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Haiti's
Great White Hope?
By
John Maxwell
History is littered
with treachery. In the noisome Slough of Dishonour are
mired thousands of reputations, most of those who
betrayed their own countries, like Pierre Laval, Vidkun
Quisling, Jonas Savimbi and Augusto Pinochet. The
deepest pits though, the most purulent sinks, are
reserved for those who have ranged abroad to betray and
sabotage strangers, to inflict unnecessary suffering on
people who have never given them cause for complaint.
People like Leopold of Belgium, Neville Chamberlain,
Hitler, Ariel Sharon and George W Bush spring readily to
mind.
On Monday, former
President Clinton announced that he would accept an
invitation from the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki Moon,
of South Korea, to become the SG's personal envoy in
Haiti. It is an appointment that will end in disaster.
I mention Ban Ki
Moon's nationality because I believe that the disaster
that already exists Haiti is the result of a culture
clash which is entirely incomprehensible to most people
outside the Western hemisphere and not easily understood
by most people outside the international crime scene
that has been created in Haiti.
Ground Zero
for Modern Civilisation
It is my contention
that the modern world was born in Haiti.
When you understand
that the modern rotary printing press is a direct
descendant of mills made to grind sugar you may begin to
get the drift of my argument. Since I am not a historian
my arguments will not be subtle and nuanced. I am simply
presenting a few crude facts which, however you
interpret them, will I believe lead inexorably to the
conclusion that modern ideas of liberty and freedom,
modern capitalism and globalisation of production and
exchange, would have spent much longer in gestation had
it not been for the black slaves of Haiti who abolished
slavery and the slave trade. In the process they
defeated the armies of the leading world powers of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, destroyed French
empire in the western hemisphere, doubled the size and
power of the United States and incidentally promoted the
European sugar beet industry and revolutionised European
farming.
The problem with
all this, as I have repeatedly pointed out, is that had
the Haitians been ethnically European their achievements
would now suffuse the world narrative; conversely, had
Spartacus been black, he would long ago have faded into
the mists of barbarian myth.
The Haitians and
all the other blacks of the Western hemisphere were
uprooted from their native grounds, their civilisations
laid waste, and they themselves transported to unknown
lands in which they were forced to create unexampled
riches and luxury for their rapists and despoilers.
For reasons lost to
history, the blacks in Haiti and Jamaica were, for most
of their captivity, the most unwilling subjects and
continued to fight for their freedom for more than three
centuries.
The Enlightenment
and its prophets and philosophers popularised the ideas
of freedom and liberty, the rights of man. Nowhere was
freedom taken more seriously than by the Haitians, who,
described as Frenchmen, fought valiantly for American
freedom in that nation's Revolutionary War of
Independence. When Revolution convulsed France in turn,
the Haitians threw their support to those they thought
were fighting for freedom. When that proved a false
trail, the Haitians continued to fight, defeating the
French, British and Spanish armies sent to re-enslave
them.
Although the
Americans and the French said they believed in freedom,
they formed an unholy combination to restrict Haiti's
liberty. The fact of Haitian freedom frightened the
Americans and other world powers. Haiti promised freedom
to any captive who set foot on her soil and armed,
provisioned and supplied trained soldiers to Simon
Bolivar for the liberation of South America. Nearly 200
years before the United Nations (and France and the
USA), Haiti proclaimed Universal Human Rights,
threatening the slave societies in America and the
Caribbean
Haiti's freedom was
compromised by French and American financial blackmail,
and as I've said before, what the Atlantic powers could
not achieve by force of arms they achieved by compound
interest. Haiti was the first heavily indebted poor
country, and the United States, Canada, France and the
multilateral financial organisations, the World Bank,
the InterAmerican Development Bank and the IMF have
worked hard to keep her in that bondage.
Eventually, 93
years ago, the Americans invaded Haiti, destroyed the
constitution, the government and their social system.
American Jim Crow segregation and injustice destroyed
the Haitian middle-class, enhanced and exacerbated class
distinctions and antagonisms and left Haiti a ravaged,
dysfunctional mess, ruled by a corrupt American trained
military in the interest of a small corrupt gang of
mainly expatriate or white capitalists, ready to support
any and every murderous dictator who protected their
interests.
