President Evo Morales said Wednesday that Bolivia would seek U.N. condemnation of what he called the U.S. military occupation of earthquake-stricken Haiti. "The United States cannot use a natural disaster to militarily occupy Haiti," he told reporters at the presidential palace.
"Haiti doesn't need more blood," Morales added, implying that the militarized U.S. humanitarian mission could lead to bloodshed. His criticism echoed that of fellow leftist, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who said Sunday that "it appears the gringos are militarily occupying Haiti."
When asked Wednesday about the possibility of the U.N. General Assembly condemning the U.S., assembly spokesman Jean Viktor Nkolo pointed to previous U.N. statements expressing gratitude for U.S. help in Haiti.
The United Nations will soon sign an agreement with the U.S. stipulating the U.N. as the lead organization for security in Haiti, Edmond Mulet, acting U.N. special envoy to Haiti, said Tuesday.
And here's Chavez:
Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez Wednesday accused the United States of causing the destruction in Haiti by testing a 'tectonic weapon' to induce the catastrophic earthquake that hit the country last week.
President Chavez said the US was "playing God" by testing devices capable of creating eco-type catastrophes, the Spanish newspaper ABC quoted him as saying.
One thing that is missing from this "analysis" is why America has any particular interest in occupying Haiti. At least with Iraq, we have a facially plausible, though conspiratorial, interest in Iraq's oil (left unclear is why we couldn't just buy it from the Hussein regime, as he would have been quite glad to sell it to us). Haiti carries with it no such natural wealth; an occupation would be a massive expenditure of American resources (at a time when they are locked up in various other locations) for no apparent gain. I'm uncomfortable enough with bare materialist explanations for behavior (particularly when they are cast as a dualism: one side is materialist, the other side, of course, morally pure), but what we are supposed to imagine is that American's have some innate, pathological desire to control the world -- something in our national biology apparently turns us into sociopaths. We might describe such a view as racist.
UPDATE: The Chavez quote, at least, appears to be a fabrication that managed to get some legs in the global media. Interestingly, the statement was repeated both by anti-Chavez outlets like Fox News and pro-Chavez entities like Iran's Press TV, apparently because, as Harry's Place put it, it panders to the prejudices of both those who think Chavez is crazy, as well as those who think that America is.
3 comments:
Does it really make sense to describe any view of the behavior of a nation of immigrants -- particularly one now headed by a mixed-race president -- as "racist"? Do you think Chavez and Morales are ready to say that there's something about Obama's race that is characterized by an inclination to invade other countries?
At least with Iraq, we have a facially plausible, though conspiratorial, interest in Iraq's oil (left unclear is why we couldn't just buy it from the Hussein regime, as he would have been quite glad to sell it to us)
Because we had sanctions on Hussein to prevent his having the material means to build weapons, and why pay Saddam's price for oil when you can invade the country, occupy it and have U.S. companies be the ones to profit? I don't agree with the conspiracy theory, but give it its due.
Because we had sanctions on Hussein to prevent his having the material means to build weapons, and why pay Saddam's price for oil when you can invade the country, occupy it and have U.S. companies be the ones to profit? I don't agree with the conspiracy theory, but give it its due.
That only makes sense if you don't believe in efficient division of labor -- which, I suspect, the conspiratorialists don't, so, point taken. The odds that the US would turn more a profit from invading Iraq and trying to nationalize the oil resources for ourselves, than through normal free trade, strikes me as scant.
Does it really make sense to describe any view of the behavior of a nation of immigrants -- particularly one now headed by a mixed-race president -- as "racist"? Do you think Chavez and Morales are ready to say that there's something about Obama's race that is characterized by an inclination to invade other countries?
I think so, insofar as "racist" seems to be stretching beyond notions of biological race that nobody believes in anyway, and turning into "hostile generalizations of an identifiable, cohesive, ethnic or national grouping." I don't invent language-drift, I just live with it. We don't actually have another word to describe such generalizations of a nation-people (that something in their character makes them particularly prone to random acts of bloodthirsty conquest), or even for ethnicity, so why not use racist?
That only makes sense if you don't believe in efficient division of labor -- which, I suspect, the conspiratorialists don't, so, point taken. The odds that the US would turn more a profit from invading Iraq and trying to nationalize the oil resources for ourselves, than through normal free trade, strikes me as scant.
But we didn't have a normal free trade situation with Iraq; we had sanctions, because the oil resources were controlled by a dictator who had previously invaded another country and whom we wanted to cut off from the money he would receive from those resources in a free trade situation. There's a pretty large overlap between the folks who opposed the sanctions on Iraq and those who chanted "No Blood for Oil," so I don't see how there's inconsistency on their part. Controlling Iraq's oil resources ourselves ensured that the profits thereof wouldn't go to any purposes of which we disapproved, and also would limit some of OAPEC's power if we pulled Iraq from that Arab subsection of the OPEC cartel.
We don't actually have another word to describe such generalizations of a nation-people (that something in their character makes them particularly prone to random acts of bloodthirsty conquest), or even for ethnicity, so why not use racist?
It's slightly less problematic to use the term "racist" about ethnicity, but with other aspects of bigotry, just using "racist" as a synonym for "bigot" without the classification in question having even the slightest connection to racial categorization seems sloppy.
I wince every time I hear the lines in Lily Allen's otherwise fabulous song "Fuck You" in which she refers to someone whom she clearly is criticizing for his homophobia as a "racist": "so you say it’s not okay to be gay/ well I think you’re just evil/ you’re just some racist who can’t tie my laces/
your point of view is medieval." I don't know if "homophobe" hasn't made it over to England or it's too difficult to rhyme, but it's annoying to me to use the term racist as a synonym for bigot, when we have the word bigot already and racist has a much narrower meaning.
Another thing very common in Britain is to use "racist" to describe religious bigotry. If a South Asian-origin Hindu is hateful toward a South Asian-origin Muslim, it is ridiculous to claim that this is racism -- we're genetically the same race. We're ethnically and culturally similar, we share languages, we eat a lot of the same food and wear the same clothes. So far as I know, the colonizers didn't even manage to find a difference in average nose length to distinguish us. We differ solely on the question of religion and can be hateful toward each other because of that, but it's religious bigotry, not racism.
It seems like people prefer to use the term "racist" because we're all agreed that it is very very bad and erroneous to be racist, and so we try to import that into other contexts: dislike of the French even by white people = racism; dislike of Muslims even by other people of color = racism; dislike of homosexuals = racism.
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