(Second of two parts)
Let us go back to Seneca the Elder to guide our practices in the face of the accumulation of obstacles which prevent us from acting against bandits and against the gang machine that the whole of Haitian society has become. A real mess! This Roman philosopher from the beginning of the Christian era encouraged people not to wait to act, aware that they were of the incapacity of human beings to determine the results of actions with certainty: “ this, he writes, is how we sow, how we navigate, how we marry, how we have children. In all this, the result is uncertain, but we nevertheless decide to undertake those actions about which, we believe, we can have some hope… We go where good reasons, and not the assured truth, lead us [1]. » At this stage, diversity is a good thing that must be encouraged to achieve a society of freedom and diversity, far from any single thought or single party.
The reflex of repression demonstrated by the power of Ariel Henry against all those who demand his departure from the public space should give pause to supporters of change. Strangely, Ariel Henry finds objective allies in an intellectual sector that claims to be progressive, rejecting the relevance of the promising wave of popular protest. The waves, currents and ripples that appear from one end of the country to the other are the disturbances of a stormy sea in its depths, even when it appears calm on the surface. Problem raised by Àlvaro Garcia Linera [2], high-flying intellectual, theoretician, guerrilla, prisoner, activist and vice-president of Bolivia under the governments of the native Evo Morales. Problem renewed on the occasion of its last master conference in November 2023 in Mexico.
A way ” kolboso » to see things
From this critical point of support, when all Christians are alive, some intellectuals will be watching and would like to divert us to take care of them instead. We won’t take it for granted. This is the last time we will talk to them. Words spoken, Words understood. This is not the time to talk much. Everyone who is aware must bring booze, all manner, all conditions. One gospel, It’s a broken tree, We are tired, It has to change, it has to go, the longer it stays, the harder it will be for him and everything that holds him back. Bali cut wood and boulova balls, it has to change, it has to go, no mother, no father, it has to change, it has to go. When the right to say that confers intellectual authority to dogmatists has no hold on reality and cannot convince anyone, it is important to revise your copy with modesty. Otherwise, we fall into the infernal circle of decay and wandering, of intellectual poverty and indigence of spirit. With, as its essential springs, demagoguery and bad faith. And instead of directing their weapons against the usurping government, the objective allies of power find nothing better than to attack Guy Philippe, Rosemond Jean and all the people who refuse to remain silent and demand the departure of the government. ‘Ariel Henry at the risk of their lives.
Would Guy Philippe be one of those who would have understood that something else is needed to get Haiti out of the misery that is strangling it? A miserabilism which has its source in the culture of distrust which sweeps the social fabric and denies it this right. An age-old distrust reflected in the saying “ From Guinea, men are betraying men “. A mistrust with multiple destabilizing powers. Didn’t we see comrades of the guerrilla Gérald Brisson shooting the macoutes alongside him, while wondering if he was really sincere? Same distrust towards former soldiers who had joined the opposition during the Duvalier era and who were preparing invasions against the tyrant in military camps abroad. These painful memories indicate to what extent the reflexes of distrust or even hostility of certain individuals, including intellectuals, towards brave people who risk their lives for the good of the country are still alive. This way kolboso to see things is not new and it is not limited to Haiti.
The gang-grained society
Strangely, thought becomes a cover in the current Haitian situation and no longer serves to guide practice. The disappearance of this ethics of knowledge leads to the triumph of a saying which is not accompanied by a doing. The big mistake is to believe that, in a colorful environment like Haiti, the gang mafia will one day lay down their arms as if by an operation of the Holy Spirit. Especially when we know that these bandits are armed and supplied with ammunition by dark forces who do not want any democratic change in the management of the country. The bandits appeared, with their firepower increased tenfold, under the Duvalier dictatorship. And since then, their terror has taken increasingly worrying forms with the cagoulards, macoutes, attaches, zenglendos and chimeras, to lead the country to the current chaos. The gang-infested society therefore has a history.
