Not even numbers

October 2 is the anniversary of the start of the Parsley Massacre in 1937. Which despite the name is not remotely comic. It was a five-day massacre of Haitians in the Dominican Republic. And I for one knew nothing about it.

Not much is known. Estimates even of casualties vary enormously, from fewer than 600 to around 20,000. It’s not even known whether butchers working for Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo really did force potential victims to say the word “perejil,” Spanish for parsley, to see particularly from how they pronounced the “r” and the “j” whether they spoke with a French or Haitian Creole language or a Dominican Spanish one.

We do know that it was carried out on Trujillo’s orders. And he was a nasty dictator who dominated the Dominican Republic for decades whether officially holding office or not. He’s a bit unusual among nasty dictators in that he had the habit of renaming cities and mountains for himself one associates with ideologically grandiose tyrants without having had much in the way of systematic ideas. He mixed in a few laudable policies like opening doors to Jews fleeing Nazi persecution in the 1930s despite a general brutal denial of rights to anyone and manipulation of popular fear of disorder generally and crime by ethnic Haitians in particular. But really all that’s beside the point here.

What matters is to give at least passing remembrance to a group of poor, desperate people massacred in a dark corner of history and the globe, largely unnoticed at the time and forgotten since. The fact that we aren’t even sure to an order of magnitude how many perished under horrible conditions even by the standards of Dominica underlines just how little value anyone seems to have attached to them at the time or later.

The massacre had no geopolitical consequences. It didn’t even awaken the conscience of the world, or part of it, as the Holocaust and Holodomor did. True, Trujillo himself was eventually assassinated, in 1961, but more as part of failed sordid political maneuvering than in retaliation for all the murders he ordered and organized. And really it is hard to devise an appropriate punishment for having as many as 50,000 people killed over three decades, although I certainly favour executing such people.

What we can do is remember. Especially those wiped out so thoroughly, and with so little notice or protest, that they lack even a number let alone names.

It happened todayJohn Robson
Wish I'd said that - October 2, 2016

“It is in the face of death that the riddle of human existence becomes most acute. Not only is man tormented by pain and the advancing deterioration of his body, but even more so by a dread of perpetual extinction.”

The Pontifical Council for the Laity quoted in Pope John Paul II’s October 1 1999 “Letter to the Elderly”

Famous quotesJohn Robson
Left to the Naive

Robespierre Meanwhile back in France, October 1 is the anniversary of the first meeting of the Legislative Assembly in 1791, the body that gave us the terms “left” and “right” in politics. But mostly left.

Try to follow a quick dismal backstory here. In 1789 the hapless Louis XVI summoned the French parody equivalent of a Parliament, the Estates-General, for the first time since 1614. It promptly deadlocked, and then the “Third Estate,” the commoners, decided their chamber was the whole legislature and turned itself into the National Assembly. Then it became the National Constituent Assembly on the theory that the sovereign authority of the French people was in its hands.

It then proceeded to be in practice the entire government, a system known as “convention government,” where instead of checking the executive the legislature takes on that role as well and who’s going to stop us? Then it dissolved following elections to the Legislative Assembly, which despite the pale twitching figure of the king still wandering the stage was another example of convention government, with one unhelpful twist.

The rules for the 1791 election included that nobody who had sat in the National Assembly could be elected to the Legislative Assembly. Which given the foul odor in which the monarchy rightly found itself meant supreme power was almost entirely in the hands of people with no experience in national affairs. Instead they were buffeted by events and manipulated by power brokers operating outside the formal system including one Maximilien Robespierre, who had been in the National Assembly and in fact had put forward the motion that none of its members would be eligible for the Legislative Assembly.

As events spun out of control in 1792 and the king was arrested, the Legislative Assembly decided to dissolve itself less than a year after first meeting, and summon a new National Convention. And to that body Robespierre returned to direct the increasingly ghastly Reign of Terror including as a member of the Orwellian Committee of Public Safety that was effectively the executive branch in France during the worst excesses of the Revolution. (It is because it happened under the National Convention that we call this highly unsatisfactory arrangement “convention government.)

Would all this have happened with more experienced members in the Legislative Assembly? Very possibly. The pressures that exploded in France between 1789 and 1794 had been building for a very long time, from long before the last futile pre-revolutionary summoning of the Estates-General. But with all due respect to the undesirable qualities of career politicians, there is something to be said for experience and a steady hand in turbulent waters. And it sure didn’t help that France lacked those from 1791-92.

It’s not the only reason left devoured right more or less literally in this period. But it did help set the stage for it.

It happened todayJohn Robson