Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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Notes -
I was reading a bit about the slow-moving disaster in Haiti today, thanks to Jimmy "Barbecue" Chérizier's declaration:
I'm only vaguely familiar with the events that got Haiti where it is--unchecked rise in gang power, assassination of the President by "foreign mercenaries"--Columbians and Haitian-Americans--apparently hoping to win contracts under a new regime). Apparently Haitians are now in general "angry" with the U.S.:
Because I am hopelessly pedantic, the thing that bothered me most about what I was reading was the notion of "genocide." Now, this is of course a loaded and often contested word. What most people mean by "genocide" is the extermination or perhaps only expulsion of a race or ethnicity, at minimum within certain geographic boundaries. But the internet tells me that Haiti is 95% African, and almost all the rest "mixed European-African." Furthermore:
And from Wikipedia:
So I'm left wondering--what's the "genocide" on offer, here? Is the Haitian gang leader threatening to just... murder everyone? The French speakers? The Protestants and/or Catholics? The infinitesimal population of non-blacks? The country has spent basically its entire existence lurching from crisis to crisis, prompting academics to for some reason describe its history as
and
It would probably be double-pendantic to point out that the inhabitants of Haiti are colonizers, for all their ancestors were brought there on slave ships; descendants of the island's earlier inhabitants are still reportedly out there--just not in Haiti. I say this in part because I have a lot of problems with "colonization" rhetoric, and Haiti helps to illustrate some of the central absurdities. But more than that, I want to drive home the idea that there doesn't seem to be an ethnic minority for Mr. Barbecue to cleanse.
It's possible he intends for "genocide" to simply mean "lots and lots of killing," but of course--he seems to be the one threatening to do the killing.
Civil war, I understand. Military-versus-gangland would be ugly in a so many ways. And given Haiti's history, I can even understand why "international interference" is a sore spot, despite the fact that Haiti seems to do much better under the rule of others than it does when left to its own devices. I am also aware of the urge some readers of this post will doubtless feel to start talking about "magic soil" or the like. But when it comes to Barbecue's prediction-slash-threat of genocide, I find myself quite at a loss. Whose race or tribe ("genos") is supposed to be under threat, here?
Ok, internet search was no help here - what does "magic soil" mean?
Yeah, sorry, @ArjinFerman is correct, though I've certainly seen both versions. "Magic dirt" is a shorthand way of criticizing arguments that seem to be about places when they should be about people, on account of there being nothing magical about the specific dirt people live on.
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