Qi

Propellerheads

The previous post serves well to remind ourselves of the gargantuan number of shitheads and dickheads that populate this planet.

But not all "[something-]heads" are abject. Take David Byrne's Talking Heads, for instance. Or the Propellerheads, one of the best big beat/drum & bass bands of the late 90s:

Pat Robertson on Haiti

Watch and cringe at the unbelievable utterances of this unlettered, Bible-thumping non-entity.
And to think that millions of Americans share the same persuasion...

The Lisbon earthquake of 1755

My country's cataclysmic event of 1755 changed Europeans' Weltanshauung forever:

"Historical Depictions of the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake

Jan T. Kozak, Institue of Rock Mechanics, Czech Academy of Science
Charles D. James, National Information Service for Earthquake Engineering

Note: With permission, this paper is abridged and edited from drafts of a longer work in progress by V. S. Moreira, C. Nunes and J. Kozak on the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755. The images presented here are taken from the NISEE Kozak Collection of Images of Historical Earthquakes.

Although not the strongest or most deadly earthquake in human history, the 1755 Lisbon earthquake's impact, not only on Portugal but on all of Europe, was profound and lasting. Depictions of the earthquake in art and literature can be found in several European countries, and these were produced and reproduced for centuries following the event, which came to be known as "The Great Lisbon Earthquake."

The earthquake began at 9:30 on November 1st, 1755, and was centered in the Atlantic Ocean, about 200 km WSW of Cape St. Vincent. The total duration of shaking lasted ten minutes and was comprised of three distinct jolts. Effects from the earthquake were far reaching. The worst damage occurred in the south-west of Portugal. Lisbon, the Portuguese capital, was the largest and the most important of the cities damaged. Severe shaking was felt in North Africa and there was heavy loss of life in Fez and Mequinez. Moderate damage was done in Algiers and in southwest Spain. Shaking was also felt in France, Switzerland, and Northern Italy. A devastating fire following the earthquake destroyed a large part of Lisbon, and a very strong tsunami caused heavy destruction along the coasts of Portugal, southwest Spain, and western Morocco.

The oscillation of suspended objects at great distances from the epicenter indicate an enormous area of perceptibility. The observation of seiches as far away as Finland, suggest a magnitude approaching 9.0. Precursory phenomena were reported, including turbid waters in Portugal and Spain, falling water level in wells in Spain, and a decrease in water flow in springs and fountains.

Detailed descriptions of the earthquake's effects in Morocco, were, in some cases, based on Portuguese manuscripts written by priests. The cities of Meknes, Fez, and Marrakesh in the interior, and the coastal towns of Asilah, Larache, Rabat, and Agadir (Santa Cruz during the Portuguese occupation) suffered much damage in the quake. Mosques, synagogues, churches, and many other buildings collapsed in Meknes, where numerous casualties were reported. The convent, church, and Hospital de S. Francisco collapsed completely.

Lisbon

In 1755, Lisbon was one of the most beautiful cities in Europe. The city retained some of its Moorish influence during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. This may be seen in the design of the streets in the quarters surrounding St. George Castle and extending as far as Rossio, the central part of the city. The Rosario, or main square, was the commercial center of Lisbon. The Estatus Palace, situated to the north, was where illustrious visitors to the Kingdom were lodged. On the east side, Saint Dominic Church and the All Saint's Royal Hospital, with its magnificent façade, were erected. On top of the hill, an ancient royal residence was situated. To the west, the church and its Convent were among the most magnificent buildings in Lisbon. Other famous buildings near the city center include the Cathedral, St. Paul's Church, St. Nicholas' Church, and St. Roch's Church.

The Architecture of the city was complemented by that of the suburbs, including a majestic aqueduct constructed by King D. Joao V. in 1731, the Jeronimus Church, and the Tower of Belem. With an estimated population of 275,000, Lisbon was, in 1755, one of the largest cities in Europe.

The Fire

Soon after the earthquake, several fires broke out, mostly started by cooking fires and candles. Some of them were rapidly extinguished, especially in the densely populated areas. But many inhabitants fled from their homes and left fires burning. Narrow streets full of fallen debris prevented access to the fire sites. The public squares filled with people and their rescued belongings, but as the fire approached, these squares were abandoned, and the fire reached catastrophic proportions. Looters setting fire to some ransacked houses caused the belief that the fire had a criminal origin. The flames raged for five days.

All of the downtown area, from St. Paul's quarter to St. Roch, and from Carmo and Trindade to the Rossio square area to the Castle and Alfama quarters were burned, along with the Ribeira, Rua Nova, and Rossio quarters. Remolares, Barrio Alto, Limoeiro, and Alfama, were partially burned.

Several buildings which had suffered little damage due to the earthquake were destroyed by the fire. The Royal Palace and the Opera House were totally gutted by the flames. The Patriarchal suffered relatively little damage in the earthquake, and religious services continued there during the afternoon, but the church was evacuated as the fire approached. Later the building was completely burned out.

The Tsunami

Immediately after the earthquake, many inhabitants of Lisbon looked for safety on the sea by boarding ships moored on the river. But about 30 minutes after the quake, a large wave swamped the area near Bugie Tower on the mouth of the Tagus. The area between Junqueria and Alcantara in the western part of the city was the most heavily damaged by the wave, but further destruction occurred upstream. The Cais de Pedra at Rerreiro do Paco and part of the nearby custom house were flattened.

A total of three waves struck the shore, each dragging people and debris out to sea and leaving exposed large stretches of the river bottom. In front of the Terreiro do Paco, the maximum height of the waves was estimated at 6 meters. Boats overcrowded with refugees capsized and sank. In the town Cascais, some 30 km west of Lisbon, the waves wrecked several boats and when the water withdrew, large stretches of sea bottom were left uncovered. In coastal areas such as Peniche, situated about 80 km north of Lisbon, many people were killed by the tsunami. In Setubal, 30 km south of Lisbon, the water reached the first floor of buildings.