On March 15, 2019, journalist Nancy Roc wrote on her Loop account: “ From political cannibalism, we arrive at real scenes of cannibalism in Haiti. This is what happens in a country where politicians use gang leaders who operate with impunity. Ungovernable anthropophagic society. The descent into hell continues. » It was just the beginning. Indeed, on February 25, 2024, several reports showed the leader of the bandits named Boutba and his acolytes roasting the police officer Dieufort Dor whom they had just killed in Mariani and eating his flesh. These facts will headline the online newspaper Trip Foumi on February 25, 2024: Scenes of cannibalism in Mariani, Haiti sinks into horror [3] !
The governments in place wink at the cannibals at the right time and, with this complicity, these artisans of misfortune find a second wind and become downright cannibals who literally eat their adversaries. This is not a metaphor. The gang leader named Boutba literally ate police officer Dieufort Dor. Eating one’s fellow man has become a real fact, because the berserk bandit, true berserk, actually eats you, is filmed to show that what you hear or read is not fiction. The essential function of these cannibals is to maintain fear in consciousness in order to dissuade, if not prevent, any form of demands coming from working-class neighborhoods. In reality, it is about keeping the people in a state of advanced zombification from which they can only emerge with the salt of action. Changing the system, questioning everything, falling and getting up again, twenty times in a row until his final emancipation.
Long before these two events, numerous cases of cannibalism had been denounced, indicating an accelerated degradation of the human condition. Power struggles are no longer limited to destroying opponents through lies and fabrications of all kinds, but they also aim to manipulate bandits to kill opponents.
Let us remember that. The government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide was not reduced to a matter of pipe dreams, and this striking force even contributed to its undoing. Amiot Métayer, known as “Cuban”, boss of the chimeras in Gonaïves, announced the color by creating an organization called “Cannibal Army”. He believed himself to be invincible and even prided himself on having accomplished low deeds such as the execution of the journalist Jean Dominique. Cuban was liquidated, we don’t know how, and his body was found on a vacant lot outside the city. So his brother Butteur Métayer returned from Miami to avenge him. It is repeated that, through black magic and “turning tables” [4], the spirits from beyond revealed the culprit to him. So he attacked Aristide’s government by triggering a revolt that spread like wildfire. We know the rest.
This seems to be the future of political struggles among those thirsty for power who believe themselves to be the only holders of the truth. This form of cannibalism is not a simple exercise in style. This sadistic impulse in the search for power reflects a certain attachment to the static approach to the essence of things instead of considering movement on a global, regional and local scale and by integrating microphysics to speak like Michel Foucault . Erno Renoncourt lent himself to these maneuvers of all kinds, honest and indigent, to subjugate and submit to others. While telling me in a private email that he agrees with 80% of my writings, he makes the remaining 20% into flesh to be devoured in a cannibalistic style that ignores any sense of proportion. And in this logic of consumption, my name is mentioned 24 times in a 10-page text. An authentic devouring.
However, I told him that this was not the time for such ” chirepit » and that we should instead focus all the spotlight on the decadent power of Ariel Henry. After this step, I was ready to resume the debate. Which ? The one between the structural on the one hand and the cyclical on the other. But he persisted so that for the moment I have no choice but to ask him to be quiet. I have more important things to do than talk about the sex of angels. Everything has its time. As Ecclesiastes points out: “In this world there is a time for everything and a time for everything: There is a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot plants. There is a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build” [5].
The real driving force in the fight to rid Haiti of the Ariel gang is the sovereign people. The real resistance started from there with its subversive potentialities. The surge of demonstrators from working-class neighborhoods changed the situation and put on the table fundamental questions such as the distribution of the national budget, the creation of schools and health centers in the ghettos, the real participation of the sovereign people in the power management, decentralization, creation of rural infrastructure for irrigation, etc.
