[News] No, Mister! You Cannot Share My Pain!
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Tue Jan 19 11:46:38 EST 2010
<http://www.infowars.com/no-mister-you-cannot-share-my-pain/>No,
Mister! You Cannot Share My Pain!
<http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/columns/Maxwell-Jan-17>John Maxwell
Jamaica Observer
http://www.infowars.com/no-mister-you-cannot-share-my-pain/
January 17, 2010
If you shared my pain you would not continue to
make me suffer, to torture me, to deny me my
dignity and my rights, especially my rights to
self-determination and self-expression.
Six years ago you sent your Ambassador
Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to
perform an action illegal under the laws of your
country, my country and of the international community of nations.
featured stories No, Mister! You Cannot Share My Pain!
haiti
It was an act so outrageous, so bestially vile
and wicked that your journalists and news
agencies, your diplomats and politicians to this
day cannot bring themselves to truthfully
describe or own up to the crime that was
committed when US Ambassador James Foley, a
career diplomat, arrived at the house of
President Jean-Bertrand Aristide with a bunch of
CIA thugs and US Marines to kidnap the president of Haiti and his wife.
The Aristides were stowed aboard a CIA plane
normally used for renditions of suspected
terrorists to the worldwide US gulag of dungeons and torture chambers.
The plane, on which the Aristides are listed as
cargo, flew to Antigua an hour away and
remained on the ground in Antigua while Colin
Powells State Department and the CIA tried to
blackmail and bribe various African countries to
accept (give asylum to) the kidnapped president and his wife.
The Central African Republic one of George W
Bushs Dark Corners of the World agreed for
an undisclosed sum, to give the Aristides temporary asylum.
Before any credible plot can be designed and paid
for for the disappearance of the Aristides
they are rescued by friends, flown to temporary
asylum in Jamaica where the Government cravenly
yielded to the blackmail of Condoleezza Rice to
deny them the permanent asylum to which they were
entitled and which most Jamaicans had hoped for.
Meanwhile, in Haiti, the US Marines protected an
undisciplined ragbag of rapists and murderers to
allow them entry to the capital. The Marines
chased the medical students out of the new
Medical School established by Aristide with Cuban
help and teachers. The Marines bivouac in the
school, going out on nightly raids, trailed by
fleets of ambulances with body bags, hunting down
Fanmi Lavalas activists described as chimeres terrorists.
The real terrorists, led by two convicted
murderers, Chamblain and Philippe, assisted the
Marines in the eradication of chimeres until
the Marines were replaced by foreign troops, paid
by the United Nations, who took up the hunt on
behalf of the civilised world France, Canada, the US and Brazil.
The terrorists and the remains of the Duvalier
tontons and the CIA-bred FRAPF declared open
season on the remnants of Aristides programmes
to build democracy. They burnt down the new
museum of Haitian culture, destroyed the
childrens television station and generally laid
waste to anything and everything which could
remind Haitians of their glorious history.
Haitians dont know that without their help Latin
America might still be part of the Spanish Empire
and Simon Bolivar a brief historical footnote.
Imagine, Niggers Speaking French!
About 90 years ago when Professor Woodrow Wilson
was president of the USA, his secretary of state
was a fundamentalist lawyer named William
Jennings Bryan who had three times run unsuccessfully for president.
The Americans had decided to invade Haiti to
collect debts owed by Haiti to Citibank.
General Smedley Butler, the only American soldier
to have twice won the Congressional Medal of
Honour, described his role in the US Army:
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.
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.
Secretary Bryan was dumbfounded by the Haitians.
Imagine, he said, Niggers speaking French!
Smedley Butler and Bryan were involved in Haiti
because of something that happened nearly a
hundred years before. The French slave-masters,
expelled from Haiti and defeated again when they
tried to re-enslave the Haitians, connived with
the Americans to starve them into submission by a
trade embargo. With no sale for Haitian sugar,
the country was weak and run-down when a French
fleet arrived bearing a demand for reparations.
Having bought their freedom in blood, the
Haitians were to purchase it again in gold.
The French demanded, essentially, that the
Haitians pay France an amount equivalent to 90
per cent of the entire Haitian budget for the
foreseeable future. When this commitment proved
too arduous to honour, the City Bank offered the
Haitians a debt exchange, paying off the French
in exchange for a lower-interest, longer-term
debt. The terms may have seemed better but were
just as usurious and it was not paid off until 1947.
Because of the debt the Americans invaded Haiti,
seized the Treasury, exiled the president, their
Jim Crow policies were used to divide the
society, to harass the poor and finally provoked
a second struggle for freedom which was one of
the most brutal episodes in colonial history.
