François Duvalier Quotes
I accept the people's will. As a revolutionary, I have no right to disregard the will of the people.
Diederich, Bernard, and Al Burt. Papa Doc: The Truth About Haiti Today. McGraw-Hill, 1969.
Honore Gabriel Victor Requiti
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The CHP is the oldest political party in Turkey. The great Turkish refomer, Ataturk, the first President of Turkey, represented this party. He modernized and cleaned up what was a backward and corrupt country and although there was little bloodshed in the massive cultural transformation, it was very much a top down revolution where the people, like most people, did not welcome radical changes to their society and way of life. Ataturk gave women the vote, imposed compulsory education for both genders, established a parliamentary system, banned traditional garb, and even forced a language change, shifting from the Arabic alphabet to the European Latin Alphabet. Most opposed however was his complete separation of church and state and the transformation of Turkey into a sectarian nation from what had been a theological dictatorship where the Sultan was the absolute ruler of the state and of the Muslim religion.
There are some who have argued that the United States 20th century of world dominance was an empire. Perhaps so, but it did not have most of the characteristics that Thucydides and most others thought of as characteristics of empire—occupation of nations, rule by the Imperial country, privilege in other nations of the Empire, control. Most important, in historical empires, money—in the form of taxes or goods was commandeered by the Empire for the mother country. The US taxed no one, and money flowed the other way in the most generous sharing of foreign aid in human history. The United States had great influence and was able to exert economic and sometimes military pressure on many nations of the world; American culture was adopted by many nations, but America rarely behaved as Empires historically did.
François Duvalier, also known as Papa Doc, was a Haitian politician who served as the President of Haiti from 1957 to 1971. He was elected president in 1957 on a populist and black nationalist platform. After thwarting a military coup d'état in 1958, his regime rapidly became totalitarian and despotic. An undercover government death squad, the Tonton Macoute (Haitian Creole: Tonton Makout), indiscriminately killed Duvalier's opponents; the Tonton Macoute was thought to be so pervasive that Haitians became highly fearful of expressing any form of dissent, even in private. Duvalier further sought to solidify his rule by incorporating elements of Haitian mythology into a personality cult.
