[Marxism] John Maxwell: Is starvation contagious?

[Walter Lippmann <walterlx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

JAMAICA OBSERVER      
Is starvation contagious?
COMMON SENSE
JOHN MAXWELL
Sunday, April 13, 2008

http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/columns/html/20080412T020000-0500_134463_OBS_IS_STARVATION_CONTAGIOUS__.asp


Few people, much less their governments, appear to be concerned about what
is happening in Haiti, next to Cuba our nearest neighbour and, in historical
terms, the people who paved the way for our freedom from slavery and
implemented for the first time anywhere in the world, the idea of universal
human rights.

Yet, today, while Haiti suffocates in poverty, hunger and dirt, her
neighbours in the Caribbean, with the exception of Cuba, pass by on the
other side of the road where Haiti lies in pain and anguish, ignoring the
brutalisation of the poorest people in this hemisphere by the richest
nations in the world.

Four years ago the Americans and Canadians with the backing of the French,
decapitated Haitian human rights, kidnapping her president and instituting
fascist rule by a combination of some of the greediest businessmen in the
world and the murderous thugs they hired in an attempt to depose the
overwhelmingly popular president of the Haitians, Jean Bertrand Aristide.

Mr Bush and Mr Colin Powell and a mixed gaggle of French and Canadian
politicians had decided that freedom and independence were too good for the
black people of Haiti. Lest you think I am being racist, there is abundant
evidence that the conspiracy against Haiti was inspired by racial hatred and
prejudice.

I have gone into this before and I will not return to it today. Suffice it
to say that the US, Canada and France, acting on behalf of the so-called
'civilised world', decided on the basis of lies that, as in the case of
Iraq, a free and independent people had no business being free and
independent when their freedom and independence was seen to threaten the
economic interest of the richest people in Haiti and, by extension, the
wealthiest countries in the world.

Today, and especially for the last few weeks, the starving people in Haiti
have been trying to get the world to listen to their anguish and misery.
Along with some other poor people in other countries, the Haitians have been
driven to desperation and the edge of starvation by the rapidly increasing
price of food. Unlike all the others, the Haitians are over the edge, they
are starving, refugees in their own proud country, where many are forced to
eat dirt to survive, however tenuously.

Only the Cubans, the Venezuelans and the Vietnamese appear to care about
what is happening in Haiti. The rest of us are too concerned with 'wealth
management' and the prospects of foreign investors with bursting wallets
floating down from the sky to make us all rich.

But if one listens to people on the Jamaican streets, it is obvious that we
too are in the early stages of the same curse of the globalisation which
makes Haitians expendable and assesses their value at well under the price
of one Jamaican patty per day.

So, the Haitians have taken to the streets and more than half a dozen
starvelings have already been shot dead by the armed forces of civilisation,
by the satraps and surrogates of George Bush and his Canadian and French
accomplices.

The world food programme has appealed to the world for help for the
Haitians. So has the Vietnamese representative on the UN Security Council.
Venezuela has given Haiti money and supplied them with cheap oil. Cuba,
among other things, is training nearly 500 Haitians to be doctors, about
half in Cuba and the rest in Haiti.

The Golding government, like its predecessors, pays no attention to our
suffering neighbour languishing and dying because of the explicit actions
and strategies of the United States of America and its president, George
Bush.

Which is why after Aristide, Haitians died like flies because of hurricanes
and rainstorms: their local democracy and their early warning systems had
been destroyed by the criminal gangsters whom Bush put in charge of eight
million Haitians. And when the situation became too noisome even for Bush
and the Republican Party, Haitians were allowed to vote but not allowed to
vote for the man they wanted, so they voted for a surrogate. This meant that
the Haitian elite friends of Bush, the Chalabis of our hemisphere, were back
in charge and the primacy of the light-skinned minority re-established, just
as it was in the 18th century, before the American, French and Haitian
revolutions.

It is possible that Haiti may not even be Bush's worst crime. In Haiti he
destroyed nearly 300 years of history and the rights of man. In Iraq he
obliterated much of the record of the last 8,000 years of civilisation and
set the people at each other's throats.

Many Haitians were killed by the American-paid assassins who inherited
military power from the American and Canadian marines. More were murdered
because they were community leaders and allies of Aristide. Even more died
from unnatural disasters precipitated by the decapitation of democracy. And
many, many more will die from the effects of eating dirt for the greater
glory of George Bush and because they have had enough of Bush's modern
version of slavery.

I TOLD YOU SO

Just to be tiresome, I want to remind you of a column published in this
paper on Sunday, December 10, 2000, my 240th column for this paper. It was
published just as the Republican Party was prepping the US Supreme Court to
appoint George Bush, president of the US.

I wrote, inter alia

"The approaching triumph of Greenspan/Ayn Rand capitalism may just be slowed
down by the latest developments in the US economy, but that is not cooling
down the ardour of the "cognitive elite" to gain a handle on the whole
business of corporate control of the economies and governance of the world.
The Americans a few days ago, chastised Haiti for electoral defects which,
compared to Florida, were child's play and did not really affect anything
very much more than the letter of the law.

". George Bush, if he is appointed president, will use his time to destroy
the integrity of the country he rules, starting with the Supreme Court. Then
he can start on dealing with the rest of us. That's his job, and as the
American press has made plain, nothing needs to be known about him and his
multifarious incapacities because big brother in the giant corporations will
tell him what to do.

We are all in for a very rough ride."

That was published before Bush became president, before Enron, before 9/11,
before the invasion of Iraq and before the rape of Haiti.

Today when the world faces climatic, ecological and economic meltdown, we in
Jamaica are as far away from reality as ever.

We persist in our suicidal pursuit of unsustainable development-by-gimmick,
heading for disaster like the Haitians but of our own free will, unlike the
powerless Haitians. We are determined to grow sugar cane until it destroys
our society, watching helplessly and cluelessly as food prices rise out of
our reach and unwilling to even try to save ourselves by growing more food
and putting idle hands and idle lands to work, and unwilling to face the
elemental truths about this slave society.

We can't afford rice or cooking oil, or bread or Lexuses.
Where, one wonders, is our Marie Antoinette to advise us to eat johnnycake?

More than 60 years ago when we were faced with the (for us) less dire crisis
of the Second World War, our British governors forced all landowners to
plant at least 10 per cent of their land in food crops. Sugar estates began
to produce food for the first time in 300 years and our unemployment and
malnutrition rates plummeted.

Today we face our unreality bravely, encouraging the most backward among us
to sing songs of hate against homosexuals, denying Amnesty's findings about
our internecine violence, although they are merely echoing what people like
me were writing 40 years ago. We are going to grow food for cars while our
people starve.

We know what's wrong but resolutely refuse to face reality. In the struggle
for survival we say, along with George Bush, every man for himself and let
the devil take the hindmost.

The title of my 2000 column I quoted earlier could serve as our epitaph.

It was: "Democracy? Enough already!"

I told you so.


Copyright Â2008 john maxwell
Jankunnu@xxxxxxxxx


=========================================
     WALTER LIPPMANN
     Los Angeles, California
     Editor-in-Chief, CubaNews
     http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/
     "Cuba - Un ParaÃso bajo el bloqueo"
=========================================

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