[R-G] The Audacity of Hopelessness

[Anthony Fenton]

http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/columns/html/20090404T220000-0500_148822_OBS_THE_AUDACITY_OF_HOPELESSNESS_.asp

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 at gmail.com