Throughout the day I have fielded numerous emails from readers regarding my last entry, which are what ultimately convinced me to remove it altogether. All of them made the same point, and it really is something that I should have thought through before I began typing this morning – I have nothing to prove, nor do I need to defend this website or my career. Adding fuel to useless fires is a pointless exercise. To be honest, in cases such as these, it’s a pleasure to realize that this site has such a well-rounded and intelligent readership – especially one that can point out that such rebuttals are a waste of time.
That said; there is a bit from the previous entry that I did want to keep, so I have included it below. Again, thanks to those of you that contacted me and talked some sense. We all need that now and again.
Archived
Arms proliferators feed off of conflict and the horrors that they produce. The big five have enjoyed that luxury for decades and yet we do not question it while, like lemmings, deride the inevitable backlash that it produces. The only difference between cutting the head off of a captured contractor and video taping it and helping to remove an unfriendly government and replace it with a friendly dictatorial regime is that one gets broadcast on the internet and the thousands of deaths produced by the other doesn’t. The point is; both are criminal and cowardly, but one cannot be viewed as such because to do so would require us to admit that even though we view ourselves as morally superior, we have been complicit in evils of considerable magnitude.
For a recent example of such culpability look no further than the Montréal International Conference on Haiti, what it produced, and our ultimate inclusion in the coup engineered to remove Aristide from power. Of course, here at home, Aristide was painted in a light necessary to maintain the illusion that freedom was being gifted the Haitian people. What wasn’t highlighted was that the ‘freedom fighters’ that entered the country from the Dominican to help depose him were drug lords and thugs – not some movement bent on bringing peace and stability to the country. In the end, it was Aristide’s refusal to privatize Haitian industries that led to his political demise and loss of control. And, like most Latin American leaders placed in that position, paranoia and a thin grasp on the maintenance of law and order pushed him into a corner in which acts that he might otherwise decry became undesirable options.
As Peter Hallward put it in March of 2004…
“Aristide was forced from office on Sunday by people who have little in common except their opposition to his progressive policies and their refusal of the democratic process. With the enthusiastic backing of Haiti’s former colonial master, a leader elected with overwhelming popular support has been driven from office by a loose association of convicted human rights abusers, seditious former army officers and pro-American business leaders.
It’s obvious that Aristide’s expulsion offered Jacques Chirac a long-awaited chance to restore relations with an American administration he dared to oppose over the attack on Iraq. It’s even more obvious that the characterisation of Aristide as yet another crazed idealist corrupted by absolute power sits perfectly with the political vision championed by George Bush, and that the Haitian leader’s downfall should open the door to a yet more ruthless exploitation of Latin American labour.
If you’ve been reading the mainstream press over the past few weeks, you’ll know that this peculiar version of events has been carefully prepared by repeated accusations that Aristide rigged fraudulent elections in 2000; unleashed violent militias against his political opponents; and brought Haiti’s economy to the point of collapse and its people to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe.
But look a little harder at those elections. An exhaustive and convincing report by the International Coalition of Independent Observers concluded that “fair and peaceful elections were held” in 2000, and by the standard of the presidential elections held in the US that same year they were positively exemplary.”
And where were we? Well, JTF2 was holding the airport, waiting for US operatives that had secured Aristide to arrive and usher him into exile so that the so-called ‘liberators’ of Haiti could do the rest. Haitians were indeed liberated in the two weeks following the coup, hundreds of them in fact. All by death.
We are not at war with a religion, only a fool would presume as much, only a fool who hasn’t the wherewithal to actually educate themselves would sit easy on the conclusion that we are currently engaged in a world wide struggle against several billion people that ‘hate us for our freedoms’. Generalizations and fear are terrorism’s most profound productions. That being the case, it would seem that we have been terrorized by voices amongst us as equally as by those zealots that adhere to an entirely warped and politicized religious ideology. There are examples aplenty stretching back through time that provide context with regards to how easy it is to scare the weak minded into the belief that what they fear is actually greater than what it is. That said; many have done a fantastic job of insuring that ignorance remains commonplace so that such distractions can continue to convolute reason. That is not to say that threats do not exist, only that we are just as much a threat to our own way of life than any exterior threat. And those that perpetuate that fear are, in the end, no better than those they condemn, even if violence isn’t their primary tool. Intolerance and ignorance have killed far more people through their complacency in our collective history than any single cabal of individuals. Because without that complacency their evils would never have succeeded in the first place.
What we stand for, in the end, cannot be defended by a staunch belief in insularity while at the same time promoting the violent deliverance of freedom to others. That is merely a hypocritical position preferred by those that often believe that arguments are won simply by the volume at which they profess their beliefs and not on their actual merits.
If ignorance is indeed bliss, then welcome to an age of perpetual contentment.
