| Written by Dr. Jack Wheeler
|
|
Friday, 25 May 2012 |
Cap Haitien, Haiti. On a steep mountain top three thousand feet
high above the north coast of Haiti, stands this staggeringly gigantic
fortress:
It is the Citadelle Laferrière, revered by the left's professional
distortionists of history as "the greatest monument to black freedom in the
Americas." What it really is instead is
a monument to totalitarian insanity, and what makes such insanity possible-a culture's
memetic defects.
To better understand what this means in general (and thus
how it applies to the USA), let's take a quick look at the horrific history of
Haiti.
Haiti is the western third of Hispaniola (next to Cuba, the
largest island in the Caribbean, about the size of South Carolina; the eastern
two-thirds is now the Dominican Republic).
Spain colonized the whole island in the 1500s, but in the 1600s, French
pirates took over the west. Louis XIV formally
got it for France in a treaty with Spain in 1697, naming it the colony of Saint-Domingue.
By this time, the pirates had turned into wealthy planters
with coffee and sugar cane plantations.
By the 1760s, Saint-Domingue produced 40% of all sugar and 75% of all
coffee consumed in Europe, making it enormously prosperous and providing France's
single largest source of revenue.
All of this was done by African slave labor. There were 40,000 wealthy white French
colonists, and over 400,000 Black African slaves. The French Revolution, with its language of
the Rights of Man, bloody revolt against the rulers of France, and
destabilization of the French colonial military, triggered a massive slave
revolt in Saint-Domingue in 1791. Over
20,000 French planters and their families were butchered; thousands
more fled, particularly to America and New Orleans.
When Napoleon came to power in 1798, he was determined to
get the colony back and resuscitate the sugar cash cow the slave rebels had
killed. It had imploded into a murderous civil war of rival ex-slave armies
that had divided the colony in two. The
economy had completely collapsed with widespread starvation. In 1802, Napoleon sent 32,000 French troops
to invade, then 12,000 more.
Almost all of them died, mostly from yellow fever, malaria,
and starvation as there was no food.
Napoleon lost more of his soldiers' lives in Haiti than he did at
Waterloo. For by the time he ordered
retreat in late 1803, the victorious ex-slaves had renamed their new country
Ayiti, meaning "homeland" in their Creole language. His defeat had left him so broke he agreed to
sell the French colony of Louisianne to the US for $15 million: 3 cents an acre for the Louisiana Purchase.
Haiti, meanwhile, was still divided in two. The leader of the ex-slave army in the north
was a fellow from the British island of Grenada who had adopted the French name
of Henri Christophe. He declared himself
King Henri I of northern Haiti, his wife to be Queen Marie-Louise, his
daughters to be Princesses Amethyste and Athenaire, his son Jacques to be the
Prince Royal. He anointed his cronies Dukes
and Counts - with one couple having the title of the Duke and Duchess of
Lemonade, another the Count and Countess of Marmalade.
He also proceeded to re-enslave his people. With their slave labor, he built several
palaces and chateaux - the most impressive being the marble-floored Palace of
Sans Souci (Without Care), where his ersatz nobility wore the latest French
fashions and gorged on the costliest of imported French delicacies.
That same slave labor was put to work in reclaimed sugar plantations,
and to build La Citadelle, a bastion high above Sans Sounci to ward off another
French invasion. 20,000 slaves died under the lash or from utter exhaustion
building it, hauling hundreds of cannons, tens of thousands of cannon balls,
and millions of bricks and rocks 3,000 feet up the steep slopes to the site.
Christophe murdered anyone who displeased him in any way -
including Catholic priests. In the fall
of 1820, he collapsed in terror, screaming that he had seen the ghost of one of
these priests warning him of the hellfire to come, and suffered a stroke that
paralyzed half his body.
The news that the monster could no longer rule spread like
wildfire. On October 8, a huge mob
stormed the gates of Sans Souci and his troops deserted him. Knowing that the mob would literally rip his
body apart, Christophe took his favorite pistol and fired a bullet into his
heart. He was 53 years old.
His wife and daughters, terrified of what the mob would do
to his body, fled with the body carried by assistants up the trail to
the Citadelle. The mob followed them. Reaching the fortress, in the
courtyard was a
huge vat of liquid lime, used as building mortar. The ladies and their
assistants shoved
Christophe's body in, where it dissolved.
The only thing recovered were the buttons on the monster's uniform.
