Glaz’ev’s money quote

Notable post-Keynesian economic historian and policy advisor to the Russian government Sergei Glaz’ev has the following money quote (pun very much intended) regarding the economic theories of Milton Friedman and his ‘sound money’-advocating intellectual forebears:

По своей сути монетаризм представляет собой откровенную апологетику интересов держателей монет, которые заинтересованы в повышении их покупательной стоимости. Она использует наукообразную терминологию, но по своему методу сродни квазирелигиозной догматике, поскольку не приемлет сомнений, игнорирует факты и не признает эксперимент. Поэтому многие мыслители считают монетаризм современной версией ветхозаветного культа Золотого тельца, религией обожествления денег. Исходя из этого, наверное, следует и оценивать практические результаты монетаристской политики, проводившейся с 1992 года: хотя российская экономика за этот период в основном примитивизировалась и сжалась в нефтегазовую трубу.

At its core, monetarism is a frank apology for the interests of coin holders who are interested in increasing their purchasing value. This doctrine merely serves their interests by imposing self-restrictions on the state in managing the issue of money. It uses pseudo-scientific terminology, but its method is akin to quasi-religious dogma, because it does not accept doubts, ignores facts and does not recognize experiment. Therefore, many thinkers consider monetarism a modern version of the Old Testament cult of the Golden Calf, a religion of deification of money. Proceeding from this, it is probably necessary to evaluate the practical results of the monetary policy pursued since 1992, although the Russian economy during this period was basically primitive and shrank into an oil and gas pipeline.

Or, put more bluntly, in the words of Fr Andrew Phillips: ‘Monetarism is just another word for Mammon.’ And he says so in light of the selfsame historical events that Glaz’ev does here. Understand that the legacy of the 1990s in Russia is very much so the result of the neoliberal reforms spearheaded by the Harvard Boys (themselves taking their cues on shock therapy policy from the Chicago Boys, in turn avowed devotees of Milton Friedman), taking direction from the IMF and the United States government. In the wake of the societal collapse that followed, practically none of its authors could be brought to a public account in their lifetimes. Not Chubais, not Gaidar, not Berezovskii, not Khodorkovskii, not Shleifer, not Browder, and certainly not the Harvard Boys.

Which isn’t to say that people didn’t pay. However much it pretends otherwise, the Golden Calf is nothing if not a bloodthirsty god.

Pointless video post: ‘Если (ты исчезнешь)’ by Берег Неба

Prime power metal from Krasnodon. Excellent musicianship and a definite flair for classic rock vibes: little wonder they chose to round off their only studio album with a cover of Deep Purple’s ‘Burn’. Valery Bykov really puts in the effort in on that melodic line on this song. Sadly, the band broke up in 2014, right around the time the SBU rolled up in force in the area. Hopefully they get back together and follow up this album.

Lift the sanctions; end the pillage!

The earthquake that has struck Turkey and Syria has been devastating. So far there are seven thousand, two hundred and sixty-six people confirmed dead. For a comparison point: as a result of the earthquake yesterday, more civilians across four countries—Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine—have died in just two days, than have died in the entire past year of fighting in the Ukraine. This is truly a staggering human tragedy, deserving of deep mourning. The humanitarian response in Turkey has been quick to mobilise; in Syria, it has been slower—not at all for a lack of will on the part of the people or the government, but for a lack of resources.

The eastern Mediterranean has long been a hotbed of seismic activity, with the southeast of Anatolia basically being one long strike-slip fault zone. In the 520s Antioch—a great city in the heart of this very region—was levelled by a series of similarly crushing earthquakes, each of which also killed thousands of people at a stroke. Patriarch Saint Ephraim of Amida was among those who pitched in cleaning up the city and rescuing survivors in the aftermath, among whom were Saint Martha and her son Saint Symeōn the Younger Stylite. Prayers asking the intercession of any of these three saints with our Lord Christ and the Holy Theotōkos will surely be efficacious in aiding the victims.

