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Frederick Douglas, a former slave and the U.S. President’s special envoy to Haiti, said this at the opening of the Haitian Pavillion, Chicago World’s Fair, in 1893. The speech probed the soul of Christendom to judge itself in front of the world. Is today’s world, once again, asking for this?

When Haiti defeated France, the country was declared the first Black Republic in 1804 and destroyed the slave trade. Haiti became a beacon of freedom for humanity. The Haitian constitution was an iconic example of the first bill of human rights. Haiti was a hero nation, in the nineteenth-century world.

The nation of Haiti should be a global pilgrimage site for generations of human beings born free, thanks to Haiti’s courageous spirit, and heroic sacrifice. But when people think of Haiti today, they think of hunger, not heroism. How did the Haitian brand of David beating Goliath come to this?

By standing against all those who would oppress or exploit humanity, Haiti had sealed its fate. The new country stumbled into a different type of warfare with an enemy who possesses weapons that can alter people’s perception of reality. Haiti became a target of military grade psychological operations.

“Christians believe. Vodou knows” 

This is a Creole proverb for Vodou’s claim to supernatural contact. Does a spiritual technology, known as Vodou, put humanity in direct contact with higher beings? If so, this threatens big religions who want to control what human beings are allowed to believe. Does the Vatican good cop play Vodou as bad cop? Do they need an official devil and Vodou is it? The question that must be answered is, Why is Vodou promoted as evil and who benefits from it?

Hollywood has a profitable genre of movie products that uses Voodoo as the vessel for stories of evil entities who take possession of the human soul to create zombies. “White Zombie” made in 1932 was the first feature length template for this enduringly lucrative theme. In it a young white woman comes to Haiti to reunite with her fiancée. They meet an evil Voodoo adept, Bella Lugosi, who owns a sugar mill full of zombies. A drum beat of fear and terror then assaults our senses. We tell ourselves it’s just a movie but, note to self, “Praise Jesus for white Christianity.”

The strategic ‘demonization’ of African spiritual systems actually started with slavery, centuries before Hollywood reinvented the business model as films for white audiences. In his 1938 master work, The Ancient Kingdom of Dahomey, Melville Herskovits showed us an African civilization of high spiritual development with millennia of cultural continuum. A scholar’s response to Hollywood’s salacious portrayal of Haiti as host for black magic sex rituals, in “White Zombie.” But even massive evidence of a University of Chicago superstar professor’s research, loses to Hollywood ‘Voodoo’. Why this preference for an evil version of Vodou?  

Is it irrational to speculate that most people believe Haiti is a backward mess due to Voodou? Is it conspiratorial madness to suggest that this message, repeated in regular cinematic rituals, is designed to zombify the minds of Western citizens to see Vodou as evil and the sole cause of the Haitian tragedy. Is it a shameless plot to blame the victims for our brutally criminal history?

Good versus Evil 

This paradigm is the engine of ideological subversion since ancient times. Populations must be convinced that there’s a threat, evil barbarians who must be eliminated. The Africans weren’t threatening anyone in Europe and their spears were no match for European firepower. So, how do you demonize an enemy who doesn’t threaten you but also doesn’t want to be enslaved somewhere across the ocean, never to see home again? The slavery business had to be sold to European Christians as a net positive, with nothing that might incriminate us during the exit interview that awaits all Christians. A marketing challenge!

European slave traders and governments who sponsored them created an African brand for the calming of any European guilt. Their version of the African male is a dangerous savage, an uncivilized sorcerer with mysterious access to demons, the sworn enemies of Jesus Christ and His Church. Slavery became a sacred obligation, a mission that should reap rewards in eternity.

This vile propaganda worked because Europe was a Christian civilization and needed a Christian motive to justify slavery. Enslavement would be God’s platform for the conversion of all Africans to Christianity. Slavery was marketed as a consecrated duty to the white man’s burden and a kind of imperial benevolence to exorcise these ‘black devils’ and get them worshipping the white gods. The strategic chutzpah cancelled the sin of profiting from the slave’s lifelong free labor to his owner.

African slavery stands as an early iteration of the, “It’s for their own good!” school of foreign policy.  

“Men made fortunes and were esteemed as good Christians. Until Haiti spoke the church was silent, the pulpit dumb.” — Frederick Douglas

Slavery was an untouchable issue because it was a gold rush, an official policy to plunder the wealth of others under the cover of virtue signaling. Not much has changed. Haiti is exploding again. The International Community calls it a humanitarian crisis and will send soldiers to pacify the population. 

The Haitian national character of a violent people incapable of self-government will be reconfirmed. Haiti’s noble birth as a champion of human rights is long forgotten. Noble Haiti has been replaced by a Haiti of black thugs killing each other in an open-air penal colony. What caused this tragic transformation? The imperial playbook prescribes cultural demoralization of the targeted country, as preparation for the stage of resource plunder, cultural genocide and state capture. Haiti is a text book example of this process.

What is there in Haiti to plunder?

Why is the third largest U.S. Embassy on the planet in Port au Prince? 

Is Haiti a threat?

Is there something Haiti isn’t telling us?

Why is Haiti always in decline while surrounded by successful island nations of the Caribbean Community?

Why hasn’t Hollywood ever made any movies about Haiti’s history-changing and world-improving achievements in the liberation of the human soul from bondage?

Why are we told Haitian Voodou is evil when it was Christian nations who got rich from slavery? What’s wrong with all of this?

“Slave traders lived and died, funeral sermons preached over them, they went to heaven among the just.” — Frederick Douglas

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Cameron Brohman has managed international development projects in Haiti and other developing countries for forty years. His decades in Haiti encompass the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship to the 2010 earthquake. He is “hounsi canzo.”