You have a point, but for me the term encompasses the moderate and basic social progress in the quotation.

fairleft

Ah, so you are reading it into the piece. "Xism", to me, implies the position espoused by X. It says nothing about whether X him or herself has the personal qualities of a saint.

It is, indeed, absurd to think that the ability to express more or less what ought to be done automatically comes with either the ability to bring it about, or with the characteristics of sainthood - and normally, the ability to bring it about and the characteristics of sainthood are mutually exclusive.


I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.

By that reasoning, the term "Republicanism" could be seen as representing the republican party as panacea.
There are important issues here, and we're losing them in trivia.
It makes little sense to quote any American, French or British mainstream publication, even one as prestigious as the New York Review on any subject relating to Haiti, without a thorough and probably futile attempt to separate the conventional political wisdom from the useful facts. It's equally difficult to know much about Chaves's Venezuela, since it's on the US death list, and so it's leaders need to be dehumanized, so we can then "rescue" it's poor, misled, helpless people.
The history of Haiti, once lush and lovely, rich in resources and potential, is a panorama of merciless predation, with the most spectacular being the French insistence on Haiti's repayment of "Damages" asessed for the illegal theft of property-- the Haitian people themselves. Thus the freed slaves were forced to pay their opressors for the right to be free- even after attaining it through force of arms, and the loss of almost a third of their population. And they paid- thanks to the embargo, it was that or starve.
 Little has changed.
The IMF instituting the utterly discredited but now sadly traditional terms of the "structural adjustment loan" is just the latest insult..
The US involvement is like so many others- on an individual level, many kind and brave workers and soldiers risk their lives for the Haitian people- while the traditional policy machine formed during and schooled by a century of predation turns their gift into first a photo-op for the fig leaf, and then a tool of dominance. Only an utterly ahistorical person could be unaware of this oft-repeated ongoing dynamic, it seems to me.

 Haiti today is the clearest possible example of the end-point of the policies of predation with which the region has had to cope. There but through- what? an accident of inattention?- goes the rest.

Aristide "became unpopular" (do we really know what local opinion really was--or is? How? From whom?) because almost from the first day, he was thwarted and sabotaged by the regional predator. Like the Sandinistas or the Bolivarians, his every policy attempt, every nascent success was a threat to the world view those who still think of Haitians as quasi-human, or as cheap labor, in need of some stern paternal discipline.

And lest you think I speak from a comfortably safe haven of academic debate, I lived on the island of Hispaniola for a significant part of my 13 years in the area, in Puerto Plata, Gonaves, and Santo Domingo. I did reforestation research at Cabo Roho, built fishing boats at Puerto plata, and taught composites technology in Santiago.

Thanks for this, Fairleft. But Haiti is a story so heartbreakingly cruel I can almost not bear to discuss it.

Capitalism searches out the darkest corners of human potential, and mainlines them.