17830: Esser: 'Imagine! Niggers speaking French!' (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

 From D. Esser torx@joimail.com


The Jamaica Observer
'Imagine! Niggers speaking French!!!'

John Maxwell Wednesday, January 07, 2004

Just 11 months ago, in his celebrated oration documenting
the awesome details of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction,
US Secretary of State Colin Powell made sure that he would
not address the UN General Assembly against the background
of Picasso's Guernica - Picasso's celebrated protest in
paint against superpower terrorism. The mural was hidden
from sight on General Powell's orders, as he documented the
compelling reasons for a pre-emptive invasion of Iraq to
keep the world safe from terrorism.

Guernica memorialises the attack by fascist German and
Italian dive-bombers against the Spanish town of Guernica,
an assault on the civilian population which helped doom the
legitimate, socialist government of Spain and introduce
nearly half a century of dictatorship.

The world considered the dive-bombing of Guernica an
atrocity. Unfortunately for us, the world did not know of
another Guernica, in Haiti, nearly 20 years earlier, when
American dive bombers obliterated peasants, men and women
armed with machetes fighting for the freedom of their
country.

The Haitians are celebrating two centuries of freedom, two
centuries since their slave ancestors rose in revolt to
throw the French colonisers out of Haiti. They had to do it
twice, when Napoleon, newly installed in France, tried to
recapture the richest colony in the world for his country.
The Haitians threw out a British army too, but neither of
these extraordinary and heroic feats is reflected in our
history books.

The unprecedented achievement of Toussaint, Christophe,
Dessalines and the others has been devalued by historians
who have seized on the extravagances of Christophe
particularly to smear a glorious revolution. Since the
revolution, the history of Haiti - like the history of most
of the Americas - has been a history of war, violence, and
exploitation financed and directed by foreigners, mainly
Americans.

It is hardly known here that at the height of the US'
expansionist "Manifest Destiny" period an attempt was made
on Jamaica, after the 1907 earthquake. The Americans at that
time, used all sorts of pretexts to intervene - humanitarian
reasons or to quell disorder or to restore financial
stability or whatever. In the case of Jamaica, the then
governor, Alexander Swettenham, ordered the express
withdrawal of American warships and marines which had landed
in Kingston, so they said, to restore order. Swettenham lost
his job, but those Jamaicans who were looking for an
American godfather had to wait another 90 years.

"If we must die."

In an editorial a few days ago, the Jamaica Observer said,
inter alia that Caricom should have "made it clear to the
Haitian opposition that the bicentenary celebrations of the
achievement of black slaves was of monumental importance to
black people across the world and transcended the immediate
domestic politics. Mr Mbeki of South Africa understood this.
Unfortunately, Mr Patterson didn't."

The artificial instabilities of the 19th century in Latin
America had their real genesis in the Monroe Doctrine, which
decreed that countries in the Americas, except those
controlled by the European powers were subject to US
hegemony. George Canning, then Britain's foreign secretary,
chortled: "I have called a New World into existence to
redress the balance of the Old."

France, the old colonial landlord of Haiti, had been so
scared by the success of the Haitian revolution that it sold
off, for a pittance, the Louisiana territories to the United
Sates, more than doubling the size of that country. But
after Napoleon, France had second thoughts and finally
managed, during another period of Haitian instability, to
extort an "agreement" that condemned Haiti to pay a
substantial annual indemnity to France for the success of
the revolution. This criminal burden was faithfully
respected by the Haitians, though it caused them no end of
grief. With much of their revenue exported to France, there
was little left to develop Haiti. The Americans lent money
to "help" Haiti repay the French. Finally, just like today,
the accumulated debt became impossible to pay and the
American marines stepped in.

The first US marine general, Caperton, was a diplomat. He
was able to set up a puppet regime of collaborators and
secure a "legal" basis for the occupation in the
Haitian-American Treaty of 1915. His successor, General
Littleton Waller, was different: "These people are niggers
in spite of the thin varnish of education and
refinement.Down in their hearts they are just the same
happy, idle, irresponsible people we know of."