We should not, however, be content merely to offer prayers. Our energy, our money and our hearts should go out to the victims as well. International Orthodox Christian Charities has set up a special response for the victims of the 6 February earthquake. So too has the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America. Please consider donating to either of these two response funds.

There is another important step that people in the United States and the European Union especially can take for the victims of this earthquake. That is: we can call for an immediate halt to the cruel sanctions policy of our government. Over ten million Syrians have already been placed in dire straits financially on account of this sanctions policy. But more to the point: this sanctions policy directly hinders international aid efforts for the Syrian people, which they need now more than ever.

Another thing we can and should pressure our government to do after this earthquake, is to recall our troops from the oil fields in al-Ḥasaka in northern Syria. We should begin allowing the Syrian people themselves to benefit from their own natural resources, instead of pillaging the stuff out from under their feet—a Trump-era policy that Biden has not seen fit to end. That wealth, which justly belongs to the Syrian people, could well represent the difference between suffering and flourishing, even between life and death, for hundreds of thousands of Syrians.

May God soften the hearts of our leaders, and preserve in faith and steadfast perseverance the long-suffering people of Syria!

EDIT: Russia and China have both offered Syria significant aid packages to help with disaster relief. The US is still slowing humanitarian aid from entering the country with its sanctions policy, which appears to be motivated entirely by geopolitical self-interest. The three Patriarchs of Antioch, including Patriarch John X, have issued a letter condemning sanctions against Syria, and calling for them to be lifted.

Echoing Morris on Russia

And who are they who flaunt in our faces the banner inscribed on one side ‘English interests’, and on the other ‘Russian misdeeds’? Who are they that are leading us into war? Let us look at these saviours of England’s honour, these champions of Poland, these scourges of Russia’s iniquities! Do you know them?—Greedy gamblers on the Stock Exchange, idle officers of the Army and Navy (poor fellows!), worn-out mockers of the Clubs, desperate purveyors of exciting war-news for the comfortable breakfast tables of those who have nothing to lose by war, and lastly, in the place of honour, the Tory Rump, that we fools, weary of peace, reason and justice, chose at the last election to ‘represent’ us: and over all their captain the ancient place-hunter, who, having at last climbed into an Earl’s chair, grins down thence into the anxious face of England while his empty heart and shifty head is compassing the stroke that will bring on our destruction perhaps, our confusion certainly:—O shame and double shame, if we march under such a leadership as this in an unjust war against a people who are not our enemies!

- William Morris, from ‘To the Working-men of England’, 11 May 1877

It is not as a Russophile (though perhaps I may be called that, however reluctantly) that I oppose war with Russia, or more accurately further escalation from the West of the already-devastating war in the Ukraine. It is in the same spirit of William Morris, the true Tory radical and advocate of the advancement of the working classes in Britain, that I oppose the same self-serving machinations of the imperialists at home and the squandering of American wealth on a war abroad that benefits only the war-profiteers in the so-called ‘defence’ sector and their assorted hangers-on. The character of these latter is precisely the same as the gamblers, mockers, purveyors of war-news and rump-parliamentarians whom Morris declaimed in this letter.

Yet I expect many of the same who in our day claim Morris as an inspiration would have been quick to dismiss him then, as they are quick to dismiss leftists now, as ‘campist’ or ‘tankie’ or ‘pro-Putin’ or ‘Russian bot’. Indeed, Morris did face opposition among fellow-‘leftists’ in his own day for his principled opposition to British imperialism, his support of Bulgarian independence and his opposition to Turkish atrocities in the Balkans. In the name of William Morris, then—in the name of the Eastern Question Association of his day, in the name of the good Englishmen and Americans of his day who opposed war and the exploitation that comes with it—this iteration of the Great Game must be opposed. It must be brought to an end before it brings on our destruction as it has already brought on our confusion. And those who flaunt in our faces the faded and jaded banner inscribed on one side ‘rules-based order’ and on the other side ‘Russian aggression’ must be called to account and shown for what they truly are!

Does God take sides?

