Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier Returns to Haiti... Who Do Voodoo?

Yes, he returned to Haiti recently. Where had he been? Who is he? How/Why did he leave Haiti? It's an interesting but deeply disturbing story, and very few people even know who the Duvalier's were. Let's begin with who "Baby Doc" is...

The son of the despot, François "Papa Doc" Duvalier, who died in 1971 , "Baby Doc" came to power upon his father's death, and carried on the family tradition of pillaging, rape and murder. He also directed the infamous and bloodthirsty Tonton Macoutes (Creole for "bogeymen") - the Haitian secret police - whose primary function was to eliminate dissenters and critics of the Duvalier regime, and was formed under "Papa Doc". He ruled Haiti from 1971-1986 continuing his father's legacy of terror on the small island nation. The Duvalier's lived like royalty, while their subjects lived in abject squalor and poverty. The elder Duvalier was a practitioner of voodoo, which should be no surprise since Haiti is the birthplace of voodoo, and voodoo is the de facto religion of the majority of Haitians. Who is "Baby Doc"? In a nutshell, he is the Haitian equivalent of the "Black Death" plague, which killed roughly 30% of Europe's population in the mid-14th century.

How/Why did Duvalier leave Haiti? He was eventually run out of the country by the people, and he departed on an aircraft provided by the U.S. Air Force. Wasn't that nice of us... to assist a thieving, murdering dictator in making his escape to France, where he has lived in luxurious exile for 25 years? How can we Americans reconcile such despicable behavior from our own government? And those - and similar behaviors - continue today! Are the requirements of international politics such that governments cavalierly ignore such things as morality, character, justice and that which is simply "right"?

Haiti has forever been an economic sinkhole, and has suffered a series of tragedies that seem to be virtually endless. Since its establishment as a French-owned slave colony, it has never flourished economically, and the average per capita income today is USD $75. We Americans could not provide for a family of four on $75 a week even, but the Haitians manage to do it because they are used to nothing more. They do not "live" (by our standards), but they do survive.

The only good news to come from Haiti recently is that Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier has been arrested. Accused of ordering thousands of killings, the question now is will he be properly tried in a court of law?

Motive For Ill. Church Killing Suspect Elusive

It's their job, I'm sure we all realize that. After the commission of a crime, it's the function of law enforcement to look for an understandable explanation of why the crime occurred in the first place. However, the more heinous the crime, the less likely there is to be any explanation. In the case cited in my title for this post, and any other case where people kill other people that they don't even know, and who presented no perceived threat to them, there are only two possible motivations:

1. Mental illness, or

2. the doer is the personification of evil

Mental illness - as a concept - is understood by most lay persons. What is not totally understood is the root causes of many kinds of mental illness. Most mental distress isn't the result of some physical illness or bacterial infection. It stems from a series of perceived wrongs or inequities, and their accumulation and storage. Frequently that is the result of chemical imbalances in the brain. The inability to discard such perceptions, after objectively evaluating and processing them, eventually creates more psychological "weight" than the individual can bear, resulting in mental collapse.

"Objectivity" is skewed in the mentally ill, and therefore perceptions are distorted, which results in skewed objectivity, which distorts perceptions, ad infinitum. We could easily get hung up on the "chicken-egg" argument here, but it really makes no difference in the outcome. We must also understand that perception creates our "personal reality." When several people witness the same event, they each process it in their own fashion and may perceive it as totally different events. Some processing is intellectual, but all processing is colored by cultural, emotional, political and spiritual influences. Thus is our personal reality formed.

An example of this would be the so-called "Extreme Fighting" matches. To most people from civilized backgrounds these physical confrontations - for the sake of feeding egos - are seen as barbarism. Two people enter a cage and proceed to beat one another senseless (my assumption here is that they had some sense to begin with). These matches always result in the victor injuring, sometimes in maiming, and, on rare occasions, killing their opponent. There are those others who see the same event as entertainment, fun, a test of skills, heroic personal combat, etc..

The key words in the preceding two paragraphs are "perceived" and "accumulation and storage". Most people are capable of observing, processing, evaluating, and then compartmentalizing events. Some compartments are for the purpose of recall at a later time, while others are for discards - things that the person has witnessed that are either neutral influences, or negative influences. These are events that have little or no positive influence on their life, and are otherwise just burdensome.

There is disagreement within the medical and psychological communities over the possibility of somebody being evil by nature. Arguments against an "evil nature" would fall short of explaining the "motives" of people like Adolf Hitler, Idi Amin, Papa Doc Duvalier, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacey, Richard Speck, the 9-11 terrorists, et al.

The motives behind the actions of others are not always visible to others, simply because others do not share the actors' personal reality - it's as foreign to them as Egyptian hieroglyphics would be to the vast majority of the worlds' people. Searching for motives created by a deranged mind, beyond the elimination of what the "normal mind" might see as motive, is generally a waste of time, effort and resources.

The willful taking of a human life, one that is otherwise unknown to you and presents no apparent threat to your life, is either an act of severe mental illness ... or evil personified.

I could be wrong about this, I suppose ... but you'd have to be insane to think so!