The destruction was greatest in Algarve, southern Portugal, where the tsunami dismantled some coastal fortresses and, in the lower levels, razed houses. In some places the waves crested at more than 30 m. Almost all the coastal towns and villages of Algarve were heavily damaged, except Faro, which was protected by sandy banks. In Lagos, the waves reached the top of the city walls. For the coastal regions, the destructive effects of the tsunami were more disastrous than those of the earthquake.

In southwestern Spain, the tsunami caused damage to Cadiz and Huelva, and the waves penetrated the Guadalquivir River, reaching Seville. In Gibraltar, the sea rose suddenly by about two meters. In Ceuta the tsunami was strong, but in the Mediterranean Sea, it decreased rapidly. On the other hand, it caused great damage and casualties to the western coast of Morocco, from Tangier, where the waves reached the walled fortifications of the town, to Agadir, where the waters passed over the walls, killing many.

The tsunami reached, with less intensity, the coast of France, Great Britain, Ireland, Belgium and Holland. In Madeira and in the Azores islands damage was extensive and many ships were in danger of being wrecked.

The tsunami crossed the Atlantic Ocean, reaching the Antilles in the afternoon. Reports from Antigua, Martinique, and Barbados note that the sea first rose more than a meter, followed by large waves.

Earthquake Depictions

The pictorial material related to the 1755 Lisbon earthquake is extensive and broadly distributed. It includes factual renderings of the actual events, as well as fanciful interpretations. The latter, which tend to exaggerate the disaster, are most often found in rural regions. In general, it can be said that the degree of accuracy in these materials decreases in proportion to increases in distance from Lisbon and the time elapsed after the earthquake. Some examples contain both accurate and fanciful material.

Accurate Depictions

Pictures that accurately depict the events of November 1st, 1755 are few. Among the best of these are a series of six excellent engravings by Le Bas. These were based on drawings made by Paris and Pedegache, who were in Lisbon at the time of the earthquake. The final compositions, which appear in several printed series, are characterized by a photographic-like accuracy. They show the damage caused to St. Roch Tower (Fig. 1), St. Paul's Church (Fig. 2), the Cathedral (Fig. 3), the Opera House (Fig. 4), St. Nicholas Church (Fig. 5), and to the Patriarchal (Fig. 6). The size of the vegetation growing on top of the ruins in these pictures indicates that they were probably created late in 1757. Four of these original drawings survived and are on display in the City Museum of Lisbon.

One version of this series contains legends written mainly in English. The text of this version, which retains some subtitles in Portuguese and French, notes that the depiction is of the ruins "immediately after the earthquake." The bushes and trees on the ruins, however, are the same as in the pictures with the Portuguese/French legend dated 1757. The text in the English version mentions the names of Paris and Pedegache. It is difficult to decide which series was made earlier.

Of the several reproductions of the six Paris and Pedegache drawings printed from copper engravings, one series contains Portuguese and French text numbered 1-6 in Arabic numerals (an example is on display at the City Museum, Lisbon). The same series with Roman numbering is located in the National Library, Paris. There is also an unnumbered series with English captions, also kept at the National Library, Paris, and several series done in color, one of which has English captions and is kept in the City Museum, Lisbon. The later series, probably printed in the 19th century, is shown in Figs. 7-12. One unnumbered depiction shows the damaged Patriarchal Square, engraved by Prattent for Barlow's book General History of Europe. Le Bas compositions were copied many times in the course of the 18th and 19th centuries. These copies are marked by descending quality and accuracy.

The Le Bas series represents the first instance of exact and systematic documentation of damage caused by an earthquake. Only 28 years later, this method was enriched and improved by F. Schiantarelli, who, together with his colleagues, created 68 excellent engravings of the 1783 Calabrian earthquake.

Fanciful Depictions

The Lisbon quake was redrawn, often in a fanciful manner, for many years throughout Europe. Chronologically, these depictions can be split into three groups. The first group was made immediately after the event, between 1755 and 1757. The second series is from the 18th century. The last are the illustrations for scientific or religious purposes of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

In Fig. 13, Lisbon is shown before (top) and after (bottom) the earthquake. The artist is from Tobias Lotter's cartographical workshop in Augsburg, Bavaria. He utilized an older depiction of the city published by Braun and Hogenberg (1598) for the upper part of the composition - note that he has tried to authenticate the older picture by adding the baroque fortifications in front of the Royal Palace Square. The very fanciful picture at the bottom includes active volcanoes. The shape of the town bears no resemblance to Lisbon. The castle in the background, which collapsed and burned in the earthquake, is shown as undamaged. This is a typical 17th century depiction of the Lisbon earthquake.

Fig. 14 is a Czech broadsheet with the curious inscription "The true story of the disastrous earthquake in Lisbon…". It was published in 1755 in Prague, but is incorrectly dated 1750. This simple illustration bears no resemblance to the city of Lisbon. Note that the facades of the houses have a typical 18th century Czech baroque architectural style. A timely and relatively accurate written report on the disaster, however, is attached.

The triple depiction shown in Fig. 15 shows Lisbon before the earthquake, and the central picture shows it immediately afterwards. The bottom picture portrays the effects of the quake on the suburbs of Meknes. Under the depiction is the inscription "I.D. Nessenthaller inv. del. et sculps. A.V." Although it is not dated, we can assume it was composed shortly after the earthquake.

The German engraving presented in Fig. 16 shows, on the left, a refugee camp in the suburbs of Lisbon. On the right is a reference to the Jan 26th, 1531 earthquake, which also caused heavy damage to Lisbon. The date shown in the depiction is Nov. 6th, 1755. The inscription in the picture says "Qui no ha visto Lisboa, no ha visti cisa boa," or "Who has not seen Lisbon, has not seen a wonderful thing (town)." The picture is signed: I. Ferd. Baechler seel. Terb exc. A.V." This broadsheet probably also originated a short time after the earthquake.

