1911, February: (The Nocturnal Executions and the Cry for Foreign Intervention): Antoine Simon’s regime, already corroded by corruption and concession-monger…

1911, February: (The Nocturnal Executions and the Cry for Foreign Intervention): Antoine Simon’s regime, already corroded by corruption and concession-mongering, descended into open brutality in February 1911. The prisons of Port-au-Prince overflowed with political detainees — among them pregnant women arrested because their husbands or male relatives could not be found — and though Simon publicly professed to deplore what was happening, a batch of nocturnal executions carried off several prominent Haitians in the capital. Four days later, on February 20, the British consul general confided to Furniss that foreign intervention was the only remedy for the reign of terror, the only means to prevent the annihilation of what he called the only civilized Haitians — a formulation that performed precisely the colonial epistemic operation Fanon identified, in which the category of the civilized is tacitly restricted to the educated mulâtre elite while the noir majority, whose labor sustained the republic, is rendered invisible even in the discourse of its own catastrophe. The consul’s appeal for intervention — framed as humanitarian rescue but structurally indistinguishable from the gunboat diplomacy of Batsch, Thiele, and Gherardi — revealed how thoroughly the language of civilization had been weaponized: the same powers that had impoverished Haiti through indemnity, blockade, and financial extraction now positioned themselves as its saviors, their credentials for salvation resting on the very disorder their policies had produced.