Haiti Genocide a la
bonne femme
John Maxwell
This
article originally appeared in Jamaica
Observer.
"This clay is guaranteed to make your bones stronger even
as your flesh melts away."
We have
some great news for dieters this week!
The
Haitians, with a little help from the Americans, the French and the Canadians,
have produced a solution to the obesity crisis that now threatens western
civilization.
Haiti's
great and good friends in Washington, Paris and Ottawa have, at last, after several years of hard,
grinding effort, managed to create the condition known as ‘critical mess' [sic]
allowing the Haitians to produce a diet which - unlike any other slimming
solution - is absolutely guaranteed to work. Other slimming solutions have
always had one weak spot: no matter how low-calorie the diet is, dieters can
always defeat the purpose by overeating.
The new
Haitian diet makes that impossible!
No matter
how much you eat you will not get fat!!
This is
sensational news!!!
Here for
the information of our avid readers is the recipe, direct from the street
vendors of Port au Prince.
One caveat:
the special ingredient may have to be imported from Haiti. We haven't yet found
a gourmet specialty shop in North America which stocks the main ingredient -
Glaise de Plateau Central - a special kind of clay from the Central Plateau of
Haiti. This clay is yellowish in color and the best grades contain lots of
healthy calcium, guaranteed to make your bones stronger even as your too, too
solid flesh melts away.
Method
Take enough
Glaise de Plateau Central and dry it in the sun.
Pound (in a
mortar) and sieve the dried glaise,
to remove any small stones, twigs, insect parts, bird droppings or other
visible impurities.
Add a
little water, enough to make a soft dough.
Add a
little fat and a soupçon of salt (gros sel, pounded fine).
Mix all
together forming small - say 2 inch - cookies.
Expose to
the sun on a zinc sheet (beaten as flat
as possible).
When dry
your mud pies are ready to eat.
Bon
appetit!!!
It may
sound better in French but it is genocide in any language.
‘And so say all of us!'
The
Haitians are giving new meaning to the phrase "dirt poor."
Four years
after the Americans, Canadians and French beheaded democracy in Haiti it is now
clear that a Final Solution is in sight for the 200-year old Haitian problem.
Almost
exactly three years ago, on January 30, 2005, I wrote in this column in this
paper about the world's commemoration
of the liberation of the Auschwitz
murder factory sixty year before
Elie
Weisel, a survivor of the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews, said eloquently:
"In those
times those who were in the death camps felt not only tortured and murdered by
the enemy, but also tortured and murdered by what they considered to be the
world's silence and indifference ."
" ... Those
who committed the crimes were not vulgar, underworld thugs, but men with high
positions in government, academia, industry and medicine." Weisel said.
I wrote
then: "The world is remembering Auschwitz and the Holocaust. It is not paying
any notice to the 200-year Holocaust still underway in Haiti. There too, the
people in hazard must feel tortured and murdered by the indifference of a world
conned into believing that the high-minded leaders of the United States,
France, Canada and Brazil have the interest of the Haitian people at heart when
their agents torture, murder, maim and rape Haitians for no better reason than
that they support their democratically elected and unconstitutionally removed
President, Jean Bertrand Aristide."
That was in
2005.
"Haitians have had their leaders kidnapped, tortured and
murdered, innocent women and children have been killed by the UN occupation
forces working to eliminate the enemies of the Haitian ruling elite."
Since then
the Haitians have continued to languish in suffering. They have had their
leaders kidnapped, tortured and murdered, innocent women and children have been
killed by the UN occupation forces working to eliminate the enemies of the
Haitian ruling elite, the destruction of
Haitian democratic organization meant the death of thousands from
hurricane, floods and other natural disasters, and they have waited for hours
in the heat of the sun to cast their votes hoping that those votes would have
meant a better life for them, or at least a chance for a better life. That
hasn't happened.
Haiti is
still paying for the foreign aid gormandized by the Duvaliers and their allies
and they still have no roads, no hospitals, and their medical school started by
Aristide with the aid of the Cubans is now the site of the barracks of the
occupying forces.
These
Haitians are the people who helped the Americans win their independence,
destroyed the American ambitions of Napoleon, destroyed slavery and accelerated
the abolition of the slave trade. They are guilty on all counts and obviously
deserve to be punished. They inhabit one of those places Mr. Bush called "the
dark corners of the world."