Fig. 17 is not directly related to the 1755 event, but is an allegorical representation produced ten years later. It is included in a thesis on the physics of the Earth from the West Bohemian Premonstrate Order monastery at Tepla. The image includes the apparition of St. Alexius, the patron of protection in earthquakes, in the sky. Nevertheless, the thesis is an example of the many geological studies throughout Europe which were stimulated by the Lisbon disaster.

Fig. 18, entitled "Lisbonne Abysmbe..." is an anonymous broadsheet illustration, probably of French origin. This picture accurately depicts some of the local topography. In the foreground, people are escaping in panic from the Tagus River banks. The central and eastern parts of the city are totally in ruin. A large wave falls on the city. The buildings in the most western suburbs (far left) seem to be undamaged. The architecture of the houses and the church steeples correspond more to western and central European construction than to that found in Iberia. A legend accompanying the picture is unfortunately missing. This depiction is among the most impressive of the 1755 disaster.

A depiction of "The Great Earthquake of Lisbon" published in the Illustrated London News on March 30th, 1850 is shown in Fig. 19. This is a highly inaccurate depiction of the event but serves to illustrate how the disaster, which had happened nearly a hundred years before, still lived in the memory of the Europeans.

The depiction in Fig. 20 entitled "Zachraneni hrabeci rodiny (The Rescue of the Duke's Family)", is an illustration taken from the Czech book Zemetreseni v Lisbono, nejvetsi na svete pameti lidske (The Earthquake in Lisbon, the Largest in the World During Human Memory). The book was written by W.D. Horn and is translated from the original German. The Czech version was edited in Prague in 1864. The descriptions in the text of this book served to sustain memories of the Lisbon disaster for a long time.

A more dramatic composition is presented in Fig. 21, the frontispiece illustration taken from the book by Hartwig (1887). This view is from the right bank of the Tagus looking west. The manifestations of the quake are presented here quite convincingly: large movements of water masses, sinking ships, collapsing houses in the front along the river bank, and panicked crowds trying to escape. It is possible that this photo-like depiction was created using an older depiction as a model.

Conclusion

The extensive number of renderings of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake found throughout Europe demonstrate the traumatic effect the disaster had on the continent. Depictions of the Lisbon earthquake were created, copied, and widely distributed and discussed throughout all of southern, western and central Europe. Whether created by the new desire to investigate, record, and understand the earthquake in natural rather than strictly metaphysical terms, or created by the more sensational desire to report on human calamity, these depictions indicate that the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 represents a watershed event in European history.

(Source: http://nisee.berkeley.edu/lisbon)

Haiti: quid nunc?

An account of hopelessness in the aftermath of last week's disastrous earthquake in Haiti:

"Washington Diarist: Aftershocks

• Leon Wieseltier
• January 23, 2010 | 12:00 am

“Think of our new village here as the home of Jesus Christ, not the scene of a disaster,” the Reverend Joseph Lejeune told the smashed souls in a tent city in Port-au-Prince. “Life is not disaster. Life is joy! You don’t have food? Nourish yourself with the Lord. You don’t have water? Drink in the spirit.” One of the aftershocks in Haiti has been the revelation that belief may be immune to experience. The survivors are praying to the author of the destruction. Their metaphysics is their shelter, and I would not deny them their metaphysics as I would not deny them a bed. Yet this is very unVoltairean. Was not God buried in this rubble, as He was buried in all the rubble that preceded it? What happened in Haiti ought to bring philosophy back, except that nothing can bring philosophy back. In an intellectual universe that consists mainly in position-taking, everyone comes away from the enormity with a tingle of validation. The complacence of the theists is matched by the complacence of the atheists. The cocktail-party Karamazovs shake their fists at the live feeds and gleefully pounce on the latest confirmation of their belief in the cruelty of the deity that does not exist. In their scorn for the religious explanation of evil they omit to explain it themselves, except perhaps to extol “lucidity,” which is of course not the beginning of the answer but the beginning of the question. There is nothing analytical or heroic about knowing the facts. And to regard all this suffering as meaningless seems indecent. One can always adopt the standpoint of the cosmos, and in this way detach oneself from the pain and the perplexity, but then one cannot call oneself a humanist. Watching the charnel scenes in Haiti, I wonder, without much mental satisfaction, whether in such circumstances it may not be the highest achievement of the spirit to be stuck. For the relation of belief to experience is a complicated matter, and not only in a catastrophe. It is as foolish to assert that God does not exist because I am unhappy as it is to assert that God does exist because I am happy. In the ruins of Haiti, I do not see how one can be nourished by the presence of the Lord and I do not see how one can be nourished by the absence of the Lord. The earthquake leaves the metaphysical problem where it found it.

But the ruins of Haiti may provoke another crisis of another faith. Many commentators rightly noted that the magnitude of the devastation was owed not only to natural causes but also to human causes--to the country’s history of social, political, and economic abjection. Harrowing poverty, corrupt government, broken institutions, shabby infrastructure: those are not divine injustices, they are human ones. (In one of the more notorious sections of his Theodicy, the supreme masterpiece of the justificatory mind, Leibniz remarked that “one single Caligula, one Nero, has caused more evil than an earthquake.”) And America’s interventions, even when they have been for a right end, have often been shifting and thoughtless, a discouraging saga of unintended consequences. In the aftermath of the earthquake, the Obama administration and other governments and the NGOs and the international relief agencies are saying that this time it will be different. The magnanimity of American and other donors, public and private, has certainly been remarkable. The charitable energy, the pulse of compassion, is everywhere. And in one of the greatest hours in the history of human benevolence, as the angels of rescue and relief do their work, there emerged a kind of humanitarian happy talk. “There are great reasons to hope,” Bill Clinton and George W. Bush wrote. “We have a chance to do things better than we once did. … At our best, we can help Haiti become its best.” Ban Ki-Moon observed that “the disaster in Haiti shows once again that even amid the worst devastation, there is always hope,” and cited the millennial goal of eliminating extreme poverty by 2015. Bernard Kouchner declaimed that “stubbornly and fearlessly, we must reach toward hope. … The sad truth is that when everything has been destroyed, anything becomes possible.”

