23274: Esser: Zombies a Go-Go (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. Esser <torx@joimail.com>

COMMON SENSE 433
Sept. 25, 2004

Zombies a Go-Go
by John Maxwell

So Kofi Annan has at last discovered that 3 A’s
(Anglo-American-Australian) attack on Iraq attack was illegal and
against the basic premises of the United Nations. Some of us knew it
then, and said so. Some of us wondered why Kofi Annan withdrew his UN
inspectors from Iraq, giving the US carte-blanche to launch its
bombers against an innocent people.

But courage was in short supply those days, as it is now, and cowards
abound and proliferate.
If the war on Iraq was a crime against humanity, what description do
we use for the decapitation of the Haitian democracy?

The world Press, those brave gladiators for justice and truth, speak
about “hapless Haiti” and the “hapless Haitians”; they hide  their
prejudice and deceit  behind euphemisms and euphuisms, behind
circumlocution, obfuscations  and outright lies to conceal foul
crimes. They say President Aristide  fled ‘amid a popular revolt’  –
of about 500 bandits in a population of 8 million.

But the Haitians are “hapless”. Our leaders, like the leaders of the
United States, France and Canada, the triad behind the criminal
enterprise in Haiti, we are all full of hap:  hatred, arrogance and
prejudice .

   While we, the hap-filled, are cleaning up and burying the few
unfortunates killed by Category Five hurricanes, hapless Haiti is
burying, in mass graves, thousands of the hapless killed by extremely
heavy rain from a storm whose winds affected Haiti only minimally.

It is the second time in less than a year that thousands of hapless
Haitians are dying because of rain.

History in Haiti has a habit of repeating itself. And history, in
Haiti, consists largely of the United States and its assaults on
Haitian freedom, all well meant, of course, and obviously  intended
to reduce Haiti’s Haplessness index to manageable levels.

Who do they think they are?

  Haiti’s history of haplessness began more than 200 years ago when a
Jamaican runaway slave called Bouckman lit the spark that fired  the
Haitian revolution. Bouckman, despite being a giant of a man, a born
leader and probably a Muslim (think terrorist) did not survive to see
the fruits of the revolution. He was betrayed, captured and his head
stuck on a pike to discourage the others –perhaps a primitive attempt
at exorcising demonic  ideas of freedom and liberty from the
revolutionaries.

  It didn’t work. The Haitians went on to defeat the French colonial
forces, then defeated a British expeditionary force and then defeated
a French expeditionary army under Napoleon’s brother-in-law, killing
some 60,000 Frenchmen in the process.

Before that  the Haitians had fought alongside the American
revolutionaries to help them throw the British out of the American
colonies. Haitian help was crucial in at least two battles in which
British power was broken – at Savannah, Georgia and at Yorktown.

In addition to all that,  the Haitian revolution made another massive
contribution to the new American nation: in defeating France, the
Haitians exhausted the French treasury to the point where Napoleon
had to sell Louisiana to the US or risk losing it to the British. The
Louisiana Purchase doubled the  size of the US.

So, if the Haitians contributed so much to American independence and
development, why is it that in their extremity of grief and
suffering, the United States treats the Haitians so meanly?
Originally, when the scale of the current  disaster became known,
the United States, the richest country in the world, offered about US
$60,000 for Haitian relief. Venezuela offered $1 million, Trinidad
and Tobago earmarked US $5 million while the European Union pledged
US$ 1.8 million. Somewhat abashed, the US raised its pledge to US $2
million. In the US itself, where the damage has been far less severe,
the federal government alone is contributing more than $6 billion in
hurricane relief.

Charity, of course, begins at home or perhaps, it is simply another
case of Haitian haplessness. But it must be said, however discreetly,
that the United States has had a great deal to do with the current
Haitian propensity to catastrophe, by destroying Haitian governments,
Haitian infrastructure economic and social, and by policies which
have reduced Haiti almost to a desert.

The United States and Britain refused to recognise Haiti after it
declared independence The US made recognition conditional on the
former colonial power, France,  recognising Haiti’s autonomy. At that
time, of course, the United States was busy titrating the humanity of
blacks and came to the conclusion that a black was 60% human and
therefore not entitled to  all the rights of Man. And Liberty was as
dangerous then as socialism was in the twentieth century.

Three-fifths Human

Oddly, the French, the Americans and the Haitians had all been
inspired by the Enlightenment and Tom Paine’s codification of the
Rights of man. But only the  Haitian revolution recognised all those
rights. In the US blacks and women, for instance, had to wait more
than a century to reach the status guaranteed to Haitians. France and
the US maintained slavery more than 50 years after Haiti abolished it.

