The Dogs Of The Oligarchs Snarl at Springfield's Haitians

Edited by Sam Thielman

I'M WRITING THE NEXT IRON MAN SERIES FOR MARVEL COMICS! IF YOU PREORDER IT, I'LL SEND YOU FREE STUFF! FOLLOW THE PROCEDURE AT THE LINK AND THEY'RE YOURS!

IT DOES NO GOOD to point out that Senator J.D. Vance was lying about Haitians, since everyone not already primed to go along with Vance knew he was lying about Springfield, Ohio's Haitian community. But on Sunday, Vance got so mad when CNN's Dana Bash challenged him about his bloodthirsty slander that he gave the game away. "If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people," said Vance, "then that’s what I’m going to do." Truth is truer these days; truth is man-made.

Vance will never do anything to alleviate the suffering of the American people, because he is a creation of the oligarchs who cause it and make it worse. The claim of the nationalist against the immigrant is that the immigrant takes finite resources from the native-born. In so doing he reveals himself as the attack dog of the oligarch who hoards resources from the immigrant and the native-born alike. This is why nationalist governance never actually gets around to taking care of Our People. As long as the attack dog has someone he is trained to bite, he will never bite his master, no matter how much deprivation the master inflicts on the dog. (Among these dogs, Vance himself seems to be suffering very little, in financial terms.)

As long as the master's political opponent is a capitalist like him, then the suffering of the people will persist, since capitalism creates the oligarch. The longer that suffering persists, the greater the number of attack dogs that will respond to the call of the master. What is the political opponent's answer to all this? 

Trump and Vance can neither be shamed nor scandalized away from their lies. Manufacturing a crisis along on nationalist lines is to their political benefit. Already bomb threats have shut down Springfield schools and forced lockdowns at hospitals. A pastor told the New York Times that his congregants were worried for their safety at church on Sunday. FOREVER WARS friend Jonathan Katz reported that last month a neo-Nazi group marched through Springfield, and on Saturday afternoon, Mother Jones' Noah Lanard posted a KKK flier he said a local pastor provided him. The flier says what you'd expect it to say about Haitians. (A quick search shows that the Klan has targeted Springfield with recruitment propaganda in recent years.) Proof of concept for Springield came in the United Kingdom this summer, when social-media-borne provocations redirected outrage over the murders of three Southport children into days of pogroms against Muslims and immigrants. It does not matter that the murderer was neither Muslim nor an immigrant any more than it matters that Haitians do not eat dogs and are in the U.S. legally.

Vance is a creature of unsubtle, aching insecurity, and lacks Trump's natural, trollish indifference about lying. Trump would have laughed or lashed out at Bash. Vance, determined to prove he's committed to the bit,  has to take umbrage. He has no choice but to portray Bash's focus on the facts of the circumstance—no matter how thoroughly that focus misses the point of what Vance is doing—as scandalous elitism, since he cannot defend himself on the merits and also cannot be publicly shown up, least of all by a woman. He needs white people, in Springfield and beyond, to associate objections to racism with elite betrayal, so they will vote for him. Incitement to violence is all the better for their purposes, since he can portray a vote for him as a civilized alternative to mob violence. [It’s a playbook they ran as recently as four years ago, when racist memes about Covid coming from bat-eating Chinese people—spread by right-wing content farms, the mainstream press, and social media—fueled lethal anti-Asian violence. Yesterday it was basement troll Paul Joseph Watson tweeting videos of fake “proof,” today it’s career liar Christopher Rufo.—Sam.]

I do not for a second mean to diminish the bomb threats, the Nazi marches, or the continued provocations of violence against Haitians by what I'm about to write. This situation is a powder keg entirely because of these manufactured controversies and needs to be approached with the utmost seriousness to defuse it. 

It has struck me as potentially hopeful that the extant reporting to date shows that Springfield's social bonds to the fairly new Haitian community in its midst appear strong. Now, as someone who grew up in Brooklyn during multiple cross-community riots, I am aware that even strong civic fabrics can unravel quickly. Yet journalism about Springfield contains many stories like this one, which at the end reports a woman from "the working-class area of Springfield" who focuses on the Haitians' "help[ing] spruce up the neighborhood" while pulling her children out of school before someone murders them. Katz asked Viles Dorsainvil, who runs Springfield’s Haitian Community Help & Support Center, if "the white community in Springfield or the city government" is attending to the needs of a targeted community. Dorsainvil replied:

I think the city government is working with everybody for us to have a peaceful community in Springfield. And I like it, because they understand the situation of the Haitians in Springfield and try to work towards a common solution where the city can be at peace and everybody is okay.

Perhaps the most powerful reply possible came from Nathan Clark, the father of a little boy who horrifically died when a van driven by a Haitian immigrant struck the boy's schoolbus. When MAGA began to use the boy's death as their UK counterparts did the deaths of the little girls in Southport, Clark told them the only decent thing to tell them, which is: Fuck you. 

I encourage you to click that link, because what this suffering father says has to be seen and heard to be properly appreciated. Clark starts off by explicitly wishing that his son had been killed by "a 60-year old white man," so his pain wouldn't be used as a pretext to cause more of it. Clark ended by saying: "Please stop the hate, I said to Aiden that I would try to make a difference in his honor. This is it. Live like Aiden. Thank you." 