Sometimes one hears it said in American theopolitical discourse, that God does not take sides in politics. There is one sense in which this is a true and worthy impulse to say. And there is another sense in which this glib characterisation becomes dangerously wrong.

Firstly, I tend to believe that it is fully right and accurate to hold that the God of the Holy Scriptures, the Creator of the cosmos, has little to choose in terms of American politics. I believe it is proper to say that God is neither a Democrat nor a Republican.

The first reason that such a characterisation is true, is because the agendas of both parties take moral positions which would be thoroughly and irreconcilably repugnant to the early Church. The first-century Apostolic text called the Didachē, to take one example, explicitly condemns the practice of abortion. This practice is, sadly, ‘unequivocally’ countenanced as a ‘reproductive right’ by the official platform of the Democratic Party.

The Republican Party is no better than the Democratic Party—indeed, in one fundamental way it is worse. The Didachē condemns idolatry as thoroughly as, and in fact more often than, it condemns abortion. And the Republican Party upholds, from the very first sentence of the preamble of its own platform, an explicit form of idolatry: the idolatry which exalts the nation-state as ‘exceptional’ and ‘unlike any other nation on earth’, and which exalts the US Constitution as a sacred ‘covenant’. What does God have to choose between one party for which destroying innocent children is a sacred right, and another party which proclaims aloud with the priests of the Sanhedrin that they have ‘no king but Cæsar’?

Although for a long time I have personally refused to support either major party with my vote, I say this not to cast aspersions on the ordinary American Christians who decide to vote with one major party or the other. Most people have independent reasons, driven by pragmatism or by personal and contextual considerations, for preferring, even strongly preferring, one party over the other. I assuredly do not believe that having such reasons makes one evil or an enemy of God. I say this merely to demonstrate that the God Who created the whole of the cosmos, Who revealed Himself by the law and the prophets to ancient Israel, and Who Himself took human flesh from a certain virgin in first-century Galilee, has nowhere to lay His head when it comes to the halls of power in Washington.

But does this mean that God does not take sides in politics, full stop?

First-order, it strikes me as rather presumptuous for American Christians to assume, that simply because the two main Coke-and-Pepsi options in their own particular powerful nation-state are both distant from God, that God must be equally distant from all possible forms of political expression. Yet many high-minded and well-intentioned evangelicals, Catholics, even Orthodox Christians, make an explicit and public point that ‘God is not political’ and that it is the job of Christians to ‘rise above politics’.

However well-intentioned this apolitical impulse may be in its attempt to engender benefit of the doubt between neighbours on opposing sides of the political divide, it nevertheless confuses a particular point. Politics is, at its basis, merely the art of learning to live together with one’s neighbour. The call to love one’s neighbour is a fundamentally political statement, and even the strictest hermits and most cloistered monks in Christian history were enjoined by their vows to uphold this particular substance in their politics. But then comes the question of the scholar of the law to Christ: ‘Who, then, is my neighbour?’

Christ answers this in the immediate sense with the parable of the Good Samaritan. However, He also more generally answers the question of this scholar of the law in the Beatitudes of Matthew 5. If nothing else, the Beatitudes tell us, in their apportioning of blessing, the political position of God. In short: God does take sides. God takes the side of the poor; of those who sorrow; of the meek; of those who hunger and thirst for justice; of the merciful; of the innocent; of the peacemakers; of the persecuted.

Worth noting is that these categories are not merely symbolic or transcendental. The Beatitudes are not a parable—in fact, they are one of the few places in the Greek Scriptures where Jesus is not speaking in a way that points primarily to the symbolic. The Beatitudes are specific, direct and concrete. And they have immediate ramifications to present-day political situations.

Would Jesus be found on the side of the Iraqi people who still suffer from poverty, infant deformity and internal displacement—or would He be found on the side of their invaders and occupiers?

Would Jesus be found on the side of the Yemeni people, overwhelmingly children, who still suffer from the attacks of bombs and rockets and the threat of starvation—or would He be found on the side of the Croesuses of Saudi who launch those bombs and rockets and blockade Yemen’s ports?