Long before Franco bombed Guernica, exciting the
horror and revulsion of civilised people, the
Americans perfected their dive-bombing techniques
against unarmed Haitian peasants, many of whom had never seen aircraft before.
The Americans set up a Haitian Army in the image
of their Jim Crow Marines, and it was these
people, the alien and alienated Élite who, with
some conscripted blacks like the Duvaliers, have
ruled Haiti for most of the last century.
When I flew over Haiti for the first time in 1959
en route from New York to San Juan, Puerto Rico,
I saw for the first time the border between the
green Dominican Republic and brown Haiti.
First-world journalists interpret the absence of
trees on the Haitian side to the predations of
the poor, disregarding the fact that Western
religion and American capitalism were mainly responsible.
Why is it that nowhere else in the Caribbean is there similar deforestation?
Haitis Dessalines constitution offered sanctuary
to every escaped slave of any colour. All such
people of whatever colour were deemed black and
entitled to citizenship. Only officially
certified blacks could own land in Haiti.
The American occupation, anticipating Hayek,
Freedman and Greenspan, decided that such a rule
was a hindrance to development. The assistant
secretary of the US Navy, one Franklin D
Roosevelt, was given the job of writing a new, modern constitution for Haiti.
This constitution meant foreigners could own
land. Within a very short time the lumberjacks
were busy, felling old growth Mahogany and
Caribbean Pine for carved doors for the rich and
mahogany speedboats, boardroom tables seating 40,
etc. The devastated land was put to produce
rubber, sisal for ropes and all sorts of pie in the sky plantations.
When President Paul Magloire came to Jamaica 50
years ago Haitians were still speaking of an
Artibonite dam for electricity and irrigation.
But the ravages of the recent past were too much to recover.
As Marguerite Laurent (EziliDanto) writes: Dont
expect to learn how a people with a Vodun culture
that reveres nature and especially the Mapou
(oak-like or ceiba pendantra/bombax) trees, and
other such big trees as the abode of living
entities and therefore as sacred things, were
forced to watch the Catholic Church, during
Rejete the violent anti-Vodun crusade gather
whole communities at gunpoint into public
squares, and forced them to watch their agents
burn Haitian trees in order to teach Haitians
their Vodun Gods were not in nature, that the trees were the houses of Satan.
In partnership with the US, the mulatto President
Elie Lescot (1941-45) summarily expelled peasants
from more than 100,000 hectares of land, razing
their homes and destroying more than a million
fruit trees in the vain effort to cultivate
rubber on a large plantation scale. Also, under
the pretext of the Rejete campaign, thousands of
acres of peasant lands were cleared of sacred
trees so that the US could take their lands for agribusiness.
After the Flood
Norman Manley used to say River Come Down when
his party seemed likely to prevail. The Kreyol
word Lavalas conveys the same meaning.
Since the Haitian peoples decisive rejection of
the Duvalier dictatorships in the early 90s,
their spark and leader has been Jean-Bertrand
Aristide whose bona fides may be assessed from
the fact that the CIA and conservative Americans
have been trying to discredit him almost from the word go.
As he put it in one of his books, his intention
has been to build a paradise on the garbage heap
bequeathed to Haiti by the US and the Elite.
The bill of particulars is too long to go into
here, but the destruction of the new museum of
Culture, the breaking up of the medical school,
the destruction of the childrens television
station gives you the flavour. But the essence is
captured in the brutal attempt to obliterate the
spirit of Haitian community; the attempt to
destroy Lavalas by murdering its men and raping
its women, the American-directed subversion of a
real police force, the attacks on education and
the obliteration of the community self-help
systems which meant that when Hurricane Jeanne
and all the other weather systems since have
struck Haiti, many more have died than in any
other country similarly stricken. In an
earthquake, totally unpredictable, every bad factor is multiplied.
The American blocking of international aid means
that there is no modern water supply anywhere, no
town planning, no safe roads, none of the
ordinary infrastructure of any other Caribbean
state. There are no building standards, no emergency shelters, no parks.
So, when I write about mothers unwittingly
walking on dead babies in the mud, when I write
about people so poor they must eat patties made
of clay and shortening, when I write about people
with their faces chopped off or about any of
eight million horror stories from the crime scene
that is Haiti, please dont tell me you share their pain or mine.
Tell me, where is Lovinsky Pierre Antoine and ten thousand like him?
If you share my pain and their pain, why dont
you stop causing it? Why dont you stop the torture?
If you want to understand me, look at the woman
in the picture (above), and the children
half-buried with her. You cannot hear their
screams because they know there is no point in
screaming. It will do no more good than voting.
What is she thinking: perhaps it is something
like this No, mister! You cannot share my pain!
Some time, perhaps after the camera is gone,
people will return to dig us out with their bare hands. But not you.
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