1920–1922: (The Stream of Invective: Vincent’s Statistical Whoppers, Bellegarde’s Crucifixion Charge, and the War Dogs from the Philippines): If The Nation a…

1920–1922: (The Stream of Invective: Vincent’s Statistical Whoppers, Bellegarde’s Crucifixion Charge, and the War Dogs from the Philippines): If The Nation and other foreign critics of the occupation stooped to irresponsibility and untruth, the stream of invective and invention flowing from the Union Patriotique never faltered — as Dantès Bellegarde once sadly wrote, they lived in an atmosphere of lying, and telling the truth was not a quality the majority of Haitians possessed. Russell was widely accused of peculation, and when Colonel Hooker went home in 1921, Le Courrier Haïtien wrote of the fortune he had amassed and charged he had come to Haiti for the sole purpose of enriching himself. In Les Annales Capoises, Jolibois fils signaled the expiration of Wilson’s presidency with a prayer that he might never find a resting place upon this earth and on his deathbed might eat his own waste. In August 1921, Sténio Vincent told a U.S. Senate investigating committee that 4,000 prisoners died or were killed at the Cap from 1918 to 1920, that from the same prison 78 bodies a day were thrown into the pits throughout 1918 — a total that would have amounted to 28,470 deaths in one year on an average prison population of about 400 — and that at Chabert from 1918 to 1920, 5,475 prisoners died, with mortalities just as high at Gonaïves and Port-au-Prince. Besides these statistical impossibilities, Haitian accusers specialized in attributing to Marines kinds of behavior foreign to Americans but amply recorded throughout Haiti’s own past: an anonymous Union member accused Caperton of selling the entire Haitian navy for $14,000 to a New York accomplice who resold the ships for $500,000; Danache said American officers’ wives — véritables gangsters à jupe — pillaged shops during the Rue des Fronts Forts fire; the Manchester Guardian credulously detailed the killing of entire families by Marines, wanton burning of villages, and outrages on pregnant women. Bellegarde, for all his devotion to veracity, asserted as fact the crucifixion of Charlemagne Péralte and charged the occupation with butchery of women and children, massacre of prisoners, and use of man-eating dogs as in the days of Rochambeau — a colleague told French readers that Haiti’s villages had been sacked and their inhabitants devoured by war dogs imported from the Philippines. Such vilification, carried on without cease by the Cacos de la Plume and given a gloss of verisimilitude when filtered through The Nation and foreign periodicals, would continue for a decade. The propaganda campaign of the Union Patriotique — conducted from the salons of Port-au-Prince, amplified through the NAACP and The Nation, featuring statistical claims that collapsed under the slightest scrutiny and atrocity narratives that recycled the imagery of Haiti’s own past and projected it onto the Americans — represented, in the decolonial reading, both a legitimate act of resistance against foreign occupation and a characteristic performance of the national bourgeoisie that Fanon diagnosed: the elite’s deployment of anti-colonial rhetoric to advance factional interests, the language of liberation serving as the vehicle for the restoration of the very class that had presided over Haiti’s pre-occupation misery.