John Maxwell has been writing about
http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/columns/Maxwell-Jan-17
No, Mister! You Cannot Share My Pain!
John Maxwell
Sunday, January 17, 2010
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
The Aristides were stowed aboard a CIA plane normally used for 'renditions' of
suspected terrorists to the worldwide
The plane, on which the Aristides are listed as "cargo", flew to
hour away - and remained on the ground in
Department and the CIA tried to blackmail and bribe various African countries
to accept ("give asylum to") the kidnapped president and his wife.
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
Rice to deny them the permanent asylum to which they were entitled and which
most Jamaicans had hoped for.
Meanwhile, in
rapists and murderers to allow them entry to the capital. The Marines chased
the medical students out of the new
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 -
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
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
of the Spanish Empire and Simon Bolivar a brief historical footnote.
Imagine, Niggers Speaking French!
About 90 years ago when Professor Woodrow Wilson was president of the
secretary of state was a fundamentalist lawyer named William
who had three times run unsuccessfully for president.
The Americans had decided to invade
General Smedley Butler, the only American soldier to have twice won the
Congressional Medal of Honour, described his role in the
"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: "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."
racketeering made Capone look like an amateur.
Secretary Bryan was dumbfounded by the Haitians. "Imagine," he said, "Niggers
speaking French!"
Smedley Butler and Bryan were involved in
happened nearly a hundred years before. The French slave-masters, expelled
from
connived with the Americans to starve them into submission by a trade embargo.
With no sale for Haitian sugar, the country was weak and run-down when a
French fleet arrived bearing a demand for reparations. Having bought their
freedom in blood, the Haitians were to purchase it again in gold.
The French demanded, essentially, that the Haitians pay
equivalent to 90 per cent 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 Americans invaded
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
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 a Haitian Army in the image of their Jim Crow Marines,
and it was these people, the alien and alienated Élite who, with some
conscripted blacks like the Duvaliers, have ruled
When I flew over
San Juan, Puerto Rico, I saw for the first time the border between the green
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
any colour. All such people of whatever colour were deemed 'black' and
entitled to citizenship. Only officially certified 'blacks' could own land in
The American occupation, anticipating Hayek, Friedman and Greenspan, decided
that such a rule was a hindrance to development. The assistant secretary of
the
modern constitution for
This constitution meant foreigners could own land. Within a very short time
the lumberjacks were busy, felling old growth Mahogany and
carved doors for the rich and mahogany speedboats, boardroom tables seating
40, 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
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 gunpoint 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
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
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
The bill of particulars is too long to go into here, but the destruction of
the new
destruction of the children's television station 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
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
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 eight million horror stories from the crime scene that is
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 (above), 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!
Some time, 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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