An Exchange on Haiti
Sandwiched between stories from The New York Times, Miami Herald, ABC News, and The Dallas Morning News on the uprising (or resisitance, or thug riots–whatever you want to call it) is an interesting exchange in the World Socialist Web Site. A reader replies to a previous piece in the journal:
“As a Haitian whose family was persecuted, arrested, exiled and/or killed by the Duvalier government for being ‘radical leftists’ and ‘communists,’ I am dismayed by the knee-jerk support the United States left is expressing for Aristide. To me, it is part of the same colonialist mentality that the United States has always had towards Haiti?that foreign whites know what is best for Haiti. Rather than blindly accepting the Aristide government?s propaganda, the United States left should consider why so many of Aristide?s Haitian partisans, including many who fought hard for his return to power after the 1991 coup d??tat, have turned against him.”
A sample response quote from WSWS (aka WWKD?) editor Richard Dufour:
“The irony is that your own position, glorifying the Haitian opposition movement, is but the other side of the same coin. You share with the pro-Aristide ‘lefts’ the view that the most one can do is support one or the other of the bankrupt bourgeois factions now at each other?s throats in a deadly feud for the crumbs of power.”
February 18th, 2004