I know, I know. What else were they going to say? But something is amiss with this notion of policy as theodicy. For it may well be that anything is not possible. Haiti, like everywhere else, is thick with its past, and it will take more than “a very successful donors conference” (Hillary Clinton’s reassuring example on January 15) or the “development of clean energy” (one of Bill Clinton’s and George W. Bush’s prescriptions on January 17) to break its grip. Hope, like fear, is an easily exploitable emotion; and the disappointment of hope is not significantly different from despair. I am not sure what interests are served by talk of transformation, except the interests of cynics. The Red Cross has my money, but not because I expect to see a new Haiti. I do not. I also do not expect to see a lasting American commitment after the bodies are buried. I would like one, of course; but what I would like is not what counts. What counts is what we know about the inconstancy of men and the intractability of the world. That knowledge does not teach quietism, not at all; but we must learn to distinguish between meliorative action and millennial action. The struggle against suffering should take place soberly, grimly, with what the poet called a heart for any fate, because it sets out from the prior actuality of suffering. It is born disabused, or it is a misunderstanding.

I recognize the risk in such an intuition. In demanding too little of the world, we may become complicit with it. Fatalism is always, almost as a matter of definition, self-fulfilling. And yet intelligence must not be blinded by its tears. Tragedy cannot be adequately met with the confidence and the cheerfulness of Leibniz and Bono. This time it will be different. Looking at Haiti, why would anyone not believe it, and why would anyone believe it? We cut our deliverances to the scale of our disasters, but it is never measure for measure: we cannot overtake what the world has done to us, what we have done to ourselves. It is just not the case that the less you believe in God, the more you believe in man. It may be impossible to believe in them both. The short-lived nature of ethical alertness is one of the most rudimentary facts of individual and collective life. So let us quicken to the intervals between our indifferences, because whether or not God exists, we do, and much of the time--though not now, as the planes clog the runways in Port-au-Prince--we are terrible.

Leon Wieseltier is the literary editor of The New Republic.

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Source URL: http://www.tnr.com/article/world/washington-diarist-aftershocks

Haiti: tragoedia ab origine atque ad infinitum

The Haitian people are one of the most traumatised in modern History, the victims of both evil Man (racism, mass murder, torture, dictatorship, crime, poverty,  illiteracy, corruption/nepotism) and unforgiving Nature (disease, landslides, floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis).

The assessment below was written 24 years ago, but remains wholly accurate on the social, cultural and political issues that have plagued Haiti for over two centuries:

" Slaves and Slaughter

Haiti's horrible history.

• David S. Landes
• March 10, 1986 | 12:00 am

There in the affairs of men ... when it is time to go. Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier seems to have missed the boat. A year ago, when things were still pretty quiet in Haiti, he could have gone off with his wife, children, entourage, designer clothing, Gucci bags, Vuitton luggage, and les musts de Cartier and retired to one of his Swiss or French properties to spend the proceeds of years of prudent squirreling against a powerless winter. Any excuse might have done.

But now it is probably too late, France doesn't want him. An embarrassed Francois Mitterrand, good Socialist that he is, feels that the sacred right of French asylum, always liberally accorded to such freedom-loving figures as Karl Marx (shortly withdrawn), sundry brigadisti rossi, and Khomeini was never intended to serve as cover for a man with so much blood on his record if not his conscience. Mitterrand’s masterpiece of understatement: "I don't know whether this person is really the best symbol of human rights in the world."

But if France doesn't like him, who will? The French thought they had made a deal: a rest stop and then away--back to American, if no one would take him. That was not our sense of the matter. We were concerned, we said, to make possible a peaceful transition to a better regime, not to serve as the haven for a royalist emigration. Since the Duvaliers are francophone, we feel, they would prefer France to the United States (and maybe anything to Liberia). Having taken in tens of thousands of Haitian refugees, we could not assure the Duvliers' security: too many angry people around. Besides, it is far more important to us than to France to maintain a good image in the Caribbean.

Meanwhile there is Haiti--a crowded piece of badly deforested and eroded land with the lowest income per head in the Western hemisphere. We hear talk of a new era: the institution of popular government; a resumption of foreign investment; a restoration of infrastructure; employment-creating enterprises--onward and upward. The program and goals are standard and unexceptionable. Getting there is the problem. After all, this is not Haiti's first chance. By 20th-century measures, it is an old country. Like the United States, Haiti won its freedom by driving out a European power in what Robert Palmer has called the age of democratic revolution. Haiti was known then as Saint-Domingue and was France's richest colonial possession. Its wealth came from sugar and coffee, above all from sugar, cultivated on large and middling plantations by slave labor. These blacks made up more than 90 percent of the population. Saint-Domingue was in effect a piece of Africa transported to the New World.

The rest of the population was about evenly divided between mulatto freemen (the "yellows") and the whites. Color was class. The yellows constituted an intermediate group between whites and blacks, serving as overseers, agents, shop clerks, craftsmen. The whites were planters, soldiers, merchants, technicians, doctors, clergy. Some of these had brought families from Europe. But Haiti was not a healthful place, and the wiser whites left wives and children at home in France. That was another reason for the creation of a Creole population.

The official religion--officially the only religion--was Roman Catholicism. But this moved only the whites, their households, and to a lesser extent the yellows. The blacks in the huts and fields, though touched by the white man's faith, retained a mix of African beliefs and practices that we still know as voodoo, with a strong component of sorcery. Whites and yellows spoke French. Blacks spoke a Creole mix of French and various west African tongues. Two worlds cohabited, both of them brutalized and terrorized by a relationship of power and exploitation. The great mass of sullen, smoldering slaves had to be kept in line by whip and fire. Their white masters, quick to punish, had nightmares of slave revolt. The hills were filled with marrons, rogue slaves gone over to plunder. The sugar estates and refineries were plagued by sabotage.

