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Book by John Maxwell
How to Make Our Own News: A Primer for Environmentalist and Journalists
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No, Mister!
You Cannot Share My
Pain!
By John Maxwell
If you shared my
pain you would not continue to make me suffer, to
torture me, to deny me my dignity and my rights
especially my rights to self determination and self
expression.
Six years ago you sent your Ambassador Extraordinary and
Minister Plenipotentiary to perform an action illegal
under the laws of your country,my country and of the
international community of nations.
It was an act so outrageous, so bestially vile and
wicked that your journalists and news agencies, your
diplomats and politicians to this day cannot bring
themselves to truthfully describe or own up to the
crime that was committed when US Ambassador James Foley,
a career diplomat arrived at the house of President Jean
Bertrand Aristide with a bunch of CIA thugs and US
Marines to kidnap the President of Haiti and his wife.
The Aristides were stowed aboard a CIA plane normally
used for 'renditions' of suspected terrorists to the
worldwide US gulag of dungeons and torture chambers.
The plane, on which the Aristides are listed as "cargo"
flew to Antigua – an hour away – and remained on the
ground in Antigua while Colin Powell's State Department
and the CIA tried to blackmail and bribe various African
countries to accept ('give asylum to") the kidnapped
President and his wife.
The Central African Republic—one of George W Bush's
'Dark Corners of the World'—agreed for an undisclosed
sum, to give the Aristides temporary asylum.
Before any credible plot can be designed and paid
for—for the disappearance of the Aristides—they are
rescued by friends, flown to temporary asylum in Jamaica
where the government cravenly yielded to the blackmail
of Condoleezza Rice to deny them the permanent asylum to
which they were entitled and which most Jamaicans had
hoped for.
Meanwhile in Haiti the US Marines protected an
undisciplined ragbag of rapists and murderers to allow
them entry to the capital. The Marines chased the
medical students out of the new Medical School
established by Aristide with Cuban help and teachers.
The Marines bivouac in the school, going out on nightly
raids, trailed by fleets of ambulances with body bags,
hunting down Fanmi Lavalas activists described as 'chimeres'
– terrorists.
The real terrorists, led by two convicted murderers,
Chamblain and Philippe, assisted the Marines in the
eradication of 'chimeres' until the Marines were
replaced by foreign troops paid by the United Nations
who took up the hunt on behalf of the civilised
world—France, Canada, the US, and Brazil.
The terrorists and the remains of the Duvalier
tontons and the CIA-bred FRAPF declared open season
on the remnants of Aristide's programmes to build
democracy. They burnt down the new museum of Haitian
Culture, destroyed the Children's television station and
generally laid waste to anything and everything which
could remind Haitians of their glorious history.
Haitians don't know that without their help Latin
America might still be part of the Spanish Empire and
Simon Bolivar a brief historical footnote.
Imagine, Niggers Speaking French!
About ninety years ago when Professor Woodrow Wilson was
President of the USA his Secretary of State was a
fundamentalist lawyer named William Jennings Bryan who
had three times run unsuccessfully, for President.
The Americans had decided to invade Haiti to collect
debts owed by Haiti to Citibank.
General Smedley Butler, the only American soldier to
have twice won the Congressional Medal of Honour,
described his role in the US Army:
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I helped make Mexico safe
for American oil interests in 1914. I helped
make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the
National City Bank boys to collect revenues
in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen
Central American republics for the benefits
of Wall Street. The record of racketeering
is long. |
General Butler said:
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I suspected I was just
part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure
of it. . . . My mental faculties remained in
suspended animation while I obeyed the
orders of higher-ups. This is typical in the
military service. |
Butler compared himself unfavourably to Al Capone. He
said his official racketeering made Capone look like an
amateur.
Secretary Bryan was dumfounded by the Haitians;
"Imagine" he said, "Niggers speaking French.
Smedley Butler and Bryan were involved in Haiti because
of something that happened nearly a hundred years
before. The French slave-masters, expelled from Haiti
and defeated again when they tried to re-enslave the
Haitians, connived with the Americans to starve them
into submission by a trade embargo. With no sale for
Haitian sugar, the country was weak and rundown when a
French fleet arrived bearing a demand for reparations.
Having bought their freedom in blood, the Haitians were
to be oblige to purchase it again in gold.
The French demanded, essentially, that the Haitians pay
France an amount equivalent to 90 percent of the entire
Haitian budget for the foreseeable future. ~~When this
commitment proved too arduous to honour, the City Bank
offered the Haitians a 'debt exchange" paying off the
French in exchange for a lower interest longer term
debt. The terms may have seemed better but were just as
usurious and it was not paid off until 1947.
Because of the debt the Americas invaded Haiti, seized
the Treasury, exiled the President, their Jim Crow
policies were used to divide the society, to harass the
poor and finally provoked a second struggle for freedom
which was one of the most brutal episodes in colonial
history.
Long before Franco bombed Guernica, exciting the horror
and revulsion of civilised people, the Americans
perfected their dive-bombing techniques against unarmed
Haitian peasants many of whom had never seen aircraft
before.
