Propoganda in the Caribbean: The case of Haiti's deforestation

[the_future_modernes]

My father said to me once:"The Haitians are so stupid that they deforested their island. They don't think about the long term, they just think about survival." The newspapers I read while I lived in the Caribbean said "Haiti is deforested because the Haitian people cut down all the trees and didn't plant them again.

THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE AT THE LINK IS TRIGGERING REALLY SHITTY WAR PRACTICES BY THE
 US ARMY ON THE HAITIAN PEOPLE.  

Today I find that that was a lie.

From the Jamaica Observer No Mister! You cannot feel my pain!

First-world journalists interpret the absence of trees on the Haitian side to the predations of the poor, disregarding the fact that Western religion and American capitalism were mainly responsible.

Why is it that nowhere else in the Caribbean is there similar deforestation?

Haiti's Dessalines constitution offered sanctuary to every escaped slave of any colour. All such people of whatever colour were deemed 'black' and entitled to citizenship. Only officially certified 'blacks' could own land in Haiti.

The American occupation, anticipating Hayek, Freedman and Greenspan, decided that such a rule was a hindrance to development. The assistant secretary of the US Navy, one Franklin D Roosevelt, was given the job of writing a new, modern constitution for Haiti.

This constitution meant foreigners could own land. Within a very short time the lumberjacks were busy, felling old growth Mahogany and Caribbean Pine for carved doors for the rich and mahogany speedboats, boardroom tables seating 40, etc. The devastated land was put to produce rubber, sisal for ropes and all sorts of pie in the sky plantations.

When President Paul Magloire came to Jamaica 50 years ago Haitians were still speaking of an Artibonite dam for electricity and irrigation. But the ravages of the recent past were too much to recover.

As Marguerite Laurent (EziliDanto) writes: Don't expect to learn how a people with a Vodun culture that reveres nature and especially the Mapou (oak-like or ceiba pendantra/bombax) trees, and other such big trees as the abode of living entities and therefore as sacred things, were forced to watch the Catholic Church, during Rejete - the violent anti-Vodun crusade - gather whole communities at gunpoint into public squares, and forced them to watch their agents burn Haitian trees in order to teach Haitians their Vodun Gods were not in nature, that the trees were the "houses of Satan".

In partnership with the US, the mulatto President Elie Lescot (1941-45) summarily expelled peasants from more than 100,000 hectares of land, razing their homes and destroying more than a million fruit trees in the vain effort to cultivate rubber on a large plantation scale. Also, under the pretext of the Rejete campaign, thousands of acres of peasant lands were cleared of sacred trees so that the US could take their lands for agribusiness. MORE

I do not blame my father for not knowing this. He grew up learning colonial lies and propoganda that it has taken him his entire life to disentangle, and there is STILL so much hidden history to find and put back together. if you don't know that you need to look for something, then you won't think to look for it. Unfortunately, the Internet is a recent invention. And even newspapers in the Caribbean can still be misled.But there is pushback.