It was not the blacks, though, who were the most immediate enemies of the slave order. It was the yellows, nominally free but deprived of civic rights. They read the new literature of freedom put out by enlightened French opinion (the Society des Amis des Noirs was founded in 1788), and the outbreak of revolution in the mother country led them to demand immediate rather than gradual reform. In 1791 Paris granted them citizenship. The whites on the island, infuriated, sought to block enforcement. The yellows agitated, conspired, fomented resistance. And then in 1792 the blacks rose in revolt.

It took more than a decade to end the conflict. An initial period of anarchy and warlordism drove the French from the countryside into the cities, where they could shelter under the protection of military garrisons and naval guns. When they sought help from the home country, they found that the new revolutionary government was too busy fighting a coalition of European enemies to divert resources to the colony. Instead it sent out commissars, who in 1793 proclaimed freedom for the slaves. This no more ended the struggle than Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation would end the Civil War.

Nothing is so ferocious as a race war. It is war to the death. Black bands surged through the land, killing every white they could, from the oldest of invalids to suckling babes. White garrisons sallied forth and returned atrocity for atrocity. Prisoners were routinely massacred, which only discouraged surrender. There was even an anticipation of the Nazi gas chambers. The French fitted out a ship as a mass extermination machine: blacks were driven down into the hold and asphyxiated by noxious fumes. The name of the vessel: The Stifler. It was one of the quieter ways to go.

This first stage ended in 1796, when Pierre-Dominique Toussaint l'Ouverture, said to be the son of an African chief and destined for leadership, united the black armies and imposed a respite. The French, keen to save the form if not the substance, made him governor in the name of France, But then he declared himself governor-for-life, and Bonaparte in Paris was not ready to tolerate another Bonaparte in Haiti. In 1802 a French expeditionary force landed on the island, its mission to subdue the blacks. Binaparte had even bigger plans: Haiti, in combination with Louisiana, would be the making of a new French empire. But the invasion force was quickly defeated, as much by disease as by fierce resistance. The French, however, did succeed in trapping Toussaint by means of the most solemn promises: how could he not trust the bearers of liberté, égalité, fraternité? His captors took him to France in irons and placed him in an icy cell in a fortress in the Jura mountains. There this son of Africa, strong and valiant as he was, quickly shriveled and died of pneumonia. Napoleon gave up his American dream and sold Louisiana for two cents an acre.

Toussaint's successor, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, was filled with an immense, unappeasable bitterness. He drove out the rest of the French forces, and on January 1, 1804, proclaimed independence in terms that evoked the crimes of the past and promised more blood to come: "Citizens, look about you for your wives, husbands, brothers, sisters. Look for your children, your nursing babies. Where have they gone?" And then Dessalines personally led a massacre of every remaining French man, woman, and child in the country, excepting only a handful of doctors and clergy.

Haiti has cherished the memory of Toussaint, pupil of the Enlightenment, believer (and victim) of the hopes and illusions of a revolutionary era. But it also has remembered and honored Dessalines, savage in his hates, a man who turned his country in upon itself, the better to confront a hostile world. It is a mixed and bloody heritage, with the disappointed hopes of the one reinforcing and justifying the angry withdrawal of the other.

The effect of these barbarities is still being felt. The legacy of fire and blood was a population reduced almost by half and an economy in ruins. Fields and cities were laid waste; the sugar mills were a rusting mass of scrap iron and ashes. The houses were gone, the huts were empty. Nor were reconstruction and resumption possible, because the freed slaves wanted nothing to do with employment. No one wanted to work for another, because that was what slavery was all about. Instead, each wanted his own plot, to grow food for consumption and perhaps coffee for market.

But Dessalines needed sugar, because sugar was money and money was needed to pay for those forts and inland towns (away from the vulnerable coast) and a standing army consisting of up to ten percent of the population. So, in what was surely one of the most ironic betrayals in history, within two weeks of exhorting the Haitian people "to accept death in preference to the yoke," Dessalines proposed to open his ports to slave ships that would bring adult males for purchase by the Haitian government. And he offered a price for every Haitian refugee returned to the island. Neither measure helped, so Dessalines conducted a raid on the Spanish-speaking eastern part of the island. It was a raid to kill whites and capture blacks. It brought back some thousands of conscripts. Like the peasants assigned to forced labor in the fields, they were not called slaves, because slavery was forbidden by law. Whips were also prohibited, but adequate substitutes were found in vines (often with thorns) and sticks. The cocomacac, a heavy cane, could be very persuasive when it did not kill. Laborers, Dessalines pointed out, could be controlled "only by fear of punishment and even death," The Haitians had to kill Dessalines to get rid of him.

In the meantime, neither force nor fear could overcome a population schooled in resistance. Many of the plantations were now owned by mulattoes, who found themselves targeted as the new enemy. Like the French before them, they retreated into the cities, creating a color line between rural and urban. Sugar was finished. Even coffee exports dwindled, from 77 million pounds in 1789, at the peak of colonial prosperity, to 43 million in 1801, 32 million in 1832. As foreign earnings shrank, Haiti found it ever harder to make up domestic food shortages by imports. In the end, the government had to give up its hope of restoring cash crops and had to encourage subsistence farming. As the population increased, plots grew smaller, the earth poorer, people hungrier--a downward spiral of squalor and immiserization.

It was a poor basis for a democratic polity. This was a country with an elective presidential regime, but it quickly acquired the characteristics of pillage politics. Poor as Haiti was, there was always some surplus to be appropriated. The property of the ruling elite was there for the taking by any coterie strong enough to seize the reins. So in 150 years, Haiti ran through some 30 heads of state, almost none of whom finished his term or got out at the end of it.

Many of them died to leave office, and their departures were followed by bloody, racist massacres--blacks revenging themselves on yellows, the yellows getting theirs back. In the long run, the blacks had the best of it, if only because there were more of them and they were the standard-bearers of unconditional negritude. The yellows were always suspected of being too French, in language, dress, and manners.

