#5190: Re: #5186: Opposition to Aristide: Hyppolite responds Chamberlain (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: HYSEKA@aol.com

Greg,

I am not going to prolong this particular dialogue here because of one thing: 
I sincerely believe that it is pointless in the sense that it relates more to 
propaganda than anything else. Granted, I am not accusing you of such. I am 
rather pointing to that "game" that many of us have fallen into, oftentimes 
without realizing it.

Let me tell you Greg as you must know yourself, that Lavalas is not a 
religion. It is a political party with a distinct political philosophy. An 
intellectual as we love so much to call them in Haiti, may decide to defend 
the disinherited majority. But when comes the time for some of them to get 
into the nitty gritty work, most do leave and very few hang on. This is 
oftentimes, more a question of political courage and commitment than anything 
else.

Haiti's traditional intellectual elite is very comfortable at making 
grandiose statements, without the courage to do the grunt work. In Haitian 
politics, that includes working directly with the poorest of the poor in a 
deprived and oftentimes, depressing environment. Very few of them really have 
that kind of courage. This, is a fact. No one can convince me otherwise. I 
have seen it.

A second factor that may be at play in those "defections" is the issue of 
consensus. Because those intellectuals think they know best, when comes time 
to decide in a political forum for instance, if their argument does not stand 
in the face of a majority opinion, they may decide to leave the party. It is 
as we all know, very hard for Haitians to accept group decisions that do not 
correspond with their own premise.

One quick example. Gérard Pierre-Charles and René Théodore were for a long 
time, members of the same political party. Now, they are sworn political 
enemies.

A political party that is truly democratic may have people with divergent 
political opinions under the same umbrella, so long as the basic belief is 
common. We are not there yet in Haiti.

On the issue of great intellectuals that have left the Lavalas party, I am 
not sure I really would have time or space to answer it here the way I would 
like to. I can assure you however that the last time I checked when I read 
the news about the Lavalas party leadership, I saw names of people with 
different professional titles. They may not be intellectuals in the 
Greco-Roman tradition. But they seem to know what they're doing and have been 
pretty successful at it, at least so far.

On a final note, I used to believe that having those great names on your list 
of members in a political party make it more "tasteful", and intelligent too. 
But after having read some of those "great names" comments about the May 
elections, and heard them over the airwaves, I am simply baffled. I simply 
cannot relate to their intellectual dishonesty. Or is it perhaps denial? I 
even asked myself at times, why was I so taken by them when I was growing up 
in Port-au-Prince? How can they be so blind and misunderstanding of Haiti's 
reality?

Hyppolite Pierre