Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - *PREVIEW* The Time The Cops Tried To Invade Haiti

Episode Date: November 27, 2024

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Hey everyone, what you're about to listen to is a preview of a bonus episode that is available on our Patreon. If you like this clip, you can grab the whole episode as well as years of other bonus content at www.patreon.com slash lions led by donkeys. I mean, Woodrow Wilson is 100% the American equivalent of a guy who's like, no, I'm being serious. My grandpa did fall out of a guard tower at Auschwitz and die. That's how level of bad he is. It's one of those situations that's like, occasionally you kind of, even in the almost seven years we've been doing this show, you occasionally stumble upon a guy that even

in 1915, other white people look at Woodrow Wilson, like, God damn, he is racist. Yeah, I mean, and this is in the same era when like, you know, Teddy Roosevelt was, I mean, he was of the time being a little more progressive minded when it came to race relations. There was, I don't know if you guys know this, but at the time there was kind of like a minor racism scandal, if you want to call it that, in the sense that because Teddy Roosevelt invited a black boxer, I believe. It's just kind of shocking because yeah, you look at the history of America and two things will stand out is that obviously there were people who were even in their time, people like that person is racist and this is insane. And then also like if you were to, by the standards of today, if you were to actually just read verbatim the stuff that was just said in media everywhere and like

it would, it would come across like you were trying to do storm front shit. I mean, congrats to all those people on their new cabinet positions. I mean, it's really funny in the sense that I, when we were in Belfast, I in a charity shop found three volumes of punch cartoons. One of them was a hundred years of punch starting in 1856 and holy fuck did I see racist stuff in that that I did not think existed. Oh god yeah. I mean long story short, Lock Woodrow Wilson in a cage with Mike Tyson. I didn't want to fight him, he seemed like a good man, but an old Mike came out from

inside of me after I turned Jake Paul into mulch. We have to use evil to fight evil. Now this occupation of Haiti rapidly turned young Francois political, who is now a college student studying medicine at the University of Haiti. He was vehemently anti-occupation writing articles for the nationalist and anti-american newspaper national action and slowly became radicalized towards a movement that has a name in French that I don't feel comfortable saying but it roughly translates to blackness in English

but it roughly translates to blackness in English. Eww. It doesn't sound good in French. I don't speak French. We're all three white. We're not saying it. I mean, I do speak French, but I think that it's one of those things where, yeah, the context of it is, I couldn't speak to how offensive it comes across us, but it is a term that you will encounter a lot if you talk about, like, you know, sort of literary theory and studies and historical studies of this period I just know to a largely English speaking population doesn't sound great. Google it if you want to This this is kind of a black liberation

Afro-centrist movement that believed in a mixture of Marxist theory as well as the idea of embracing traditional beliefs such as Haitian voodoo in order to create and harness a Haitian national identity for various classes to be able to rally around and take as their own. Though probably more important than any of that came was the idea that the black majority, which was mostly the lower and middle class of Haiti, needed to be organized to harness their power and overthrow the mulatto elite, a population which he did not believe was black nor Haitian in any way.

He saw them as Europeans and just another extension of European colonialism. Though years of rallying against Americans did not mean at this point of his life that Francois was a madman or someone who didn't care. He graduated from medical school, then he took the US up on an offer to allow him to travel to Ann Arbor, Michigan and spend a year learning about public health at the University of Michigan.

Yeah, and then he just went back and he's suddenly talking like Iggy Pop. He went back, he was a really big Wolverines football fan. It's a shame that the timelines don't match up because I remember watching what is it, there's a documentary about, what is it, 826 Gilman, the sort of like space that created a space that became kind of like the punk movement in the Bay Area. Yeah, Gilman Street. And Iggy Pop narrates it and the way Iggy Pop with his just an art does he is from an art but these from Detroit he's just incredibly Michigan I'm not sure where he's from but I know he's from Michigan he pronounces the word punk like punk punk and it's just like it's

not spelled P O N K but yeah it's in Midwestern English it is well I told this to Joe once that I had a friend in high school who was from Flint and He I always just thought he just talked goofy actually Joe and my friend Brian have the exact same accent So I realized no it is actually the Michigan accent and confirmation Iggy Pop did grow up in on Arbor But he was born in Muskegon, Michigan Okay, that explains the accent yeah I do like the idea of Papa Doc spending way too much time in Ed Arbor coming back to Port-au-Prince Like you know we're missing a microbrewery Papa Doc meets Iggy Pop and he's like, you know, honestly if we move to Berlin together

