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haiti
The American Reckoning
Someday Israeli leaders will stand in The Hague for what they have done in Gaza, and they will deserve to. But if we are honest, we know US leaders belong there too.
Sep 11, 2025
I have met people who gave me grace in Iran, in Mexico, in Haiti, in Gaza, in Cambodia, in Vietnam. People who understood the difference between ordinary citizens and the governments that rule them. People who offered me kindness when they had every reason not to. That grace stays with me.
As a US citizen and physician, I have lived my life trying to hold onto a sense of responsibility. But what I see now, in Gaza, in Haiti, in the wake of Iraq and Afghanistan, is the full weight of what psychologists call diffusion of responsibility. It is the shrug that says: Someone else will answer for this, someone else will carry the shame.
The United States cannot keep living in that shrug. We armed, funded, and protected Israel as it has carried out the genocide of the Palestinian people. We have supplied not only weapons but coordination, intelligence, and political cover. We let the American Israel Public Affairs Committee function as the arm of a foreign government, not as a lobbying group. We looked away from the checkpoints, the administrative cruelty, the killing of children. This is our legacy.
But Gaza is not an aberration. It is a mirror held up to the long history of our interventions. We overthrew Mohammad Mossadegh, the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, in 1953, not because he was a tyrant but because he dared to nationalize oil. We turned that nation toward dictatorship and decades of repression, then had the arrogance to call it democracy. In Central America, we toppled leaders and propped up death squads. In Chile, we helped usher in the bloody reign of Augusto Pinochet, betraying yet another democratic choice in favor of authoritarian brutality.
We speak of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s murderous ways as if they are foreign to us. They are not. We have assassinated leaders. We have sanctioned extrajudicial killings, calling them “targeted strikes.” We have funded militias and trained torturers. We still carry Guantánamo on our conscience. We are not better than Putin. We are his rival and his mirror.
We should be an anti-interventionist nation, one that stops imagining itself as the builder of nations and instead takes responsibility for its own failures, its own violence, and its own complicity.
In Vietnam, we unleashed hell. Entire villages were burned to the ground. At My Lai, US soldiers slaughtered more than 500 unarmed civilians, women, children, elders. It was not an accident, not a one-off. It was part of a culture of violence we exported and excused.
And then there is the School of the Americas, now rebranded as Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, a US military institution in Panama where we trained some of the worst dictators and death squad leaders in Latin America. The manuals we gave them were explicit: torture, execution, terror as tools of governance. We sowed horror and called it security.
Someday Israeli leaders will stand in The Hague for what they have done in Gaza, and they will deserve to. But if we are honest, we know we belong there too. For Mossadegh, for Pinochet, for Central America, for My Lai, for every extrajudicial killing and every sanctioned massacre, and most immediately for Gaza, we should be in the dock as well. We should stand in handcuffs, our heads lowered in shame, finally facing the truth of what we have unleashed in the world.
The truth is that our foreign policy has been one long history of intervention, violence, and betrayal of human dignity. We were in Haiti. We were in Iraq. We were in Afghanistan. We have left the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa littered with the bones of our experiments. Always we tell ourselves it was complicated. Always we tell ourselves we meant well. But what we meant was power, and what we left was ruin.
What reparation looks like now is not cash or aid dropped into a void. It is restoring justice. It is ending our culture of nation building and intervention, and replacing it with support for people, families, language, culture, dignity, and jurisprudence. It is standing against genocide, no matter who commits it. It is admitting that our strength lies not in military power but in whether we can build schools instead of prisons, communities instead of empires.
This is not just a populist opinion. It is a moral imperative. We should be an anti-interventionist nation, one that stops imagining itself as the builder of nations and instead takes responsibility for its own failures, its own violence, and its own complicity.
I am a doctor. My oath is to heal, to do no harm. But as a citizen, I see harm everywhere our government touches. We cannot keep pretending that this is someone else’s crime, someone else’s burden. This is ours.
The reckoning will not wait forever. The question is whether we face it with honesty now, or whether we let it destroy us later.
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From Revolution to Reparations: Black August and Haiti’s Ongoing Struggle for Freedom
Haiti’s struggle for restitution is not a historical footnote—it is the next chapter in the global struggle for Black liberation.
Aug 30, 2025
As we mark Black August, the struggle that launched the global fight for Black liberation—the Haitian Revolution—remains unfinished. Over 200 years after enslaved Haitians lit the first beacon of Black resistance in August 1791 and set a precedent for abolition by winning their freedom, they are fighting the next chapter in the struggle for Black economic and political liberation—one that could set another precedent, this time for reparative justice.
On August 22, 1791, Haitians revolted against their French enslavers, liberating themselves and forming the world’s first free Black Republic, and the first country to abolish enslavement. The Haitian Revolution was not just a simple victory against one of the world’s most powerful empires. It was a global rupture, proof that Black freedom was possible and European domination was not inevitable. It lit the fire of revolution globally, inspiring enslaved and colonized people worldwide. As Frederick Douglass, one of the 19th century’s leading advocates for Black rights in the United States, said in his speech to the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, “[in] striking for their freedom, [Haitians]... struck for the freedom of every black man in the world.”
France and other enslaving countries realized the power of the Haitian Revolution as a herald of global Black liberation and a threat to their supremacy. They sought to punish Haiti for the crime of being Black and free. In 1825, France sent a fleet of 14 warships equipped with 528 canons to Port-au-Prince and demanded that Haiti pay 150 million francs as compensation for the loss of what they considered their “property,” including captive Haitians. In exchange for this payment, France would recognize Haiti’s independence—an independence already paid for by the blood and lives of the Haitians who fought Napoleon’s army and won.
