Another socialist blog

It’s all very well to say you like democracy. It’s another thing to allow democracy to flourish when you don’t happen to like what the majority has chosen. The United States has a long history of toppling democratically elected governments, including in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1953), Guyana (1964), Brazil (1964), Dominican Republic (1966), Chile (1973), and Grenada (1984).

Now Haiti is added to that long and shameful list. President Jean-Bertrand Aristide has been forced out of office at gunpoint by U.S. Marines, who took him to the Central African Republic. (This is strenuously denied by the Bush administration, but they’ve told enough whoppers lately that it seems safe to dismiss their self-serving denials out of hand.) Aristide was doomed because he dared to be independent of the United States.

Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark’s statement notes

President Aristide listed in the final chapter of his autobiography, “The Ten Commandments of Democracy in Haiti,” first spoken by him before the General Assembly of the United Nations in September 1991. The commandments of President Aristide, the political faith of a priest, scholar and person of, by and for the poor, included: liberty; democracy; fidelity to human rights; the right to eat and to work; defense of the Haitian diaspora; no to violence; fidelity to the human being — and the highest form of wealth — fidelity to Haitian culture; everyone around the same table.

This is the man President Bush has deposed.