Glenn Beck the average American who makes $20 million a year. Does the average American fall for this line of BS . If millions do believe it and act upon Glenn Beck's nonstop call to arms then be afraid.
"...Not many writers would have the courage to use a tragic event like a 50,000-fatality earthquake to volubly address the problem of nonwhite laziness and why it sometimes makes natural disasters seem timely, but then again, David Brooks isn't just any writer."
From Matt Taibbi Blasts David Brooks: 'Wait Until After The Bodies Were Cold' at huffington Post ,Jan. 18,2010
"The Haitian tragedy has opened up a whole new industry for what I call the genteel racist point of view. A week into the crisis I heard an otherwise intelligent report on NPR in which the correspondent opened her piece from Port-au-Prince by declaring that it "is not falling into a...pit of violence," thereby giving us an idea of what she had been anticipating, almost breathlessly. We heard this kind of thing frequently in the days after the earthquake, with scores of fresh reporters receiving their Haitian baptism amid the rubble. There are many problems in Haiti, but most of the negative pronouncements that have been circulating do not touch on them. The commentary has been psychopolitical rather than analytical."
From: Hey David Brooks, How Dare You Blame Haitians? By Amy Wilentz, The Nation. Posted January 25, 2010. Armchair commentators like David Brooks, who know nothing about Haiti, have rebuked suffering Haitians from the comfort of the U.S. and Europe.
and : "Exploitation, racism keep Haiti in despair"
Tony Fraser at Guardian.co 20 Jan 2010
It is necessary to temporarily break from the series on party politics to share a perspective on Haiti that responds to the ignorance and frankly racist comments flowing since the earthquake of last week. A particular strain of the comments seeks to make Haiti and its people incurably backward, genetically subhuman and so preoccupied with evil and voodoo that even the God of the universe has turned His back on the land and its people. Any attempt to understand and analyse the reasons for Haiti’s backwardness as a society and the human condition of large numbers of its people should start from the appreciation that that country has been a victim of the worse forms of economic exploitation, racist sub-human degradation and imperial imposition known to man.
and more on David Brooks racist analysis of Haiti"David Brooks Blames the Victim in Haiti :Is David Brooks competing with Pat Robertson to make the most callous commentary on Haiti's earthquake?" by Yifat Susskind at Commondreams.org/ Jan. 16,2010
and : Racism, misinformation and militarization have hurt Haiti relief effortBy Derrick O'Keefe at rabble.ca,January 21, 2010
And a few words from Uberconservative Lt. Governor Andre Bauer (South Carolina).
"My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that. And so what you've got to do is you've got to curtail that type of behavior. They don't know any better," GOP Hopeful Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer
Typical thinking of a Uberconservative and even spouting such nonsense out loud to the public at large.
GOP Hopeful: People on Public Assistance "Like Stray Animals" Saturday 23 January 2010 by: Nathaniel Cary,McClatchy Newspapers via Truthout
Glenn Beck creates an in depth propaganda piece purportedly reporting on the centuries old leftist and liberal conspiracy theory. Hitler, Stalin,Mao ,Mussolini, Franco, Pinochet in Chile and Chavez in Venezuela Castro. Polpott are all begin as stealth fifth columnists out to destroy democracy and religious freedom. Beck also accuses the left and liberalism of committing all of the acts of Genocide over the last two centuries. The left was responsible for centuries of anti-semitism and racism for the pogroms and massacres of Jews or other peoples and even the practice of slavery. So it is liberalism as in Thoms Paine's "Rights of Man" ?. Beck even picks and chooses which things Thomas Paine' was in his view right about and ignore all the rest.
Glenn Beck is pulling the mask off of the Leftist Monster .The Wild & Crazy World of Wacko Glenn Beck on Self-hating Jews & The Revolutionary Holocaust Live Free or Die 1of5
And on international and American aid to devastated Haiti and the notion that Haitians are incapable of governing themselves according to many conservatives or even neo-liberals. The usual stereotypes of a backward , lazy, uncultured, who's system of values is non-existent and so as a people are to become as Kipling said "The White Man's Burden". At the end of the day this is just another form of racism.
The Haitian people historically proved that they were capable of initiative by revolting against their plantation masters and free themselves from this tyranny. For rising up and defeating a European power to the colonial powers this was unforgivable so this event was for the most glossed over or never mentioned . The very idea of Black slaves defeating a white European power was unthinkable and that these former slaves were able to govern themselves was too threatening to White Europeans to accept as an historical fact. Even the Bible had said that slaves were to obey their masters and had no right to rise up and revolt demanding the end of their oppression.