The strength of Haiti’s claim poses just as much of a threat to the global white supremacist order now as the success of Haiti’s revolution did in 1804.
Under threat of attack and re-enslavement, Haitian President Jean-Pierre Boyer and his allies agreed to pay. The ransom—and subsequent extortionate loans by French banks to finance payments—crushed Haiti’s economy, prevented it from investing in its own development, and left it vulnerable to foreign intervention and exploitation that further impoverished and destabilized the country. Many of the conditions used to paint Haiti as a “failed state” today can be traced directly to that original grave injustice.
The Independence Ransom and other measures delayed broader liberation, but the promise of Black freedom and autonomy that Haiti gave the world remained alive. In his speech, Douglass called Haiti “the Black man’s country, now forever”—and Haitians are still fighting for their freedom and inspiring others. These are the struggles we honor during Black August, born in the 1970s in California’s prison system to commemorate the lives and assassinations of revolutionary brothers Jonathan and George Jackson: the Nat Turner rebellion in Virginia in August 1831; the March on Washington on August 28, 1963; and every uprising that has dared to defy enslavement and racial capitalism.
This August, Haiti stands at the heart of another urgent struggle: the fight for restitution for the Independence Ransom. Calls for France to pay restitution have increased in recent years, not just from Haitians but from all around the world. The strength of Haiti’s claim poses just as much of a threat to the global white supremacist order now as the success of Haiti’s revolution did in 1804. In fact, when the United States and its powerful allies realized the power of Haiti’s claim to balance the global economy in 2004, they overthrew Haiti’s democracy rather than risk its claim succeeding.
Haiti’s struggle for restitution is not a historical footnote—it is the next chapter in the global struggle for Black liberation. Restitution would not only address the grave injustice done to Haiti, it would also lay a powerful legal and political foundation for broader reparations. Just as Haitians won their freedom in 1804, they will eventually win restitution for themselves and unlock the door to reparations for all. But that victory will require sustained pressure—on France, the United States, and the banks and companies that facilitated and profited off this economic extraction—not just from Haitians, but from all people who wish to honor the memories of those who paid the ultimate price in the fight for liberation. This means support for restitution, but also for a democratic, sovereign government that will assert the claim and otherwise be accountable to the Haitian people.
This Black August is not just a commemoration, it is a call to action. It is a call to join the 60-plus leading organizations from Haiti, the United States, the Caribbean, France, and beyond that sent a letter to French President Emmanuel Macron demanding restitution and reparations. And it is, above all, a call to remember Haitians’ pivotal role in the global Black struggle for liberation and to recommit ourselves to the unfinished work they started in 1791.
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In Dissent, Jackson Warns of 'Devasting' Impacts as Supreme Court OKs Trump Ending Protections for 500K Migrants
One immigration lawyer wrote that the order "simply ignores the human costs and blesses the Trump admin's stripping of status of hundreds of thousands of people who entered the country legally."
May 30, 2025
The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday cleared the way for the Trump administration to end, for now, legal protections for more than 500,000 Haitian, Cuban, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan migrants with a ruling that liberal Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson blasted in a dissent as deeply harmful.
The decision puts on hold a ruling from U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani, who in April issued a stay on the Trump administration's move to end a humanitarian program extended to this group under former U.S. President Joe Biden. The ruling means the immigrants are at risk of being deported under President Donald Trump's mass deportation effort, even as the core legal issues in the case continue to play out in lower courts.
The unsigned order from the Supreme Court focuses on the so-called CHNV parole program, which allows certain individuals from those four nations to apply for entry into the U.S. for a temporary stay, so long as they have a U.S.-based sponsor, go through security vetting, and meet other conditions. In some cases, beneficiaries of the program work in the U.S.
On his first day in office, Trump issued an executive instructing the U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security to "[t]erminate all categorical parole programs," including CHNV.
"The court has plainly botched this assessment today. It requires next to nothing from the government with respect to irreparable harm" wrote Jackson in her dissent, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. "And it undervalues the devastating consequences of allowing the government to precipitously upend the lives of and livelihoods of nearly half a million noncitizens while their legal claims are pending."
Friday's ruling is the second time this month that the Supreme Court has permitted the Trump administration to halt a program aimed at protecting immigrants who leave their home countries for humanitarian reasons. Earlier in May, the court issued an unsigned order allowing Trump to cancel Temporary Protected Status protections specifically extended to 350,000 Venezuelans immigrants while the legal case winds its way through lower courts.
The court's decision on Friday is a temporary order and litigation is still playing out, but it signals that a majority of the justices think the Trump administration is likely to prevail in the case, according to The New York Times.
"Respondents now face two unbearable options," according to Jackson's dissent. Jackson wrote that immigrants in the program could either chose to leave the U.S. and potentially confront dangers in their home countries, and other adverse outcomes, or "risk imminent removal at the hands of government agents, along with its serious attendant consequences."
"The court allows the government to do what it wants to do regardless, rendering constraints of law irrelevant and unleashing devastation in the process," she concludes in the dissent.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, wrote: "an incredibly devastating decision which simply ignores the human costs and blesses the Trump admin's stripping of status of hundreds of thousands of people who entered the country legally."
Josh Gerstein, a legal reporter at Politico, wrote that the ruling "may spell trouble for Ukrainians/Afghans with similar status."
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