Saturday, February 28, 2015

Haiti

Which was the greatest disaster to befall this corner of such a small Caribbean island, all of which is called Hispaniola, the eastern two-thirds of it the Dominican Republic, the rest Haiti? Was it: 

a) the arrival of Europeans with their slaves and their Christianity (the native Taino, who inhabited the island before 1492, were virtually annihilated by Spanish settlers within twenty-five years)?

b) the departure of the Europeans (Haiti was the world’s first republic to be led by a “black” man; the French left in the early 19th century, kicked out after a slave rebellion in 1804)?

c) the endless repetition of dictatorship (so many, far too many to list)? 

d) the tendency to get in the way of hurricanes and earthquakes (the earthquake in January 2012, the worst in this region in the last two hundred years, was measured at 7.0 on the Richter scale; its epicenter was about 15 miles west of the capital, Port-au-Prince; it is estimated that about 300,000 people were killed and another 1.5 million left homeless)? 

e) the Duvalier family?

f) a combination of all the above? 

If you are planning to go on holiday in Haiti, remember to take a sleeping bag and tent, as this is where you will be staying. Medical supplies in your luggage will also be appreciated, and even cash – the billions promised by the world’s rich nations while the media was still focused on the issue have simply not materialised now that the media has stopped focusing on the issue (Ebola is more important than poverty in Haiti for the simple reason that poverty in Haiti is neither infectious nor contagious, whereas Ebola may be both; wealthy countries do not allow Ebola to enter at their ports, and quarantine in deportation centres any who might be carrying the disease; those with mere poverty are still free to enter).

Of all of Haiti's rather too many "interesting" historical characters, François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture, also known as Toussaint L'Ouverture, Toussaint-Louverture, Toussaint Bréda, and even The Black Napoleon, merits a paragraph or two, for leading the only successful slave revolt in modern history. 


Toussaint grew up on Santo Domingo, where he was fortunate to have a liberal slave-master, who trained him as a house-servant rather than a field-worker, and included literacy in the curriculum. Toussaint read the various Enlightenment philosophers, in particular Rousseau, who were campaigning, not in fact for the abolition of slavery, but at least for an extension of the "Rights of Man" to include slaves. How exactly one makes that distinction is not the subject of this essay; I would suggest that it may have been rather more of a strategy towards abolition than a semantic distinction, and for a brief moment it was successful. Very brief. In 1791 the plantation owners fought back, and the measure was withdrawn. This led the slaves to cry treason, and rebel, first against the French, then the British, finally the Spanish, who took turns at theoretically putting down the rebellion; in fact, in the case of the latter two, simply trying to take advantage of the defeats suffered by their predecessors. Toussaint was the leader of the rebels, and his skills as an untrained military general were repeatedly made manifest. When, in 1793, the Jacobins under Robespierre took power in revolutionary France, slavery was abolished altogether, and Toussaint appointed to lead the French attacks against the British and Spanish on Hispaniola, to liberate the slaves there too. Seven separate battles in seven days left him as governor of the colony. 

Then the Jacobins fell, and Napoleon took power in France. Extraordinarily, given that he was responsible for the "Edicts of Tolerance" which tore down the walls of the ghettos and liberated most of Europe, at least until he had established his dictatorship completely, Napoleon repealed the abolition laws, reinstating slavery, and sent a navy to Haiti to enforce it. Toussaint sued for peace, and agreed to retire from public life in exchange for Haitian independence, which Napoleon granted, but only because trickery was the easiest way to defeat Toussain, reclaim Haiti, and strengthen his own position, the only position that ultimately he cared about.

In 1803 Toussaint was invited to France to complete the independence discussions. No sooner had he arrived than his safe conduct documents were torn up in his face, and himself arrested and thrown into a dungeon at Fort de Joux in the Jura mountains, where cold and starvation did not take long to kill him. A cruel and pointless death in any circumstances, but worse still when you learn that, six months later, Napoleon changed his mind about the Caribbean because matters in Europe required total concentration, and it was much simpler just to abandon the region, sell every remaining piece of territory in North America to the United States (the so-called Louisiana Purchase), and grant Haiti its independence after all.

