization of about 450 freed blacks, which were to be sent to a small island just off the coast of Haiti and under the sovereignty of Haiti. The whole colonization thing was a disaster, but the whole case is is really very illuminating. Haiti was recognized at the same time Lincoln and the government knew that they were going to free the vast majority of the enslaved. It no longer mattered if Haiti was a good example, because with the freeing of the enslaved, there would no longer be any threat of good examples for the enslaved. But beyond that, Haiti had become a convenient neighbor.
Derek Kreider:I mean, they're not right next door, but they're conveniently located. If we could recognize their sovereignty and then dump our nation's baggage there so we didn't have to deal with it, why not? Right? Lincoln, when trying to pitch the idea of colonization to a group of free blacks said, quote, your race suffer very greatly, many of them by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence. In a word, we suffer on each side.
Derek Kreider:If this is admitted, it affords a reason, at least, why we should be separated. Poor Lincoln and whites, they were suffering but the presence of blacks. The easy way out for the United States then was to take the labor force, which had been kidnapped from their homes and abused for generations, a force which had brought in so much wealth and now removed them from the very land that they had helped to work in the nation which they had helped to enrich. The United States was now asking the enslaved who had planted the vine and the fig tree not to sit under it. And even worse, they were trying to dump this population with absolutely nothing to their name onto an island nation that was suffering from the lingering effects of empire.
Derek Kreider:A nation that the US only conveniently recognized once their services were needed. And by the way, they recognized them alongside of Liberia, another nation where we sought to send freed blacks. We wanted to give these countries, Liberia and Haiti. We wanted to give them our tired and poor and huddled masses so that we didn't have to deal with them ourselves, these victims that we had created. Speaking of the lingering effects of empire, let's jump back over to Haiti here in 18/63
Derek Kreider:and see what's going on there. Well, it was less than
Derek Kreider:a decade after Haitian independence that King Louis, the 18th defeated Napoleon and regained the throne. And with the throne established, Louis was looking to add to the wealth of Haiti, back into his empire. However, Louis realized that he may be able to accomplish his goal of obtaining wealth in easier way. Thus, over the next decade, France continued to work on negotiations with Haiti for a settlement. A settlement?
Derek Kreider:A settlement for what, you might ask? Well, settlement for all the loss of wealth that the poor slaveholders and imperialists were robbed of by the Haitians. Haiti was struggling for, as a a little island nation who wasn't receiving recognition from the biggest trading players in the game, players which included France and the United States. If the Haitians can negotiate a settlement, then they could at least earn the recognition of France. But on top of this motivation for negotiating a repayment, the Haitians also wanted to avoid the threat of reimposition of slavery and a costly war in both lives and money.
Derek Kreider:And France certainly was threatening them with with, warships off the coast. Right? Agreeing to pay France reparations would avoid potential slavery, war, and bankruptcy. So in 18/25, France agreed, with Haiti that Haiti would pay 150,000,000 francs back to France. An amount 10 times what was paid by the United States for the Louisiana territory.
Derek Kreider:The amount that the Haitians ended up paying eventually was 5 times France's annual budget. The total cost of all the payments, which only ended in 1947, was in 2023 money, approximately $30,000,000,000 Try to wrap your mind around this. France extorted a small island composed of the people that they had kidnapped, enslaved, and tortured to the tune of $30,000,000,000 But, hey, that is par for the imperialist course. It was recently revealed that Great Britain actually made its last slaveholder repayment installment in 2015. Many slaveholding nations compensated the slave owners while rarely compensating those who were once enslaved.
Derek Kreider:The United States, however, largely escapes the scandal because slaveholders were almost universally not compensated for their slaves in
Derek Kreider:the states, but I did say almost. There was one exception. Can you guess?
Derek Kreider:I bet you can. Just pause the episode for a second or 2 and think about it. The United States has never undergone a social revolution.
Derek Kreider:So where might there be a
Derek Kreider:group of people who have power and who don't want, what applies to the rest of society to apply to them?
Derek Kreider:K. You ready?
Derek Kreider:Slaveholders in the District of Columbia were compensated for their slaves. Ding ding ding ding ding. So I don't know if that's actually better or worse than than compensating everyone. Now on the one hand, it's disgusting that slaveholders were compensated at all, but it seems doubly disgusting to me that the, political or aristocratic slaveholders were compensated. Both of those those routes just show a complete disdain for the supposed inhumane act that you just outlawed because you're compensating those that the law now denounces as evil.
Derek Kreider:But only reimbursing the elite does this, plus it shows an inequality and disdain for the non elite. I don't know. I'll have to think about that one a little bit more. Either way, the American Civil War is over, and slavery is pretty much outlawed. Haiti is now recognized on the world stage, and it seems like things are looking up for freed blacks.
Derek Kreider:In fact, in 18/89, Frederick Douglass himself became the US ambassador to Haiti. A black man as an ambassador. That's pretty cool. Right? Well, that's what we call progress.
Derek Kreider:Actually, Douglass was the 4th black ambassador to Haiti. Well, that's really quite a feat now then too. Right? In a time where racist sentiment still persisted in the country, United States was sending black representatives out into the world as the face of the great United States. We finally had some integrity in government.
Derek Kreider:Actually, I I think you all know a little bit better than that. The US was sending black representatives to black nations like Haiti and Liberia because putting forward black representatives was viewed as the best way to grease the wheels of diplomacy with a nation that had been denied sovereignty for over half a century until we really needed them so we could ship our baggage off to them. Nevertheless, Douglass determined to do his best as an ambassador, regardless of of his merely being a political pawn. He thought maybe he could he could fight that and and, you know, uphold America as well as as Haiti and, black people. But it didn't take Douglas too long to, figure out that it was impossible to do his job with any integrity, and he lasted only 20 months on the job.
Derek Kreider:Why? Because his job as an ambassador made him a pawn not only for government, but for the big and influential businesses, which essentially ran the government. When Douglass refused to pressure the Haitian government to accept a potentially economically devastating plan by an influential American capitalist, it sealed his fate as the US ambassador to Haiti. Douglass became a marked man as other businessmen and government officials recognized that Douglass wasn't playing along. This story is worth digging into in more depth, so please go check out the links in the show notes.
Derek Kreider:But I I think the story is important because it highlights 2 vital aspects, concepts that we need to be aware of. First, it highlights the difficulty that oppressed groups have on both the world stage as well as the personal stage represented in both Haiti and Douglass. Haiti, a nation still reeling from tremendous debt and political upheaval at the time, was not in a position to decline governmental and capitalistic advances from nations and businesses that held extreme power. They were extorted by France and in debt to them, and we see in Douglass's story that they ended up paying off businessmen so as not to cross them the wrong way. They wanted recognition by the world, which would hopefully lead to greater opportunity, but they found that they had only received the facade of recognition.
Derek Kreider:There was still injustice and exploitation that was now carried out behind the scenes rather than overtly. The same applied to Douglass on the individual level. It was great in theory that the US was finally putting black persons in representative positions. Of course, Douglass really should have received a more prominent position in government. But, hey, if your people have been oppressed and underrepresented, you accept any form of of advancement that you can get.
Derek Kreider:It's a step forward. Right? Well, Douglass found out that this wasn't really the case. He was placed in a position not where he had power to use his voice and his expertise, but rather in a position where he could be wielded as a tool to exploit those who were, in many ways, more his people than the government who sent him as a representative. The formerly enslaved, liberated, exploited, and despised Haitians were more similar to Douglass than whites in the US.
Derek Kreider:The government and big businesses weren't giving Douglass a chance to advance the cause of his people or people like him. He was being asked to throw off his integrity and become a part of the system of oppression. He was being asked to betray his people and betraying his own humanity. Those in power were using him as a pawn to exploit the very people he was sent to represent, all while giving him the semblance of power and voice. They're asking him to be an Uncle Tom.
Derek Kreider:While it appeared as though progress was being made by appointing black men as ambassadors to Haiti, its appearance of progress was really just exploitation in another form. These covert forms of oppression were beginning to be the operational norm for the US, but the Empire still hadn't thrown off its old violent ways of oppressing. In less than a decade from the termination of Douglass' appointment as ambassador to Haiti, the violence of empire would rear its ugly head again on the world stage with the start of the Spanish American war in 18/98. That war would be an interesting rabbit trail to go down in its own right, but we'll do our best to resist that here. What's important to note is that the United States used the war to snatch up a number of territories from Spain.
Derek Kreider:The US viewed itself as a liberator, yet they were clearly opportunistic colonizers. The acquisition of the Philippines probably shows this the clearest, that when it became clear that the US wasn't going to give the Filipinos independence and the Filipinos fought back, the US waged a war against the people that they came to, quote, liberate and give freedom to. And the US actually enacted a genocide, which killed anywhere from 100 of 1,000 into the low million mark. Their disdain for human life can be seen clearly in a popular marching song of the time, a song set to the music of Tramp Tramp Tramp from the civil war. Or if you grew up like I did in church, it's to the tune of Jesus Loves the Little Children.
Derek Kreider:That tune really makes this song all the more horrendous, when when you hear the lyrics that they were singing in the Philippines. The first verse and chorus say, quote, in that land of dopey dreams, happy peaceful Philippines, where the Bolo man is hiking night and day, where Tagalogs steal and lie, where Americanos die, there you hear the soldiers singing every day. Damn, damn, damn the Filipinos. Cross eyed kakyaqla drones. Underneath our starry flag, civilize them with a crag, and return us to our own beloved homes.
Derek Kreider:End quote. Civilize them with a crag, a gun. Right? Some bullets. That was essentially the sentiment, and there was a lot of, just plain old murder, even instructions to to kill anybody over 10.
Derek Kreider:A whole whole history in and of itself. Right? That happened in the 20th century. Less than half a century away from Hitler, we are we are exterminating people. But, anyway, no.
Derek Kreider:The United States did not have a concern for liberation. We are seeking to extend Empire. Our internal conquest of the Native Americans was largely over with the last battle coming 7 years before the Spanish American war started, the Battle of Wounded Knee at the very end of, of 18 90. Expansion now meant looking outward, and the Spanish American War provided a perfect opportunity to snatch up some prime real estate. The Philippines were a nice addition to our conquest, but we had our eyes on more local territory too.
Derek Kreider:We gained Puerto Rico, which was nice, but what we really had our eye on was Cuba, which was actually where the whole war started in the first place. Coincidentally, where the ship just so happened to blow up in Havana Harbor, giving the US a pretext to take that very lucrative island from Spain? Cuba is actually a place that comes up in US talks a lot when discussing Haiti. Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to James Monroe in 18/23 said, quote, but we have first to ask ourselves a question. Do we wish to acquire to our own Confederacy any one or more of the Spanish provinces?
Derek Kreider:I candidly confess that I have ever looked on Cuba as the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of states. The control which with Florida points, this island would give us over the Gulf of Mexico and the countries in the Isthmus bordering on it, as well as all those whose waters flow into it would fill up the measure of our political well-being. Yet as I am sensible that this can never be obtained even with her own consent, but by war, and as her independence, which is our second interest, and especially her independence of England can be secured without it. I have no hesitation in abandoning my first wish to future chances and accepting its independence with peace and the friendship of England rather than its association at the expense of war and her enmity. End quote.
Derek Kreider:Can we seriously even make a more solid case for US motive on the world stage today? I mean, especially for starting the war with with, Spain to take Cuba, but, I mean, same MO today. Right? Whereas the US didn't want to recognize Haitian independence back then, until we needed them as a colony to transport freed slaves that we didn't want to have to look at. As Lincoln said, we had relations with Cuba from essentially the day that it opened up its doors.
Derek Kreider:It's one thing to recognize the freedom of former slaves who fought for their independence, and another to recognize a slave colony that's still under the subjection of its masters. And that Cuba certainly was. Cuba was actually the second to last country right before Brazil to emancipate its slaves, doing so at the end of 18/86, only two and a half years before the war with the US. So this country that had become a very lucrative sugar producing nation, country which still had a populace used to being under subjection, It was ripe for the picking and beautifully located to complement the growing US empire. But, hey, the the US were probably liberators.
Derek Kreider:Right? They fought for independence and knew what it was like to seek freedom. The US wouldn't colonize. Right? After liberating Cuba, it didn't take too long for the Cubans to not feel too liberated.
Derek Kreider:They eventually asked the American army to leave, but the US wasn't wild about that idea. So a brilliant plan was devised, which would allow the US to appear as though they were liberators who walked away from the new Pearl of the Antilles of their own accord while actually maintaining significant control over it. They developed what came to be known as the Platt Amendment, the conditions upon which they'd leave Cuba and leave Cuba a free Cuba to do exactly as they wished. Well, do as they wished with a few caveats. Listen to some of the provisions of the Platt Amendment.
Derek Kreider:Cuba couldn't let anyone else have military access to the country. Only the US. Right? They basically couldn't make treaties with other nations. Cuba couldn't go into debt.
Derek Kreider:Cuba, the government of Cuba had the consent that the United States could exercise the right to intervene for the preservation of Cuban independence, the maintenance of the government adequate for the protection of life, property, and individual liberty. So, essentially, let the US military run the show if they ever thought that they needed to. The Platt Amendment also ratified and validated all acts done while under US military occupancy. What did we call that with the police? I forget.
Derek Kreider:Or like essentially you can't get, get convicted or anything like no claims against you, something immunity, qualified immunity. I don't know. But yeah, that's essentially what that was, it seems. And then, the to to enable the United States to maintain the independence of Cuba and protect the people thereof, as well as for its own defense, the government of Cuba will sell or lease the United States lands necessary for coaling or naval stations at certain specified points to be agreed upon. Alright.
Derek Kreider:So you have to give you can't give anybody else military territory, but you have to give the US some military land. And, finally, one of the other ones that stood out was, by way of further assurance, the government of Cuba will embody the foregoing provisions in a permanent treaty with the US, just like all of our permanent treaties with
Derek Kreider:the Native Americans. Actually, I I think we defined permanently different here.
Derek Kreider:If you're like me, and you've ever wondered, like, during the the Iraq and, and the war with Afghanistan, and you wondered, where in the world did Guantanamo Bay come from? How does the US have territory in a nation that we've had an active embargo against for half a century? It seems like any treaties we had with them or, like, friendship would be over. Like, why doesn't Cuba have Guantanamo Bay? Well, here's why.
Derek Kreider:Because we swiped it from them when we liberated them, and then we took it essentially by force back when we made them independent. And it's a permanent treaty, and Cuba can't really take it back. Not because they wouldn't, nullify that treaty, but just because the US is who they are, and and are just very powerful.
Derek Kreider:So the US made Cuba independent, or as the US tends to define independence, dependent on us. Again, I'll put links in the
Derek Kreider:show notes because the history of Puerto Rico is also worth going into here, especially in regard to sugar. But Cuba will hopefully at least give you a glimpse of how things played out. With an understanding of what was going on around Haiti, let's zoom back into Haiti in 1915, 25 years after Frederick Douglass left his post as ambassador and 15 years after the Spanish American War. In 1950, the United States invaded Haiti. Why?
Derek Kreider:That is a good question. Of course, there's a standard US answer, which is that we ran to the assistance of our beloved island neighbor out of the abundance and overflow of love that we had for them. Our benevolence compelled us to help. We just so happen to have a bunch of warships and thousands of troops in the vicinity ready to invade. Perhaps that had something to do with the fact that only several months prior, the US literally landed troops in Haiti, walked into its national bank, and stole all the gold towards the end of 1914.
Derek Kreider:We took something like $14,000,000 worth of gold on the pretext that, in today's money, on the pretext that the US thought Haiti might default on the loans that they had faithfully been paying on up to that point. They the US did this at the behest of National Citibank, the bank which today is Citigroup, and the bank which held part of the debt Haiti was paying to France until 1947. But fear not. This was all benevolence in the part of the US. Taking their gold was right.
Derek Kreider:How do I know that? Well, because the state department's website tells me. The site for the office of the historian writes, quote, in 1914, the Wilson administration sent US Marines into Haiti. They removed $500,000 from the Haitian National Bank in December of 1914 for safekeeping in New York, thus giving the United States control
Derek Kreider:of the bank, end quote. Safekeeping. I was worried there for
Derek Kreider:a second that the US were the bad guys again. Only 3 months after United States began to keep Haiti's gold safe in New York, it just so happened to be in the neighborhood when they thought their buddy, Haiti, could use a little bit more help with the elections. You know, because the people had just successfully risen up against a dictator who had just executed a bunch of people, and they got tired of it. So the US Army sets up shop in Haiti because the people, you know, overthrew their violent dictator. And the US decides to do what it what it did so well in Cuba.
Derek Kreider:It decides to help Haiti write a new constitution. And in this constitution, the US included things like giving US total power over Haiti's financial system, authorizing US to create a new Haitian military, and prohibiting Haiti from selling or renting territory to another foreign power. Man, isn't this, like, the exact type of behavior we saw from abusers way back at the beginning of the season? You initiate violence and blame it on the victim, then you isolate them from the outside world by taking their resources and preventing them from having outside relationships. You make them dependent.
Derek Kreider:This is a tactic that the US and the West has gotten very good at. There's a, a really interesting book that you should check out in regard to how this works. It's, it's entitled Confessions of an Economic Hitman. And I don't know if the author is relaying events that actually happened or if it's based, you know, on whatever historical fiction. I don't know.
Derek Kreider:But it purports to be real, and this guy actually has a TED talk too. So you can go hear him chat. But, regardless, the book does a great job of showing you how economic dependence works today and how we're able to put a strangle hold on nations now without actually invading them on flimsy pretexts. It used to be okay to invade on flimsy pretexts. You know, even if everyone knew what you were doing, but it's kind of harder to get away with invasions like that now.
Derek Kreider:It's harder than it used to be. A 100 years ago, invasions only required that there be a tiny conflict where you needed to go and keep the peace right, out of the the goodness of your heart. Today, invasions require that you find or hypothesize weapons of mass destruction. US would remain in Haiti for 19 years, running the show and training the military. This latter role will come back to haunt Haiti over the next century as the US trains soldiers to be cunning and ruthless, two things that wreak havoc on populations when dictators end up coming to power and having control of the military.
Derek Kreider:Perhaps nothing shows the ruthlessness of US fighters more than the execution of one of the rebels who fought against the US invasion, Charlemagne Perrault. I've heard his name said a lot his last name said a bunch of different main, ways, but we're gonna go with Charlemagne. I'll use his first name because, I don't wanna deal with the last one. Plus, Charlemagne is just kind of a cool name. But Charlemagne, he was a resistance fighter who rallied the people and continued to annoy US troops.
Derek Kreider:After a few years of this, the US were able to find someone who helped them to sneak into Charlemagne's camp and executed him. His his, buddy betrayed him. The US hauled his body away and took a picture of his dead body propped up against the door in hopes that this proof that the Haitian rebel was dead would deter others from following him. The picture actually had the opposite effect, causing the Haitian rebels to fortify their commitments against the US thieves and invaders. This famous picture of Charlemagne, which you can easily find with a quick search, has come to be known as the Crucifixion of Charlemagne.
Derek Kreider:A man who, like Jesus, inspired revolutionaries by his death for an ideal. Charlemagne was eventually honored with a place on Haitian currency in 1994, which coincidentally or purposefully coincided with the return of a president, Jean Baptiste Aristide, who the US helped to foment a coup against twice. So Charlemagne definitely still had a place in the heart of many Haitians who recognize their oppressed role on the world stage, But we'll, we'll get to Aristide later. Right now, we're still in the the 19 teens. About the same time Charlemagne is waging a fight against the US invaders, other Haitians are trying to put up a fight in the government through the legal system.
Derek Kreider:The US had drafted a terrible constitution for Haiti in 1915 that began to suck the economic resources out of Haiti in favor of the US government and big business. But in 1917, the Haitian government got enough momentum that they attempted to nullify and rewrite this constitution that was forced upon them. You know, these representatives, these elected officials like this this body of the people said, hey. This is not good for us. However, major general Smedley Butler and the marines barged into the senate and forced the Haitian senate at gunpoint to dissolve.
Derek Kreider:This was one of the many experiences which moved Butler to write his famous book later in life, War is a Racket. A book in which he says, quote, I was
Derek Kreider:a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism, end quote. That he was. He just didn't realize it yet.
Derek Kreider:Just as when Frederick Douglass was ambassador to Haiti, the US continued to seek their own wealth and advancement on the world stage even at the expense of a weak, vulnerable island nation of former slaves and exploited peoples. Maybe it's not really despite Haiti's vulnerability that the Empire struck Haiti. It's actually because of the vulnerability. Sure. There were some conflicts between European powers, but the long term exploitation that that we see in history tended to exist in the most vulnerable places.
Derek Kreider:At the same time, Haiti was being invaded and exploited. The US also invaded Veracruz, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua, putting, pulling similar exploits in several of those places. The United States was setting itself up for the most lucrative century of its short existence. With implied violence being communicated to all of South and Central America, the US made clear by actual violence that they were, they were willing to fight and
Derek Kreider:invade. So US influence began to grow.
Derek Kreider:This influence was extended after World War 2 as the US was directly involved in quite a number of regime changes via coup and a number of clear as well as assumed assassinations of leaders facilitated by the US. The US under Reagan also showed its willingness to engage in huge extended campaigns of terror and human rights violations. As the United States government looked the other way for drug dealers selling crack in the inner cities so that those dealers could fund the violent terrorist group in Nicaragua, the Contras, who Reagan was not legally allowed to divert money to. This is part of the same scandal which precipitated the Iran contra affair in which Reagan sold weapons to a supposed enemy of the US, Iran, in order that he could divert this untracked money where he wanted it to, to the Contras' reign of terror in Nicaragua. The reason for all our murders, torture, fomented coups, invasions, and exploitations were relatively diverse.
Derek Kreider:I mean, primarily, we want power and control, so it really boils down to that. Whether that means money, political advantage, military advantage, or whatever. The US didn't want those it couldn't control, so it ensured that those in power would be under the thumb of the US. If leaders in the Western Hemisphere weren't willing to
Derek Kreider:be put on a leash, then the US would put them down. And this
Derek Kreider:happened to a number of good popularly elected leaders, but one with which I'm most familiar is Salvador Allende of Chile. While Allende was murdered, after he was murdered, the man who took his place was Augusto Pinochet. And and Pinochet was a ruthless dictator, but a dictator backed by the US. He only eventually lost the full backing of the US after he foolishly assassinated a Chilean exile along with a US citizen on US soil by car bomb in Washington DC. That was just foolish.
Derek Kreider:Right? Now there are just some things that the US has to distance themselves from. You know? Thousands of tortured, raped, and murdered foreign peasants or Nicaragua Nicaraguans. No problem.
Derek Kreider:1 US citizen on US soil. Absolutely unacceptable. This is the good old US of a. We undermine democracies we don't like. We subvert the will of the people if it doesn't suit our interests, and we install, train, and support horrendous dictators so long as they'll be our lackeys, our dogs on a leash.
Derek Kreider:Let me give you just one other example of of how you can see this play out. Take a look at Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines. He was a pretty bad dictator who was eventually ousted by the People Power Revolution. He sent the army out of out, and, a 1000000 people literally crowded around the tanks and the soldiers and won the army over with love, I guess. I don't know.
Derek Kreider:Marcos hightailed it out of dodge because he saw the writing on the wall. But where, oh, where was he to go? If the military are against him now, how is he gonna get out of the country? Well, fortunately for Marcos, he had some friends in high places. One of the highest places, actually.
Derek Kreider:Marcos was friends with none other than Ronald Reagan. And he sought to flee the Philippines. And when he did, he boarded a US C 130 bound for Hawaii. He brought with him when he fled to Hawaii, by way of Guam, he brought with him, quote, 22 crates of cash valued at $717,000,000, 300 crates of assorted jewelry with an estimated value of 4,000,000, was, 4,000,000. He brought a bunch of precious gems contained in Pampers diaper boxes, 65 Seiko and Cartier watches, 12 by 4 foot box crammed full of real pearls, 3 foot solid gold statue covered in diamonds and other precious stones, $200,000 in gold bullion, and nearly 1,000,000 in Philippine pesos, and deposit slips to banks in the US, Switzerland, and the Cayman Islands worth $124,000,000, which he all amassed during his dictatorship, end quote.
Derek Kreider:Marcos was a dog who exploited his people, but that didn't matter because of the master who held his leash. His master cleaned him up, tucked him away in a beautiful Hawaiian home, let him take all his stolen money, and issued absolutely zero consequences, Unless you consider island arrest with access to luxurious living and virtually unlimited resources on Hawaii, justice. This is US foreign policy. We put down any dog, especially the nice ones, if they're stray, but we keep the most vicious and rabid ones around so long as they're attached to our leash. A lot of what the US seeks to do on the world stage then is to attach leashes.
Derek Kreider:For as many invasions and coups as we've been a part of, it really is a costly and inconvenient way to do business. It's much easier and less costly to put a dog on a leash than it is to train or replace a dog. There are many ways the US puts leashes on its dictators, but one of the most effective has been through economics. And this isn't at all a new thing. In fact, it's one that
Derek Kreider:the founding fathers explain, quite quite, well. I want you to
Derek Kreider:listen to the words right now of, of Thomas Jefferson as he explains the strategy of economically leashing another. He's not talking about Haiti, but never, nevertheless, same process. Right? It's a pretty lengthy quote. So you might want to change, change your podcast to 1 speed or buckle up.
Derek Kreider:Quote. Our system is to live in perpetual peace with the Indians to cultivate an affectionate attachment from them by everything just and liberal, which we can do for them within the bounds of reason, and by giving them effectual protection against wrongs from our own people. The decrease of gain rendering their subsistence by hunting insufficient, we wish to draw them to agriculture, to spinning and weaving. The latter branches, they take up with great readiness, because they fall to the women who gain by quitting the labors of the field for those which are exercised with indoors. When they withdraw themselves to the culture of a small piece of land, they will perceive how useless to them are their extensive forests, and will be willing to pair them off from time to time in exchange for necessary for their farms and families.
Derek Kreider:To promote this disposition to exchange lands, which they have to spare, and we want for necessaries, which we have to spare and they want, we shall push our trading houses and be glad to see the good and influential individual among them run-in debt. Because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands. At our trading houses too, we mean to sell so low as merely to repay us cost and charges so as neither to lessen or enlarge our capital. This is what private traders cannot do, for they must gain. They will consequently retire from the competition, and we shall thus get clear of this pest without giving offense or umbrage to the Indians.
Derek Kreider:In this way, our settlements will gladly circumscribe and approach the Indians, and they will, in time, either incorporate with us as citizens of the US or remove beyond the Mississippi. The former is certainly the termination of their history, most happy for themselves. But in the whole course of this, it is essential to cultivate their love. As to their fear, we presume that our strength and their weakness is now so visible that they must see we have only to shut our hand to crush them, and that all our liberalities to them proceed from motives of pure humanity only. Should any tribe be foolhardy enough to take them, to take up the hatchet at any time, the seizing of the whole country of that tribe, and driving them across the Mississippi, the only condition of peace, would be an example to others and furtherance of our final consolidation.
Derek Kreider:That quote right there is filled with absolutely so much. You, you should go and read it. I'll try to put it in the show notes or at least the link to it. I mean, paternalism, you know, we know what's best for them. They don't need their forests, just all of these gross things.
Derek Kreider:Well, you know, if, if any one of them takes up a hatchet, then, we'll just have to take their lands to make an example of them to the other other tribes. Right? Giving, giving ourselves a pretext for war, so that we can take lands and all with this air of benevolence. Like we're doing this. They can see our liberalities and like, we love them and we want peace with them.
Derek Kreider:It's like, no, you don't. You want their land. You're going to take it. You, you already gave a pretext for, for taking it in here. If any one of them takes up the hatchet.
Derek Kreider:And on top of that, to get to what we're talking about, you're, you're talking about making them dependent on you by undermining the market, by doing what? Two things, making them go into debt so that that then they're beholden to you and they have to, like, sell you their land or do what you want them to do. Or, the other thing was to to, sell at unfair market values, which I guess they could do if they wanted to sell at cost, but they're the government. They can sell at a loss, or right at cost, and it doesn't hurt them because they can just take more tax money. And so they they undercut the market so that, they put other people out of business.
Derek Kreider:Right? Well, the same thing applies on the the international scale. If we can get a country dependent on us through imports, foreign aid, debt acquisition, or any other number of routes, then we don't have to worry about control. I mentioned a book, Confessions of an Economic Hitman before, and which I really recommend in regard to this. It's it's an interesting look, but he would show how it was his job to go around to vulnerable countries and put an economic leash on them, which made them dependent on the US.
Derek Kreider:And he gives lots of specific examples, which is really helpful. And you can see this leash being put on Haiti as far back as the beginning where the US used recognition or the lack thereof as a bargaining chip, when the US drafted constitutions that put Haiti into its pocket. That sort of thing didn't end when the invasion force left Haiti. US economic policy has been impacting Haiti ever since. It's just one example.
Derek Kreider:Take a look at Haiti's rice. Haiti used to be self sufficient in regard to its agricultural production. And that makes sense because for an island nation to survive, it really needed to be able to produce its own food. However, US economic policies ended up driving the cost of imported rice down, meaning that Haitian rice farmers could no longer make a living. It was actually cheaper to import rice than it was to grow it on the island.
Derek Kreider:How is that possible? Because the US heavily subsidizes its rice, meaning that the imported rice with all the subsidies that the government gave to it was actually significantly cheaper than Haitian rice grown on the island. And that's that's the same sort of thing that happened with Mexico and the South. As a result of of, things like NAFTA and policies kind of, you know, forced onto Mexico and other countries, Mexico is restricted from placing tariffs on certain US products. Great.
Derek Kreider:Free trade. Right? No tariffs. Great. Let's trade across borders and not not mess with the market.
Derek Kreider:Well, it's not really free trade because the products don't have prices which actually reflect their cost. The US can afford to give its farmers huge subsidies, meaning that US imports to Mexico are way cheaper than Mexican products because Mexico can't afford to subsidize its farmers to the same extent that the US does. So US practices of subsidizing their products while drawing other countries into unfair trade agreements that do significant harm to them have resulted in terribly unjust consequences. For Mexico and South Central America, that means many are out of jobs and without food. You know, that immigration crisis that they talk about in the US all the time, and we have all the far right people saying they they shouldn't come in here and take our jobs.
Derek Kreider:Well, guess who took their jobs? Our farmers. Right? Because of the the US government. It's just absolutely unjust.
Derek Kreider:And and this whole crisis or is if not in large part, at least in part, because of the way that the US has exploited other countries for its own self interest. And part of that, the way that we do that is through economics, economic leaching. For Haiti, the results are just as bad, if not worse, since it's a bit more limited in the fact that it's a small island nation. It's kind of locked, trapped in. Right?
Derek Kreider:It's not self sustaining now, and it is the most impoverished nation in the Western Hemisphere by far with, interestingly, Nicaragua coming in second at about double Haiti's GDP. And 2 countries that, we invaded and had a significant hand in in the 20th century, twice, actually both. Well, Haiti, we've invaded several times. Nicaragua, right, with the Contras, and then also back in, like, 1910. And we were there for, like, 20 years.
Derek Kreider:So it's just interesting how that that plays out. Right? And that would be interesting to take a deep dive into that for somebody who might be a historian. So while while Haiti's poverty is bad for Haiti, its dependence on US imports and foreign aid is a benefit for the US. In fact, 26% of Haiti's imports came from the US in 2021, with the Dominican Republic, its neighbor, it's actually on the same island, coming in at 2nd place with about 22%.
Derek Kreider:No other country topped 20%. I think China was at, like, 19, and then most of the others were below 5. So, sure, Haiti doesn't make the US wealthy from its importation of 1,000,000,000 worth of US goods. But we have to remember that a large part of what empires fight for isn't directly economic, but rather idealistic. US recognizes the threat of a good example.
Derek Kreider:And so long as Haiti is on a leash, they can't become a threat because we'll ensure that they don't become a good example. If they're an island nation and they get a quarter of their imports from the US, it might not make the US a whole lot of money, but it gives us a lot of control if Haiti needs us for a quarter of their imports because they're not self sufficient in part because of us. But sometimes the best laid plans don't work, and you have to foment a coup. While the US has fomented coups in many countries to prevent good examples, and we will get to the one in Haiti that that was more recent, maybe the most pertinent example for those of us who are in the US today that that we might be able
Derek Kreider:to understand better comes in the
Derek Kreider:example of Iran. This example is really pertinent to us because not only is it really clear and very representative, but because it's had a significant impact on the world too. Beyond the real world impact, it's also an example which shows us what ideal the US is ultimately fighting against. Sure. The US is fighting against communism or socialism in a sense.
Derek Kreider:That's always put forward as this ideology, which is genocidal and forced upon the people. Right? Perhaps, say, like, Mao's revolution, which murdered many and was forced upon a significant portion of the population through violence. But in Iran, we see that this is a caricature of what the US often ends up fighting. Often, the US fights against an ideal, which is seeking justice.
Derek Kreider:And that's exactly what, in my opinion, was happening in Iran at the end of 19 fifties. You had this, this guy who, Masagdha, I can't say his name. I've heard it pronounced. I know it's not that, but whatever. This guy in Iran who, who gets elected by the people.
Derek Kreider:And he gets into power, but and he's like, look, this system is unjust. You realize, like, in the last 50 years, especially since World War 1, all kinds of Western countries are coming in and, snatching up land, exploiting the system, right? All the disorder that's in there, and then saying, well, you know, we bought this land fair and square. It's ours. So now we can extract all the oil from your land and we get rich off of it and we don't pay your workers anything.
Derek Kreider:And so, the, the popularly elected leader of Iran is like, this is unfair. This is unjust. And so they start to, to to take control as the nation of Iran of Iranian oil so that they can treat their people justly. Well, Great Britain didn't like this, and they're like, oh, we got to do something about this. And so they work together with the United States and eventually foment a coup against a popularly elected a democratically elected dude.
Derek Kreider:They foment a coup. And who gets installed? You get somebody who is a ruthless dictator, who the US helps to, you know, train. They, in in, interrogation techniques and stuff. And so they're they're torturing people.
Derek Kreider:They're they're making people disappear in Iran. You can look at pictures. Sometimes you'll see people on the right who are like, well, look at this picture of Iran before then, you know, in the seventies and, look at the pictures now. It's all these people wearing burqas and stuff. It's like, well, okay.
Derek Kreider:But, you do understand that if you're living in a society that looks really nice, but your your family is disappearing because you say something against the government, you realize that it doesn't really matter how nice your society looks if you're being tortured. Right? If you don't have free speech and those other things. So it was, it was a terrible time and not to mention, the reason that there was a power vacuum for, the Shah and everything for the people who are in now to come into power, the, the extremists, is because the US created the power vacuum. Right?
Derek Kreider:They, they essentially created the circumstances under which the current Iranian, leaders are able to be in power.
Derek Kreider:But that's what the US does. They foment coups. They blame it on something like communism. When
Derek Kreider:in in, reality, oftentimes, it's justice. Not always, but, you know, a lot
Derek Kreider:of times it's it's justice trying
Derek Kreider:to come under the scene, maybe imperfectly, but, they're trying to throw off Western exploitation. And then the US actually ends up installing or supporting dictators who do horrendous, horrendous things and even training their their militaries and stuff. And that's, you know, that's the story of Iran. Why do they hate us? Because we're hateable.
Derek Kreider:Because we should be hated by them. There's no logical reason for them to like us. Alright. But, you know, that was Iran. What about Haiti?
Derek Kreider:Interestingly, Haiti came close to being a good example in the early nineties. At that time, the country had been run by a ruthless family of dictators for for decades, the Duvalier family. The US had been really supportive of the Duvaliers, of their regime, even helping to train the military who would eventually return to Haiti and torture its citizens. All that was, was really common knowledge, and the Duvalier family would, of course, siphon funds off for themselves too. And we knew that.
Derek Kreider:We knew that we were essentially paying the Duvalier family, which kept them on a leash. Right? You you got the guy in control on a leash. You're good to go.
Derek Kreider:So if a few people grow rich at
Derek Kreider:the expense of the masses, as long as they're on leashes, we didn't care. But one day, this this guy, Jean Bertrand Aristide, a religious leader and a liberation theologian, he decided that he'd had enough, and, he was for the poor. He ran against the Duvalier family and won the presidency by an overwhelming majority vote. The US, however, was not a fan of liberation theology. In fact, we trained some other people, who ended up assassinating a bunch of priests throughout South and Central America.
Derek Kreider:I think Oscar Romero was was one of those, you know, assassinated while doing mass. We're good with that kind of thing. Right? We don't like liberation theologians, because they're not on leashes. See, when there's there's one leader who's on a leash, that leader might appear to have a lot of power, but they're manageable by the US.
Derek Kreider:If they get out of line, you can just assassinate them or get a new guy in office. But if someone who truly represents the people comes into office, as we saw with the story of Iran, then when you deal with a leader, you're you're really dealing with the, will of the people, and it's going to be harder to suppress if you let that go on too long. So the people finally recognize that they had power, and they're no longer easy to manipulate. Under Aristide, the the people were recognizing their power, but the US, the leash holder, and the business military elite there, the ones on leashes, didn't like Aristide, of course. He, upset the apple cart.
Derek Kreider:Is that the the phrase? Whatever. He he was knocking tables over like Jesus. Before Aristide could even take office, though, a coup was put into the works, and he had to leave the country. While the US had seemingly won, though, there were such mass protests in the US that Clinton, was forced to help escort Aristide back to power in a military exercise called Operation Uphold Democracy.
Derek Kreider:Talk about virtue sing signaling, hypocrisy. Right? The very people who support a coup and hide behind the bushes wanna take credit for reinstalling democracy. That's okay. If you fail, try again.
Derek Kreider:And the US did. Aristides policies and his calls for France to pay Haiti back for the the billions, tens of 1,000,000,000 in extortion money that the Haitians had to pay them. Those policies weren't very popular with white Westerners. Right? So another coup was enacted in 2004 when Aristide was forced to resign by US soldiers and escorted out of the country into exile.
Derek Kreider:That brings us up to the present on Haiti. There are so many stories, rabbit trails, trains of thought that, I have left out in regard to the story of Haiti. And I really hope you'll check out the links in the show notes, as well as my reading list on Goodreads in regard to this. You should especially check out, the work of Paul, Paul Farmer, who served as a doctor in Haiti for decades. He has a fantastic insight into Haiti's place in the world, and he's also a liberation theologian and carries a beautiful perspective.
Derek Kreider:But for now, we have enough material to work with to talk about the implications for our season on propaganda and conspiracies. First question for us might be, does this whole history of US relations with Haiti really count as a conspiracy? It's not like Jefferson hatched this huge elaborate plan up 200 years ago. It's not 200 years in the making. The history that we've unpacked is filled with a number of separate conspiracies, a number of unjust incidents that weren't really master plans, but rather actions of circumstance and opportunity.
Derek Kreider:At the same time, what do
Derek Kreider:you call it when the history of what the US has done to Haiti and to much of the
Derek Kreider:rest of the world is so clear? Yet nobody seems to know it. Nobody seems to know this history.
Derek Kreider:We are taught that Haitians are poor and dirty, and it's implied that this is because they're lazy or not as industrious. Maybe they're not as smart. Maybe they're sexually promiscuous and immoral. They're unwise. Like we saw, you know, when Haiti was stigmatized during the early days of the AIDS pandemic and kinda blamed for that.
Derek Kreider:The United States isolated Haiti in its early days, sought to exploit Haiti to unload its baggage after the civil war, sought to exploit Haiti for big business under black ambassadors like Douglass, invaded the country and stole their gold, rewrote their constitution to allow foreign corporations to buy land and to give us military rights there, forced Haiti to pay extortion money for its freedom from slavery until 1947, undermine their agricultural self sufficiency through forced economic policies like tariff rates and the subsidization of our farmers, supported ruthless dictators, upheld their regime, and trained their security forces, supported the killing of, or at least looked the other way when people's movements arose under leaders like those who held the liberation theology, and fomented or supported 2 coups against the most popularly elected president in Haiti's history. And that's the short list.
Derek Kreider:A big list, but a
Derek Kreider:short one of the injustices that we've done. The fact that we as Americans can look on Haiti with pity rather than guilt, that we can seek to give charity to them every once in a while when there's an earthquake, rather than give reparations for what we owe them in hopes that we might find some sliver of forgiveness and redemption. What do you call that other than propaganda and conspiracy? A long running conspiracy isn't any less of a conspiracy, and the intent of the conspirators doesn't nullify what it is. For most,
Derek Kreider:it may be a conspiracy of ignorance, but it's a willful ignorance. And when conspiracies reach this level in the bible, when injustice becomes so baked into the system that nobody can see it, or so they say, nobody wants to see it, That's when God troubles the waters. When God sets the slaves free. When pharaoh gets dethroned. When the rich cry out.
Derek Kreider:When the oppressive people who think they're God's people get sent into exile. Maybe I'm waxing biblical here.
Derek Kreider:I mean, the waters haven't been troubled for 100 of years, it seems. But I don't think my sentiments are far off. In fact, many thoughts here are reminiscent of the the founding fathers, who I've already quoted in this episode quite a bit. But listen to the words of Thomas Jefferson on this idea of justice. Quote, and can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God, that they are not to be violated, but by his wrath with his wrath?
Derek Kreider:Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever, that considering numbers, nature, and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune in exchange of situation is among possible events, that it may become probable by supernatural interference. The almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest. End quote. Jefferson recognized, as King recognized and Theodore Parker recognized before him, that the arc of the moral universe is long but bends towards justice. Or in Negro spiritual terms, God is going
Derek Kreider:to trouble the waters. The waters off the coast
Derek Kreider:of Haiti have been troubled by the United States ever since the country's inception. They've been troubled so that we, the Empire, Babylon, could build the wealth and power that would secure our place in the world, But injustice cannot go on forever. God will eventually trouble the waters, and Babylon, the great will fall. When she does, there will be many shouts of joy rising up from the blood of the millions we've afflicted from around the globe, but especially from the place who has for so long been our neighbor, but to whom we have not been a neighbor to. That's all for now.
Derek Kreider:So peace. And because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it. This podcast is a part of the Kingdom Outpost Network. Please check out the links below to find other great podcasts and content related to nonviolence and Kingdom Living.