Finally, twenty
years ago, the Haitians rose up and overthrew the
Duvaliers and the apprentice dictators who followed. In
their first free election the Haitians elected a little,
black parish priest, the man whose words and spirit had
embodied their struggle. But the real rulers of Haiti,
the corrupt, bloodthirsty capitalists with their
American passports and their bulletproof SUV's, had no
intention of letting Haitians exercise the universal
human rights their leaders had proclaimed two centuries
before.
When Jean Bertrand
Aristide was deposed after a few months in office it was
with the help of the CIA, USAID, and other American
entities. Then ensued one of the most disgraceful
episodes in the long unsavoury history of diplomacy.
Bill Clinton – elected President promising to treat the
Haitian refugees as human beings – elected instead to
observe the same barbarous policies as George Bush I,
and when the refugees became a flood Clinton's answer
was more illegality. He parked two massive floating
slave barracoons in Kingston Harbour where refugees
picked up in Jamaican waters were, with the craven
connivance of the Patterson government – denied asylum,
captured and rocessed and 22% of them selected for the
Guantanamo Bay concentration camp while the rest were
returned to their murderers in Haiti.
Eventually, largely
due to pressure from black pressure groups in the US and
crucially, a fast to the death begun by Randall
Robinson, Clinton agreed to restore Aristide while
General Colin Powell talked grandly of the soldier's
honour he shared with Haiti's then murderer in chief, a
scamp called Raoul Cedras.
President Clinton
made several pledges to Aristide and to Haiti, but
history does not seem to record that any were kept.
Had even a few been
kept, Haiti may have been able to guarantee public
security and to install some desperately needed
infrastructure. Instead Haitians are still scooping
water to drink from potholes in the street and stave off
hunger with 'fritters' made from earth and cooking fat.
The Haitian Army,
the most corrupt and evil public institution in the
western hemisphere was abolished by Aristide, to the
displeasure of the North American powers. Now that the
Americans have deposed Aristide for the second time,
security is in the hands of a motley mercenary army, a
UN peacekeeping force.
Security in Haiti
is so good that three years ago, the then head of this
force, a Brazilian general was found shot to death after
a friendly chat with Haitian elites.
The rapes,
massacres, disappearances and kidnappings continue
unabated and the only popular political force, the Fanmi
Lavalas, has been effectively neutered.
President Clinton
"will aim to attract private and government investment
and aid for the poor Caribbean island nation, according
to Clinton's office and a senior U.N. official.
"A U.N. official
said that Clinton would act as a "cheerleader" for the
economically distressed country, cajoling government and
business leaders into pouring fresh money into a place
that is largely dependent on foreign assistance."
It all sounds so
nice and cosy, a poor, black 'hapless' nation under the
tutelage of the rich and civilised of the earth.
I am prepared to
bet that neither Haitian democracy nor Bill Clinton's
reputation will survive this appointment. Democracy is
impossible without popular participation and decision
making.
In Haiti democracy
is impossible without Lavalas and Aristide
If Haiti itself is
to survive, the UN General Assembly needs to seize this
baton from the spectacularly unqualified and ignorant
Security Council and its very nice and affable Secretary
General, even less attuned to Haitian reality than the
last SG, Kofi Annan and his accomplices, Colin Powell,
Condoleezza Rice, P.J. Patterson and Patrick Manning.
Dual citizenship
and Parliament
The laws of Jamaica
are apparently being rewritten behind our backs. As I
understand the Representation of the People Act, if only
one person is nominated on Nomination Day, that person
is automatically elected to parliament.
There is no need
for a bye-election, and it would seem to me that it is
illegal to have a bye-election when there is a lawfully
nominated and elected MP. No court can declare a seat
vacant except under certain specific circumstances.
The North East St
Catherine seat cannot legally be vacant. A grant of poll
resulted in one valid nomination. The seat was therefore
filled by Phyllis Mitchell.
Can anyone explain
when the law was changed?
Copyright ©2009 John Maxwell
jankunnu@gmail.com
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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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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post 24 May 2009
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