Would Jesus be found on the side of the Syrian people who still suffer from the effects of war, invasion, religious persecution, starvation, sanctions—or would He be found on the side of the Turkish, Saudi, Qatari, Emirati, Uighur and other CIA-funded Wahhâbi religious extremists who invaded and murdered them?

Would Jesus be found on the side of the Palestinian people whose livelihoods are destroyed, who are evicted from their homes, and who are shot dead and detained on the streets of their own cities and villages—or would He be found on the side of the settlers and military who do the destroying, evicting, shooting and detaining?

Would Jesus be found on the side of the Haitian people who are protesting in the streets against the dysfunction of their state and the theft of their country’s wealth—or on the side of those who would send in tanks and planes to oppress them?

Would Jesus be found on the side of the ordinary people in Donbass who have suffered from nearly nine years of non-stop shelling and from deliberately-engineereed lack of access to schools and hospitals—or would He side with the race-nationalist paramilitaries, SBU, AFU and NATO forces who are doing the shelling?

Would Jesus be found on the side of ordinary Venezuelan people—or on the side of the foreign operatives and mercenaries who tried to overthrow their elected government? Would Jesus be found on the side of ordinary Bolivian people—or on the side of the lithium mining consortiums which foisted a coup on them? Would Jesus be found on the side of Indigenous water and land defenders—or on the side of huge multinational energy conglomerates who use police forces and National Guard to harass and repress them? Would Jesus be found on the side of ordinary Africans—or on the side of the French and British and American governments who continue to siphon off Africa’s wealth? Would Jesus be found on the side of innocent children—or on the side of those who traffic and exploit their bodies, or kill them in the womb?

In my own humble opinion, even to pose these questions in the light of the Beatitudes, is to answer them. Unfortunately, in each of these cases, the considerations and interests of worldly power—sometimes soft-pedalled into the conversation under the guise of soi-disant ‘democracy’, ‘rule of law’, ‘nuance’, ‘impartiality’, ‘objectivity’—serve to cloud and muddy the consciences of those who would otherwise clearly answer in each of these instances. But if Jesus does promise the blessings He did in the Beatitudes, then we must say that He would take the side of the Iraqis, Syrians, Yemenis, Palestinians, Haitians, New Russians, Venezuelans, Bolivians, Indigenous nations, African nations, children—over their oppressors and persecutors. Jesus Himself took just such a political side when He chose to be crucified by the Roman authorities in conjunction with the Sanhedrin and their Herodian puppets… between two bandits. They discredited Him and crucified Him as a political agent, as a would-be ‘King of the Jews’.

Those of us who live in an empire with pretensions of universality, a latter-day Rome, where the primary political choices are between infanticidaires on one side and open idolaters on the other, have a responsibility to choose a radical third option, and to side with those throughout the world who suffer at the hands of Cæsar. And we must do so even at the risk of being called ‘communists’, ‘tankies’, ‘campists’ and worse. To do otherwise would be to betray the Gospel, and the Beatitudes in particular which place God on the side of those who suffer, rather than those who of design and intent inflict suffering.

It’s an unreal world that we’re forced to live in

Yves Smith over at naked capitalism recently reposted an interview between Nomi Prins, the author of several books about central banking, and Lynn Parramore of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. It’s a disturbing and in many ways disheartening read, in part because it describes a fictional economy of pure finance and manipulation of money that has become increasingly severed from what Prins calls the ‘real economy’ – that is to say, the economy in which real people exchange real goods and real services. The inflection point for this divorce, in her view, was the 2007-2008 financial crisis under the George W Bush administration and the Federal Reserve’s choice to insulate in perpetuity the investment-finance sector of the economy from any real-world consequences of their actions.