*

Part of the reason why the aid money has not arrived is the politics of Haiti itself, which operated a kind of Voodoo Socialism for thirty years at the end of the last century, under the shaman Papa Doc Duvalier and then his son baby-Doc. The usual calumnies, with tens of thousands disappearing, babies routinely eaten for breakfast, etc. After they went there was a period of pretend democracy, but the army, as so often in the world, couldn’t resist seizing power (when you have no external enemy to fight, soldiering is dull, so you have to turn on your own people), couping Jean-Bertrand Aristide not once but twice. Some states are failed states; Haiti is sadly an example of failed humanity, and that is not a slur against Haitians; most of the failed humanity takes place elsewhere in the world, by wilfully ignoring the dire needs of this benighted place.



*


(Finally, I would just like to give a little plug to Tap-Tap, my favourite restaurant in South Beach, Miami. On 5th street, between Meridian and Jefferson – Haitian cuisine and live music Thursdays and Saturdays).


Marks For: As many as you can send, plus Euros, Dollars, any currency will do.


Marks Against: This is not the time to be counting up the negatives. The relief fund is still open. Click here




Copyright © 2015 David Prashker
All rights reserved
The Argaman Press


Guyana

Not to be confused with Guinea, Guinea-Bissau or Equatorial Guinea, all of which are in Africa; this one is officially in the Caribbean, though in fact it is on the mainland of Central America. In full the Cooperative Republic of Guyana (it is strange to think of a country operating as a Co-Op, or indeed a Co-Op operating as a country; I grew up in a world in which a Co-Op was a grocery store and a cooperative was a place where hippies and anarchists "hung out" to do "free love" and smoke pot; on the other hand, co-operative is also a synonym for bi-partisan, a word which used to be in the dictionary of American politics, and would serve every country in the world well if only they adopted it). 

Like New York, Guyana started as a Dutch colony which the British grabbed (Britain’s finances are based in its Treasury; a Treasury is the place where you keep the treasure; treasure is what pirates steal – just wanted to be sure we all understood the terminology). British Guiana became independent in 1966, and a republic in 1970. Though it is still a member of the Commonwealth, it is also a founding member of the Union of South American Nations; and will be made an honorary member of the International Society of Poverty-Stricken Nations, if ever the rich and greedy people in the world, all of whom claim to be caring and compassionate members of one or other of the main religious faiths, actually get around to making the moral decision to reduce their levels of narcissistic greed and self-indulgence and help the 80% of humanity who are candidates for the aforementioned club. 

Guyana makes up for being poor in human living conditions by being extremely rich in ecology, though unfortunately you can’t eat most of the exotic trees, plants and birds, and not just because they are protected species – Guyana is particularly good at protecting species, so long as they are not human. Two thirds of the population are descended from African slaves, brought by the Dutch to work the sugar plantations. One half of the population is descended from Indian agricultural workers whom the British brought when slavery was abolished. The arithmetical disparity is attributable to intermarriage. Politics is ethnically based in the usual manner; it seems to me a universal paradigm that human beings would probably get along much better with each other if there were no politicians trying to organise them, while actually driving them to hatred and war in the process; by odd paradox, total anarchy may actually provide a better chance of harmony and unity, whereas imposed harmony and unity invariably lead to anarchy. 

Economically too the country had little chance for a long while, as the incompetent politicians also owned and managed all the industries; and how surprising that things started to get better when denationalisation took place in the late 1990s. Oil has now been found, though Guyana is still disputing with Suriname over who owns which part of it – and anyway, to access the oil, they will need Dutch or American oil companies, who like to take their profits to tax havens like Guernsey and the Cayman islands, so they won’t gain any benefit from finding it.

In the same league as Niagara and the Victoria Falls, though perhaps at the Liverpool level rather than the Chelsea, Guyana hosts one of the world's great waterfalls, Kaieteur Falls (see photo at the top of the page), which I include in order to balance the mark I am subtracting for the country's appalling treatment of gay people, and consistent failure even to investigate allegations of violence against women.

Marks For: 2 (with a bonus for putting the word "cooperative" in their name)

Marks Against: 5




Copyright © 2015 David Prashker
All rights reserved
The Argaman Press


Guinea-Bissau

Part of the great empire of Mali that once dominated western Africa, it became Portuguese Guinea when the Europeans arrived, destroyed the ancient African tribal way of life, suppressed its culture and civilisation, took millions of its men away as slaves, raped its resources to enrich itself at home, governed it by brute force for several centuries, and then wondered why Africa is in such a mess today (it's actually all Africa's own fault; but if Africa would like some patronising aid or some belittling wise counsel from we who know so much better in Europe, we will be happy to condescend). 

Independent since 1973, it added the name of its capital to the name of the country because otherwise people might think it was Equatorial Guinea, and now go back to my notes on that great land and you will understand the wish for disassociation. There is also another Guinea next door, which used to be French Guinea, and now uses Guinea-Conakry, likewise adding the name of its capital, and for the same reason. Guinea-Bissau also has the honour and the privilege of sharing its initials with Great Britain, though it is G-B and not GB which uses the double-barrel on this occasion.

Politically too G-B likes its double barrel; it has the distinction of being the only country in the world in which, through its entire history (admittedly only forty years), not a single one of its elected Presidents has yet managed to complete a full five-year term, though the reasons and methods of replacement have varied: from military coup to civil war, from assassination to arrest, though not yet natural causes. At the moment the army is in charge, but only, of course, to aid the transition back to democracy. 


Meanwhile the country’s official language, Portuguese, cannot be spoken, let alone read or written, by more than 80% of its population, GDP per capita is in the bottom five in the world with 70% of the population living below the African poverty line (the European poverty line is drawn at the point where a household has no television, no computer, no telephone, no indoor toilet and no washing machine; the African poverty line expects none of these and is drawn at the point where a household has no food, limited clothing, and no likelihood of what is called in the NGOs “Human Development”). Having said that, G-B does produce an awful lot of cashew and ground nuts, though these are mostly exported. Presumably the natives, like me, have histamine allergies, and so can’t eat nuts anyway. Having said that, no one can claim any longer that G-B is economically depressed, given that it now houses one of the world’s most successful industries, in the top ten of contributors to the world’s economy – yes, G-B is now the principal African base for Latin American drug smugglers.

 







 





Marks For: 0

Marks Against: 7




Copyright © 2015 David Prashker
All rights reserved
The Argaman Press


Guinea

Also known as Guinea-Conakry, so that it does not get confused with its neighbour Guinea-Bissau or the Republic of Equatorial Guinea, which is much, much further south and east across the Bay of Guinea.

How is it possible that a country which contains some of the richest mineral mines and quarries in the world, is also one of the world’s poorest countries? To which the answer is usually obvious: corrupt, bullying leaders who have expropriated (that's a euphemism for "stolen") the wealth to themselves, and who keep the people passive by brute force. And is that answer correct in this case? Yes, sadly it is. So correct, that Guinea’s alpha males do not only beat up their own people, but have been implicated in several regional conflicts as well, notably Liberia, Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast.

A French colony until 1958, it started independent life as the Wassoulou Empire under President Ahmed Sekou Toure, an Islamic state attached to Moscow, using the tried-and-tested methodology of Stalin to maintain power for twenty-six years – thousands disappeared, thousands more were tortured, executed, banished. After Toure came military rule and the abandonment of socialism, but no change in the methodology of power, and no change in the level of poverty either. Lansana Conte ruled as a civilian, but when half a million refugees poured in from those three neighbouring wars that I mentioned, and then Conte died, the military took over by name (the name is junta) for two years, before establishing the current political system, in which around twenty different ethnic groups appear to get on very harmoniously with each other, until elections are called, at which time politicians stir up inter-ethnic hatreds, violence ensues, people get elected and don’t need the rhetoric any longer, and the ethnic groups go back to living harmoniously again; until the next elections.

All of which suggests zero marks; but in fact some marks may shortly be forthcoming. Twice recently, in 2010 and again in 2013, Guinea has held free and competitive democratic Presidential and Legislative elections, both of them regarded as respectable by international observers, electing Alpha Conde as President for a five year term, with a multi-party National Assembly, and for the first time in its history an all-civilian Cabinet.


English people reading this will know that, long before decimalisation, longer even before the Euro, British coinage included the Guinea, which was a gold coin worth twenty-one shillings, which is a shilling more than a pound (you'll see why I've mentioned that oddity in just a second). It was called a Guinea because the gold for the original coin was mined in Guinea, in 1663 to be precise, at which time a Guinea was a one-pound coin, only the price of gold tends to fluctuate, and by the turn of the 19th century it had fluctuated up to a full thirty shillings, which makes economic management problematic. In 1816 Britain adopted the Gold Standard, fixing the Guinea at twenty-one shillings, and then abandoning the coin altogether. The Arabs also had a one-pound coin, whose source was also Guinea, and therefore known in Arabic as الجنيه el-Genēh, by which name it still functions to this day in Egypt, and elsewhere in lands that once belonged to the Ottoman Empire, one hundred Qirsh being one Geneh.


Marks For: 21 shillings


Marks Against: 28 years of tyranny




Copyright © 2015 David Prashker
All rights reserved
The Argaman Press


Germany

See European Union




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Guernsey

The land of the dairy cow, Guernsey is an archipelago of the many Channel Islands (administratively Guernsey is in fact Guernsey itself, plus Sark, Alderney, Brecqhou, Herm, Jethou and Lihou) that really ought to belong to France as they are fractionally nearer France than they are to England, only France prefers its islands to be much further away, and to have coral reefs and sea-turtles, whereas Guernsey really does only have dairy cows (though you can make excellent Camembert from cow’s milk). 

There are some wonderful quaintnesses about Guernsey, even before we include the people and the scenery. For example, it is not a United Kingdom dependency, but quite specifically a British Crown dependency, which means that the Queen owns it as part of her personal estate, which also means that it is not part of the EU, which is ridiculous given its geographical location, which is dealt with by its being “regarded as if" in the EU for the purposes of free trade, which makes a complete nonsense of everything. 

It is known in French as a Bailliage, which translates into English as a bailiwick, a bailiff, or in this case a Lieutenant Governor, appointed by the monarch to exercise the office of a sheriff, much as happened in Nottingham in Robin Hood’s time. This wick includes the adjacent isles of Alderney and Sark, though both have their own Parliaments, despite the small number of inhabitants – Sark has only six hundred, Alderney almost two thousand. Presumably, if we discount those too young to vote, a gathering of Parliament could actually be a parish meeting of the entire island, and democracy à la kibbutz function fully; sadly, it doesn’t work that way in practice. Guernsey’s Parliament has forty-five elected members, plus two from Alderney but none from Sark (do they refuse?), as well as two representatives of Her Majesty, who never attend and could not vote anyway if they did, which makes an even greater mockery of the whole situation. While the LG represents the Queen, who is the figurehead chief, the Parliament is led by a Seigneur, a residue of Norman law, though I cannot ascertain whether he still retains the “droit de seigneur”, which is the right to sleep with any female that he pleases, regardless of her age or marital status. 

One last quaintness that I particularly like: the French, who claim the islands, nonetheless have a consulate on Guernsey; it is at Hauteville House, which was Victor Hugo’s home for fourteen years. Why do I like this? Because Guernsey was a place of exile for Hugo, after being declared an enemy of the state for his liberal views by Emperor Napoleon III.

Other than tourists, most of whom are not really tourists at all, as you will work out for yourself shortly, Guernsey has no basis for an economy whatsoever, save those few dairy cows. Guernsey functions to the British economy exactly as Guam does to the American military and as Sin City used to do for White South Africans: it is a part of the UK, but it is outside the UK’s borders, and so it can have its own tax system, which happens to be very favourable to any who wish to subsidise the islanders. Guernsey is therefore a haven, I mean a very convenient headquarters, for any number of financial and other institutions. It may not last however; moves are afoot to make Guernsey change its laws, and force the buggers to declare their assets and pay their taxes, just like the rest of the world.


Marks For: 2

Marks Against: 5




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Thursday, February 26, 2015

Guatemala

Not in principle a sovereign territory, dependent state, foreign colony or any other part of American suzerainty, politics in Guatemala, as in most other countries in Central America, is determined in Washington, and not at home. 

Once upon a time, however, in the epoch of innocence and purity, Guatemala was the home of the Mayan people, a great and glorious civilisation in its own terms, which unfortunately were not the same terms as those employed by Catholics in Rome and Spain, who brought them out of their heathen state of sin by burning them at the stake, or other methods of redemption and salvation advocated by the enlightened European synods (yes, enlightened - how else do you get an auto-da-fé to burn, except by enlightening it?). Go Jesus! 

(Can someone please explain to me why picture above-right is inferior to or even different from picture below-left? And no, I don't mean the quality of the picture; I mean the what-is-depicted.)


Spain mercifully quit in 1821, after which Guatemala wavered between attempts at proto-democracy and outright dictatorship for a hundred and sixty years. Twenty-two of those (1898 to 1920) were under the despotry of Manuel Cabrera, a fact I only mention because he was secured in power by the American United Fruit Company, the same company by a different name that Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote about in "One Hundred Years of Solitude". The 1950s saw Jacobo Guzman elected President on a platform of land reform, credit for the poor and literacy for all, the sort of liberal values that Americans cherish for their own people because it manifests Judeo-Christian ideology at its best, but not apparently for those in other countries, because there it manifests socialist and communist ideology at its worst. Guzman lasted three years, only because the CIA tend to be slow and stupid, and it took them that long to plan and execute the coup that overthrew him. 

Of course, it may not have been the fear of Communism; the United Fruit Company was still in business, albeit renamed Chiquita Brands International by this time, and land reform and credit and literacy were a threat to its dominance, which is to say its profits, all of which were taken back to feed the poverty-stricken citizens of the USA, rather than being wasted on the pampered, spoiled, over-indulged affluenciados of Guatemala. The man the Americans installed, Carlos Armas, turned out to be a fascist pig of the worst kind, and no one was bothered or surprised when one of his personal guards assassinated him in 1957. After that, rigged elections brought the military to power, until another military coup, and then another, this one backed by the Kennedy administration, and then right wing death squads, and left wing death squads, paramilitaries, secret armies, the presence of American Green Berets to train this side, or it might have been that side, it wasn’t always clear which side was which, or even what anyone was fighting for, but they went on fighting, for thirty-six long years, until virtually the entire country collapsed into the hole left by an earthquake in 1977, and then the same-old same-old resumed again, and as you can imagine there are few more poverty-stricken places on Earth, because how can you plant fields or cultivate trees or run businesses with all this crap going on around you all the time, and the rates of illiteracy, infant mortality and malnutrition are the worst in the region, while organised crime has been taking advantage of the anarchy for decades, and the street gangs fill in the holes that they leave. Geographically the place is very beautiful, and the ancient step-pyramids and megalithic alignments are absolutely fascinating, but do you really want to go there for a vacation?

Support my online campaign to "Bring Back The Mayans" by putting your name in the comments box below. When we reach a sufficient number, we shall take our case to the International Criminal Court in The Hague and have the Pope impeached for crimes against humanity!


Marks For: 1


Marks Against: 10




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Guam

East of the Philippines and Indonesia, but west of West Point, Guam, otherwise known as Andersen, is the USA’s main military base in the western Pacific. It was used by the B-52s in the war in Vietnam and is the resting-place in the off-season for a type of shark known as the nuclear attack submarine. Current US plans include the removal thither of several thousand marines, with their families, from Okinawa in Japan, and a series of war-games in the surrounding seas, so that they will be ready should war break out with China. Guam is also inhabited by something called “people”, but as these are frankly irrelevant to life on the island beyond Andersen Air Force Base, there seems little point in dwelling on them here.

 



Marks For: 0

Marks Against: 10





Copyright © 2015 David Prashker
All rights reserved
The Argaman Press


Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Guadeloupe



"Guadeloupe is a group of Caribbean islands located in the Leeward Islands, in the Lesser Antilles, with a land area of 1,628 square kilometres and a population of 405,739 inhabitants." 

This is Wikipedia, trying for once to be accurate. But how can you be so precisely accurate, with population figures? Does nobody die or get born in Guadeloupe? Does nobody migrate or emigrate? And what about land erosion, when the tides do their wicked work? These numbers are as accurate as a stopped clock.


Recognising Guadeloupe as a cluster of small islands thousands of miles from Paris, you will be able, by this stage of reading this blogbook, to deduce for yourself that it must be a dependent territory of France. 10 out of 10. "Overseas region" is the technical term on this occasion, though how exactly this is different from the others is beyond my capacity to explain. The fact is, Guadeloupe, more than four thousand miles from the coast of France, is a part of the European Union, uses the Euro, speaks French (badly, but still better than the Quebecois), and qualifies for the Eurozone. Isn't that just weird! One day, who knows, the European Parliament will be moved to Basse-Terre, Guadeloupe's capital and the French and Germans will take up cricket.

Because these things matter, at least to the people whose families have lived there for many centuries longer than the French or even the Spanish, the real name of the island is Karukera, which means "the island of beautiful waters", and its indigenous peoples, before Columbus brought Christ and civilisation to enlighten them and make their lives joyful (he also discovered, and named, the pineapple there), were second the Arawaks and third the Caribs; we don’t know who the first were, because the Caribs went in for ethnic cleansing, just as Columbus’ Catholics did, and wiped them out; just as the French did when they took over the place in the 17th century, and wiped out all the Caribs.

The Spanish and French fought over the islands for several centuries, but as always it was the British who won (they simply seized the place, a traditional act of piracy), and then established sugar plantations worth more than all their other sugar plantations combined. When Napoleon’s aspirations forced Great Britain to choose between Canada and Guadeloupe, they obviously chose Canada (why would you take the beach-hut if you are offered the country estate?), and Guadeloupe became French again, though the islanders refused to accept the Napoleonic Codes and Edicts of Tolerance, which gave equal rights to all people, including “free people of colour”, a term that did not include slaves, who rebelled. It gets complicated after that, with Britain retaking the islands, then Napoleon again, and Napoleon of all things unabolishing slavery which that slave rebellion at the time of Victor Hugues had briefly achieved. At one point it was even made part of Sweden, but finally it went back to France, and has remained there. 


Sugar cane is still the main agricultural product, with bananas now added, but unemployment is not a problem as France has an extremely generous social security system, and most Guadeloupans are happy to take advantage of it.

Victor Hugues (not to be confused with Victor Hugo) is an interesting man, not much known about outside the French-speaking world, and generally overlooked or at least disregarded inside the French world, where witty phrases like "the Colonial Robespierre" and "the demon of Republicanism", or cruder derogations like "disgustingly lewd cynic" and "the well-known brute" are employed to dismiss him. 


The son of a baker, he was born in Marseilles in 1761 - so say the history books, without first taking a careful look at the accounts of those who knew the family; the son of a baker who was himself probably of American Indian origin, and a woman of African descent, is a more likely account of his ethnicity, though you will struggle to find this in French text-books. Enlisted as a soldier at the age of seventeen, he was sent to Santo Domingo, where he remained for the next twelve years. Then came the French Revolution, the dawn of Enlightenment, the incipit of the epoch of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité but not yet Sororité, and Hugues, whether because of his ethnic background or because of what he had witnessed all those years in Santo Domingo, Hugues declared his personal support for the new democracy, as a consequence of which he was transported back to France, arraigned before the Committee of Public Safety, found to be honest and genuine in his convictions, and promoted instantly as commissioner to the French West Indies, with orders to reconquer Guadeloupe from the English. This he did quite ruthlessly, following the model set down by the newly established regime of Enlightenment in France: three hundred of the French emigrés who had supported the British were shot as traitors, despite their having voluntarily surrendered; while another hundred “free people of colour” were put in chains to undertake public works; and in the meanwhile Hugues employed the guillotine liberally to inspire the Utopian idealism of the new French state in the hearts and souls, but not any longer the heads because they had been decapitated, of his new empire, which he defended by means of the forced conscription of more than fifteen thousand "natives", while simultaneously plundering the colony's wealth for his personal use, and hundreds of the colony's women for the same purpose.

In 1798 he was recalled to France, which was now in the hands of Napoleon Buonaparte, who appointed him Governor of Cayenne, instructed him to manage affairs somewhat more gently than he had in Guadeloupe, and court-martialled him ten years later, when the gentler approach failed and he was obliged to surrender his territory to the British. Accused of incapacity as well as treason, he spent five years defending himself, and was not only acquitted (the charges were stupid: the man was capable to a level that Machiavelli would have commended, and as loyal to Napoleon as Goerring was to Hitler), but actually sent back to Guadeloupe by the new Emperor, Louis XVIII, as governor, which post he held for two years before retiring as a private citizen on the island, and returning to France only in 1826, and only then because he wished to be buried in his native land.

This, with some of my more cynical interjections, is the standard portrait of him, as painted in France: the portrait of a most unpleasant individual who nonetheless provided good service to his nation. The view from Guadeloupe is rather different - even crueller, even more vicious, even more monomaniacal. Rather than me recounting it, I recommend you to read Gerard Besson's version, in the Caribbean History Archives. As a study in human wickedness, it does for reality what Shaespeare's Macbeth could only do in fiction.




Marks For: 2

Marks Against: 4





Copyright © 2015 David Prashker
All rights reserved
The Argaman Press