With the British and the US playing hard-ball on the recognition
question, France felt able to demand that the Haitians should pay
cash for their freedom. In Jamaica and other British colonies, the
state paid the slaveowners compensation. In Haiti the former slaves
paid twice, in blood and in treasure. When they had trouble paying
back the French the kindly American bankers came to Haiti’s rescue.
We will lend you the money to pay off your debt, they said, and Haiti
achieved another first becoming the first Third world debtor nation.

That debt was eventually paid off more than a century later– the last
payment was  in 1947. In the meantime it had caused Haiti the most
extreme distress, wrecked her infrastructure and destroyed her
independence. What the metropolitan countries could not achieve by
conquest, they achieved by compound interest.

Early in the last century, the Americans became a little dissatisfied
with Haitian repayment of their debt, and that led to an immediate
increase in Haitian haplessness. The US invaded, changed their
constitution, took away their land, chopped down their trees to plant
sisal, logwood, coffee and pineapple and destroyed the agricultural
base of the country. After they left officially in 1935, however, the
Americans bequeathed Haiti an armed force which was corrupt, cruel,
ungovernable and in thrall to the US. It guaranteed that any Haitian
President either obeyed Washington or went into exile. In 1947
Dumarsais Estimé, said to be a socialist ,was deposed after a couple
of years. That began a period of dictatorship distinguished chiefly
by American support for the ruthless Duvalier and his inane son, Baby
Doc.

During the US occupation (1915 to 1935) the Haitians tried to throw
the occupiers out, only to be bombed and strafed in a eerie foretaste
of the fascist bombing of Guernica during the Spanish civil war.
Nobody made much of the Haitian version,  because, after all, what
were they but a bunch of “Niggers speaking French” as they were
described by William Jennings Bryan, one of Colin Powell’s
predecessors as US Secretary of State. The Haitian resistance
leader, Charlemagne Peralte, was like Bouckman, betrayed, murdered
and his head exhibited to discourage the others.
History repeats itself in Haiti, but never as farce.

The Congo redux

Today, we watch as the United States leads its partners France and
Canada, in an adventure in Haiti which already resembles King
Leopold’s so-called “humanitarian” incursion into the Congo over a
century ago. That enterprise, described by the King of the Belgians
as rather like “a Red Cross scheme” left between ten and twenty
million Congolese dead or with their hands and feet chopped off for
misbehaviour. Four of them went to university.

The American adventure in Haiti has not so far  been identified by
anyone as an illegal enterprise. It would seem to be, on the face of
it, an  illegal trespass into the affairs of another country, an
illegal complicity in the illegal removal of a duly elected head of
state and an illegal interference in the sovereign rights of Haitians
–for a start.

Mr  Kofi Annan, who has now condemned the  American adventure in Iraq
may yet find time to condemn the one in Haiti, but probably not
before the US elections. He is the chief guardian, it is alleged, of
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

In the meantime, however, it is clear that the intervention has had
some catastrophic consequences. The bandits let loose and sanctioned
by the Americans, French and Canadians, have destroyed the health,
educational and democratic systems of Haiti – such as they were. More
important for the latest disaster, they destroyed the Civil Defense
structure, the network which would have warned Haitians of impending
disaster and which would have at least attempted to rescue those
worst affected. It is likely that had this organisation been in
existence instead of in hiding from the  interim government’s
murderous heroes, so many would not have died.

But it is also clear that the Americans, Canadians and French do not
believe that the Haitians are entitled to the same rights as other
human beings. Perhaps, using their renowned scientific expertise and
prowess, they have once again figured out what precise degree of
humanity is possessed by each Haitian, and perhaps by each Jamaican
and Trinidadian also.

That, of course, would explain why it is not necessary for anyone to
discover what really happened on February 29, when President Aristide
was posted to the central African Republic as “cargo” in a CIA plane
which just happened to be on hand when the US Ambassador, Mr Foley,
decided to pay a call on  the President before dawn one morning.

Perhaps it may explain why various Caribbean leaders are content to
watch the Haitians die without being able to organise to  help
themselves, because of course, the Haitians are “hapless” and not
100% human.

It may not have occurred to our leaders that in condemning the
Haitians to ‘haplessness’, they are in fact, recognizing that the
United States has the right to legalise a new class of human being,
one without rights – like the thousands locked away in Abu Ghraib,
Guantanamo and a host of secret dungeons round the world.

It may not have occurred to our leaders that in acquiescing to this
foul doctrine they are not only condemning Haitians to death but they
are condemning themselves and us. It may not have occurred to them
that in their acquiescence they are occupying the same moral ground
once inhabited by such as Pierre Laval, Vidkun Quisling, Pol Pot and
the Africans who sold their brothers into slavery .

But, as the West Indies cricket team has proved, in some cases,
leaders are expendable. When the Laras, the Pattersons and the Owen
Arthurs fail us, there may be others on whom we can depend to defend
the hapless and the wretched of the earth.

Copyright©2004 John Maxwell
maxinf@cwjamaica.com
.