.> Deborah Sontag on the Palestinians. In it, she made a good point. She was talking about the difficulties of discourse between Palestinians and the West and why it never seems to work.


.> And the problem that she pointed to is quite real. She said, the Palestinians keep harping on history, where history means anything that happened more than about 5 minutes ago. And the West doesn't want to waste time on all this sort of old fashioned boring nonsense, but just get on, so that the West can lead the way to a glorious future.


.> And that makes discourse really hard. And, actually, that point generalizes all over the world. Those who have their boot on somebody's neck never want to know how it got that way.


.> That's boring, old fashioned, dusty, old stuff. Let's just go on with our boot on the neck and make it even better. But the ones who have their neck under the boot, they somehow have a different view of things. Because they're backward and uncivilized and, you know, that sort of savage, you know.


https://infinite.mit.edu/video/noam-chomsky-paul-farmer-%E2%80%9C-uses-haiti-mit-technology-and-culture-forum-2222002
#NoamChomsky #HistoryAndTheOppressed #HistoryAndTheVictims #PaulFarmer #Haiti #PaulFarmerOnHaiti #UsesOfHaiti #UsesOfPalestine ??

> [A] gigantic wall is being constructed in the Third World, to hide the reality of the poor majorities. A wall between the rich and the poor is being built, so that poverty does not annoy the powerful and the poor are obliged to die in the silence of history... A wall of disinformation...is being built to casually pervert the reality of the Third World.
https://thirdworldtraveler.com/Haiti/Quotations_Uses_Haiti.html
#UsesOfHaiti #PaulFarmer #NoamChomsky #GustavoGutierrez #ThirdWorld

One Day Moral principles will guide policy and a lot of people will be happier, healthier and not suffering under sanctions or torture regimes.

Nicaragua and the USA

,> The highest per capita debt in the region is Nicaragua’s, currently $6.4 billion and clearly unpayable. The human costs of the IMF programs designed to ensure that lenders are compensated many times over are incalculable. About $1.5 billion is from the Somoza years, hence clearly “odious debt,” of no standing. Another $3 billion is from the post-1990 period when the US regained control over Nicaragua; also odious debt. The remainder is the direct responsibility of the United States, which was conducting brutal economic warfare and a murderous terrorist war against Nicaragua, for which it was condemned by the World Court, which ordered the US to pay reparations, variously estimated in the range of $17 billion. Accordingly, the highly conservative principle of adhering to international law, as determined by the highest international judicial body, would suffice to eliminate Nicaragua’s debt, with a good deal left over. Were elementary moral principles even to be imaginable in elite Western culture, similar conclusions would at once be drawn far more broadly throughout Europe and the US, even without World Court judgments. But that day remains very distant.  [Patricia Adams, Odious Debts (Earthscan, 1991); Lissakers, Banks, Borrowers. Witness for Peace, A Bankrupt Future: The Human Cost of Nicaragua’s Debt (WFP, 2000); Envio (Managua, Nicaragua: UCA), 18.220, Nov. 1999.]
  
   - Noam Chomsky in Rogue States Jubilee 2000

Haiti and France (and the USA...)

.> ... The French king agreed to recognise Haiti’s independence only if the new republic paid France an indemnity of 150 million francs and reduced its import and export taxes by half. The ‘debt’ that Haiti recognised was incurred by the slaves when they deprived the French owners not only of land and equipment but of their human ‘property’.
.> The impact of the debt repayments – which continued until after World War Two – was devastating. In the words of the Haitian anthropologist Jean Price-Mars, ‘the incompetence and frivolity of its leaders’ had ‘turned a country whose revenues and outflows had been balanced up to then into a nation burdened with debt and trapped in financial obligations that could never be satisfied.’ ‘Imposing an indemnity on the victorious slaves was equivalent to making them pay with money that which they had already paid with their blood,’ the abolitionist Victor Schoelcher argued.
...
.> Why such animus towards Haiti’s leader? Taking up the question of the historic French debt, Aristide declared that France ‘extorted this money from Haiti by force and ... should give it back to us so that we can build primary schools, primary healthcare, water systems and roads.’ He did the maths, adding in interest and adjusting for inflation, to calculate that France owes Haiti $21,685,135,571.48 and counting. This figure was scoffed at by some of the French, who saw the whole affair as a farce mounted by their disgruntled former subjects; others, it’s increasingly clear, were insulted or angered when the point was pressed in diplomatic and legal circles.
.> Still, Aristide kept up the pressure. The figure of $21 billion was repeated again and again. The number 21 appeared all over the place in Haiti, along with the word ‘restitution’... [ Paul Farmer in "Who removed Aristide? Paul Farmer reports from Haiti" ]


- https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v26/n08/paul-farmer/who-removed-aristide

#NoamChomsky #NicaraguanDebt #Jubliee2000 #DropTheDebt #DebtRestitution #HaitiDebt #PaulFarmer #Aristide #JeanBertrandAristide #WorldCourt #WorldCourtJudgments

