Haiti the quintessential dysfunctional society

In doing some reading of Tom Watson’s writing on the Leo Frank case I came across an interesting comment on Haiti from 1915. (Watson was the only media figure who argued for Frank’s guilt and for the justice of Frank’s lynching.) Watson quotes a passage from a New Republic article on Frank’s lynching that illustrates the common perception of Haiti at the time. Like the rest of the mainstream media of the time, The New Republic was condemning the lynching of Leo Frank, comparing Georgia with Haiti, which is pretty much the worst thing you could say about a society:

A people which cannot preserve its legal fabric from violence is unfit for self-government. It belongs in the category of communities like Haiti, comunities which have to be supervised and protected by more civilized powers. Georgia is in that humiliating position today. If the Frank case is evidence of Georgia’s political development, then Georgia deserves to be known as the black sheep of the American Union.

In short, nothing much has changed in Haiti in 100 years. The only exception is the attitudes of the liberal media: The New Republic‘s liberal politics didn’t prevent it from attributing Haiti’s troubles to its lack of civilization.

The US occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934, and it wouldn’t be surprising to see a de facto occupation again. Haiti is already on welfare — a “Republic of NGOs” where half the budget comes from foreign aid and 3000 NGOs operate most government services, including education and health care. (A search on Haiti and NGOs turns up lot of articles blaming Haiti’s problems on poorly managed charity or  as a modern form of imperialism! See, e.g., here, here, and here.)

The other thing that has changed in 100 years is that now there is a very real danger is that Haitians will now be allowed to immigrate in huge numbers to the US. VDARE.com’s blog is an indispensable source of information on this. As Rob Sanchez writes, Haiti is about to become our Camp of the Saints. There are sure to be hundreds of thousands of orphaned children and others pulling at America’s heart strings. And as Patrick Cleburne notes, their neighbors in the Dominican Republic are not so stupid, but already there are calls for mass airlifts of Haitian children to the US. Will the first Black president in American history stop it. I rather doubt it.

But if there is a huge influx of Haitians, I do think that the great majority of Whites (apart from the Angelina Jolie types and professors in the humanities and social sciences) will recoil against it. It would be a politically risky move for an administration that already has little support among White Americans.