The Audacity of Hopelessness

piporiko Lun 6 Avr 2009 - 18:38

The Audacity of Hopelessness

COMMON SENSE

JOHN MAXWELL

Sunday, April 05, 2009

IT is as idle to define the problems of Haiti as problems
of economic development as it is to contemplate the problems of
Elisabeth Fritzl as a problem of delinquent parenting.

It
will never be possible to disentangle Elisabeth Fritzl from the
treachery and cruelty of an evil and incestuous father, a man willing
to steal the lives and souls of his own child and his children by her,
to suck the very breath of freedom, to steal the light and air to which
they have title as human beings; to unleash even in those outsiders who
have merely heard of these horrors the potential for an infinitely
complex self-generating concatenation of Mandelbrot images of sheer
terror which, if we had the capacity to pursue, would lead us down
endless nights and days into a chaos of unimaginable horror.

JOHN MAXWELL

It may be possible - with sophisticated help - for the
mind of Elisabeth Fritzl to begin to repair itself and perhaps even for
her children to obtain some limited version of what we call sanity. It
may be possible, but not, I think, in one lifetime.

Hold on tight to your screams!

Ban Ki Moon, secretary general of the United Nations, an
otherwise excellent human being I am sure, is among those, like the
burbling boobies of the World Bank and other international financial
agencies (IFA), who believe that what ails Haiti is simply a case of
distorted economic development and that there is a simple formula to
fix things. Free zone development and regular voting will be sure-fire
cures.

The poorest country in the Western hemisphere got that
way, according to an eminent gaggle of politicians and private sector
experts, by native mismanagement and the incompetence of the black
Haitian population and its leaders.

Among these are Colin
Powell, Condoleezza Rice and their advisers including the toxic spawn
of Jesse Helms - Roger Noriega and Otto Reich and the International
Republican Institute, and before them were Thomas Jefferson who defined
blacks as three-fifths human and William Jennings Bryan, three-time
Democratic party candidate for the presidency of The USA and who, as
Secretary of State, was astonished at the pretensions of the Haitians
whom he saw as a bunch of "Niggers speaking French".

A child from the Mission of Mercy school
looks through a wall in the slum of Cite Soleil, Port-au-Prince, on
Thursday, March 26, 2009. Haiti is one of the world's poorest
countries. (Photo: AP)

There are also some people who believe that women who are
raped are at least partially responsible for their own misfortunes and
there are, I am sure, people who will tell you with absolute certainty
that Elisabeth Fritzl must have in some way contributed to her father's
delinquency. Haiti too, conspired in its own catastrophe. It takes two
to tango, they will tell you.

Hold on tight to your screams!

In the New York Times last week Ban Ki Moon noted: "Yes,
Haiti remains desperately poor. It has yet to fully recover from last
year's devastating hurricanes, not to mention decades of malign
dictatorship. Yet we can report what President René Préval told us:
'Haiti is at a turning point.' It can slide backwards into darkness and
deeper misery, sacrificing all the country's progress and hard work
with the United Nations and international community. Or it can break
out, into the light toward a brighter and more hopeful future."

Last August the secretary general was full of hope: "The
time has come to rebuild the institutions that have been destroyed by
years of neglect, corruption and violence, to strengthen them so that
the State is able to deliver the services that the people need."

In his latest visit Ban said: "It is easy to visit Haiti
and see only poverty. But when I visited recently with former President
Bill Clinton, we saw opportunity. "My special adviser on Haiti, the
Oxford University development economist Paul Collier, has worked with
the government to devise a strategy. It identifies specific steps and
policies to create those jobs with particular emphasis on the country's
traditional strengths - the garment industry and agriculture. creating
the sort of industrial 'clusters' that have come to dominate global
trade.

". dramatically expanding the country's export zones, so
that a new generation of textile firms can invest and do business in
one place. By creating a market sufficiently large to generate
economies of scale, they can drive down production costs and, once a
certain threshold is crossed, spark potentially explosive growth
constrained only by the size of the labour pool.

"That may seem ambitious in a country of nine million
people, where 80 per cent of the population lives on less than $2 a day
and half of the food is imported." Can anyone really be so
ill-informed? Can anyone believe that a country of nine million
poverty-stricken people living on less than $2 a day and importing half
their food can generate thriving markets for anything but subsistence
production? Ban Ki Moon is our new Dr Pangloss: All is for the best in
this best of all possible worlds.

Hold on tight to your screams!

"It is easy to visit Haiti and to see only poverty." It
probably isn't much harder if you live there and, like a parish priest
named Jean Bertrand Aristide, become inflamed with the idea that you
and your people are going to change things, to "build utopia on a dung
heap".