The Americans set up an Haitian Army in the image of
their Jim Crow Marines and it was these people and the
alien and alienated Élite who with some conscripted
blacks like the Duvaliers have ruled Haiti for most of
the last century.
When I flew over Haiti for the first time in 1959 en
route from New York to San Juan, Puerto Rico, I saw for
the first time the border between the green Dominican
Republic and brown Haiti.
First world journalists interpret the absence of trees
on the Haitian side to the predations of the poor,
disregarding the fact that Western religion and
American capitalism were mainly responsible.
Why is it that nowhere else in the Caribbean is there
similar deforestation?
Haiti's Dessalines constitution offered sanctuary to
every escaped slave of any colour. All such people of
whatever colour were deemed 'black' and entitled to
citizenship. Only officially certified 'blacks could
own land in Haiti.
The American occupation, anticipating Hayek, Freedman
and Greenspan, decided that such a rule was a hindrance
to development. The Assistant Secretary of the US Navy,
one Franklin D Roosevelt was given the job of writing a
new, modern constitution for Haiti.
This constitution meant foreigners could own land.
Within a very short time the lumberjacks were busy,
felling old growth Mahogany and Caribbean Pine for
carved doors for the rich and mahogany speedboats,
boardroom tables seating forty etc. etc. The devastated
land was put to produce rubber, sisal for ropes and all
sorts of pie in the sky plantations.
When President Paul Magloire came to Jamaica fifty years
ago Haitians were still speaking of an Artibonite dam
for electricity and irrigation. But the ravages of the
recent past were too much to recover.
As Marguerite Laurent (EziliDanto) writes: Don't expect
to learn how a people with a Vodun culture that reveres
nature and especially the Mapou (oak-like or ceiba
pendantra/bombax) trees, and other such big trees as the
abode of living entities and therefore as sacred things,
were forced to watch the Catholic Church, during
Rejete—the violent anti-Vodun crusade—gather whole
communities at gun point into public squares, and forced
them to watch their agents burn Haitian trees in order
to teach Haitians their Vodun Gods were not in nature,
that the trees were the "houses of Satan."
In partnership with the US, the mulatto President Elie
Lescot (1941-45) summarily expelled peasants from more
than 100,000 hectares of land, razing their homes and
destroying more than a million fruit trees in the vain
effort to cultivate rubber on a large plantation scale.
Also, under the pretext of the Rejete campaign,
thousands of acres of peasant lands were
cleared of sacred trees so that the US could take their
lands for US agribusiness
After the Flood
Norman Manley used to say "River come Down" when his
party seemed likely to prevail. The Kreyol word
Lavalas conveys the same meaning.
Since the Haitian people's decisive rejection of the
Duvalier dictatorships in the early 90s, their spark and
leader has been Jean Bertrand Aristide whose bona fides
may be assessed from the fact that the CIA and
conservative Americans have been trying to discredit him
almost from the word go.
As he put it in one of his books, his intention has been
to build a paradise on the garbage heap bequeathed to
Haiti by the US and the Elite.
The bill of particulars is too long to go into here, but
the destruction of the new museum of Culture, the
breaking up of the medical school, the destruction of
the children's television gives you the flavour. But the
essence is captured in the brutal attempt to obliterate
the spirit of Haitian community; the attempt to destroy
Lavalas by murdering its men and raping its women, the
American directed subversion of a real police force, the
attacks on education and the obliteration of the
community self-help systems which meant that when
Hurricane Jeanne and all the other weather systems since
have struck Haiti many more have died than in any other
country similarly stricken. In an earthquake, totally
unpredictable, every bad factor is multiplied
The American blocking of international aid means that
there is no modern water supply anywhere, no town
planning, no safe roads, none of the ordinary
infrastructure of any other Caribbean state. There are
no building standards, no emergency shelters, no parks.
So, when I write about mothers unwittingly walking on
dead babies in the mud, when I write about people so
poor they must eat patties made of clay and shortening,
when I write about people with their faces 'chopped off'
or about any of 8 million horror stories from the crime
scene that is Haiti, please don't tell me you share
their pain or mine.
Tell me where is Lovinsky Pierre Antoine and ten
thousand like him?
If you share my pain and their pain, why don't you stop
causing it? Why don't you stop the torture?
If you want to understand me, look at the woman in the
picture, and the children half buried with her. You
cannot hear their screams because they know there is no
point in screaming. It will do no more good than voting.
What is she thinking: perhaps it is something like
this—No mister! You cannot share my pain!
Sometime perhaps, after the camera is gone people will
return to dig us out with their bare hands. But not you.