The only period of relative tranquility was the 20 years of American presence. From 1915 to 1934, a regiment of United States Marines helped keep order, improved communications, and provided the stability needed to make the political system work and to facilitate trade with the outside. Even a benevolent occupation creates resistance, though, not only among the beneficiaries, but also among the more enlightened members of the dominant society. Progressive Americans, including Paul Douglas (then a professor, later a senator from Illinois), reminded their compatriots that it was the United States, in the person of Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt, that had bestowed on Haiti its new constitution, which proudly affirmed that "the Republic of Haiti is one and indivisible, free, sovereign and independent." (FDR said "modestly: "… if I do say it, I think it is a pretty good constitution.") Douglas went on to warn his countrymen against the "slippery slopes" of imperialism. The United States should teach the techniques of administration and then leave the Haitians to govern themselves. To be sure, Haiti might not be ready for that, but if we couldn't do the job in 20 years, "there was little likelihood of our ever being able to do so."

No doubt. The United States left two years early, under the pressure of popular hostility and government opposition. The legislature then voted a new constitution (so much for Roosevelt's efforts), which enhanced Presidential authority without improving the assurance of tenure. Coup followed coup, until the election of François Duvalier in 1957. He was smarter than his predecessors: learning from experience, he emasculated the army and surrounded himself with a Pretorian guard of thugs. These were the tonton macoutes, country layabouts who liked nothing more than to beat, rob, and kill the educated elites of the cities, those literate few who might have nourished dreams of a better Haiti. Thanks to endemic terror variously applied (the fear is more potent than the fact). Papa Doc was able to die in office, in bed.

Not his son. He made the mistake of marrying a beautiful woman of cosmopolitan tastes and extravagant habits, a Marie Antoinette. Even her decorator had to stay at the Ritz. (Her mother-in-law, a real hard-liner, had never behaved that way.) Historians should rewrite their theories of revolution to take into account the spouse as well as the ruler.

It would be rash to predict happiness for Haiti. Nothing in history justifies anything but faith and hope. But there are some six million people there and counting--abysmally poor 80 percent illiterate, yet full of expectation--some 700 miles from our coast. We had better find something more potent and productive than charity.

David S. Landes is Coolidge Professor of History and Professor of Economics at Harvard. His latest book is Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Harvard University Press).

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Source URL: http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/slaves-and-slaughter

On earthquakes and the "causes" thereof...

Christopher Hitchens is incisive as ever in his latest article:

A Fault Is Not a Sin -- It's idiotic to blame anything other than geology for the Haitian earthquake.

By Christopher Hitchens  Posted Sunday, Jan. 17, 2010, at 11:55 AM ET

Read more about the Haiti earthquake in Slate.

On Nov. 1, 1755—the feast of All Saint's Day—a terrifying combination of earthquake and tsunami shattered the Portuguese capital city of Lisbon. Numerous major churches were destroyed and many devout worshippers along with them. This cataclysmic event was a spur to two great enterprises: the European Enlightenment and the development of seismology. Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were only some of those who reasoned that no thinkable deity could have desired or ordained the obliteration of Catholic Lisbon, while other thinkers—Immanuel Kant among them—began to inquire into the possible natural causes of such events.

Today, we can clearly identify the "fault" that runs under the Atlantic Ocean and still puts Portugal and other countries at risk, and it took only a few more generations before there was a workable theory of continental drift. We live on a cooling planet with a volcanic interior that is insecurely coated with a thin crust of grinding tectonic plates. Earthquakes and tsunamis are to be expected and can even to some degree be anticipated. It's idiotic to ask whose fault it is. The Earth's thin shell was quaking and cracking millions of years before human sinners evolved, and it will still be wrenched and convulsed long after we are gone. These geological dislocations have no human-behavioral cause. The believers should relax; no educated person is going to ask their numerous gods "why" such disasters occur. A fault is not the same as a sin.

However, the believers can resist anything except temptation. Where would they be if such important and frightening things had natural and rational explanations? They want the gods to be blamed. After the titanic eruption of Krakatoa in 1883, the Muslims of Indonesia launched a hugely successful campaign to recruit terrified local people to Islamic repentance. Following the more recent Asian tsunami of 2004, religious figures jostled to provide every possible "explanation" of tectonic events in terms of mere human conduct. (It was widely asserted in earlier times that earthquakes were caused by sodomy, yet San Francisco still stands, and when it suffered thousands of deaths in the catastrophic 1906 earthquake, it was rather more heterosexual than it is now.* Hurricane Katrina inundated much of New Orleans but saw fit to spare the immoral French Quarter.)

As so often, the first priest out of the trap on this occasion was that evil moron Pat Robertson, who announced on the Christian Broadcasting Network that Haitians had long ago made an agreement with Satan to enlist diabolic help against French imperialism. The implication was clear ... for this offense, God would kill underfed Haitian babies in slums 200 years later. (He would also kill the Archbishop of Port-au-Prince, Joseph Serge Miot, and bring his cathedral down on his head, though since Pat Robertson doesn't really think that Catholics are proper Christians, there's perhaps scant irony there.)

Robertson is stupidly trying to channel an event that may have occurred on the night of Aug. 14, 1791, when a large voodoo ceremony is said to have been held by the rebellious slaves of Haiti. After an animal sacrifice (of a black pig) to the maternal spirit of Ezili Danto, all present at Bois Caiman swore to slay their white Christian masters. This is sometimes taken as the signal for the revolt that, under the charismatic leadership of Toussaint L'Ouverture, drove French troops and slaveholders from Haiti and established the world's first black republic. (The essential book here is The Black Jacobins, by Trinidadian author C.L.R. James.) Americans have good reason to be thankful for that outcome, because it was the vanquishing of Napoleon that enabled celebrated agnostic Thomas Jefferson to negotiate the Louisiana Purchase and double the size of the United States.

