Hearts the world over have been touched by the appalling scenes of devastation following the recent earthquake in Haiti. But while we must certainly help that stricken island all we can in its hour of need, not forgetting such as our own Old People who as Nick Griffin pointed out are freezing to death this winter, what is striking about this event is the seemingly total lack of capacity of the Haitians to help themselves. The Daily Telegraph (15^th January) observed that ‘Haiti has neither the governing infrastructure nor physical structure even to start any meaningful relief operation.’  This statement could have been made almost equally before the Earthquake struck as after. We are entitled to ask ourselves 'why is it that the Haitians are so poverty-stricken, generally wretched and seemingly incapable?'

The per capita income in Haiti (2007) was US $1,913.  Haiti is the least developed country in the Americas and the only one on the United Nations list of least developed countries world wide. It has a literacy rate of 52.9%, the lowest in the region.  For the sake of comparison let us use its next door neighbour on the Island of Hispaniola, the Dominican Republic, since its proximity helps in this regard.  The Dominican Republic is also poor but it has a per capita income of US$ 6,600 (2007) which ithough  hardly grand is still a multiple of that of Haiti. Its literacy rate is about 87%. While there has been little formal job creation in Haiti for a decade, The Dominican Republic, which used to be dominated by the sugar crop is now a centre for services utilising the Republic’s advanced telecommunications system. It is now the Caribbean’s  largest tourist destination. Its ‘year round  golf courses’ are among the top attractions.

Why the poverty and lack of any real social or administrative or physical  infrastructure in Haiti compared even to the Dominican Republic?  It is not after all that Haiti was not blessed with as many of nature’s bounties as has its neighbour. In the 1920’s Haiti was a lushly forested Caribbean country with a palm –fringed beaches. It could have been by now at the very least a tourist destination as popular as its neighbour. One reason for the sad condition of Haiti is the degradation of its natural resources by overuse. Logging to produce charcoal, the country’s main source of fuel has reduced the forest cover to a mere 2%. This has produced severe soil erosion especially in the mountainous regions, destroying fertile farmlands and encouraging flooding.  The Dominican Republic has not seen problems of this severity.

But Environment abuse on its own is not sufficient to explain the wretchedness of Haiti compared to its neighbour. So what is the Explanation?

A cause of the overuse of Haiti’s natural resources is the high fertility rate in Haiti of 6.4 TFR as opposed to 3.3 TFR in the Dominican Republic, which has contributed to the fact that while 100% greater in area, the latter country has a population only slightly greater at  9.5 millions approx compared to Haiti’s  8.5 millions approx.  Thus Haiti has many more mouths to feed on a far less land resources.

This though begs the question as to why the birth rate is so high in Haiti (Both Haiti and the Dominican Republic are at least nominally Roman Catholic) as is the infant mortality rate  and why the Haitians have not done more to control their environment and pull themselves out of the mire as have their neighbours, relying on hand–outs from foreign aid which contribute 30%-40% of government income.

Is its Cultural Inheritance the Reason for Haiti’s Wretchedness?

It could be argued that the reason for all of this is cultural. 95% of Haitians are black with 5% mulattos and their country was a slave society liberated from its French masters by the national heroes Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines at the turn of the18th/19^th Centuries. Mulattos have higher incomes and form the upper socio-economic stratum. Haiti’s population, the argument goes, lacks the kind of cultural background which produced modernity and civil society in Europe and elsewhere. But Haitians cannot simply blame the culturally African and slave nature of the origins of their country for their present state, including the dominance of the mulattos. They have been running their own affairs now for 200 hundred years – ample time for socio-economic racial levelling and to learn how to run a modern society with plenty of models available, including the USA which is not that far away. 

We are not simply Prisoners of our Cultures.

But we are not simply prisoners of the culture we live in and culture is not an ‘accident’ which  is the left’s pathetically weak explanation for differences.  It is a two-way process. As well as being moulded by our culture we help to create it. What we are able to create depends not only on the capacities of our culture but on our inherent abilities. The West created Modern Science because of the ideas of God and Nature in medieval Christian Civilisation and because of the abilities of Western people. Could the Christian Haitian people have created Modern Science and the Modern World? Could they have conceived and executed the Sistine Chapel and have gone to the moon? What do you think?

Blacks On Average perform comparatively badly in IQ and other Tests across the World.

                                                                      Richard Lynn

In his book ‘The Global Bell Curve’ Richard Lynn remarks that while nothing is known about the intelligence of the population of Haiti, there is a study of the maths abilities of second generation Haitian immigrant school students in Florida compared to second generation Cubans and Nicaraguans.

The students were tested in 1992 and 1997 and on both occasions the Haitians scored significantly lower than the other two groups while the Cubans scored significantly higher than the Nicaraguans. These results Lynn says can best be explained by the racial composition of the populations. The Cubans performed best, (whites 66%, mulattos 22%; blacks 12%). The Nicaraguans came next (whites 17% mestizos 69% black 9%), the Haitians worst (mulattos 5%, blacks 95%). These results are in line with his findings on racial IQ s in societies world – wide  which he argues  are reflected in their respective socio-economic hierarchies and in the wealth of those societies. The racial composition of the Dominican Republic is  16% white, 73% mulatto and 11% black. The much higher  birth rate and  infant mortality rates of Haiti compared to those of The Dominican Republic (and elsewhere) are now indicative of low IQ populations.

It is Lynn’s contention that we do not need to bring in culture or other factors to explain the comparative success of races and nations or the lack of it because the average IQs of their populations are on their own enough to do this. His book is a world-wide confirmation of the results of Murray and Herrnstein ’s ground-breaking ‘The Bell Curve’ for the USA.

The Left is Emotionally and Ideologically Incapable of Accepting the Scientific Evidence of Racial IQ Differences.