I could get clean off coke and you can get clean off heroin who can make some amazing out We can explore each other's bodies Afterwards he returns to Haiti and begins to work with the US authorities, helping stop the spread of malaria, yaws, and typhus, which disproportionately impacted the poor, killing and maiming thousands upon thousands of people every year in Haiti. What the fuck is yaws? I don't know. I have no idea. I mean, I don't want to be dismissive of it, but yeah, I think-

It's real bad, whatever it is. Once you start to learn about tropical medicine and tropical diseases you realize like how many things there are in tropical climates that just like live everywhere and just eat you alive yeah yeah like and you know of course in most places this is the case where the the poor and underprivileged are horribly impacted by disease more than anyone else. This just impacted Haiti in a special kind of fucked up way due to all the other institutional and structural failures taking place, like complete lack of healthcare infrastructure and things like that. No mitigation attempts.

And during this point, he became beloved by his patients, and this is where he gets the nickname Papa Doc, and it stuck. Had nothing to do like people like to say it has a lot to do with the voodoo shit or anything like that? Absolutely not. It's because people loved him. He had good bedside matter, he was sympathetic and caring, he took care of everybody. And this is where he takes a jump from this grassroots politics that he was kind of living in, into the political machine itself. Being appointed as the minister of public health in 1949, under president Demarrié Estémé.

Just going to jump in really fast because I checked the World Health Organization website. Yaw's is a chronic skin infection characterized by papillomas or non-cancerous lumps and ulcers. It's caused by the bacterium treponema palladium subspecies pertinu, which belongs to the same group of bacteria that causes venereal syphilis. Yaws primarily affects children aged under 15 years who live in poor communities in warm, humid, and tropical forest arid areas of Africa, Asia, Latin America, Pacific Islands. The majority of affected populations live in the rural areas, far from health services, and it can be controlled, but it only occurs in humans. Yeah, this is why I just defaulted to saying bad,

because it sounds awful. It sounds fucking terrible. You also have stuff like river blindness and yellow fever. Yeah, it's really bad. Yeah, now, Estemme was something of a moderate, rather than what Francois was looking for in a leader. He wasn't radical, but in general, he was a voice that

advocated for the equality of Haitians. He also made sure to bring in former opponents and not exclude anyone from his cabinet to create what amounted to be the first national unity government in the country's history. As you can imagine, the radical ideas of equality and reform were not popular with the people who benefited from things not being reformed and then being incredibly unequal. This led to a military coup, spearheaded by a guy named Paul Maglior just a year later. His presidency was supported by the Haitian elites as well as the US because of course Maglior hated communists.

Of course, of course. Yeah, I mean, it's like back in the day in order to get a blank check to do crimes either It's become an explicit communist or an anti communist and people someone shows up at your door to be like go ahead It's either some like some dude from Yale or some dude that went to fucking Moscow University I don't know like it depending on it. It's just a different flag giving you a green light to horrific things Moscow online university. Yeah, I went to Phoenix. I went to the University of Phoenix campus in Grozny Just the weirdest Tex-Mex cuisine made by Russians at this point François was forced to go into hiding because, wouldn't you know it, Maglior's

left-wing opponents had a tendency to vanish into thin air. Funny how that happens. Funny how that is a constant to every anti-communist government. Afterwards, Maglior rebuilt the country around the needs and wants of the elites. People began to hate him, but then a hurricane smashes into Haiti, and he offers no relief whatsoever. Even the majority at this point fucking hates him. The majority of everyday Haitians hates him. The mulatto elite absolutely fucking hate him because the hurricane deletes Haiti, and he does nothing. He's deeply fucking corrupt.

So in reality There's probably no money to spend on relief because they sold all and bought Bugatti's or whatever They're like 19 Mid-century Bugatti's or whatever. Yeah, he old Bugatti. It's a really nice horse. I don't know They look like the car that It's a horse with spinners The big long saloon that FDR would commit adultery in or something