Haitian at Rose Goute Creole Restaurant in Springfield, Ohio, helps a line of customers, September 16, 2024.
Springfield is a small industrial town that had been shrinking for over 50 years. In the last decade, the city, in collaboration with the federal government, began a “Welcome Immigrants” program to try to reverse the decline. Ultimately over 10,000 Haitians moved there. These new residents stimulated the economy, filling some low-paid jobs in agriculture and other industries that had not been filled by Springfield natives, and drawing some new industries to the area.
These Haitians are mainly refugees from an extreme economic and political crisis in their homeland that has torn apart society and made daily life impossible for many.
In Haiti, extreme economic and political crisis has torn society apart and made daily life impossible for many, as seen here in the streets of Port-au-Prince, September 13, 2024. Photo: AP
What has caused this crisis? First, the vicious revenge taken by all the imperialist powers against the enslaved people of Haiti for freeing themselves in a revolution 230 years ago. Second, and the main thing today, 110 years of direct domination by U.S. imperialism. (See Bob Avakian’s social media dispatch REVOLUTION #20, “Haiti—Horrible Suffering, More Horrific Crimes by U.S. Imperialism” at @BobAvakianOfficial and “The History of Haiti and the Revolution It So Urgently Needs Today: Part 1: Haitian People Heroically Overturn the Hell of Slavery… Only to Be Ensnared and Exploited by Imperialism”) This has been 110 years of direct military operations, support of corrupt and tyrannical governments, economic and environmental plunder, and gross interference by the CIA and military when some figure arises who even seems to oppose one or another aspect of U.S. policy. At this point, life in Haiti has become extremely dangerous, forcing thousands to leave friends, family and homeland behind to seek safe haven and a way to send some help home.
This influx of new people caused some stress on the social system—schools, health care, traffic, etc. And some conflicts and tensions have arisen between the immigrants and longtime residents, which surfaced after a tragic accident in which a Haitian man crashed into a school bus, killing one child and injuring many others. He was found guilty of “involuntary manslaughter,” but J.D. Vance—already seeking to fan the flames of hatred—tweeted falsely that “A child was murdered by a Haitian migrant”—as if the accident was intentional.
Still, by most accounts, overall people were getting along, and Haitians considered Springfield a relatively welcoming environment. But there were also undercurrents of conflict, misunderstanding and outright racism and xenophobia (hatred of foreign people) waiting to be further tapped by MAGA and other organized fascist forces.
Donald Trump Launches Fascist Assault on Humanity of Haitian People
During his September 10 debate with Kamala Harris, the Notorious P.I.G. (aka Donald Trump) spewed out this racist slander about Haitian immigrants: “In Springfield, they [Haitians] are eating the dogs—the people that came in, they're eating the cats. They're eating—they're eating the pets of the people that live there and this is what's happening in our country, and it's a shame.”
This particular lie was not new—Trump’s running mate Vance had been banging this drum for months, and the neo-Nazi “Blood Tribe” organization has been doing it for even longer.1 But blasting it out to the debate audience of 67 million people was a calculated move by these fascists to dehumanize and unleash terror and violence against Haitian people on a national platform. And this in turn is part of amping up and “justifying” their larger program of attacking all non-white immigrants, with plans to put millions in “detention” camps and then deport them, revive the “Muslim ban” and other fascist xenophobic measures—all as part of “Making America Openly White-Supremacist Again.”
And so far it’s working! Right away, other powerful fascists like Elon Musk and Texas Senator Ted Cruz took the cue from Trump/Vance and started posting anti-Haitian memes to their millions of online followers. The fascist “Proud Boys” marched in Springfield’s streets, anti-immigrant KKK leaflets have been circulating, and Trump himself says he is planning to go to Springfield “soon.”
In two weeks since the debate, there have been at least 35 bomb threats, many directed against worksites in Springfield that employed Haitians, schools and colleges in which Haitians were enrolled, and so on. Two Walgreens stores had to evacuate! The city felt compelled to cancel its annual CultureFest—a celebration of cultural diversity. And the Mayor has assumed “emergency powers” to deal with “security concerns.”
Springfield, Ohio, Haitian kids, kept home from school because of the bomb threats sell Kool-Aid, September 17, 2024. Photo: AP
Haitian people report feeling terrorized. One nursing student—now having to attend courses on Zoom because of bomb threats to the campus—pointed out that in his community people used to be out on the sidewalks, walking and greeting each other. Now they’re scared to leave their homes. A Haitian pastor wondered “what Haiti has done to the world that they hate us so much.” Imagine answering that question from a six-year-old who can’t go to school because somebody might set a bomb off and kill her and her friends. Imagine the lifelong trauma for small children forced to confront this kind of racist terror at an age when they still believe in magic.