This would have been quite a useful pact with the devil, but voodoo or santería and their related religious fusions are not Satanistic. They are, rather, a localized and Africanized form of Catholic superstition, based on much the same calendar and communion of saints that was being celebrated in Lisbon on that day in 1755. And if any single thing explains the abject misery of Haiti in the years between independence and today, it is the prevalence of religious cultism in its various aspects. Voodoo keeps people afraid and makes them cowed into apathy by the nearness of the spirit world. It was exploited by the horrible Tonton Macoute regime of "Papa Doc" Duvalier and his gruesome son, who for decades kept the country as their own rack-rented fief. But please do not forget that Mother Teresa came to Port-au-Prince in 1981 to receive the Haitian Légion d'honneur from "Baby Doc," as well as to accept stolen money from him, and that the Vatican protected the foul system for as long as it was able. In September 1992, exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide denounced the Vatican from the podium of the United Nations, correctly pointing out that it maintained the only embassy that still recognized the continuing post-Duvalier dictatorship. Unfortunately, Aristide's own brand of religious populism was a failure. Still, one cannot believe that the Almighty has recently slaughtered so many Haitians because of the unbelievable squalidness of their competing priesthoods.

Currently, the cry is that Robertson is out of step and that it is Christian charities that are doing the hardest work. By all means let the pious agree to keep God out of it (though I wonder if that doesn't make them feel slightly insipid). However, the heaviest lifting will, in fact, be done by nonreligious outfits like UNICEF and the International Red Cross (which may sound Christian, but isn't). The biggest work of all will be performed by carrier groups and airborne brigades of the United States, the taxpayer-financed forces of a secular republic. The vital next stage—beyond mere charity and rescue—will be to try and liberate Haiti's people from fear of witch doctors of all stripes and to educate them in the family planning that their country so urgently needs. Let's see how the various parties of God come out on that.

In the meantime, I urge everybody to think first as a human being, and to give as much as they can to any relief organization at all, but most especially by contacting the newest secular aid group at Non-Believers Giving Aid.

Correction, Jan. 21, 2010: This piece originally and incorrectly asserted that San Francisco was last hit by an earthquake in 1906. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

Rubinstein at 90

Below is a heartwarming interview with Arthur Rubinstein, at 90. He would pass away 5 years later, in 1982:

Double-click on the video to enlarge and to access the next segments.

Grieg by Rubinstein

Another wonderful piano composition, Edvard Grieg's Piano Concerto in A minor, Opus 16, performed by the legendary Arthur Rubinstein:

Double-click on the video to enlarge and to access the next segments.

Lizst by Argerich

A stunning performance of Franz Lizst's Piano Concerto No. 1, in E-flat major, S.124 (1849), one of my favourite compositions, by the renowned Argentinian pianist Martha Argerich:

Double-click on the video to enlarge and to access the next segments.

Isaac Stern in China

I love the violin, the most 'human' and emotional of musical instruments, and I revere the late Isaac Stern, one of the greatest virtuosi of the 20th century.

He was the Zeus of the violinists' Mount Olympus, where the heavenly Pinchas Zukerman, Yehudi Menuhin and Itzhak Perlman reside (curiously, all Jewish with Russian background; likewise some of the best younger violinists of this century: Shlomo Mintz, Gil Shaham, Maxim Vengorov).
Below is a memorable documentary on Stern's visits to China, the Oscar-winning From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern in China (1980):

Double-click on the video to enlarge and to access the next parts of the programme.

Il Cannone

I have just bought the original DVD recording of virtuoso Shlomo Mintz's 1997 exquisite rendering of Niccolò Paganini's Concerto for Violin and Orchestra No. 1, in D major, Opus 6, on Paganini's famous Il Cannone ("The Canon") violin, which the master bequeathed to the city of Genoa.

Il Cannone Guarnerius

This instrument, made in Cremona by Guarneri del Gesù (1698-1744), the legendary Antonio Stradivari's main competitor, is an Italian national treasure and never travels without armed police escort and a multimillion dollar insurance policy.

Below is an excerpt, found on the web, of the mentioned performance: the third and last movement, a wonderful Rondo.

Tous les matins du monde

The new permanent feature in the side bar is the piece "La Rêveuse" [The Dreamer], composed for viol, or viola da gamba, by Marin Marais (1656-1728).

The track was played by the great Jordi Savall for Alain Corneau's Tous les matins du monde [All the mornings of the world] (1991).

Alain Corneau's masterpiece is one of the best films ever.

Watch it below:

Double-click on the video to enlarge and to select the next segments of the movie.

(Disclaimer: I am not responsible for the posting of the movie in the source website, which allows for the sharing and embedding of such material.)

White Terror

One of my favourite films of 2009, the Taiwanese production Prince of Tears (淚王子) depicts the human toll of the "White Terror" period in Taiwan, especially during the 1950's.

It is estimated that the Nationalist (Guomindang or KMT) dictatorship killed, tortured and/or arrested up to 140,000 citizens on mostly bogus charges of espionage and Communist 'agitprop' and infiltration. A KMT McCarthyism taken to extremes, if you will, as the linchpin of a repressive, corrupt and quasi-fascistic regime. Let's not forget that martial law on Taiwan was lifted only in 1987.

The film has a very poignant narrative, based on true events, with great cinematography, excellent acting and spoken in beautiful Mandarin.

A candidate for a top place in the art house genre (there have been too many movies resting solely on CGI this year!), it was included in the official selection of the 66th Venice Film Festival (2009).

Here's the trailer:

Below is a brief description:

A poem by Cao Cao: "Short Song"

I lift my drink and sing a song,
for who knows if life is short or long?

Man's life is but the morning dew,
past days many, future ones few .

The melancholy my heart begets,
comes from cares I cannot forget.

Who can unravel these woes of mine
I know but one man...the God of Wine

Disciples dress in blue,
my heart worries for you.

You are the cause,
of this song without pause.

Across the bank a deer bleats,
in the wild where it eats.

Honored my guests I salute,
strike the harp! Play the flute!

Bright is the moon's spark,
when can I pick it apart?

Thoughts of you from deep inside,
cannot settle, cannot subside.

