The Haitian “zombie” folklore and mythology entered white American cultural consciousness during the 1920s-30s, that is, during the U.S. military occupation of Haiti.
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Alas, the suggestion that the Haitians are themselves somehow ontologically evil, hasn;t been banishes from Horror cinema. The dreadful Exorcist: Believer has some utterly reprhensible content, echoing Pat Buchanan by pinning that Earthquake on the people's association with Satan
Seeing the zombie thru the distorting lens of capitalism is intense, too. The hatred of the common/random person as self destructive and antisocial; the "great man" who survives/conquers the teeming masses, it sucks and it isn't even very well hidden.
there's a common thread between "slave revolt" and "workers' revolt" that capitalism seized upon to immediately co-opt because of course it did, and now we have shit like the human shredder from the WWZ movie (itself a great representation of this exact process, when taken w the original novel).
Until today, I’d thought William Seabrook’s book The Magic Island had introduced Haiti’s zombis to the US, inspiring the early Hollywood movies. No idea it was (another) US invasion.
And the Haitian occupation is almost never talked about. I certainly don’t recall any US history class discussing it. The first I heard of it was reading “The Serpent and the Rainbow.”
At the same time that U.S. officers were subjecting poor Haitians to forced labour schemes (they reintroduced the corvée system), Haitian culture was being sensationalised, distorted and commodified in order to sell theatre tickets.
The military officer behind this was Smedley Butler, one of the most decorated marines in U.S. history. Butler resurrected this forced labour system via an 1864 Haitian Law with the aim to augment a large network of public roads as their condition had been a hindrance to U.S. military movements.
In 1920 a U.S. Admiral admitted that the Haitians forced into this labour system had been treated abominably. They had been forced to work away from their families, were kept under armed guard and even “marched to and from their work bound together.”
When Butler was praised by his superiors with regards to the progress of this project, he wrote to Assistant Secretary of the Navy Roosevelt that “it would not do to ask too many questions as to how we accomplish this work.” (Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti, 1915–1934)
There was of course resistance to the corvée system and to the U.S. occupation in general. One of the leaders of the guerrilla forces was Charlemagne Péralte. He was assassinated by U.S. marines who were disguised as Haitians (and probably in blackface) on Halloween night 1919.
Hanneken, the marine who fired the shots that killed Péralte, was awarded the Medal of Honor in 1920 “for extraordinary heroism and conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity…resulting in the death of Charlemagne Peralte, the supreme bandit chief in the Republic of Haiti.”
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Zombie Apocalypse: Holy Land, Haiti, Hollywood
x Terry Rey
#OpenAccess
https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/textbooks/1628
Smedley. Butler.
This guy never stood a chance of being anything but evil with that name.