'The Ebony Phoenix' & 'The Second Enlightenment' | Part 01

(Rush Written)
To be Continued...

Part 01
The Ebony Phoenix & The Second Enlightenment

The OlderQuake, The OtherQuakes, The Others'Quakes, 
The EarthQuake & Quaking The World!

The Portuguese Empire through its own science joined by Islamic and Jewish sciences working together, and other European brains (Dutch, Spanish, Italian) made really come true the old idea of a spherical Earth.

Portuguese Sea

“Oh salty sea, how much of your salt

Are tears of Portugal!

Because we crossed you, so many mothers wept,

So many sons prayed in vain!

So many brides remained unmarried

That you might be ours, oh sea!

Was it worthwhile? All is worthwhile

When the spirit is not small.

He who wants to go beyond the Cape.

Has to go beyond pain.

God to the sea peril and the abyss has given 

But it was in it that He mirrored heaven.”

Fernando Pessoa (Portuguese Poet)

Through the opened Oceans a New World was born.

Together with it – as always, within the onus-bonus-onus wheel of History – from light, darkness was born: brute colonialism as the second ugliest son of feudalism, and ethnic slavery as since then and forever the ugliest one.

One place in the New World detached from the rest: the colony of Saint-Domingue, the richest source of the French small Elite wealth.

Darkness had conquered Europe through the fires of Inquisition and the cooling of thoughts (when the “all is well” philosophers begun to appraise that world as the best possible world “under God”).

As always, within the bonus-onus-bonus wheel of History, when unanimity emerges, contradiction installs.

And some new few thinkers had begun to put some tiny new light on that status quo.

Suddenly, the earth and brains big shake came without advice.

Lisbon, Portugal, 1755, November 1st, “All Saints Day” celebration, around 10½ in the morning.

An unprecedented earthquake came, followed by an enormous Tsunami.

Tears everywhere sunk lives, rules and dogmas.

Fires everywhere enlightened brains, hearts and souls.

All-Saints-Day! All the churches were plenty of people.

Most of them, unaware, made their lives last pray.

It was the most devastating earthquake from the history of Europe.

It would change the World forever.

As today, the World was living at the edge, at a crossroads.

By one side, the Philosophy of Optimism, the full domain of the Church, the Feudal system and a very small noblesse’s immense affronting wealth.

By other hand the emerging power of a new class so-called Bourgeois, and arising questionings about Imperial powers and its rulers, and about the Rome’s Church truth-owning omnipotence, and presence.

The impact was tremendous within the Portuguese Empire and elsewhere.

It could not be different as the big Metropolis of five continents possessions was destroyed by an earthquake followed by innumerous aftershocks and an enormous Tsunami whose waves could be watched in some parts of Americas.

The Portuguese catastrophe awakened a myriad of controversies about religion, nature, philosophy, government and launched the first stronger lights towards the 'XVIII Century Enlightment'.

The Inquisition saying that the tragedy was due for the Portuguese’s sins, while the French future Encyclopaedists arguing how it could be if most of the people – about 200,000 – died exactly because they were in the places for seeking salvation, The Lord’s Homes, that fallen down on their heads.

Voltaire, and Kant – amongst many others intellectuals - were some of the most active questioners. Tons of writings and debates were produced.

Remarkable was the reaction of the French philosopher Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet).

Voltaire responded to the Lisbon cataclysm, coming shortly after another deadly earthquake in Lima, Peru (1746), in a series of letters, a lengthy poem and the novella Candide, questioning blind faith in god and the fatalism that the then-dominant philosophy of “Optimism” engendered.

In the preface to his “Poem on the Disaster in Lisbon” (1756) Voltaire wrote mockingly:

“All is well, the heirs of the dead
will increase their fortunes,

masons will make money rebuilding the buildings,

beasts feed off the bodies buried in the debris:

this is the necessary effect of the necessary causes; 

your particular misfortune is nothing, 

you will contribute to the general welfare.”

In Candide (1759), Voltaire reported how, “After the earthquake, which had destroyed three-fourths of the city of Lisbon, the sages of that country could think of no means more effectual to preserve the kingdom from utter ruin than to entertain the people with an auto-da-fé [faith ritual], it having been decided by the University of Coimbra, that the burning of a few people alive by a slow fire, and with great ceremony, is an infallible preventive of earthquakes.”

Candide’s mentor, the optimist philosopher Pangloss, opines that it is all for the good, “all this is for the very best end, for if there is a volcano at Lisbon it could be in no other spot.” But when Pangloss is hanged for heresy, the earth shakes again. Candide laments:

“If this is the best of all possible worlds, what are the others like?”

All those debates lead to an emergent comprehension of ‘the nature of the own nature itself’.

That it could happen elsewhere where no one would be there to suffer or even notice the quake.

The earthquakes and other nature’s manifestations begun to be studied through evolving methods leading to our days' Geology and Earth Sciences so forth.

Religion, philosophy, politics, private property and everything related to life and society begun to be questioned.

A boiling brainstorm flowed alive until culminating on the reported as the most important fact alone of the whole following centuries.

Which was actually completed five years later, and somewhere else.

Coming at a time when bourgeois forces were growing strong enough to burst the straitjacket of feudalism, the Lisbon disaster played a key role in the Enlightenment, intellectual forerunner for the French Revolution of 1789-1804.