Trump and Vance have to fray those social bonds, because they know that most people's natural response when their neighbors are threatened is solidarity. MAGA's interests depend on subverting those instincts. And they can succeed. But Trump and Vance are not voicing an "authentic" demand of the people of Springfield. They are attempting to manipulate people into embracing what they say the people's demands ought to be. This, always, is the imperative of the fascist.

TO ANYONE WHO LOVES FREEDOM—real freedom; not the watered-down Coors Light bullshit of American freedom—the history of Haiti centers around perhaps the most inspiring true story ever told, a rare moment when the justice promised by religion manifested on earth. The fantasy-myth that reactionaries peddle about the American founding actually happened in Haiti. If this isn't a story you're familiar with—and as you watch books like Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between The World And Me get banned, you understand why you were not made familiar with it—read The Black Jacobins by C.L.R. James and then Avengers of The New World by Laurent Dubois. "Haiti is Black, and we have not yet forgiven Haiti for being Black," Fredrick Douglass remarked when observing the punishment meted out by France and the United States for Haiti's unforgivable act of self-liberation. 

That punishment is so enduring and sickening that in this country, the story of the U.S. and Haiti is rarely taught and accordingly rarely remembered. When I learned it, I realized how obscene it was for me and most other "national-security" journalists to have written for so long that Afghanistan was the U.S.' longest overseas war. As you can read in Katz's excellent book about Smedley Butler, in 1915, the U.S Marine Corps occupied Haiti, plundered its national bank on behalf of what is now Citibank, and did not leave until 1934. There they committed the sort of atrocities you might expect from a generation-long counterinsurgency. It was only in the final year of the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan that it surpassed Haiti for the title of Longest Overseas U.S. War. (Katz’s previous book, The Big Truck That Went By, is about the failure of international aid in Haiti in 2010.)

I was reminded of the Douglass quote by my friend Evan Narcisse, with whom I wrote WALLER VS. WILDSTORM and from whom I learned an invaluable amount about how to write comics. Evan is Haitian-American, and he comments on all of this in his newsletter: 

Colonialism and its younger cousin, interventionism, are the primary causes for turmoil in Haitian history. The people there have the same foibles and strengths as human beings anywhere else. But catastrophic consequences have followed every time outside nations have become involved in Haiti’s affairs.

Variations of the slander launched against Haitian people have been deployed against Black people all over the world, all throughout history. It’s not new, interesting, or illuminating in any way. It is, as mother ancestor Toni said, a distraction. It’s 2:01 PM as I wrap this writing. I’m going to get back to my reason for being.

That point is so crucial: U.S. and French interventions account overwhelmingly for the enforced poverty of Haiti. Those interventions continue to the present day. 

JOSEPH COX OF 404 MEDIA reports that the Air Force has contracts to introduce artificial intelligence for "networks of autonomous systems," to include aspects of its surveillance-drone fleet. While the documents and the service represent the contract as both research-exploratory and geared toward its communications functions—"not aimed at developing an adversarial capability," an Air Force flack said—that's where it is for now. The contract occurs within the context of an Air Force that seems further determined to erode the human-in-the-loop principle around autonomous systems involving lethal force. And it also hasn't been very long since we learned the revelations surrounding the Israel Defense Force's Lavender AI. 

AND SPEAKING OF ATTACK DOGS, Eric Adams' senior counsel Lisa Zornberg quit on Saturday, the latest to abandon him as multiple federal investigations intensify. Edward Caban, the NYPD commissioner, had to quit last week as it came out his brother runs a nightlife shakedown operation trading on his connections to the police leadership. Here's Hell Gate on Zornberg:

What would drive a lawyer to leave a client in the midst of their most legally fraught moment (yet)? 

We don't know exactly yet, but clearly the temperature inside City Hall was getting pretty high for a former federal prosecutor meant to keep this administration on the right side of the law. The CITY reports that Zornberg repeatedly met over the past year with Adams's "best friend" Timothy Pearson, specifically about migrant shelter contracts. Pearson had his phone seized by the feds earlier this month, and according to a lawsuit (one of many against him currently), he was known around town as "Crumbs," after asking his subordinates, "People are doing very well on these contracts. I have to get mine. Where are my crumbs?"

Perhaps Zornberg understands that the Cop-Mayor having a best friend called Crumbs will not help beat the Eric Adams Is A Criminal allegations. 

Meanwhile, the NYPD did a mass shooting at the Sutter Ave L train station because someone jumped the turnstile. The cops ended up shooting each other as well as two bystanders. Nor were the Sutter Ave victims the only people killed by NYPD gunfire this weekend. Congratulations to the Keep Funding The Police crew for getting the world they wanted.

WALLER VS. WILDSTORM, the superhero spy thriller I co-wrote with my friend Evan Narcisse and which the masterful Jesús Merino illustrated, is available for purchase in a hardcover edition! If you don't have single issues of WVW and you want a four-issue set signed by me, they're going fast at Bulletproof Comics! 

No one is prouder of WVW than her older sibling, REIGN OF TERROR: HOW THE 9/11 ERA DESTABILIZED AMERICA AND PRODUCED TRUMP, which is available now in hardcover, softcover, audiobook and Kindle edition. And on the way is a new addition to the family: THE TORTURE AND DELIVERANCE OF MAJID KHAN.