17397: From Kathy Grey, racine125@aol.com: Race Hatred and the $22 billion (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Racine125@aol.com

Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com> was kind enough to forward Amy Bracken's Reuter wire service article about the "France, pay me my money, $21,685,135,571.48" campaign that Aristide has launched.

Not only is the whole idea absurd - for example, if France is going to pay restitution, are they also going to receive restitution for the helpless French women mutilated and slaughtered by that insane sadist Dessalines and his troops?  Should they be paid back for the land, houses and other possessions that they were forced to leave?  Should each side carefully tot up each act of violence, each abomination, assign them all dollar values, and then split the difference?  It's ridiculous, it's like Great Britain suing the USA because they lost the American Revolutionary War and the War of 1812.  No, that's not true - it's like the USA suing Great Britain AFTER THEY WON  the American Revolutionary War and the War of 1812!

But I think it is mistaken to believe so straightforwardly that "Haiti is making serious efforts to get France to pay restitution", and that's all that's on their minds.  Haitian Foreign Minister Joseph Antonio must be horribly embarassed to have to champion such a cause - it's nothing but a front, a scapegoat, to take people's minds off the fact that Aristide has done nothing for them since removing the boot of the Haitian Army off their neck.

It's disgusting!  It's like pre-World War II Germany, with Hitler whipping up hatred against the Jews to gain power.  And since people here are so much less educated, it's even easier.  Everyone on this list knows perfectly well that I have supported Aristide for years, risked my neck for him during the coup years, etc.  I wasn't expecting this from him.  But let's call a spade a spade, and not two hearts, okay?

Beyond this constant fruitless yammering about "reparations", there is a constant, unrelenting stream of "hate white people" propaganda emitting from the National Palace.  Every Christa'mighty thing that goes wrong in Haiti, it's the "blan".  And no effort is made to distinguish among and between different "blans", all one has to be is "blan" and hey presto -  One is immediately guilty of everything, and deserves almost anything!

Couple that with the general aggressivity of many Haitians, and it's a recipe for disaster.  Fortunately there really aren't enough white people in Haiti that there would be a "white community", or I wouldn't be suprised to see physical attacks against that community.

Not long ago I was shocked to see this sort of racist hatred play itself out in a mundane context.  There is a woman I know, not Haitian but French, who has lived in Haiti for many years.  She is the widow of a Haitian man, and now recently remarried to another.  She raised her first husband's five Haitian children from a previous marriage, and adopted three of her own - all Haitian.  She has educated them all at her own expense.  The eldest is a professional in his mid-thirties living in Europe.  The youngest is seven, and every day this woman, who is in her sixties, rises before dawn to feed, bathe and dress her child for school.

She employs between six and eight people year round, all Haitian.  She is active in community work, disaster preparedness, the local Chamber of Commerce, she has donated both materials and money to improving the area.  She's given cement to build a small bridge, and unlike any of her Haitian neighbors, she pays workers to clean the section of drainage canal that passes in front of her property.  In short, she is a better citizen than most members of her community.

Recently some local madman decided that he should be entitled to this woman's land!  And why?  Because his grandfather sold that land to her late husband's grandfather, and "now a blan should not have it".  He came onto her property with ten or twelve thugs, one equally insane woman who claimed to be his daughter, and a tractor, if you can imagine!  He tore up her access road, he ruined her pasture.

The police came and sent them packing, but a few hours later they returned and resumed their destructive work.  At this point, I arrived on the scene by chance, since some of my livestock was pastured nearby.  The madman's daughter accosted me under the mistaken impression that I was the French woman, the owner of the land.

She didn't waste any time, either.  "You f-cking French whore", she screamed at me in African-American accented English.  "You better go back up there to your house and get all your f-cking sh-t packed and get the hell out of here, we don't want you f-cking white sh-theads here in Haiti!  We have two hundred years of independance, we are not your slaves!  If you were not a whore you would not have come to Haiti!"

I suggested to the woman that I am not French, and that she didn't know who she was talking to.

"Who cares, you f-cking white b-tch!", she replied, and thereupon continued in Creole - "Depi se blan nou pa vle we ou!  Tout blan pou kite peyi dayiti", that is, "As long as you are white we don't want to see you!  All whites must leave Haiti", and so on.

Now, one could dismiss this sort of behavior as evidence of insanity and nothing more, BUT!  The French woman's neighbors, who have known her for decades, who were her late husband's schoolmates, were ecstatic!  They howled, they jeered, they screamed threats, they promised that they would make "white people can't live here".  "Go tell her to come up here so that we can beat her ass!", they screamed.

The madman who came with the tractor, by the way, is an older Haitian man with a horrible reputation for avarice and dishonesty.  No one, not even the Haitians who were watching, had anything good to say about him.  It is certain that he, if he were to take possession of that land by force, would not do one thing to help his neighbors or his community.  But he is "better", they shrieked.  "Li Ayisyen!  Li nan peyi li!"  He's Haitian, he's in HIS country.  (As if he owned a country.)

The fact is, the man doesn't even own the land he invaded, much less.  But the issue of who owned the land wasn't important, all that was important was to hate and rob and commit violence against a white person, because she is white and French and for no other reason.

Finally the police returned, they arrested and handcuffed the tractor driver and the madman who brought him to the woman's land, and carted them away, along with the daughter, all of them still screaming threats and obscenities.  I had been taking photos, and the police requested those photos of me.  I was only too happy to oblige!  Later I went to sit with a few of those same neighbors who had been screaming for the French woman to be beaten and driven from her home.

They felt that it was completely unfair - for the police to have arrested anyone!  It didn't matter that they were trespassing, it didn't matter that they were destroying the possessions of another person, it didn't even matter who actually owned the land, none of that mattered.  All that mattered was the fact that the woman who owns the land is white.  Even being French was secondary.

So, here's what I propose:  Every single white person should leave Haiti, taking with them their wealth, their jobs, their capital, their organizations, their expertise.  And the United States, France and Canada should eject each and every single Haitian.  No more dollars from overseas - instead of sending home US dollars, those Haitians will sit in Haiti praying for employment, a place to live and food to eat.

Surely Aristide, with all his education and all his international experience, knows that there is more than one "blan" in the world, and that not all "blans" could possibly have the same opinion on everything, or the same ethnic heritage.  He could easily say, "We have an issue with the French government, which we are handling in a civilized manner.  But we discourage and condemn race hatred against whites!"  But no, that's not what he does.  It's pathetic that a man who came to power on a landslide of popular approval now has to resort to the most bestial of scapegoating to turn his own people's wrath away from his administration.

Sincerely,

Kathy S. Grey