Haiti's inconvenient truths

[demosincebirth]

By David Ellison
Oakland Tribune
Posted: 02/01/2010 12:00:00 AM PST


THE CALAMITY in Haiti is staggering by any measure, with more than 200,000 presumed dead, and five times that number homeless.

It appears as if fate were conspiring against the hemisphere's already poorest nation.

For teachers in the United States, however, Haiti's devastating earthquake provides a unique and important "teachable moment."

First, a history lesson: In 1791, inspired by the American and French revolutions, Toussaint L'Ouverture led an uprising of black slaves in the French colony of what is now Haiti.

Unfortunately for him, Napoleon and Thomas Jefferson believed liberty was a privilege reserved only for whites, and that a country of free blacks was just too frightening to contemplate.

Napoleon sent huge armies against L'Ouverture, while Jefferson was only too eager to help: "Nothing will be easier than to furnish your army and fleet with everything to reduce Toussaint to starvation."

About 100,000 blacks died to foil this Napoleon-Jefferson cabal, and to create an independent Haiti. (Compare with the 25,000 colonists who died in the American Revolution.)

Ironically, by denying Napoleon a foothold in the hemisphere, they ended his dream of American empire, thus enabling Jefferson to make the Louisiana Purchase. As Stanford professor John Chester Miller explained, "By their long and bitter struggle for independence, (Haiti's) blacks were instrumental in allowing the United States to more than double its size.


http://www.insidebayarea.com/dave-ellison/ci_14291008