Friends drop by via a country road,
the respect they pay really show.

A long due reunion we fest,
sharing past stories we possessed.

Stars around the moons are few,
southward the crows flew.

Flying with no rest,
where shall they nest?

No mountain too steep,
no ocean too deep. 

Sages pauses when guests call,
so at his feet the empire does fall!

Cao Cao

Is the tomb recently found near Anyang, in Henan, really the long sought-after one belonging to Cao Cao (曹操; 155-220 CE)?

This historical character of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms (三國演義), the last de facto ruler of the Eastern Han Dynasty and the founder of the Wei Kingdom, is still revered by some, anathematised by others.

You might recall Cao Cao as the leader of the Eastern Han forces in John Woo's epic movie Red Cliff (Part 1: 2008; Part 2: 2009) on the eponymous battle which took place near the Yangtze in 208 CE. His defeat lead to the demise of centralised government and ushered in the Three Kingdoms Period (220-280 CE).

Below is a China Central Television documentary on the topic:

Double-click on the video to enlarge and to access the next parts of the programme.

The greatest man alive

I just finished watching this excellent documentary on the insurmountable Nelson Mandela:

First book of 2010

My inaugural read for this year: Amy Chua's Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--and Why They Fall (Kindle edition: Anchor, 2009; file size: 673 KB; print length: 432 pages).

Below is a review quoted by amazon.com:

"From The Washington Post

Reviewed by James F. Hoge Jr.

Call 'em the Magnificent Seven. There have been many great powers in history but only seven that Amy Chua describes in Day of Empire as hyperpowers, those that have dominated not only their immediate surroundings but all the known world of their time: Persia, Rome, China, the Mongols, the Dutch, the British and the United States.

Chua finds they all achieved dominance by similar means, then succumbed to similar ills. The lone exception to this pattern of decline has been America, and that may be only a matter of time. Chua, a Yale law professor, worries that America may now be slipping off the top perch for the same reasons that its predecessors did: Once "a magnet for the world's most energetic and enterprising" people "of all ethnicities and backgrounds," she says, the United States seems to be tipping toward intolerance and "xenophobic backlash."

Of course, a hyperpower has to rise before it can topple. For starters, an ambitious climber must amass formidable military capabilities. However, might alone will not do. The coercive resources of a single state have never been enough to dominate the known worlds of ancient history or the larger ones of the modern era. To prevail over time, Chua argues, a hyperpower must add to its capabilities the strengths and talents of those it conquers, much as illiterate Mongol rulers embraced Chinese art, music and drama in the 13th century, and as the Dutch Republic took in refugees from religious persecution across Europe from 1492 to 1715.

Mind you, tolerance did not fully supplant coercion in any of the past hyperpowers. Brutality accompanied conquest and stood in ready reserve to suppress those who were immune to enticements. But in Chua's view the key resource for reaching hyperpower status has been human capital. The Magnificent Seven all obtained the acquiescence, even the support, of diverse peoples stretched over vast territories through what Chua calls "strategic tolerance." They accepted the customs and religious practices of the defeated; they recruited the best and the brightest of their new subjects for government and military service, sharing the riches and other benefits of empire.

This co-opting of human resources is what, to Chua, separates true hyperpowers from other imperial entities, such as the Ming and Mughal empires and medieval Spain. In one small but illuminating example, she notes that at the zenith of China's Tang dynasty in 713 -- "the most magnificent cultural flowering that China would ever see" -- the emperor received a delegation of Arab ambassadors and waived the requirement for them to perform a ceremonial kowtow. Roughly 1,000 years later, by contrast, China's Manchu rulers made the opposite decision, turning away an English envoy because he refused to prostrate himself. The Manchus were less tolerant than the Tang, and far less successful as a result.

Chua charts each hyperpower's decline from the point when its leaders stopped embracing diversity and started repressing part of the population in the name of racial purity or religious orthodoxy. At that moment, she says, the crucial "glue" of an overarching political identity disappeared, and otherwise manageable disputes became mortal.

"If the history of hyperpowers has shown anything, it is the danger of xenophobic backlash," she writes. "Time and again, past world-dominant powers have fallen precisely when their core groups turned intolerant, reasserting their 'true' or 'pure' identity and adopting exclusionary policies toward 'unassimilable' groups. From this point of view, attempts to demonize immigrants or to attribute America's success to 'Anglo-Protestant' virtues is not only misleading (neither the atomic bomb nor Silicon Valley was particularly 'Anglo-Protestant' in origin) but dangerous."

Chua acknowledges, however, that American predominance differs in some respects from traditional empires that gobbled up territory. The hegemony of the United States, emanating from victories in World War II and the Cold War, has depended on devising an international system that benefits others as well as itself. At this time in history, American leadership is needed to make the system work. But Chua sees that leadership crippled by the rise of protectionism and nativism in the United States, along with an over-reliance on military responses to danger. Rather than depending on force of arms, she contends, America needs to strengthen its "soft power" appeal; otherwise, fear of U.S. intentions will only grow from what is already a worrisome base of anti-Americanism.

Day of Empire follows Chua's bestselling World on Fire, which maintained that the export of democracy does not initially bring international nonviolence but instead excites ethnic hostility and regional instability. In her new book, she notes that, inside its borders, the United States "has over time proven uniquely successful in creating an ethnically and religiously neutral political identity capable of uniting as Americans individuals of all backgrounds from every corner of the world." But outside its borders, she says, "there is no political glue binding the United States to the billions of people who live under its shadow."

One might argue that Chua relies too heavily on "strategic tolerance" to explain the rise and fall of hyperpowers. Military and administrative excellence are key to the complex processes of creation and destruction, as is the growth over time of corruption. So, too, are the ambitions of those conquered -- not all of which are generated by the behavior of their rulers.

But the thesis of Day of Empire, like the thrust of her previous book, is provocative. Chua's lively writing makes her case studies interesting in themselves. And her convincing presentation of their relevance to the contemporary scene adds meaning to this timely warning.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved."