La Jalousie et la Haine

Another day, another conflated myth that the rest of the world isn’t playing along with: Le Figaro fuels the obsession with the American intervention in Haiti somehow being about the French. While the crazies are taken at their word, most of the reader comments at this point are calling the bluff to a writer practicing a quiet bigotry of low expectations.

There are over 150 000 dead whose relatives are still suffering. The country is devastated.

But French media are stunned by the small U.S. presence. Small, because this presence, even if it doubled, would still not enough to secure the country. (The others such as France will not send more, which is criminal).

This article is about phantom international diplomats, to hide the fact that it is the journalist doing the talking.

While they were talking NEEDLESSLY of the U.S. presence in Haiti, a presence requested by the Haitians, we do not speak of Haitians’ dead, suffering relatives of the dead, and survivors suffering with poverty. It's despicable.

And this journalist ends by insulting the Haitians. Nobody is forcing Haitians to accept anything from anyone.

Stop your indirect racism. The Haitians have ANY power over Haiti they want to pursue.

And typical to Euro-think, they seem surprised when Haitians tell them that they want to rebuild, and can’t seem to make a distinction between the national notion of Haiti (presumably saying something), and Haitians telling them something. It comes from a “Risk game board mentality” about the world, spiked with the nationhood rhetoric that brackets their little world.

What comes out the other end of this beast is the commentary of armchair revolutionaries along with the basic, common sense of those who seem rather able to get the gyst of those with an accusatory tone. In the conversation which turned to a fear that Haitians rebuilding their own country after the earthquake, the typical argumentative hostility turned to corruption with the idea that Haitians can’t be trusted.

We should recolonize them first, because the independence already recognized and established since 1804 isn’t to be taken very seriously.

Strange that the commenter can’t seem to remember the basis of the Haitian rebellion, the half-century of usury that they had to pay thereafter, or from whom it was they were seeking their independence.

In light of the need to see things work, the hatred of the ‘take charge’ Americans yielded to the resignation that it should just be a de facto American protectorate for a while, because even the American military force was just a drop in the bucket in a nation of almost 10 million people.

About French aid - this will be a blow to the U.S. and a chance for France, which offers aid and its’ fellowship

It sounds oddly like they are fighting a cold war, taking up the goals of the now defunct Soviet Union, perfectly willing to use Haitians as a tool to... wait for it... render a blow to America – in particular an America that doesn’t seek to take notice of this attitude projected toward them, and discounts it as a fantastic raving no different than some other lunacy last week.

Case in point, these comments are passionless and eclipsed enormously by another article drawing the reader attention: a short item about how the US is a magnet of many people’s conspiratorial ire.

Festooned with the canned 9-11 Truther rhetoric, you can take a kind of sick pleasure in the consistent ease of replication that the subject gets, decade after decade, year after year.

Of course these arguments are credible! Besides, now everyone (except the journalists of Figaro) knows that the U.S. knew about Pearl Harbor and let it happen. We also know that they have carried out coups in South America. We also know that they have funded and armed bin Laden and the Taliban against the USSR. All this we know, it’s PROVEN. So when the towers fall at the speed of free fall, when you can not find any airplane wreckage in the Pentagon and the FBI confiscated all the pictures, when the official version does not even mention the tower 7 and well one wonders, because we are not sheep! And in any case anti-conspiracy "that support the official account are suckers because the official theory is that a PLOT was planned in the caves of Afghanistan.

Ah, stock rhetoric – a comfort food for the feeble-minded and those with an (aptly named) Napoleon complex. After all, we all know that the Soviets weren’t doing anything in South America to cause revolts, that any other events that take place, that don’t fit the conspiratorial idea that picking anything that seems related to fit into a ‘cause and effect’ model of how reality should work CAN’T be perturbed by real events.

Much as the effect continues with the stranger among the French and Venezuela over aid to victims in Haiti, so it seems to work with “Truther” logic, that hits the wall when something needs to actually be done – when some course of action has to take place, and when consequences and responsibilities for ones’ own actions or even assertions come into play.

Then, what you were more than willing to castigate as “occupation”, suddenly seems okay, because the fantasy is perturbed again by reality. Even raving lunatics who still go on about some theory about the attack on Pearl Harbor two generations ago eventually get mugged by reality.