The Thin Veneer of Civilization

The Thin Veneer of Civilization | Frontpage Mag

Frontpage Mag

**The Left is turning us into a “sh*thole country.”**

During a White House meeting with Senators in January, 2018, then-President Donald Trump reportedly questioned the reasoning for allowing immigration from “shithole countries” such as Haiti. This triggered the pearl-clutching mainstream media, and charges of racism flew fast and furious, including from Haiti Ambassador to the U.S. Paul Altidor, who said Trump’s language was based on “clichés and stereotypes rather than actual fact.”

Today Haiti is a shithole country, and that is not a racist cliché or stereotype but actual fact. It is a failed nation in a state of emergency, becoming a dangerous power vacuum in the Caribbean. Awash in violence and chaos, the country is run by a heavily armed gang whose messianic leader Jimmy Cherizier is grotesquely and justifiably nicknamed “Barbeque.”

Even reports of cannibalism have surfaced amid the current chaos, including videos on social media showing at least one gang member gnawing on a human leg from a burning corpse. An anonymous journalist on the ground told The Daily Express, “We have seen images of gang leaders eating people they have killed. We have seen images of people being tortured when they are kidnapped.”

As Horowitz Freedom Center Shillman Fellow Daniel Greenfield notes, Haiti is a failed state because it lacks “a legitimate government or a functional society,” and its police force is barely distinguishable from the murderous gangs it is supposed to control. The police there actually spawned “Barbeque” Cherizier, a warlord now the most powerful man in Haiti, who has orchestrated or been involved in a number of massacres of the Haitian people.

Predictably, left-wing elites blame Haiti’s long history of anarchy and corruption on European-driven slavery and colonialism. But as author Rod Dreher noted recently, a government minister told journalist Robert D. Kaplan in 1994 that the widespread Haitian practice of voodoo – a polytheistic folk religion derived from West African animism, with no central authority or institutional structure – is “the central fact explaining their country’s chronic misery,” as Dreher puts it. He continues:

If people within a social order believe that they have no real moral agency, and that their fate lies in the hands not of a God of reason and justice, but of an irrational spirit with a mercurial will, then it will be hard to build ordered social structures and ways of life.

Haitian Protestants, Dreher adds, “say the country’s founders brought a curse on Haiti by consecrating it to demons in the slave revolt that sparked the Haitian Revolution… that eventually overturned despotic French colonial rule” in 1791…