Of course, literacy is a skillset that increases one’s access to information. The lack of access to crucial information is known as ignorance.
No, but it certainly helps to have a college degree to lay pipes for a sewer.
Yes, but fundamentally beside the point. Illiterate people can certainly overthrow a government, they just aren’t going to have much luck replacing it with something better. That and it’s actually pretty rare that illiterate people carry out revolutions. Literacy is one of the cornerstones of civilization, and revolutions are usually stage managed by educated Bourgeoisie like Che, Lenin, Trotsky, and Castro.
Not bad for a relatively small overpopulated group of island people who are very poor in energy and other natural resources, yet somehow managed to engage and compete with the big boys of the superpowers in the world.
What a country does, how rich it is, and how well it succeeds, is totally up to the people of that country.
No country needs to allow itself to be interfered with by outsiders.
Even tiny Switzerland, which has a significantly smaller population than Haiti, does not tolerate foreigners interfering with Switzerland’s internal affairs.
Neighboring cuba, which has a couple million more people than Haiti, but still comparable, would, and has, also resisted foreign interference in Cuba’s intenral affairs.
It’s hard to answer a question like this without sounding condescending but I will anyway
A large part of it is education. In places like Haiti you have a huge number of the masses as uneducated. Let’s say they have the education level of a third grader in the USA.
Would you say that the average 3rd grader has enough intellect to make a good choice to run their country?
Probably not, so how could you expect a person in a third world country to do any better?
In better developed country people simply ignore what they don’t want to see.
The best example of this is a book written by a secretary of Adolf Hitler. She was 19 when she worked for him and the war ended. She was asked if she knew what was going on all around her, in terms of the Holocaust etc. She answered, “No, I didn’t know, then again, if I had bothered to look, I couldn’t have missed it.”
The people of Germany were pretty highly educated and they elected Hitler and kept him in power. Was that a “good choice to run their country”? …just because they were “educated”?
The people of Vietnam were not highly educated and fought off the chinese, japanese, French, and the Americans to win independence and self rule.
Lastly, although the people ALWAYS have the government they want, they do not always want a government like ours.
Just because another people choose not to be like the United States, materialistic, militarily aggressive, and have its civilian citizenry armed to the teeth…does not make them wrong, nor does it mean that they dont have the government they want.
The big fallacy here that everyone is forgetting, is that everyone here seems to think that the Haitians should want to be like the United States, or like Japan, or like Cuba, when they dont want to be…obviously.
Switzerland has no natural resources that other nations want and sits across a mountain range that has made invasion a serious problem for anyone who actually wanted to invade. Of course, France went ahead and conquered it anyway. When the Napoleonic wars ended, the major European powers agreed to let Switzerland remain permanently neutral to provide a place where they could meet to hash out their differences. Hitler agreed to honor their neutrality, in no small part becuase they provided a local access to bankroll his war. Without taking anything away from Swiss resolution, they are neutral because no one chooses to interfere with them.
Cuba suffered a lot of interference from the outside between their (very late for the hemisphere) independence from Spain and the Castro revolution. Following that, they had a significant world power as patron for the next thirty years, following which they have been too poor to bother with.
Vietnam received significant support from the Soviet Union, (in contrast to Haiti that has been the target of theft and outside deprivation throughout most of its history) and remains poor. (You are also in error regarding the amount of education that most Vietnamese received–it is significantly higher than what has been available in Haiti, whether under the French or during its massive civil war or united under the Communists.)
If there is some point that you think you are making, you might want to bring an awareness of actual history to the discussion.
Well, there are significant differences in the rainfall between the Haiti and the D.R. side of the island (because of the mountain range in between the countries). So the frequent droughts on the Haiti side could certainly have contributed to the loss of the forests and damage to farmland.
Because they were imported as slaves? Because they were then embargoed for decades? Because they then spent rather more than a century paying compensation to the French? Because the power of the global hegemon has more recently kept commercially friendly governments in power to preserve their interests.
Seem to know their interests to me, hence the long Aristide affair. The brutal UN occupation probably has more to do with it than supposed ignorance.
Okay, the “apartheid nation” thing is pretty far off - but in fairness, so was the “palestinians are fundamentalist bigots” thing.
Here’s the deal, as best as I understand it from studying the conflict back in college: The overwhelming majority of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories are not Islamists. They’re mostly Muslims, just as most Americans are Christians - but they’re pretty secularized Muslims, with no real desire for a political system governed as an Islamic theocratic state.
That being said, there have traditionally been two major political movements in the Terrritories - Arafat’s Fatah, and Hamas. Fatah pays lip-service to Islam, but basically has an ideology that grew out of Nasser’s Pan-Arabism - they’re secular, mildly socialist, and ostensibily democrats. These are views with a lot of appeal to Palestinians - but the problem is, Fatah has also been (a) astoundingly, amazingly corrupt, and (b) unable to deliver Palestinian statehood.
On the other hand, Hamas has had a long-standing (and deserved) reputation for competence. Much like Hizbollah in Lebanon, they run schools, clinics, all sorts of social institutions. Prior to winning the Parliamentary elections, and seizing sole control of Gaza at gunpoint, a lot of secular Palestinians could say, not unreasonably, “Look. Fatah just doesn’t know how to govern a damn thing. Hamas has show that they at least know how to deliver social services - and if they take a harder line with the Israelis, is that such a bad thing?” So Hamas did well in the elections. Sadly, the Hamas leadership genuinely are violent, extreme Islamists, and so things turned to crud quite quickly thereafter. But that doesn’t mean most Palestinians are “fundamentalist bigots” - just that they had to choose between really terrible options in a system where none of the major parties really believe in a non-corrupt AND democratic AND secular state.
As for the Israelis - look, they’ve made some bad calls. A bunch of them - and it’s deeply troubling that we can say with almost absolute certainty that no Arab will ever be Prime Minister. Or Defense Minister, for that matter. But apartheid was far, far worse on its best day than the Israeli system has been at its worst. The Israelis, and their Supreme Court, actually give a damn about the human rights of their minority population - to the extent that the Court routinely slaps down attempts by right-wingers to ban the Arab lists in the Knesset. I don’t like the idea of a state founded on the basis of a religion - any religion - but the Israelis aren’t monsters. And in terms of the Palestinians - unfortunately, for the reasons described above, the Palestinians don’t have the capacity to constrain their own bad actors. Which means that the Israelis have a bunch of very unpleasant options, and no good options, for constraining those bad actors themselves.
The Duvaliers were monsters, Susannan. They forcibly recruited children and teens to terrorize the populace - with rapes, murders, beatings. The regime left the mutilated bodies of its opponents on public display as a warning to others. And despite all that horror, despite the risk, the Haitians did manage to force out the dictators and hold free and fair elections. But the damage - both the growth of corruption in government institutions, and the sheer economic carnage, was done.
Tell me that the Haitian people wanted their children raped and murdered by their government, Susannan. Failing that, convince me that they deserved it.
The point remains. As sad as that whole affair was, that a country that is literate and has a highly technically savvy populace is more difficult to subjugate. That’s just the bottom-line. But at the end of the day, revolutions are not largely organized by the illiterate. Aristide was not illiterate and I doubt too many of his closest confidants were either.
You’re really not going to get very far with me arguing against literacy as the cornerstone of civilization.