It is in this deleterious environment that Erno Renoncourt decided to speak in a somewhat mocking tone about the gospel of Guy Philippe. The good news that the latter brings does not please him. It is his complete right. But let him share with us his own proposals. What is the content of his good news? We have tried to identify some of the verses of this gospel that Erno Renoncourt condemns. It seems that these are simple messages against which this one should have nothing to say. Unless he knows something we don’t. And in this case, we would be happy if he would share his wisdom with the people. After counting the deaths that occurred during the demonstrations intended to be peaceful held in towns such as Hinche, Ouanaminthe, Les Cayes, Roseaux, well before the victims on the road to Laboule/Kenscoff, let us listen to the main verses of Guy’s gospel Philippe whom Erno Renoncourt rejects out of hand.
Verse 1. No force can prevent the people from taking their destiny into their own hands.
Verse 2. The Whites defend their interests through their embassies and the Core Group. The battle to be fought is against a system that oppresses the people for two centuries.
Verse 3. The BSAP and the National Police must join hands like brothers and not shoot at each other.
Verse 4. By respecting the conditions, we can make water catchments like that on the Massacre River, produce rice, cereals and food currently imported. We can ensure food security
Verse 5. The first gang is the Haitian STATE. In 90 days, the bandits can be subdued and security can reign.
Verse 6. An elected government can put an end to the NGO republic.
Verse 7. Let us demonstrate peacefully and show the world our determination.
Verse 8. The duty of the State is to provide security without requesting support from foreign forces.
Verse 9. Like the Jewish diaspora for Israel or the Japanese diaspora for Japan, the Haitian diaspora can play a vital role in the construction of Haiti.
Verse 10. Ariel Henry must resign to avoid bloodshed and new foreign occupation. Otherwise, popular forces will force him to leave.
The actual realization of these verses is entirely possible, but supporters of resistance cannot take these verses as gospel and must be “vigilant” to ensure that they are accompanied by appropriate actions and that the promises will be kept. No progress is possible in a gang-involved society with people who earn their living by kidnapping for ransoms and kidnapping for organ trafficking, particularly in Cité Soleil and Canaan. Indeed, the study carried out by the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime in February 2024 reveals cases “ of corpses stripped of vital organs and left in the streets – both in Port-au-Prince and in rural areas where gangs have attacked and kidnapped people. Finally, local sources within hospitals confirmed some such cases, adding that some gangs now also operate their own clinics, not only to treat their soldiers, but also to harvest organs from abductees. [6].
In a society organized on new bases, the reintegration of young bandits into jobs where they earn a fraction of their daily plunders per month is a Herculean task. Real consultation of the people at all these stages is, if not essential, at least necessary. Otherwise, if he does not feel involved in decision-making, he will leave for the hills and refuse to get involved and work on the plantations, as he did after independence in 1804. It is therefore necessary that the balance of power changes and that by eliminating corruption, society grants a greater part of the national income to the urban and rural masses.
10 to 1 – The attention economy
Erno Renoncourt writes that Leslie Péan presents “ a certain detailed pragmatism of 10 to 1, which he proposes to achieve as a priority, in defiance of any strategy, to oust the illegitimate government of Ariel Henry. This is absolutely false, that’s not my point. It’s not honest to cut a sentence and only retain its second part. I said and repeated that “ if on the strategic level we fight 1 against 10, on the tactical level we must fight 10 against 1”. During the interview that I gave to Gotson Pierre de Tichèzba on AlterRadio on February 10, 2024, I said clearly, between the 17th and 26th minute, that we must fight to get rid of Ariel Henry “as a symbol”. Likewise, in the range between 23 minutes 40 seconds and 26 minutes 14, I insisted that “ if on the strategic level we fight 1 against 10, on the tactical level we must fight 10 against 1”. We can listen to these statements at any time on podcast to realize that Erno Renoncourt himself is showing great poverty, has made a masterly mistake or wants to deceive others. For what purposes? The scholar who lives on this kind of poverty is doing the worst thing, because it is the attention economy that must dominate. Elementary principle when we claim to fight for social justice.
