Maybe 200,000 souls have been lost in the carnage of Haiti. What was one of the poorest, most miserable places on Earth has been turned into a living nightmare for those who have survived.
The public and state responses to the earthquake have been heartwarming if likely transitory. And there has been little cluckclucking about "looting" - as if anyone would let their child go thirsty in an earthquake when there was mineral water in the shop window but no one to work the cash register.
More focus has centered on the absolute dearth of any kind of government in Haiti, any infrastructure through and across which the huge amounts of aid now arriving can be channelled.
But there's less on how Haiti got here. The Americans now declaring their "friendship" for Haiti are, in fact - along with former colonial power France - deeply implicated in this mess.
Both countries encouraged the Papa Doc dictatorship - followed by his son Baby Doc - that stole billions of dollars (which they sank into French and US real estate and spent in the casinos and bordellos of the west). They armed the regime and kept it in power - even though the black magic voodoo torture state could have seeped from the pages of Joseph Conrad or Graham Greene.
When the dictatorship was swept away, and especially when the radical priest Aristide was swept into power, the countries now bemoaning the lack even of the most basic roads turned their faces away. The International Monetary Fund then took over and its policies soon became the new slavery for poor Haitians - 90 per cent of the population.
That led to the destruction of the agricultural sector, the bloating of the Port au Prince capital city by urban flight, and the almost complete deforestation of the country to provide fuel for cooking by fire.
Yet it was not always thus.
In fact, Haiti was the scene of the very first successful slave revolt. Unlike Spartacus - rightly remembered - the leader of the Haitian slave uprising, Toussaint Louverture, has been forgotten.
The entire population of Haiti are the descendants of slaves - whose blood stained the sugar that sweetened western palates in the 18th century. Emboldened by the rhetoric of liberty from Napoleon Bonaparte, the Haitian slaves rose up and drove out their French masters, declaring the first Slave Republic in 1804.
However, their leader found Napoleon was not as nice as he looked when the French captured him and he died of TB in their dungeons.
The French came back, were replaced by a 20-year occupation of "friendly" Americans, who then installed the Duvaliers for another 30 years. The dictatorship of the IMF followed. However many died under falling masonry, it's a fair bet that many more Haitians will have died, not directly because of the quake, but crushed under the altogether avoidable weight of never-ending poverty.
http://blogs.dailyrecord.co.uk/georgegalloway/
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