In the Caribbean country of Haiti, the people are once more suffering horribly: the corrupt government has collapsed, gangs are running wild in the capital city of Port-au-Prince, robbing, raping, and murdering; masses of people are lacking food and clean water, children are dying. This is happening in what is already one of the poorest countries in the world.

But how did it get this way?

Haiti is a country where, over 200 years ago, a rebellion of the enslaved people succeeded in overthrowing the rule of the French colonialists. Yet, as righteous as that slave rebellion was—and although it led to independence for Haiti—it did not lead to fundamental liberation for the masses of people there. After it no longer directly colonized Haiti, France worked to choke Haiti economically—even forcing Haiti to pay “reparations” to France! But, over the past couple of centuries, and more, it has increasingly been the U.S. that has plundered Haiti and its people.

Especially fearing that the example and spirit of the revolution in Haiti would spread to and be taken up by slaves in this country, the U.S.—beginning with the presidency of Thomas Jefferson in the early 1800s—adopted an actively hostile position toward Haiti and worked to isolate it economically and diplomatically. The U.S. did not recognize Haitian independence until the 1860s, during the Civil War in the U.S., which finally put an end to slavery in this country. And even after formally recognizing Haiti as an independent country, especially in the last 100 years and more, the U.S. has repeatedly invaded Haiti militarily, has imposed brutally oppressive governments and backed murderous dictators terrorizing the people in Haiti, and has wrecked the economy of that country, ruining the lives of the masses of people.

This is part of a larger pattern, where, along with its horrendous crimes in other parts of the world, in the period from 1846 to the present the U.S. has intervened in countries in the Caribbean, Central and South America at least 100 times—militarily, through CIA coups, or in other ways—at the cost of literally hundreds of thousands of deaths and endless misery for the people of those countries.

And it should surprise no one that the role of the U.S. in Haiti has been historically accompanied by the kind of crude racism toward the Haitian people that is all-too-familiar to anyone who knows anything about the actual history of the U.S.

When a massive earthquake hit Haiti in 2010, the effects of that earthquake were all the more terrible because of how U.S. imperialism had already plundered the country and its people. In the words of Bill Quigley, legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights, speaking about the role of the U.S., in all this: “We didn’t create the earthquake, but we created some of the circumstances that made the earthquake so devastating.”

Now, the U.S. is once again seeking to impose a “solution” to the chaos in Haiti by pulling together yet more flunkies of U.S. imperialism to form some kind of government that will be imposed on the people of Haiti. But U.S. imperialism is not a “solution” to the terrible situation in Haiti. U.S. imperialism is the problem—it is the fundamental cause of this terrible situation.

More about the situation in Haiti, and the solution to this, is gone into in the Youtube RNL (Revolution, Nothing Less!) Show #188, and the whole history of U.S. crimes against Haiti and its people is gone into more fully and deeply in articles at revcom.us. What is crucial to understand is that what the U.S. has done to Haiti is part of the whole pattern of monstrous crimes committed by this system and by the ruling class of this country, from the very founding of this country and down to today, within this country itself and all over the world. And, most fundamental is the fact that all this horror flows out of the very nature of a system that rests on ruthless exploitation, murderous oppression, and massive destruction of people and the environment—a system which cannot be reformed but must be overthrown at the soonest possible time, and be replaced by a radically different and far better system.

Once more, the current events in Haiti—on top of the whole history of what the imperialists have done to that country and its people—drive home this urgent lesson: We, the people of the world, can no longer afford to allow these imperialists to continue to dominate the world and determine the destiny of humanity. And it is a scientific fact that humanity does not have to live this way.