The tactic of fighting 10 to 1 is an old recipe. For more than 2,500 years, humanity has evolved with wars. Some examples. Since that of the Peloponnese between Athens and Sparta which the latter won thanks to the help received from the Persians. Thinkers and authors such as Socrates, Plato and Thucydides mention this armed conflict in their analyses. Strategists and thinkers determine how to establish a battle plan, electrify the troops and gather external support. After the Age of Enlightenment, the French people stormed the Bastille on July 14, 1789 and beheaded King Louis XVI on January 21, 1793. In Saint-Domingue, the Jacobin Sonthonax distributed 30,000 new rifles to former slaves in their stating: “he who wants to take it away from you will want to return you to slavery.” These rifles will help Toussaint Louverture to form the liberation army from 1796.
This massive distribution and the disarmament of farmers constitute the very essence of General Leclerc’s mission to Santo Domingo in 1802. But it was too late. The War of Liberation was to give birth to the first independent black republic on January 1, 1804. In the United States of America, it took the Civil War to obtain the abolition of black slavery in 1865. To achieve the change, it is absolutely necessary to understand the words of Clausewitz, “war is politics by other means”, as well as those of Mao “Politics is war without bloodshed and war is politics with bloodshed.”
This is precisely what the philosopher Michel Foucault said in his own way when he wrote: “ It may be that war as a strategy is a continuation of politics. But we must not forget that “politics” was conceived as the continuation, if not exactly and directly, of war, at least of the military model as a fundamental means of preventing civil unrest. [7]. May the BSAP remain up to the task of constituting the armed arm that is lacking in peaceful popular struggles.
Attacking everyone all the time as Erno Renoncourt does would, in other times, have provoked a smile and amused the gallery. But the situation today is much too serious for that. This commentator seems unaware that there are agents provocateurs paid to do this kind of destructive work in politics. It is important to applaud any critical approach that gets to the heart of the real problem: the prevailing futility and reigning absurdity. But not in the way that Erno Renoncourt proceeds. Don’t make people say what they don’t say. Especially when we present ourselves as a great censor before the Eternal, as an ideologue possessing all knowledge. This amounts to charging like a suicide bomber towards your own suicide. It would be a disservice to Erno Renoncourt to let him slide down this dangerous slope which cancels all the subsequent developments of his text. There’s nothing we can do if he wants to go hara-kiri, but we can’t let him kill others in his path.
The method of falsifying what is said and written cannot give good results for various reasons. Presenting yourself as the sole holder of the truth is not good teaching and can only irritate those whose behavior you want to change. There is a fun side to dishonest criticism that often leads others to question your own lucidity.
Against the grains of sand in the gear
Erno Renoncourt would probably not want to be seen as a professional pain in the ass. So, he needs to have a little modesty, learn to focus his attention better and avoid letting himself go into endless diatribes. He would benefit from reading the Mediapart text entitled “When the CIA set out to dismantle the French intellectual left”. The text begins like this: “In a report written in 1985 and which has just been made public, we discover that the CIA closely followed French intellectual life. A Sartre under surveillance, appreciated “new philosophers”, Foucault and Derrida analyzed… Secret agents thus immersed themselves in the study of French Theory. Objective: to help fractures in the intellectual left and fuel the global cultural war…”.
A second reference on the same theme is that of Violaine Morin entitled “When the CIA was closely interested in Foucault, Derrida and Althusser” published in the newspaper Le Monde on the use of extraordinary thinkers by the CIA to sow discord among the French left. She writes: This document, delivered in 1985 by American agents based in Paris, shows a certain interest in the great figures of structuralism, who would soon be called, across the Atlantic, the « French theory ». As summarized by Gabriel Rockhill, a French-American philosopher who studied the report for the Los Angeles Review of Books, “the CIA devoted significant resources to the study, by a group of secret agents, of the theoretical corpus considered by some to be the most abstruse and convoluted ever produced [8] ».