Three years
ago, at the Holocaust commemoration the US vice president Mr. Cheney delivered
himself of these words:
" ...these
great evils of history were perpetuated not in some remote, uncivilized part of
the world, but in the very heart of the
civilized world. ... Men without
conscience are capable of any cruelty the human mind can imagine. Therefore we
must teach every generation the values of tolerance and decency and moral
courage. And in every generation, free nations must maintain the will, the
foresight and the strength to fight tyranny and spread the freedom that leads
to peace."
And so say
all of us! And so say all of us!! And
so say all of us !!!
Meanwhile,
the Haitians eat dirt.
Gimmick Development
Caribbean
culture - the product of a tiny proportion of the world's people, is awesome.
We have produced Jean Jacques Dessalines,
Marcus Garvey, Fidel Castro and Norman Manley, Capablanca and George
Headley, Alexandre Dumas, Arthur Lewis and Derek Walcott, Ernesto Lecuona, Bob
Marley and the Mighty Sparrow, Karl Parboosingh and Cecil Baugh, Colin Powell
and Malcolm X to name only a few who have changed the world. Visitors to the
region, especially to Jamaica, are unlikely to discover any of this.
Caribbean
culture is the magnet that draws foreign visitors to these countries but once
they get here, they could be anywhere. They don't eat Caribbean food or meet
Caribbean people or hear any but the most formulaic, tired Caribbean music.
There are
exceptions of course. But Caribbean tourism is largely not a Caribbean product.
The people who are the stewards of the flame that draws the visitors have very
little part in the industry. In Jamaica the people are losing their beaches and
even their landscapes to so-called "developments" which accord no respect nor
pay attention to their Jamaican context.
"Caribbean tourism is largely not a Caribbean product."
The Jamaica
of song and story is replaced by petting zoos featuring captive camels,
parakeets and dolphins and other exotica imported from other places.
"Development"
in Jamaica follows the maxim quoted in the 1954 World Bank Report on Jamaica:
"In Jamaica, the absolute ownership of land means in practice the absolute
right of the owner to ruin the land in
his own way." These days one does not
even have to be the absolute owner. If, like Robert Cartade, one can
persuade the right people one can get permission to destroy Hope Gardens and if
the "proles" protest too much, Long Mountain instead. If you are the government
you can pour concrete and sterilize an area half the size of Hanover to build a
Doomsday Highway that, as I predicted, will be impossible to pay for. We can
try to rescue disastrous developments like the Port Antonio Marina by making an
even bigger bet on a new airport (for flying yachts?). We can destroy Falmouth
so that financiers can make millions from cruise ships before they are sunk by
the price of petroleum in five or ten years.
We can
destroy Kingston Harbor by pollution or by dredging and we are now told that
the parish of Portland is so beautiful and so attractive that it must be saved
for foreigners and covered with villas and other attractions which will change
it into Las Vegas by the sea.
The latest
"development" proposals for St. Thomas mean that the people will give up some
of the most valuable farmland in Jamaica for our fourth - fourth! -
international airport. Jamaica already has one mile of roadway for every square
mile of land. We will now have one international airport for every thousand
square miles of land or one international airport for every 200 square miles of
reasonably level land.
And all
this is to be done without consultation with the Jamaican people whose
sacrifice is essential for these ‘developments'. Although we are bound by the
Treaty of Rio, by the Cartagena Convention and other national and international
laws, the people of Jamaica will be asked to yield their treasure as the
Arawaks/Tainos were "asked" to yield theirs.
"I claim
this land in the name of Development!"
So There!
Give us a
break.
Endnote: Is it just me? Or is anyone else
disturbed by the heavy promotion of the film "Vantage Point" on CNN in
concert with news reports and programs about the US party presidential
primaries. ‘Vantage Point" is about the assassination of an American
President, and the promos, especially
when they follow Barack Obama political advertisements, give me the creeps.
John Maxwell of the University of
the West Indies (UWI) is the veteran Jamaican journalist who in 1999
single-handedly thwarted the Jamaican government's efforts to build houses at
Hope, the nation's oldest and best known botanical gardens. His campaigning
earned him first prize in the 2000 Sandals Resort's Annual Environmental
Journalism Competition, the region's richest journalism prize. He is also the
author of How to Make Our Own News: A Primer for Environmentalists and
Journalists. Jamaica, 2000. Mr. Maxwell can be reached at [email protected]
Copyright©John
Maxwell