1789-1804. The Fall of Bastille, and the victory of The French Revolution whose endurance could not be kept for so long, and few years later the dream seemed to be over under Napoleon ruling.

1791-1804. The seeds of The French Revolution floated over the Atlantic (on maybe the same waves that crossed the ocean when of the Lisbon Tsunami) and arrived in an island that gave them good soil, better climate to grow, and brave gardeners.

The dream reborn “noir” and The French Revolution, actually, only could come true within that land and by the deadlock-tied hands of the oppressed by the own France.

The Liberty Flag regained the skies carried by the Negro strong hands of Saint-Domingue in The Haitian Revolution.

After years of restless fighting against the most powerful empires on earth – as England, Spain, and France - the dreamers won, the dream was not over.

The ideals once expressed in the 1789 “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” could breathe again.

1804. 

‘Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité’, 

‘L’Union Fait la Force’ 

et L‘Independence ou Mort’!

All burning hearts and minds came to light through 'The Only Successful Slaves’ Revolt of History’, which could proclaim ‘The First Free Nation of The New World’.

A new Nation was born, freed from external and internal rulers: no more a colony under a Metropolis, no more slavery under the heavy wills of ‘people that owned people’.

And an enormous influence, a loud dense voice – not only inspirational but also material and pragmatic -, arose soaring and being spread around the whole Western Hemisphere towards the ears of the entire Old World.

From 'The Mountains beyond Mountains’ brigades went to help the United States Independence.

The ‘Black Jacobins’ struggle echoes won the freedom for all the slaves in the vast French colonial possessions.

The ‘Repiblik Dayiti’ took over the neighbor island-sharing Spanish colony and abolished the slavery there.

A defeated Simon Bolivar have found twice in ‘The Pearl of Antilles’, abridge, shelter, rest, support, food, ammunition, money, ships, weapons, and soldiers to come back and make the independence of the Spanish southern colonies in America. In exchange, only one duty: the end of slavery there.

‘The Black Republic’ sent also troops to fight in The United States Civil War with highlighted participation as in the Savannah Battle.

Defeating the frightening Napoleon troops twice Haiti opened the doors for France giving up in Americas and made feasible the Louisiana Province deal when United States bought very cheap what represents around 23% of its today’s territory and without which there would be no path for the West Conquer.

The Saint-Domingue achievements and tales had a strong impact at both the anti-slavery fighters and the slaves-owners around the other countries where slavery still survived, as in Brazil for instance.

The anti-slavery fighters got hope and will strengthening from the Caribbean History. Talks got hotter, riots emerged, and the fight at a whole gained momentum.

The slave-owners, by other hand, felt threatened, and from their fears some slavery-smoothing new rules were designed to avoid what they used to call “The Saint-Domingue Catastrophe”.

And since then, since 1804 – a year avoided by many "official” historians for a long time – the claims against discriminations about race, origin, faith and so on evolved through time and space with crescent energy.

But with all those merits Haiti was awarded with the very strange prize of the outside emptiness and indifference: no trade, no talk, no support, no recognition, no deal.

And this is the best part as the other is fulfilled with sanctions, isolation, invasions, dictatorship sponsoring, trade traps, and the worst kind of the worst prejudice.

Since then until now, the History of Haiti have become the most extreme and perfect synthesis of History both of the West Hemisphere and of the South Hemisphere.

And wouldn’t be that exaggerated to say that Haiti became the most extreme and perfect synthesis of the whole world so-called Modern Era History: the endless struggle between the Ubuntu Spirit and the Colonialist Starvation.

The 2010 tragedy was not a seismic one.

It is a fully historical, social, economic, political, geopolitical, and, uttermost, human tragedy.

The Quake itself was just the trigger for a two centuries along arming bomb.

Aftermath, we should assure that 'The Ebony Phoenix’ will fly again.

And higher.

And we should align our wings together.

As from Lisbon 1755, from Port-au-Prince 2010 here comes the light.

By the second time in history, the Planet is getting smaller again.

Not through ships but through chips.

The Human Kind, again, is living by the edge, facing the crossroads once more.

Nature has been advising us.

Economy has been advising us.

Yet before both big ongoing alerts, some bright people had listened forwards, as elephants on Tsunamis.

Since some years ago those gifted eyes could envision the urge and design some alternatives on paths for achieving this New New World to come.

This is the time for make the changes happen.

The lessons, we still know them in depth.

Time has come for actually learning from them.

Haiti is the Time Mark, the Turning Point, the Energy born from Earth Revolutions, the Energy born from Peoples’ Revolutions, the Energy born from the Resistance of Peoples that unconditionally always refused to fall on their knees, the Energy born from Peoples’ Resilient Self-Determination.

There is the Energy to Empower the ‘Second Enlightenment’.

In Haiti, History planted the deep roots for Humanity growth.

And this growth means a Whole New Breakthrough Framework on Human Relationships (within, with others, and with Earth), and a Whole Paradigm Shift on World’s Socio-Politic-Economic-Environmental Order.

Haiti’s fate to begin again from scratch is the World’s unique chance to begin again for better.

Again, Aysians will be (this time, I hope, hands by hands with everybody else)… Haitians will be 'The Avengers of The New World'.

And then… And so… And so what?

The best planning tools for the best planners and achievers are not inside but outside the head: two ears willing to listen.

As Haiti is beginning again, let’s begin from the beginning...

To be Continued...