Democrats Hem and Haw While Refusing to Confront Open Nazi Terror Directed at Immigrants
Meanwhile the Democrats are refusing to confront these Nazi-style attacks on the lives and humanity of Haitian people. When Trump was spouting this racist poison at the debate, Harris wore her “what a weirdo” smile, as if Trump had fallen into the Democrats’ trap. She said his remarks were “extreme” and that he was engaging in “this kind of rhetoric, when the issues that affect the American people are not being addressed.” In other words, she treated Trump’s dehumanization of, and threats against a whole people, like empty talk and “a distraction.”
NO! If terrorizing, dehumanizing and driving out tens of millions of immigrants, as Trump has pledged to do, is not “an issue that affects the American people,” WTF is? Yet Harris did not once defend the humanity of the Haitian people. She did not assert their humanity, she did not say “these are our brothers and sisters and it is intolerable for anyone to talk about them like this.”
Since the debate, Harris and the Biden administration have expressed more outrage at “racist tropes” and the “serious threats” against “the community.” Harris said it was “a crying shame” how “this community” is being wracked by turmoil and violence and moaned that “Americans are being divided.”
But it is not “the community,” or “Americans” that are being targeted by these fascists, it is the Haitian community and people, and immigrants more broadly. They are facing very serious and ongoing danger. And so it is striking that even two weeks later, Harris rarely, if ever, refers to the Haitian people and community.
Think about it: it would be as if someone opposing Hitler talked about “attacks on the community” instead of openly saying that Hitler was going after Jews and that his rhetoric was paving the way for literally genocidal policies. This is yet more proof of what Bob Avakian has emphasized over and over: these Democrats will not fight the fascists the way they need to be fought!
And how could they, since the Democratic Party’s program on immigration is also essentially anti-immigrant, aimed at sealing the border, denying people the right to asylum and so on. They aren’t as heavy-handed and open about it as the fascists, but neither are they going to stand up for the right of all human beings to seek safety, shelter and a means to live!
Shameless Lies and Fascist Epistemology
Vance and Trump’s attacks are all based on straight-up shameless lies. Even before the debate, Springfield city officials told Vance’s staff that “these claims were baseless.” And every piece of alleged “evidence” of this racist fantasy has been shredded since then. The missing cat that was the original “victim” in these rumors showed up alive and well in her owner’s basement two days later.
Confronted by CNN anchor Dana Bash about the fact that he was spreading proven falsehoods, Vance didn’t try to present evidence—no, he fell back on claiming that anonymous “constituents” had “told him” these things happened. Then Vance proclaimed that “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m gonna do.”
This is fascist epistemology (epistemology is the science of distinguishing true from false ideas): If some fascist says something—if they “create a story”—well, then that makes it “true,” facts be damned. This is an extremely dangerous warning sign in general, and especially in relation to unleashing racist violence, up to and including genocide. When a social base of millions—like the MAGA crowd—has been trained to believe that any insanity spouted by their “leaders” is “god’s truth,” persecution, threats and worse WILL follow.
What Must Be Done?
People should stand up against the attacks being launched against Haitians, against Venezuelans, and against immigrants in general.
But this is not enough, not nearly enough. We have to go to the root of the problem to understand it and to deal with it. We have to go to the way that this system of American capitalism-imperialism has plundered, invaded and oppressed not just people in Haiti but people all over Latin America, Asia and Africa, for hundreds of years. We have to go to the way this same system has ruined the environments and societies of these countries to the point where people are forced to desperately flee, risking everything for a chance at life. We have to go to the way that both the MAGA-fascists and the Democrats have no answer to this other than walls and repression—that each taunts the other for not being “tough enough” on the people their system has forced to flee their ruined homelands.
This means right now getting into and spreading Bob Avakian’s social media dispatch that lays this out, “Haiti—Horrible Suffering, More Horrific Crimes by U.S. Imperialism.” And it means most of all getting into—and spreading—all of these dispatches from @BobAvakianOfficial, which together lay out the reasons WHY this capitalist-imperialist system must go; how a revolution could be made in this time, and not in some distant time to get rid of it; and what this revolution is all about.
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.