In many ways, what Prins is describing is a terminal stage in what Christopher Lasch called ‘the revolt of the élites’. Lasch talks about the divorce of élite segments of the society from their neighbours in terms of both values (with the élites being distinguished by New Age spirituality, a therapeutic self-help mindset, and carefully-cultivated lifestyle habits that are meant to serve as status markers) and space (with élites caging themselves off into exclusive universities, upscale neighbourhoods and gated enclaves away from everyone else). And Lasch’s prescription was for a rediscovery of certain community norms that would encourage cross-class contact. Unfortunately, the attempt by the élites to further distance themselves from working- and even middle-class people has only accelerated—a fact pointed to by more sociologically-minded (and less politically-correct) leftists such as Catherine Liu (who aims her guns as much against the élite-wannabe professional-managerial class as against the élites themselves) and Angela Nagle (who indicts the consequences to online communities of the élite betrayal of the commons).

Nomi Prins, on the other hand (as a former manager at Goldman Sachs and Bear Stearns), has a unique look into the inner workings of the economic side of the élite revolt. She talks about ‘wealth accumulation without accountability’, in which the creation of money, as decided largely through policies of the Federal Reserve meant to benefit the wealthiest fraction of the one percent, is increasingly unhinged from the creation of actual wealth. She notes that public policy initiatives, and indeed any attempts to influence the real economy for the better, are fundamentally impeded by the behaviour of this fictitious, purely monetary economy. This economy operates by processes which are irrational and opaque. One might almost say that this purely monetary economy is occult.

Prins still unfortunately places too much faith in fictive ‘decentralist’ solutions which are in fact not solutions at all. Cryptocurrencies, as we are currently seeing with the collapse of FTX and now possibly also Genesis, are not the transparent and stable alternative to checkbook-money that they promised themselves to be, but instead are themselves fuelled by the same occult processes that fuel the fictitious checkbook-money economy. (But honestly, we didn’t need FTX to collapse to figure this out. The evidence was there all along, and there were people and organisations warning us about the fundamental instability of crypto from the very start.) And the nature of exchanges in massively multiplayer online gaming spaces like Minecraft and World of Warcraft offers several intriguing possibilities, but they still ultimately cannot take the place of exchanges in the real economy. But taking Prins’s analysis alongside Liu’s analysis of the virtue-signalling élite-pretensions of the professional managerial class, and Nagle’s analysis of how online spaces have been warped by new (even nihilistic) configurations of value… it becomes clear that the Laschian emphasis on élite revolt in terms of social-ethical values, and the economic side of élite revolt in terms of the complete unmooring of the money economy from any sort of real-world accountability, cannot be divorced from each other.

Alongside the real world of actual ecologies and people and things, there now exists an alchemically-conjured financial world of unreality, which is governed by laws that are nearly completely resistant to rational analysis—even by those who have conjured it. And the élites who have conjured forth this unreality, are constantly seeking new ways to leverage that unreality to extort more and more control over the real world and its resources away from the rest of us. And the rest of us are thereby forced, to varying degrees, to live in both the real world and its simulacrum.

Among the reasons that the Fathers of the Early Church—people like Saint Basil the Great, Saint Gregory of Nyssa, Saint Gregory the Theologian and Saint John Chrysostom—preached so strongly against the practice of usury was that usury was based on a lie: producing what seems to be wealth out of the misery and debt of the indebted, or planting money in the backs of the poor and expecting it to grow out of itself. Consider what the Fathers of the Church would have to say about the way the Western form of capitalism is currently run: in which central banks—all empowered to do so by lending at interest—can conjure money out of thin air and flood it into various sections of the economy practically at whim, distorting the outcomes in the real economy of real people, real ecologies and real things as it pleases! Would they not see at work in this the hands of demonic powers? I understand how much he is (unjustly) hated in the West (because the West now blindly, unthinkingly, reflexively hates everyone and everything Russian); even so, I think the person who gave best voice to the suspicion of the way the current economy works is Patriarch Kirill of Moscow:

The modern economy is built largely on fraud, creating money out of thin air. [Money is] equivalent to human work and the riches God has given us: namely coal, ore, oil, our intellect, our physical labour, our culture and our spirituality. [But today,] every company produces its own money in the form of shares, which in the secondary market, rather than acting as simple securities, are used as items of trade and speculation. If these spectres earn billions, not being backed by real labour or capital, how can such an economy exist? And what becomes of the simple worker, who produces the value behind this entire bubble! [We need] a fair economic system, where money and capital are equivalent and are the expression of real work.

