by Ezili Dantò
Imperialists all want the same thing: to subjugate smaller peoples to the interest of empire. Any imperial power worth his salt is trailing an entourage of captive little countries echoing the bully’s every word. Today, just as in the days of President Franklin Roosevelt, the U.S. diplomatic entourage includes beaten-down little republics like Haiti and Honduras.
US Control of Haiti and Other Little Republics' Vote at the UN is Not New
by Ezili Dantò
“Stop being so confused by the rebranding of the same old fascists.”
I found an August 10, 2012 George Will opinion piece relevant to UN/US occupied Haiti today for reasons that would probably not occur to Mr. Will. The piece discusses and juxtaposes other US candidates' "indelicate claims" to Democrat Obama's current campaign obfuscations that have caused consternation.
Whether intended or not, the opinion piece made a point we've made in several articles and commentaries about the key players in Haiti's containment in poverty and misery today: the Barack Obama administration, Dr. Paul Farmer, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, USAID, Congress, World Bank and the tiny big business corporatocracy they all serve.
See, for instance "US False Benevolence: Failure of Foreign ‘AID’ is Structural"; “Not voting for Obama: We’re Not Even Buying a Voting Ticket to the Show a or, "Haiti: Time to remember Kandyo, the Malfini and Mongoose," where I wrote:
"Stop being so CONFUSED folks by the rebranding of the same old fascists. The good cop/bad cop play-acting of the Democrats and Republicans or that of the ‘progressives’ and the right wingers...don't be confused about the power plays between the malfini and the mongoose. Between Democrats and Republicans (Between Obama and Bush.) Or, 'between Wilson and Harding,' to quote (Kandyo) one of Haiti's most favorite satirist" in the time of the first US occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934.
Maybe Mr. Will intended to make the point that the Republicans and Democrats (the US duopoly) as well as the Left and Right wingers in Congress and elsewhere, mostly serve the same global oligarchs and their profit-over-people interests, especially in the realm of US foreign policy. But I doubt it.
Speaking about US presidential campaigns and an Obama current public faux pas in an opinion piece titled "It’s a question of context," George Wills wrote, in part:
"On Aug. 18, 1920, the Democrats’ vice presidential nominee (Franklin Delano Roosevelt), campaigning in Butte, Mont., said that it would be fine for the United States to join the League of Nations because our nation would have multiple votes. He assured listeners that ‘the votes of Cuba, Haiti, San Domingo, Panama, Nicaragua and of the other Central American states’ would not be cast ‘differently from the vote of the United States,’ which is ‘the big brother of these little republics.’
“Then, (Franklin Delano Roosevelt) referring to his days as assistant secretary of the Navy, the vice presidential candidate said: ‘You know I have had something to do with running a couple of little republics. The facts are that I wrote Haiti’s constitution myself and, if I do say so, I think it a pretty good constitution.’ He added: ‘Why, I have been running Haiti or San Domingo for the past seven years.’”
Maybe Mr. Will intended to make the point that the US empire's control of the Haiti and other little republics' vote at the UN is not new.
Maybe Mr. Will intended to make the point that Haitians often make, in Haitian folkloric peasant parlance. That is, Haiti and other US dominated client states, and their huddled masses are like small chickens. Both the malfini (ie. the birds of prey – the Republicans, neocons or Right wingers) and the mongoose (ie. the small carnivores - the progressives or Left wingers) are just fighting over which of them will either swoop down from the sky (the malfini – birds of prey) or crawl up from the ground (the destructive terrestrial mongoose) to eat – plunder, pillage, exploit Haiti or the world's poor masses (the chickens preyed upon by both these predators)! That's probably not what George Will intended to point out with the FDR/Haiti anecdote in his opinion piece. Nonetheless, he did. FDR and the US did rewrite Haiti's Constitution, controlled its UN vote, just as the current US occupying powers in Haiti today control Haiti, helped select its president, are rewriting Haiti's current Constitution as well as Haiti's mining laws.
Human rights attorney, Ezili Dantò, is dedicated to correcting the media lies and colonial narratives about Haiti. A writer, performance poet and lawyer, Ezili Dantò is founder and president of the Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network (HLLN), runs the Ezili Dantò website, listserve, eyewitness project, Zili Dlo Clean Water Program, FreeHaitiMovement and the on-line journal, Haitian Perspectives. Website: http://www.ezilidanto.com/zili and http://www.ezilidanto.com/.
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