14283: Simidor re Pina, re Montas (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: karioka9@arczip.com

The quotes attributed to Montas in the Defede article seem sensible enough.
They take nothing away from my argument, however, in as much as I was
conjecturing that the attack against Montas might have been a warning to
keep her mouth shut, whenever the report about her husband’s killing
happens to be released.  Either the investigating judge’s report is a
whitewash, a “non-lieu” which indicts no one in particular, or it indicts those
who pulled the trigger but leaves those who commandeered the crime in the
dark.  In either case, Montas would be expected to denounce the report as a
cover-up, hence the attempt to silence her.

Let me add that this enshrining of Michelle Montas as holy icon, with blessed
citations and paraphrases, leaves me rather cold.  I was interviewed
simultaneously with her after the first verdict in the Louima case, over WBAI
radio in NYC, and I recall her gushing enthusiasm about this “wonderful
victory for the Haitian community.”  As one who had helped lead community
efforts to demand justice in the Louima case, I objected that the investigation
and therefore the verdict did not go far enough, that Volpe deserved what he
got but that the “Blue Wall of Silence” was still intact.  Predictably her
response was that “people from the ultra-left are never satisfied.”  And I
remember thinking at the time, “there goes a bourgeois woman who knows
which side her bread is buttered!”

For the record, you cannot label as “ultra-left” every opportunist who recants
their “socialist” or “communist” beliefs because the Soviet Union is no longer
there to fund their pretenses, or because they are now feeding at the Lavalas
trough.  At some point in the 1970s, it was fashionable for (petty-) bourgeois
types like Jean Dominique to be on the left.  I suppose that Montas also saw
herself then as being on the left, by association.  The truth is that well before
Aristide and his Lavalas populism, these ladies and gentlemen of the
bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie were at the beck and call of Jimmy Carter
and the mighty US Democratic Party.  Jean Dominique was a Haitian
nationalist and a man of courage, but let’s not mix our pitimi and diri just
because they both happen to be grains!

Daniel Simidor, who always calls a rat by its name.