Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

take Haiti, the most impoverished country in the Hemisphere. I don’t know if any of you have ever traveled to Haiti, but if you go there, you can barely believe it—I’ve gone to a lot of parts of the Third World, and Haiti is just something else. But in Haiti in the late 1980s, under extremely repressive and impoverished conditions, Haitian peasants and slum-dwellers were able to create an organized civil society: they succeeded in creating unions, and grassroots organizations, and a whole network of popular groupings which achieved such strength that, with no resources at all, they were able to take over the government. Now, it turns out they immediately got smashed by a military coup which we were assisting—but that shows you what people can do in the world.84 If you read the American press when the coup collapsed [in 1994], they were all saying, “Now we have to go down and teach lessons in democracy to the Haitians”—but anybody except a complete commissar ought to have burst out in ridicule at that. We have to learn about democracy from the Haitians, Haitian peasants have a lot to teach us about democracy, they show how it really works.