"Haitians have been punished ever since for claiming their freedom", Tracy Kidder and Peter Hallward on Haiti

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5/12/2010
How the hell did it happen? - Daniel Okrent on how Prohibition democratized drinking and made the income tax possible

1/16/2010
"Haitians have been punished ever since for claiming their freedom", Tracy Kidder and Peter Hallward on Haiti

8/8/2009
Daniel Ellsberg on the 64th Aniversary of Hiroshima Day

6/22/2009
J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye Inspires Possible Swedish Copycat

6/13/2009
Ralph Nader on master woodworker Sam Maloof, 1916 - 2009

11/23/2008
Haruki Murakami on running and dreaming

11/6/2008
Predicting the quality of a Barack Obama presidency by his ability with the pen

10/29/2008
Paul Auster on writing and his latest novel, Man in the Dark

9/16/2008
Jane Ciabattari on White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson

8/6/2008
Ammon Shea on Reading the OED

2/2/2008
20th-century art and literary history landmark, André Breton's Surrealist Manifesto, on the block

10/14/2007
Edmund Wilson published in the Library of America

9/22/2007
Lawrence Ferlinghetti on the beat generation poets

9/7/2007
David Leavitt on his latest book, The Indian Clerk

8/12/2007
Poet and Novelist Taslima Nasrin attacked

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1984 is the definitive book of the 20th century

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Judy Blume on why she wrote her controversial young adult novel, Forever

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On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain - Edward Said's farwell book

5/10/2007
Flannery O'Connor letters to be unsealed

4/11/2007
First English Dictionary back in print

3/18/2007
Susan Sontag on the moral superiority of the novel

2/25/2007
Jewish Book Week

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The Grapes of Wrath sets new world record

2/17/2007
Janet Maslin analyses the Dan Brown formula:

2/14/2007
Arundhati Roy to return to fiction

2/2/2007
Norman Mailer's new book on Hitler, Castle in the Forest, sparks criticism

2/1/2007
France to allow sequel to Victor Hugo's Les Miserables

11/27/2006
Tribute to R K Narayan on his 100th birth anniversary

11/17/2006
Competition for new monument to great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam in Moscow

11/16/2006
'Tea leaves thwart those who court catastrophe, designing futures where nothing will occur.' -- New Sylvia Plath poem discovered.

10/27/2006
Daniel Stashower reanimates Edgar Allan Poe murder mystery

10/23/2006
Memorial to be unveiled for first African American novelist Harriet Wilson

10/21/2006
New edition of 10 volume Encyclopedia of Popular Music edited by Colin Larkin

6/20/2006
'It's going to be scandalous. This would tickle my husband. It would crack him up.' Widow donates Charles Bukowski's literary estate to Huntington Library

5/28/2006
'My identity is Israel.' Celebrated Israeli novelist A.B.Yehoshua provokes U.S. Jews

5/14/2006
The Best Work of American Fiction in the past 25 years

4/12/2006
Exodus from the National Theatre? David Hare follows Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard

3/28/2006
Voices from the dead. Philip Larkin speaks again.

3/25/2006
Beatrix Potter a la Renee Zellweger

3/23/2006
Not for export. Miguel de Unamuno's manuscripts off limits to foreign buyers

3/10/2006
Daughter breaks silence on father Bernard Malamud

2/26/2006
'Paul Auster Day' to be celebrated at the Brooklyn Academy of Music

2/21/2006
Philospher Daniel C. Dennett reverse engineers religion

1/26/2006
Turkey drops criminal charges against best-selling author Orhan Pamuk

1/16/2010 "Haitians have been punished ever since for claiming their freedom", Tracy Kidder and Peter Hallward on Haiti

Haiti is a country created by former slaves, kidnapped West Africans, who, in 1804, when slavery still flourished in the United States and the Caribbean, threw off their cruel French masters and created their own republic. Haitians have been punished ever since for claiming their freedom: by the French who, in the 1820s, demanded and received payment from the Haitians for the slave colony, impoverishing the country for years to come; by an often brutal American occupation from 1915 to 1934; by indigenous misrule that the American government aided and abetted. - from the New York Times, Country Without a Net, by Tracy Kidder.

The noble "international community" which is currently scrambling to send its "humanitarian aid" to Haiti is largely responsible for the extent of the suffering it now aims to reduce. Ever since the US invaded and occupied the country in 1915, every serious political attempt to allow Haiti's people to move (in former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide's phrase) "from absolute misery to a dignified poverty" has been violently and deliberately blocked by the US government and some of its allies.

Aristide's own government (elected by some 75% of the electorate) was the latest victim of such interference, when it was overthrown by an internationally sponsored coup in 2004 that killed several thousand people and left much of the population smouldering in resentment. The UN has subsequently maintained a large and enormously expensive stabilisation and pacification force in the country.

Haiti is now a country where, according to the best available study, around 75% of the population "lives on less than $2 per day, and 56% – four and a half million people – live on less than $1 per day". Decades of neoliberal "adjustment" and neo-imperial intervention have robbed its government of any significant capacity to invest in its people or to regulate its economy. Punitive international trade and financial arrangements ensure that such destitution and impotence will remain a structural fact of Haitian life for the foreseeable future.

It is this poverty and powerlessness that account for the full scale of the horror in Port-au-Prince today. Since the late 1970s, relentless neoliberal assault on Haiti's agrarian economy has forced tens of thousands of small farmers into overcrowded urban slums. Although there are no reliable statistics, hundreds of thousands of Port-au-Prince residents now live in desperately sub-standard informal housing, often perched precariously on the side of deforested ravines. The selection of the people living in such places and conditions is itself no more "natural" or accidental than the extent of the injuries they have suffered.

As Brian Concannon, the director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, points out: "Those people got there because they or their parents were intentionally pushed out of the countryside by aid and trade policies specifically designed to create a large captive and therefore exploitable labour force in the cities; by definition they are people who would not be able to afford to build earthquake resistant houses." Meanwhile the city's basic infrastructure – running water, electricity, roads, etc – remains woefully inadequate, often non-existent. The government's ability to mobilise any sort of disaster relief is next to nil. - from the Guardian, Our role in Haiti's plight, by Peter Hallward.

January 17 2010: See also from Common Dreams, Why the US Owes Haiti Billions – The Briefest History by Bill Quigley.

Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment
Peter Hallward
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Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World
Tracy Kidder
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The Uses of Haiti
Paul Farmer
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Haiti, Rising Flames from Burning Ashes: Haiti the Phoenix
Hyppolite Pierre
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The United States Occupation of Haiti, 1915-1934
Hans R. Schmidt
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