Pants-of-dog wrote:It is not the only reason.
It is simply the most egregious example of colonialism that Haiti dealt with and that other countries may not have. Colonialism in East Asia was qualitatively different from colonialism in the Caribbean.
And then there is even the "colonialism" that theoretically still exists in Washington or Manitoba, right, and then there could be the "neo-colonialism" of China in Nigeria, right?
It sounds like a very complex topic.
"Colonialism" is like "war."
Every war is different. Some wars do resemble one another and may be more or less similar, but, generally speaking, to evaluate a war, one must be an expert in that specific war. It is not enough to talk about 'wars' generally.
So, perhaps, the position of being 'anti-colonial' can be tricky sometimes. The topic is just so broad.
And how much of that actually made it to Haiti? Most foreign aid is subsidies to local private companies that then get a contract to do some work in Haiti. Most of the money stays in the donating country. And often in return for these loans (as many of these are loans), the country has to give up economic control to other countries who then exploit the country.
But it is nice to see someone have so much faith in foreign aid.
Those are interesting claims about the money staying mostly in the subsidizing country. I would love some juicy quotations about that.
Do you have any?
I have long said that
aid can sometimes be ineffective and a racket, and it can often undercut the local industries.
Then it should be easy for you to actually come up with an amount and an argument. As far as I can tell, the argument is that people have given a lot of money to Haiti so colonialism magically never had an impact.
So what is the lasting impact?
At some point, the impact must be thought of as having gone away, right?
I understand how your dad may have beaten you up while drunk 5 or 6 times as a boy and it had a very negative impact on you. Perhaps it caused a few meltdowns in your twenties and you acted like a jerk a few times. Maybe you even got an arrest or two from those terrible days where you were out of control....
But at some point you can be a well-adjusted 30-year-old with a few hang-ups, or you can be a 30-year-old covered in prison tattoos and with a rap sheet down to his
prison tattoos. Personal responsibility has to kick in.
When does Haiti start taking responsibility for Haiti? Obviously, I am not saying individual Haitians should be thought of as
less for the state of their country. I am just saying that, at some point, the culture and the society has to be held accountable for the circumstnaces that it regularly faces.
Eventually the culture of alcoholism & NASCAR in the trailer park has to be thought a bad thing, right. When do we get to criticize Haiti's trailer park.
It probably could because of the current global attitude towards newly formed countries as opposed to the international attitude at the time Haiti rebelled.
Yes and no.
Legacies will be different.
Colonialism has a measurable and consistent negative impact.
Other factors also matter, but are not necessarily more relevant.
Here's a thought:
Sometimes the positives of colonialism are really lost.
We just take it for granted that you can have access to modern medicine in Saigon or Bombay or Mozambique, and that these nations have a concept of human rights and participate in a very rich global economy...
But we can meticulously count every engative that happened 80 years ago, and that is all that is relevant today.