Not surprisingly, Waller's regime provoked resistance, led
mainly by a man called Charlemagne Peralte. The puppet
government had been forced to agree to changing the
constitution to allow foreigners to own land and American
capital poured in, destroying forests to plant coffee and
citrus. The US next introduced forced labour, under an old
Haitian law which commanded the people to give an occasional
free day to build the country. In the American regime, the
corveé was transformed into something indistinguishable from
slavery.

Charlemagne Peralte was murdered by American troops. His
people were bombed and otherwise massacred. Haiti was safe
for American democracy. One of those who made it so was
American marine, General Smedley Butler, who, after he
retired had second thoughts:
"I helped make Mexico.safe for American oil interests in
1914. 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. Like all the
members of the military profession, I never had a thought of
my own until I left the service. My mental faculties
remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of
higher-ups. This is typical.in the military service." Butler
compared himself unfavourably to Al Capone. He said his
official racketeering made Capone look like an amateur.

Floating barracoons in Kingston Harbour

The utter backwardness of the present government of Jamaica
was never better expressed than in 1994, when, stooging for
the Americans, it allowed the mooring of American "floating
barracoons" in Kingston harbour. On these ships Haitians
fleeing the successors to Duvalier were "processed" - most
of them sent back to the country in which they were in
danger of having their "faces chopped off", according to no
less than President Clinton.

This unprincipled and barbarous betrayal of fellow human
beings, our brothers, made me want to vomit. It still does.
Because that stooging prepared the way for what now happens
in Haiti, where forces antagonistic to every principle of
the original revolution are determined, at long last, to
make Haiti submit, to tie her down for eternal rape - to use
General Butler's word.

People will tell you that Haitians are the authors of their
own misery. As other people say, people who don't remember
their history are doomed to repeat it.

The dismemberment and strip mining of Haiti's economy,
social, political and intellectual life was under regimes
tolerated or sponsored by the United States. To this day the
United States protects some of the face-choppers, people who
formed the US-sponsored FRAPH, supposedly a force to rebuild
Haiti, according to democratic free-market principles.

Today, elements of the same forces provide the opposition to
President Aristide, defecating on their own history with a
little help from their friends.

"The Haiti Democracy Project was officially launched
Tuesday, November 19, 2002 at the Brookings Institution in
Washington, DC. The inauguration brought together over 120
guests and participants from the Haitian-American
community.along with members of the US academic and
foreign-policy communities." This, according to the Haiti
Democracy project (HDP) website.

Even the assistant secretary general of the OAS, Luigi
Einaudi, was there - "Einaudi opened the talks with dire
predictions that Haiti was fast approaching a point where
diplomatic means would no longer contribute to solve the
crisis. According to Einaudi, those concerned about Haiti
should at this time be gathering for a 'wake'." - (Source
HDP.)

For an OAS official to take part in such a ceremony and say
what he said, seems to me to be grossly improper, at the
very least.

In June the HDP exhorted the OAS to disbar Haiti from
membership and to intervene to remove President Aristide
from office.

HDP and others blame Aristide for everything that is wrong
with Haiti. After his re-election less than four years ago
the multilateral agencies, at the urging of the United
States, withheld all aid from Haiti until they were
satisfied that Haiti had made itself into a democracy
recognisable as such by Americans. The pivot of this
blackmail was the fact that there were irregularities in the
elections of a few senators, a fact of much slighter
significance than the irregularities in the election of
President Bush. In Haiti, there was absolutely no question
of who was the people's choice.

In the case of Haiti these "irregularities" now assume
transcendental importance, and are cause for the world to
condemn Haiti to starve in obscene misery. Without the
money, Haiti's debt, incurred mainly by the Duvaliers,
cannot be serviced if the people of Haiti are to eat or go
to school. Without the money, thousands perish every year
from HIV/AIDS and starvation.

William Jennings Bryan, secretary of state to US President
Woodrow Wilson, eighty years ago expressed the contempt in
which the Haitians are held by the Anglo-Saxon power
structure:
"Imagine!" Bryan said , "Niggers speaking French!!!" Perhaps
it would be to our mutual advantage if Mr Patterson might
learn either French or Creole, like the Haitian
revolutionary hero, Bouckman, who was a Jamaican.

Copyright ©2004 John Maxwell
maxinf@cwjamaica.com
http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/columns/html/20040106T190000-
0500_53987_OBS__IMAGINE__NIGGERS_SPEAKING_FRENCH____.asp