Sometimes I really envy our elite class, because it’s so easy for them to answer questions like this. All they have to do is pull out a slip of paper from their bag of self-serving bromides.
One such is David Rothkopf at Foreign Policy, and Jonathan Schwarz makes short work of him:
This is from the high school history textbook The American Adventure, quoted in Lies My Teacher Told Me:
During Reconstruction many people tried hard to help the black people of the South. Then, for years, most white Americans paid little attention to the blacks. Little by little, however, there grew a new concern for them.
Here’s David Rothkopf, writing in Foreign Policy:
In all its benighted history, perhaps Haiti’s greatest moment of hope since its independence came just a decade and a half ago. Back then, America finally took interest in its near neighbor…But over time…the United States lost the political will to assist the struggling country. Good intentions and a pregnant moment were overtaken by events …
If you can believe it, the rest of Rothkopf’s post is even more grotesque. If I were a 1953 Soviet apparatchik looking for people to write a encyclopedia he’s just the kind of historian I’d hire.
In a postscript, Schwarz also links to David Brooks’s answer to why Haiti is so poor: Haitian culture is progress-resistant.
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