An Open Letter to David Brooks on Haiti" by: Tom F. Driver and Carl Lindskoog, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed,Jan. 19,2010
Dear Mr. Brooks,
In your January 15, 2010, opinion piece in The New York Times, "The Underlying Tragedy," you present what you seem to believe is a bold assessment of the situation in Haiti and what you certainly know is a provocative recommendation for Haiti's future. You also offer some advice to President Obama. In order to successfully keep his promise to the people of Haiti that they "will not be forsaken" nor "forgotten" the president, you say, has to "acknowledge a few difficult truths." What follows, however, is so shockingly ignorant of Haitian history and culture and so saturated with the language and ideology of cultural imperialism that no valuable "truths" remain. Please allow us, therefore, to present you with some more accurate truths.
First, Haiti is not a clear-cut case of the failure of international aid to achieve poverty reduction. For almost its entire existence, Haiti has been shouldered with a load of immense international debt. The Haitian people had the audacity to break their chains and declare independence in 1804, but were later forced by France to repurchase their freedom for 150 million francs, a burden that the country has had to carry throughout the 20th century.
What's more, the "aid" Haiti has received from its powerful neighbor to the North has never been the sort that would help the country reduce poverty or achieve meaningful development. In the early 20th century, the principle aid Haiti received from the United States came in the form of a brutal military occupation that lasted from 1915 to 1934. After "Papa Doc" Duvalier ascended to power, "aid" meant assistance to a ruthless (but conveniently anti-communist) dictator. The US gave Duvalier $40.4 million in his first four years in power, briefly suspended military and economic assistance to the dictator in 1963, but resumed shortly thereafter, restoring full military and economic aid to Duvalier by 1969. In the early 1970s and 1980s, when "Baby Doc" Duvalier was at the helm, the "aid" the United States and other international agencies contributed failed to reduce poverty, but did enrich foreign investors in the newly constructed assembly industry. Economic policies that the US forced upon Haiti decimated its agriculture for the benefit of American farming while driving Haiti's peasants into Port-au-Prince and other cities where they found few jobs and scarce housing. Four years after Baby Doc's departure, the Haitian people decided to help themselves by democratically electing a new leader, but the United States aided Jean-Bertrand Aristide's domestic opponents in the coup of 1991 and did so again in 2004. It is no wonder then that that such aid from the United States has failed to lift Haiti out of poverty.
Equally unconvincing is your argument about "progress-resistant cultural influences," which brings us to important truth number two: Haitian culture is not "progress-resistant" as anyone familiar with the examples you yourself provide can attest to. If Vodou or "the voodoo religion" as you put it, "spreads the message that life is capricious and planning futile," how do the majority of Haitians manage to survive on scant resources and less than two dollars a day? How do so many Haitians manage to travel abroad, find and maintain difficult jobs and send money back home if not through careful planning and a fierce defense of precious life? How do the nationwide customers of Fonkoze, the Haitian banking operation that teaches literacy and business practices to curbside marketers to whom it makes small loans, achieve such strong records of loan repayment? In fact, it might be Haitian culture itself (and even Vodou) which allows Haitians to persist. After all, the Vodou spirit Ogou (St. Jacques) is honored as a clever planner and master of skills. So was the champion of Haiti's war of independence, Gen. Toussaint L'Ouverture, a onetime slave who entered history as a military and diplomatic genius.
The third important truth we have to offer (and we hope President Obama is listening as well) is the opposite of your call for "intrusive paternalism" as the solution to Haiti's woes: Haiti does not need nor does it want the paternalism of the United States. Haiti is literally dying of cultural imperialism.
Whenever America's leaders and pundits speak of subordinate peoples, the ideology of imperialism shines through. As it does in your words, Mr. Brooks, so it has done for far too many earlier Americans. President William McKinley, for example, facing the difficult question of how he was to govern the newly-conquered Filipinos worried that:
left "to themselves they are unfit for self-government-and they would soon have anarchy and misrule ... [So] there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God's grace do the very best we could by them."
Closer to home, those who worried about an earlier form of "progress-resistant cultural influences" decided it was better to remove the children of Native-American families than to let them absorb the backwardness of their pagan and uncivilized parents and community. A common refrain by these "reformers" was, "kill the Indian, save the man." And now, Mr. Brooks, you propose to save the Haitians from themselves by replacing Haitian cultural values and institutions with "middle-class assumptions, an achievement ethos and tough, measurable demands." Imperialism, whether economic or military, is the primary reason for the conditions that so worsened the impact of the earthquake on January 12. Haitians need less imperialism, not more.
During the Vietnam War, an American officer famously stated that "it became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it." Today, Haiti is virtually destroyed. The earthquake having done the hard part, Mr. Brooks, you think "intrusive paternalism" will save it. Lacking a foundational understanding of Haitian history and culture, and bearing the familiar colors of American imperialism, you and your ilk will do vastly more harm than good.
Tom F. Driver
Paul Tillich professor emeritus of theology and culture, Union Theological Seminary
Carl Lindskoog
doctoral candidate, Department of History, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
and so it goes,
GORD.
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