How neocolonialism crippled Haiti

Plus: the US sabotaged negotiations in Ukraine; the failure of the counteroffensive; the nexus between conservatism and democracy; the elite weaponisation of wokism; the censorship-industrial complex

Dear all,

I’m back from the holidays and I’ve got a new piece up at UnHerd about the unprecedented wave of violence and gang warfare currently engulfing Haiti. In the article I explain that the current situation can only be understood in the context of more than a century of disastrous neocolonial interventions — mostly by the US, and more recently by the UN.

Here’s a thread where I cover a bit more early-20th-century historical ground than I managed to cram into the piece. A few not-so-fun facts: in 1911-1919 the National City Bank of New York (today Citibank), pressured by the US government, purchased the Banque Nationale de Haiti — the country’s central bank. As the historian Michael L. Krenn, Ph.D., writes: “Haiti’s national bank became simply another branch of the New York financial giant and Haiti was forced to pay National City Bank to serve as the nation’s treasury service”. This resulted in the transfer of huge sums from Haiti to the New York bank”. In 1915, in order to better secure its geostrategic and financial interests on the island, and responding to concerns raised by the National City Bank of New York, the US government deployed the Marines to Haiti — marking the beginning of the US occupation of the country. During the almost two-decades-long occupation, which ended in 1934, Haiti was transformed into a US protectorate: ruled by the US as a military regime led by the Marines. Human rights abuses were widespread, including mass killings and forced labour. In 1935, one year after the official end of the US occupation of Haiti, National City Bank sold the central bank to the Haitian government — but the US maintained financial receivership over the country’s external finances (with the resulting financial benefits) until 1947. It gets worse from there on…

And now, for paying subscribers only, here’s a ton of juicy extra content covering the most important events and articles of the past few weeks. The topics include: more evidence that the US clearly played a role in (deliberately) triggering this war and then sabotaged every attempt to bring it to an end via a diplomatic settlement; the mainstream media starting to admit that the counteroffensive has failed and that the West is actually losing the war; the strength of Russia’s war economy; the nexus between conservatism and democracy; the elite weaponisation of wokism; exposing the role of Center For Countering Digital Hate within the censorship-industrial complex; Tony Blair’s mini-WEF, the Institute for Global Change, and much more.

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Let’s start with Ukraine. Over at The America Conservative, Ted Snider wrote a very detailed article about the way in which the US systematically thwarted and blocked several peace agreements that enjoyed tentative Russia and Ukrainian support, pushing instead for constant escalation, in the pursuit of its own goals — i.e., allowing the war to go on for as long as possibile, whatever the human cost for Ukraine.

Rarely mentioned in current commentaries on the war in Ukraine, in the early weeks that followed the February 24, 2022, Russian invasion, Russia and Ukraine engaged in three separate and significant attempts to negotiate a peaceful settlement. Those negotiations had several important things in common. All three could have ended the war before the devastation of Ukraine’s infrastructure, the massive Ukrainian loss of lives, and the increased risk of unchecked escalation. All three featured an offer by Ukraine not to join NATO. And all three were stopped by the United States. 

On February 25, the day after the invasion began, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had already signaled that he was prepared to abandon Ukraine’s pursuit of NATO membership. On February 27, just three days into the war, Russia and Ukraine announced that they would hold talks in Belarus. Encouragingly, there was an agreement for a second round of talks. Those talks took place in Belarus, on the Belarus-Ukraine border, on March 3. However, though Ukraine was willing to discuss neutrality and “the end of this invasion”, the US was not. The US said no to the Belarus talks. 

The subsequent two attempts followed the same pattern: Russia and Ukraine worked out a tentative agreement, then the the US (or UK) came along and pressured Ukraine not to negotiate with Russia. As Snider concludes:

Three separate times in the early weeks of the war, negotiations produced the real possibility of peace. The third even yielded a tentative agreement that was, according to Putin, signed. Both sides made “huge concessions”, including Ukraine promising each time not to join NATO. But each time, the US put a stop to the promise of a diplomatic solution and peace, allowing the war to go on and to escalate, seemingly in the pursuit of U.S., not Ukrainian, interests.

Indeed, it would appear that of late US officials can’t help but boast about how much the war in Ukraine benefits the US. As the Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell recently put it:

We haven’t lost a single American in this war. Most of the money that we spend related to Ukraine is actually spent in the US, replenishing weapons, more modern weapons. So it’s actually employing people here and improving our own military for what may lie ahead.

David Ignatius, associate editor and columnist for The Washington Post, was even more gleeful, claiming that “overall, this has been a triumphal summer for [NATO]”:

For the United States and its NATO allies, these 18 months of war have been a strategic windfall, at relatively low cost (other than for the Ukrainians). The West’s most reckless antagonist has been rocked. NATO has grown much stronger with the additions of Sweden and Finland. Germany has weaned itself from dependence on Russian energy and, in many ways, rediscovered its sense of values.

You read that correctly: the war might not be working out very well for Ukrainians, as even the mainstream media is now starting to admit — the generally accepted figure for Ukrainian deaths is close to 70,000, which means the actual number is probably higher — but it’s working wonder for the US, first and foremost by revamping the latter’s control of Europe through NATO.