The mob spared the ladies (they were allowed to flee to
Europe), but when they found Prince Jacques, he was promptly bayoneted. The mob
then burned Sans Souci down. Here is
what it looks like today:
The Citadelle has been a deserted ruins ever since. I was the only visitor there. It is an incredibly impressive monument to
insanity, breatakingly large, with walls 130 feet high and 16 feet thick:
The holes in the wall are not windows -- they are cannon ports. Hundreds of cannons and thousands of cannon balls lie
untouched:
The solidified lime vat is still in the courtyard:
So much for "the monument to black freedom." Haiti has never
experienced a day of freedom. It's been an unending series of
dictatorships
and coups ever since, like the horror of Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier
from
1957-1971. In 2004, there was yet
another coup, resulting in the takeover of the country by the United
Nations
(UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti or MINUSTAH).
The UN takeover was made complete after the earthquake
disaster of 2010.
Haiti, in other words, is not only a failed state - for over
200 years, it has always been a failed state.
Its memes are defective.
You may be familiar with the term. "Meme" (rhymes with seem)
was coined by Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins to conceptually reframe our
understanding of the beliefs and values commonly accepted by members of a given
community. Memes are
cultural genes, the social equivalent of
chromosomal genes.
A
gene is a set of instructions for making (mostly) proteins, stored in
the DNA in people's cells, and replicated through sexual reproduction. A
meme
is a set of instructions for making belief or behavior patterns, stored in the
neuronal pathways in people's brains, and replicated through
imitation.
Just as the sum of a species' genes or genetic information is called its
genome,
the sum of a culture's memes or memetic information is called its
memome.
Just as a species has genes that promote its health and survival, so a culture
has memes that do the same. And just as there can be defective genes, so can
there be
defective memes.
A
genetic defect can prevent an organism from being healthy, can cause
its death, and if spread across its species, can cause a species' extinction. A
memetic defect can do the same for members of a culture and the culture
itself. This is what is defective about
Haiti. It's not a matter of intelligence, nor of race or ethnicity.
Take a look at the
Country IQ list
compiled by the world's expert on IQ, Richard Lynn. Haiti's is 72. Right next door, the Dominican Republic's is
84 - not a lot higher, but the cultural difference is
vast, night and day.
Haiti has completely trashed its environment with giant piles
of rotting rubbish everywhere, and deforestation like you wouldn't believe -
entire mountain ranges are simply denuded.
The DR is clean, neat, and with flourishing forests. It's just one example. Haiti and the DR are literally like night and
day.
Or for an even more dramatic contrast, check out the
Koreas: the North's average IQ is 105,
the South's is 106.
Just as Haiti's memetic defects cause its cultural failure,
so do memetic defects cause the failure of certain parts of American culture.
What prevents, for example, so many Inner City Blacks from prospering is not
anything genetic. It is a functionally deficient culture that contains a number
of defective memes - such memetic flaws as racial paranoia, racial rage,
overdependence on government, and the repudiation of standard English and
academic achievement as "acting white."
In sum, what is being repudiated are the memes that created
America and enabled her success. Memes
like individual freedom coupled with individual responsibility, the memes and
values enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. Abandon those memes, and you get
Detroit. You get Zero's America.
Conservatives have been bemoaning their abandonment for half
a century, and with good reason. For
decades, they've been pining for the wholesome decency of the Leave It To
Beaver - Happy Days 50s. Well, they just
might get their wish.
The consensus wisdom is that the overriding issue that will
decide the November outcome is the economy.
There's a good argument for that.
But how, then, is it possible that
Zero
and Romney are tied in the polls over who can best fix it? This is nuts - clinically deranged.
The guy who has put millions out of work, a socialist who hates
and knows nothing about business, versus a brilliant businessman with an extraordinary
track record of success? This is a
no-brainer - a tie on this means half of America has no brains.
Or a defective culture.
It may really not be about the economy.
The real issue is the culture - the memes of personal responsibility
versus gimme-gimme, of personal decency and integrity versus degradation, or
earning what you have versus crony parasitism.
November is a contest between America's memes - the defective
versus the effective. If the defective set
wins, America's culture fails - and as a consequence, so does the economy. If the effective set wins, both succeed.
In other words, if Romney wins, we are going to see a
cultural reawakening in America. Romney
is a Square, right out of the 50s. If
you want a cultural revival, a return to America's basic norms of decency
(which hipsters deride as squareness), he's your guy. This is a fascinating cultural phenomenon we're
going to witness, folks. Ozzie &
Harriet, here we come.
That's if, of course, the memetic defects destroying our
culture don't overwhelm us. It's up to
us to make sure they don't. NObama 2012.