I don’t think it is entirely coincidental, either, that Russia has been placing so much emphasis on building up its dacha agrarian economy, its ability to grow its own vegetables, over the past decade and a half—or that this food security has been of great use to Russia in weathering and combatting the effects of Western sanctions. Or that Russia’s banking sector, with some input from the Church of Russia, has been exploring ways to organise itself in ways that don’t resort to usurious lending. These are healthy trends which deserve to be encouraged, which attempt to ground the economic life of Russians in the real world rather than in the simulacrum.

Ultimately, the West must do the same as Russia is doing now. We must choose to live in the world that God created, rather than in the simulacrum over which we fancy ourselves little gods—but within which we are at the whim of powers which we do not understand. And in order to do that, it strikes me that we need to be listening to those thinkers within the West, like Lasch and Liu and Nagle, who in pointing out the élite revolt against reality are in fact also pointing the way back to reality.

Stand with Haiti: ‘to the next Insurrection’

We’re at it again, it seems. The Atlanticist empire is not content with the prospect of turning Eastern Europe into a blighted post-apocalyptic wasteland, with forty billion dollars of spending on weapons to the Ukraine (the profit of which will ultimately accrue to Silicon Valley and Acela-corridor defence contractors). Sleepy Joe and Shoe-Polish Justin are shipping out US and Canadian warplanes and armoured vehicles to Haiti in order to prop up the failing neoliberal government of Ariel Henry (installed after the assassination of President Jouvenel Moïse at the hands of US-backed Colombian mercenaries last year), and it seems the Haitian people are justifiably unhappy with the prospect of yet another US intervention. The following excerpt from the Life of Johnson gives us a strong impression of where our good scrivener of dictionaries and lover of language would stand on this particular issue:

Upon one occasion, when in company with some very grave men at Oxford, his toast was, “Here’s to the next insurrection of the negroes in the West Indies.” His violent prejudice against our West Indian and American settlers appeared whenever there was an opportunity. Towards the conclusion of his “Taxation no Tyranny,” he says, “how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” and in his conversation with Mr. Wilkes he asked, “Where did [Jamaica plantation owner William] Beckford and [Boston merchant Barlow] Trecothick learn English?”

Note that Haiti was founded in 1804 precisely by the ‘next insurrection in the West Indies’ which Dr Johnson toasted in front of that room full of stuffy Oxford dons in 1777. Haiti was the first country, at least in the Western world, to permanently ban slavery when it declared its independence from France. For the unforgivable sin of opposing colonialism and slavery, the French government has been extorting and impoverishing the Haitian people since 1825—to the tune of 150 million francs. The imposition of this horrific indemnity upon the newly independent nation, crippled Haiti’s ability to invest in its own people, infrastructure or education. Haiti’s government was only able to pay off the entire amount—including interest—in 1947.

But France’s partner in (as Samuel Johnson called it) robbery, the United States, invaded Haiti in 1915 and subjected it to a nineteen-year-long military occupation. Woodrow Wilson sent 330 US Marines to Haiti at the behest of the National City Bank of New York, where they proceeded to establish and then act as the enforcers for a military dictatorship that murdered over 15,000 Haitians. The US government stole $500,000 from the Haitian national bank and kept it in the City Bank in New York, thus rendering the Haitian government politically dependent on the US. In 1919, the Marines assassinated a Haitian freedom fighter named Charlemagne Pérault—and then stripped him naked and photographed him hanging from a tree in what was clearly a lynching. They then disseminated the photograph around the island in order to discourage any further resistance. However, the US literally rounded up Haitian villagers and used Haitians as forced labour in building schools and roads in the US. The American government very literally plundered Haiti’s labour and wealth, condemning it even further to poverty and inescapable debt. The occupation only ended in 1934 when Franklin Delano Roosevelt withdrew the last of the Marines, but he left in place a US-dominated gendarmerie that brutalised the Haitian populace until 1941.

