POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY MARGARET WENTE IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
Read Graham Greene's "The Comedians" in considering your answer to this question.
It remains a devastating examination of Haiti although written many decades ago.
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One could theorize that an entire population of ex-slaves provides a poor basis for a society.
In general, the slaves taken by traders were the ones without the wits and cunning to avoid being taken.
Of course, people discussing slavery generally forget that it was African chiefs themselves who traded their people to slavers for profit. They weren't likely to select the most promising of youth.
Slaves were valued only for their physical abilities, strength and endurance.
I think you could fairly speculate that an unrepresentative sample of African population provided the basis for Haiti, a population then missing many of the qualities which go to building a sound society.
Two hundred years of abject failure tells all thinking people that something there is drastically wrong.
The arguments, repeated in a comment here, about past wealth seized and American occupations cannot possibly explain the human hell that Haiti is.
Immigrants came to other parts of North America, virtual peasants from Russia or Germany or Scotland, without a dime in their pockets and became successful in millions and millions of cases.
Haiti has now become the classic case of the development nightmare with a population-resource ratio inadequate ever to achieve anything. No resources and high birth rates.
There have been a small number of successful Haitians. In general, they either live in an exclusive enclave above the squalor or leave, like our Governor General.
Haiti too is an extremely racist society. People are literally graded like fruit by graduations of lightness in their skin color. This was not imposed on the society, but has arisen out of its history.
American interventions, naturally hated anywhere, have always been based in fear that huge migrations of Haitians would land on America’s shore if things became desperate enough.