Copyright©2010 John Maxwell
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HLLN Will Not Tolerate
The maligning of
the Haitian people
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To the Mr. Champagne
Re: Mr. Champagne's Haitian Lawyers Association
letter dated Jan. 19, 2010 and
copied below and made a part herein
Sir, in your letter dated January 19, 2019 to President
Obama, you write, on behalf of the Haitian Lawyers
Association, inter alia, that your organization, the
Haitian Lawyers Association in Miami, Florida:
| urge the administration to address the
rising lawlessness, created by the criminals
who have escaped Haiti's broken
penitentiary. Not only does it threaten the
current humanitarian relief efforts, but it
also unacceptably increases the
vulnerability of women and children, many of
whom now orphans. More should be done to
curtail the lawlessness before it becomes
uncontrollable |
Point one:
As lawyers and advocates who represented many of the
detainees who were in the National Penitentiary, we find
your statements criminally negligent, odious, and
irresponsible and not based on any verifiable facts. It
is a well-known fact, that most of those detainees you
are depicting as "criminals" who escaped from the
National Penitentiary were poor Haitians from poor
neighborhoods who were summarily rounded up into
preventive or indefinite detention during the 2004
Bush/Bicentennial coup d'etat without ever being
charged, tried or convicted of any crime. As of 2008, it
is reported that there were 8,204 prisoners in Haiti and
of this only 1,764 have been convicted of a crime. Of
the 8,204, 3900 were warehoused at the National
Penitentiary.
The majority awaiting charge and a hearing, some
suffering five years of prolonged detention, without
ever having been charged, tried or convicted of any
crime. These prison population statistics come from the
2008 US State Department Human Rights Report on Haiti
and do "not include the large number of persons held in
police stations around the country in 'preventive
detention' (without a hearing or filed charges).
For your legal association to call them "criminals" is
unethical. For most were indefinitely detained without
any charges, hearing or trial and have never been
charged with a crime.
Point two: It is reported that when the
earthquake hit, the wall of the National Penitentiary
collapse on these men, most of whom have suffered
tremendous injustice of indefinite incarceration without
charge, and whose wives, children, mothers and families
lost valuable time they could have had with their love
one but for their unjust and illegal incarceration.
Their "escape" Mr. Champagne was when concrete fell on
their heads!
There is NO EVIDENCE that these men are either criminals
or committing crimes right now.
We don't know how injured they were when the
Penitentiary collapsed on them or how many perished and
for you to repeat, like a parrot, what you are hearing
from CNN, Fox news and MSNBS is unprofessional. As a
legal organization you are charged with knowing the law
and speaking factually. This depiction is objectionable
also, especially as most reporters and even the general
on the ground have said there is no significant violence
amongst the earthquake wounded, thirsty and hungry. This
idea of POTENTIAL violence, or as you put it "the rising
lawlessness, created by the criminals who have escaped
Haiti's broken penitentiary" is defamation and libel
against people who are not here to defend themselves but
HLLN is and we demand a retraction.
Point three: HLLN runs the Ezili Danto Witness
Project and we have people on the ground in Haiti. Their
first hand account of the current situation is that a
natural disaster of epic proportion has hit the poorest
of the poor and they are wounded, hungry, hurt,
traumatized and most without food, clean water and
medical treatment since last Tuesday. For you Mr.
Richard to criminalize and vilified these people at such
a time is repugnant. The people of Haiti are not violent
or naturally prone to lawlessness. The US is
statistically more violent than Haiti and the only
times, in the past 20 years, that the violence in Haiti
increases is when the US supports death squads and
regime change that
massacre the poor.
Point four: Haiti needs conscious disaster relief
with human rights and dignity, it does not need your
propaganda Mr. Champagne alleging the innate violence of
people who were not ever committed of any crimes.
Medical relief, food, shelter and water are its priority
right now, not 12,000-pentagon gun, to, as you
write "curtail the lawlessness before it becomes
uncontrollable." This projection of fear is arbitrary
and capricious Mr. Champagne.
Here are two reports that contradict your irresponsible
assertions about the current situation in Haiti:
1. Doctor: Misinformation
and Racism Have Frozen Recovery Effort at General
Hospital in Port-au-Prince |
http://bit.ly/7zZ4gu
“There are no security issues,” says Dr. Evan Lyon of
Partners in Health, reporting from the General Hospital
in Port-Au-Prince in Haiti, where 1,000 people are in
need of operations. Lyon said the reports of violence in
the city have been overblown by the media and have
affected the delivery of aid and medical services.
http://bit.ly/7zZ4gu
2. Tell CNN to stop hyping fears of violence in
Haiti. For shame at
http://bit.ly/6bXnPz
HLLN is working at over capacity right now.
But we are prepared to provide testimony, including from
some who were held indefinitely, detained without ever
having been convicted or charged with a crime, and who
are now seriously injured and dying and who you are
maligning. Their survivors are ready for a class action
suit against the media and you and your organization,
Mr. Richard, to take all to court for this
vilification/defamation. As HLLN is working over
capacity, we are prepared to make a general call to
human rights attorneys who wish to assist should your
organization not make a retraction IMMEDIATELY.
This letter will go public—on facebook, twitter, our
blogs and all the social networks and to the Ezili
Listserv. We are hereby asking civil rights and human
rights lawyers who would like to assist the earthquake
victims to help HLLN stop the maligning and
criminalization of the people of Haiti and anticipate
your retraction within the next 3 days.
Very Truly Yours,
Ezili Dantò
Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network
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Haiti—An unwelcome Katrina Redux
Cynthia McKinney
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies. As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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posted 19 January 2010
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