Oh god, that site makes it close to impossible to read the actual content between all those advertises. Where is that bot that links to readable sites?
I wasn’t aware of any history that happened in Haiti, and only took this post as an initiative to look it up a bit. This is quite interesting.
The debt imposed by France for its recognition as independent state was paid off in the 1940s. That debt drained off any resources that Haiti had for almost 120 years.
But now Haiti is free from that debt for close to 80 years and it’s still one of the poorest countries in the world. How can that be, given that it was one of the richest slave colonies of France only 250 years ago?
It seems Haiti suffers from its geopolitical location in more than one way, and then some from its geological location. Between Europe and the USA, all in their own way dealing with their slave and colonial past, it found no friends on either side. It never reached political stability for long enough to build up institutions like a solid educational or medical system, in part by internal squabbling but also by repeated interventions mostly from the US.
And if that’s not enough to deal with, the exposure to natural desasters makes it doubly hard to build up anything lasting.
I think those circumstances are enough to explain why Haiti suffers the way it does, there’s no need to suspect an additional long running conspiracy for a thing that happened around the time of the French Revolution. Honestly, we Europeans are so wrapped up in our own more recent history that largely starts with WW1, most are hardly aware of the general location of Haiti, let alone our intertwined colonial history.
But I totally get that such a situation feels like the world has conspired against the Haitians. In a way it has, just not in the way of countries or populations forging secret bands of vengeance.
I think Haiti is totally right to want back that money from France. But I also think that it won’t do much if Haiti has no stable political system and institutions. Because then it’ll just be siphoned away by some corrupt politicians and their cronies.
What's a sci-fi or fantasy book or series that you want to see adapted as a movie/television series?
I didn’t read this series when I was a kid, but I finally got around to reading Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber....
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