[News] No, Mister! You Cannot Share My Pain!

[Anti-Imperialist News]

<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 
Powell’s 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 
Bush’s ‘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 Aristide’s programmes 
to build democracy. They burnt down the new 
museum of Haitian culture, destroyed the 
children’s television station and generally laid 
waste to anything and everything which could 
remind Haitians of their glorious history.

Haitians don’t 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?

Haiti’s 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: Don’t 
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 people’s 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 children’s 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 don’t 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 don’t 
you stop causing it? Why don’t 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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