sisu

The enemy within

"There is something peculiar to the Middle East that worries the world," writes Victor Davis Hanson, asking rhetorically "Did Saddam create Fallujah or Fallujah Saddam?":

The Arab world for years has promulgated a quite successful media image as perennial victim -- proud folks, suffering under a series of foreign burdens, while nobly maintaining their grace and hospitality. Middle-Eastern Studies programs in the United States and Europe published an array of mostly dishonest accounts of Western culpability, sometimes Marxist, sometimes anti-Semitic that were found to be useful intellectual architecture for the edifice of panArabism, as if Palestinians or Iraqis [were] part of a universal "other" deserving victim status and its attendant blanket moral exculpation. But the curtain has been lifted since 9/11, and the picture we see hourly now is not pretty . . .

And then there is the asymmetry of it all. Walk in hushed tones by a mosque in Iraq, yet storm and desecrate the Church of the Nativity in the West Bank with impunity. Blow up and assassinate Westerners with unconcern, yet scream that Muslims are being questioned about immigration status in New York . . .

When there is news of 200 murdered in Madrid or Islamic mass-murdering of Christians in the Sudan . . . we no longer look for moderate mullahs and clerics to come forward in London or New York to condemn it. They rarely do. And if we might hear a word of reproof, it is always qualified by the ubiquitous "but -- followed by a litany of qualifiers about Western colonialism, Zionism, racism, and hegemony that have the effects of making the condemnation either meaningless or in fact a sort of approval . . .

The enemy of the Middle East is not the West so much as modernism itself and the humiliation that accrues when millions themselves are nursed by fantasies, hypocrisies, and conspiracies to explain their own failures. Quite simply, any society in which citizens owe their allegiance to the tribe rather than the nation, do not believe in democracy enough to institute it, shun female intellectual contributions, allow polygamy, insist on patriarchy, institutionalize religious persecution, ignore family planning, expect endemic corruption, tolerate honor killings, see no need to vote and define knowledge as mastery of the Koran is deeply pathological.

They are, in fact members in good standing of what Zev Chafets, writing about Haiti, the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere, calls "the Victim Internationale, for whom problems in the Third World are always someone else's fault."

No more excuses

"Haiti is a land rich in excuses," writes Zev Chafets in the New York Daily News:

It was entirely predictable that deposed Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide would claim that he was overthrown and kidnapped by the United States.

It is equally predictable that some Americans like Reps. Charles Rangel (D-Manhattan) and Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) deem Aristide a victim. They belong to the Victim Internationale, for whom problems in the Third World are always someone else's fault.

Haiti has been independent for 200 years. It is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. It has no infrastructure, no democratic institutions, no decent government. Right now, only U.S. Marines separate it from total chaos.

But  not all Haitians are so cynical or fatalistic, reports Chafets, citing emigrant Gary Pierre-Pierre, publisher of The Haitian Times out of Brooklyn, who writes that Haitian emigres have the technical expertise Haiti lacks and "need to become involved in nation building."

Pierre-Pierre's idea is based on the French model of dispatching bureaucrats to former French colonies. But it has an American twist. This would be a rebuilding corps drawn from the ranks of people with an instinctive understanding of and emotional commitment to the nation they are sent to assist.

We took at peek at The Haitian Times and found this editorial take on the Haitian situation, past and present:

Haiti was not always the insignificant place it is today, unimportant to the world's major powers. Its independence in 1804 was a devastating blow to France, and not merely to French self-esteem. Economists estimate that in the 1750s, Haiti provided as much as 50% of the gross national product of France. The French extracted sugar, coffee, cocoa, tobacco, cotton, indigo and other products, and grew rich on them. Americans owe a debt of gratitude to Haiti. After Haitian slaves under Toussaint Louverture wrested control of their island, Napoleon had no further use for Louisiana -- which was to have supplied food to Haiti, the hub of France's empire. So he sold it.

Once freed -- Haiti was only the second free country in the hemisphere, after the United States -- the Republic began the fall from riches to rags that has lasted until today. Haiti faced a hostile world, and an international boycott of Haitian goods and commerce plunged the Haitian economy into chaos. The boycott was punitive, no doubt; it was also done to extinguish a paradigm, to stamp out an example of armed slave uprising that might have led slaves in the U.S., as well as in the neighboring French and British Caribbean colonies, to act in emulation. The boycott, therefore, was the slavers' self-defense -- tough, pragmatic, unsentimental. One might even call it racial segregation as realpolitik.

We'd never thought much about Haiti one way or the other.  Is Pierre-Pierre's editorial historically accurate or mostly spin?  We don't know, but it's gotten us interested in learning more.

[via Lucianne]