Successive short-lived governments under Sténio Vincent and Elie Lescot attempted but failed to stabilise the society. There was a military-led revolution in 1946 that briefly established a populist, socially-minded government under Dumarsais Estimé: but Estimé was himself betrayed by the same elements of the military that had swept him into power. The military essentially imposed itself as a domestic dictatorship over Haiti until protests and street actions forced the military puppet president from office in 1956, paving the way for the Duvalier dictatorship: a right-wing government which used death-squad style paramilitaries, psychological and physical terror—including mutilation and rape—over the population in order to maintain power.

The United States had a rather two-faced relationship with the Duvaliers. On the one hand, François Duvalier himself was part of a US-based public health programme that combatted various tropical diseases—this is how he got the nickname ‘Papa Doc’. As an anti-communist (and friend to Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista), Duvalier was someone whom the US was keen to cultivate as a potential ally. When he made his initial bid for power, the US Marines directly provided the training for Duvalier’s rural paramilitary death squads, the Tonton Macoutes. The public revelation of American complicity in Duvalier’s reign of terror, however, caused a scandal, and the Kennedy Administration suspended aid to Duvalier in 1962 on the grounds of human rights abuses (of which it was probably already well aware).

After this, the relationship between Papa Doc and the United States turned sour. Papa Doc’s rhetoric became more and more heatedly anti-American, although his government retained a right-wing nationalist and anti-communist position. However, the US was keen to renew ties with François Duvalier, as well as his son and heir Jean-Claude Duvalier, aka ‘Baby Doc’. American military ‘aid’ for Haiti (actually aimed at repressing the Haitian population) resumed in secret in 1973, the US Marines went back to Haiti in order to train up a new generation of Baby Doc’s rape gangs and death squads. The Duvalier dictatorship ended with Baby Doc being overthrown in a popular uprising in 1986—though being notoriously corrupt, Baby Doc absconded with hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of Haiti’s wealth when he fled to France.

What was left in Haiti was a series of unstable governments that ended only when a former Catholic priest, liberation theologian and anti-Duvalierist named Jean-Bertrand Aristide was elected president in a landslide in 1990, in the ‘first honest election’ of Haiti’s history. Aristide had campaigned on a platform of improving health care, education, infrastructure and low-cost housing; returning land to farmers; cracking down on sexual violence against Haitian women; and doubling the minimum wage. He also led a campaign to rein in the military with the constitution, and replace some of its functions with a publicly-accountable civilian police force.

The Haitian army, under the newly-elevated commander Raoul Cédras, overthrew Aristide in a bloody coup and instituted a three-year reign of terror over Haiti. The US actually tried to play both sides of this coup: on the one hand, they supported Aristide’s overthrow through covert channels like the CIA, who were advising the Haitian army in 1991. On the other hand, the US State Department offered Aristide a lifeboat through the embassies, and allowed him to flee to safety. When conditions in Haiti got so bad that a ‘humanitarian intervention’ was demanded, the Clinton Administration used American military force to re-install Aristide as President of Haiti—but with some conditions attached. Instead of running on the liberation-theology platform that had gotten him elected in 1990, the US forced Aristide to enact neoliberal policies on Haiti that ran it into even further debt and rendered it completely dependent on American food aid.

Aristide himself, however, realising how badly his people had been treated by American interests, ran for the presidency and won a second term in 2000. This time he pledged to fight for Haitian interests rather than American ones, and for his trouble he was again ousted in another bloody coup, in 2004, this time by George W Bush’s neocons. But the interests that drove that coup were the same corporate interests that drove American intervention in 1994. These are the same interests, bent upon keeping Haiti subservient, dependent and miserable, that are driving calls for another ‘intervention’ now.

As a follower of Samuel Johnson’s especially in this line of his thinking, I stand with Haiti. And I too will toast, against our equivalent of the ‘grave Oxford men’ of Johnson’s time, ‘the next insurrection in the West Indies’ that has human flourishing, rather than financial-military-corporate domination and slavery, as its end.