The deliberate or unconscious negative reactions of “progressives” to the Guy Philippe symbol summarize the defects and psychic functioning studied by the Haitian psychiatrist Legrand Bijoux [9] : the Tiger complex, the Porpoise complex and the Wild Guinea fowl complex. The journalists of Rezo Nòdwès summarize these complexes in behaviors consisting of putting “grains of sand in the gear” [10] or even looking at the flea on the elephant’s back without even seeing the latter. This is not a particularly Haitian behavior because, when Fidel Castro’s bearded men returned to Havana on January 8, 1959, the members of the left of the Popular Socialist Party (PSP) had the shortest beards one could have.
Basically, the wound is there and we can only heal it by being aware of it. The spectacle is heartbreaking and Rezo Nòdwès notes with desolation: “We talk much more than we act. We have become masters of grand speeches that only produce mediocre achievements. What in Quebec we call ”big talkers, little doers”. We are first in class in oratory flights, but last in class in concrete results” [11]. The time has come for the mandarins of writing to become modest and to cease their hostility to popular struggles. Otherwise, the sovereign people will not go far and they not very far.
After the earthquake of January 2010, in an article entitled “The desperate courage of the bankers”, I wrote “ The Democrats must reach out to the bankers but without letting them continue in the insane race of financial speculation. This is the only way to escape the perpetual discontent and find in Haiti a respite from the path of degradations which have made it an overpopulated desert. [12] ». With these words, I invited my compatriots to arm themselves with the courage to stick to reality to change it and not to remain on the sidelines. When we look at a reality, we essentially see what we are, and if we are in favor of change, we detect the possibilities that are offered to move forward. Otherwise, o We find all the good reasons in the world to languish and denigrate those who put their lives on the table by going to encounter this reality.
At a time when the disappearance of the nation-state is on the agenda in the context of wild globalization, the Haitian intelligentsia must reflect with the diaspora to think about our insertion in a world prey to an inescapable externalization. Caveant Consules! to those who do not want to do anything today under the pretext of wanting to change structures! Of course, they must by taking the first step. “ Walker, there is no path, the path is made by walking. By walking the path is made » said the Spanish poet Antonio Machado: “Traveler, there is no road already built. The journey is made by walking and the road is built under your feet. »
Notes
[1] Quote from Seneca in Pascal Dupond, Epictetus, Analects II V, 4-17, Philopsis, February 20, 2020, p. 4.
[2] Guillermo Levy and Julian Rebòn, « Interview with Álvaro Garcia Linera: The fight for equality has a high social cost and someone is going to charge you for it sooner or later », ESPOILER Magazine, Buenos Aires, February 12, 2020
[3] “Scenes of cannibalism in Mariani, Haiti sinks into horror! », TripFoumi, February 25, 2024
[4] Jean-Hébert Armengaud, “Haiti, shipwreck and hitman”, Libération, Paris, December 26, 2003.
[5] Ecclesiastes 3:1-11 The Sower Bible, 2015
[6] Romain Le Cour Grandmaison, Ana Paula Oliveira and Matt Herbert, Haiti’s gang crisis and international responses, Geneva, Switzerland, February 2024, p. 20.
[7] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, Paris, Gallimard, 1975, p. 170.
[8] Violaine Morin, Le Monde, March 23, 2017.
[9] Legrand Bijoux, Morals that hurt a country, (Haiti), Presses de Media-Texte, December 1997.
[10] “Let’s reinvent a better country: From Santo Domingo to Haiti”, Rezo Nodwès, September 18, 2023
[11] Ibid.
[12] Leslie Péan, “The desperate courage of the bankers”, AlterPresse, March 6, 2010.
