The dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918 created the breach with the Western world with "an element of finality." British Ambassador to Petrograd Sir George Buchanan was "deeply shocked," Kennan writes, and advocated armed intervention to punish the crime. The idealistic Woodrow Wilson was particularly distraught, reflecting the "strong attachment to constitutionality" of the American public, deeply offended by the sight of a government with no mandate beyond "the bayonets of the Red Guard."
A few months later, Wilson's army dissolved the National Assembly in occupied Haiti "by genuinely Marine Corps methods," in the words of Marine commander Major Smedley Butler. The reason was that the Haitian legislature refused to ratify a Constitution imposed by the invaders that gave them the right to buy up Haiti's lands. A Marine-run plebiscite remedied the problem: under Washington's guns, the US-designed Constitution was ratified by a mere 99.9 percent majority, with 5 percent of the population participating. Wilson's "strong attachment to constitutionality" was unmoved by the sight of a government with no mandate beyond "the bayonets of the Marine occupiers"; nor Kennan's. Quite the contrary. To this day the events figure in the amusing reconstructions entitled "history" as an illustration of US "humanitarian intervention," and its difficulties (for us). Gone from "history" along with this episode is the restoration of virtual slavery, Marine Corps massacres and terror, the dismantling of the constitutional system, and the takeover of Haiti by US corporations.
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