The only problem is that there are people who want
Haitians to remain in the misery they have been made to embrace. The
facile American journalistic explanations for Haiti have always been
lies, launched by no less than Thomas Jefferson and sedulously
cultivated by generations of racists intent on keeping Haitians in
their proper place.

The Haitians were always presumptuous: two hundred years
ago they fought above their weight and won, abolishing slavery,
destroying France's ambitions in the New World, doubling the size of
the USA and above all, being the first nation anywhere to enshrine the
rights of man, woman and child, the fundamental universal rights of
human beings, in their constitution.

The almost
contemporaneous American and French revolutions did not do what the
Haitians did. Slavery persisted in France and in the US, and 30 years
ago the US gave up trying for an Equal Rights Amendment a few years
after narrowly forcing through a voting rights act to give all
Americans title to their democracy. The Haitians were a serious threat
to American slave-based capitalism, promising freedom to any person who
set foot in Haiti, naming a main street after John Brown and arming
Simon Bolivar to go liberate Latin America. Like the Cubans a century
and a half later, the Haitians needed to be contained.

The Americans and the French went about solving the
Haitian problem in a very businesslike way. The Haitians had sugar to
sell, but their only real market was the US. The US agreed with the
French that they would buy nothing from the Haitians unless the French
recognised Haitian independence. This extortionate double play worked.
The Haitians would starve unless they could sell their sugar.

Hold on tight to your screams!

The solution guaranteed the Haitians would starve anyway,
committing themselves to pay a ransom equivalent to US$120 billion to
the French, buying their freedom in cash having bought it in blood,
pauperising themselves for another century. When they defaulted - as
they had to - the Americans and their accomplices intervened, seizing
the Haitian Treasury and Customs services, abolishing the Haitian
constitution, dive-bombing the Haitian peasants when they rose to
assert their rights, stealing Haitian land, cutting down Haitian
forests to plant sisal, installing a fascist army to maintain the rule
of a minority - light-skinned elite who despised the black Haitians
upon whom they battened and fed.

They had great plans, the elite and their foreign
friends. They were going to revolutionise pig-rearing in Haiti, but
first they needed to get rid of the native Haitian pigs. The experts
replaced the Haitian pigs with large white hogs, pigs that needed
better housing than the Haitian peasants who supposedly owed them. The
experts, in the interest of cheap food, then completed the ruin of the
Haitian peasantry by importing subsidised American rice, destroying the
Haitian market in hill rice.

Then, when the Haitians were once again pauperised, the
experts and their elite allies introduced the nearest thing to slavery
known to this century - free zones, where Haitians laboured for the
price of less than one Jamaican patty a day. The women were injected
with drugs which stopped their monthly periods so they wouldn't need
time off to have babies. They were prohibited from joining unions.

Hold on tight to your screams!

This is the new dispensation of Mr Ban Ki Moon and of Mr
Collier, of Mr Zoellick, of the World Bank and the IDB, of Mr Kofi
Annan and Mr Colin Powell, of Mr Patterson and Mr Manning.

It will be led by a most unsavoury collection of those
George Soros describes as gangster capitalists, who paid for the terror
that has murdered thousands, driven thousands more into exile, used
rape as an instrument of political enforcement and twice destroyed the
Haitians' desperate attempts to recover their rights - the rights they
were the first in the world to proclaim, a century before the UN, that
every human being is entitled to the same rights and privileges as
every other.

The security situation is fixed, according to Mr Ban Ki
Moon. Gangs of convicted and unconvicted murderers and rapists in
concert with so-called UN peacekeepers and child molesters will again
control Haiti in the interests of the largely expatriate elite, the
market makers whose older brothers have brought the world to the brink
of moral and financial disaster, people with the divine right to be
rich and to suck the blood of the poor.

Haiti's democracy was beheaded in a conspiracy between
the US State Department, John McCain's International Republican
Institute, and the governments of France and Canada. They shut down the
development process, destroyed the nascent medical school, and blocked
Haitian access to clean water. In an initiative reminiscent of King
Leopold's intervention in the Congo a century ago - a kind of mission
of the Red Cross as Leopold described it, they set back development in
Haiti by half a century. They didn't kill quite as many people as
Leopold.

Hold on tight to your screams!

And the poor, as Condoleezza Rice points out, can always
vote. It won't do them much good but will provide Western journalists
with a deep sense of smug self-satisfaction. Meanwhile, to Elisabeth
Fritzl and the Haitians we can say: Hold on tight to your screams! One
day, somebody may hear them. They may not know what they mean - but
they may make a paragraph in the New York Times.

Copyright 2009 John Maxwell jankunnu@gmail.com