Bury The Chains by Adam Hochschild

.> St. Domingue [Haiti] was no ordinary colony. Although hard to imagine when we see the desperately poor Haiti of today, St. Domingue was the undisputed crown jewel of all European colonies anywhere. Such was its mystique that slave merchants in France sent their shirts across the Atlantic to be washed in its mountain brooks, which were said to whiten linen better than European rivers. St. Domingue was more than twice the size of the largest British Caribbean island, Jamaica; its soil was so rich and so well irrigated that its plantations yielded half again as much sugar per acre as the best land in Jamaica. It produced more than 30 percent of the world's sugar and more than half its coffee, not to speak of cotton and other crops. Thousands of slaves were at work clearing mountainside forests for new coffee estates, but the massive erosion this caused would not take its toll until the next century. The colony's eight thousand plantations accounted for more than one third of France's foreign trade, and its own foreign trade equaled that of the newly born United States. St. Domingue's annual production of sugar and other crops was roughly double that of all the British West Indian islands put together. No colony anywhere made so large a profit for its mother country.

Who removed Aristide? by Paul Farmer

.> Taking up the question of the historic French debt, Aristide declared that France ‘extorted this money from Haiti by force and ... should give it back to us so that we can build primary schools, primary healthcare, water systems and roads.’ He did the maths, adding in interest and adjusting for inflation, to calculate that France owes Haiti $21,685,135,571.48 and counting. This figure was scoffed at by some of the French, who saw the whole affair as a farce mounted by their disgruntled former subjects; others, it’s increasingly clear, were insulted or angered when the point was pressed in diplomatic and legal circles....
The figure of $21 billion was repeated again and again. The number 21 appeared all over the place in Haiti, along with the word ‘restitution’. On 1 January this year, during the bicentennial celebrations, Aristide announced he would replace a 21-gun salute with a list of the 21 things that had been done in spite of the embargo and that would be done when restitution was made. The crowd went wild. The French press by and large dismissed his comments as silly, despite the legal merits of his case. Many Haitians saw Aristide as a modern Toussaint l’Ouverture, a comparison that Aristide did not discourage. ‘Toussaint was undone by foreign powers,’ Madison Smartt Bell wrote in Harper’s in January, ‘and Aristide also had suffered plenty of vexation from outside interference.’

• https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v26/n08/paul-farmer/who-removed-aristide
  #AdamHochschild on #StDomingue #Haiti's riches and #PaulFarmer on #OdiousDebt and #FrenchDebt #HaitiRestitution
  #HaitiAndJamaica #HaitiAndFrance

#^Paul Farmer · Who removed Aristide?



On the night of 28 February, the Haitian president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was forced from power. He claimed he’d been kidnapped and didn’t know where he was being taken until, at the end of a 20-hour flight, he was told that he and his wife would be landing ‘in a French military base in the middle of Africa’. He found himself in the...

Paul Farmer on Haiti, Aristide, US intervention (2004):

Why such animus towards Haiti’s leader? Taking up the question of the historic French debt, Aristide declared that France ‘extorted this money from Haiti by force and ... should give it back to us so that we can build primary schools, primary healthcare, water systems and roads.’ He did the maths, adding in interest and adjusting for inflation, to calculate that France owes Haiti $21,685,135,571.48 and counting. This figure was scoffed at by some of the French, who saw the whole affair as a farce mounted by their disgruntled former subjects; others, it’s increasingly clear, were insulted or angered when the point was pressed in diplomatic and legal circles.

Still, Aristide kept up the pressure. The figure of $21 billion was repeated again and again. The number 21 appeared all over the place in Haiti, along with the word ‘restitution’. On 1 January this year, during the bicentennial celebrations, Aristide announced he would replace a 21-gun salute with a list of the 21 things that had been done in spite of the embargo and that would be done when restitution was made. The crowd went wild. The French press by and large dismissed his comments as silly, despite the legal merits of his case. Many Haitians saw Aristide as a modern Toussaint l’Ouverture, a comparison that Aristide did not discourage. ‘Toussaint was undone by foreign powers,’ Madison Smartt Bell wrote in Harper’s in January, ‘and Aristide also had suffered plenty of vexation from outside interference.’

-  https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v26/n08/paul-farmer/who-removed-aristide
#PaulFarmer #Haiti #Aristide #USAIntervention #DropTheDebt #RaiseReparations #HaitiAndFrance
#^Paul Farmer · Who removed Aristide?



On the night of 28 February, the Haitian president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was forced from power. He claimed he’d been kidnapped and didn’t know where he was being taken until, at the end of a 20-hour flight, he was told that he and his wife would be landing ‘in a French military base in the middle of Africa’. He found himself in the...

The Tyee: Clearing the COVID ‘Time Fog’ https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2023/11/16/Clearing-COVID-Time-Fog/ #bcnews #TheTyee - via @[email protected] #AHealthyFuture:LessonsfromtheFrontlinesofaCrisis #SaskatchewanCOVID-19response #SaskatchewanPremierScottMoe #PublicHealthAgencyofCanada #CanadaCOVID-19response #BCCOVID-19response #SaskatchewanParty #SaskatchewanNDP #RudolfVirchow #TheBMJjournal #BorisJohnson #BonnieHenry #SaqibShahab #AliceGrove #PaulFarmer #ZakVescera #AdrianDix #RyanMeili #brainfog