Quinn Zimmerman
American aid volunteer Quinn Zimmerman has been in Haiti for two years. Lately it's been tough. People scream curses at him and other international volunteers. He's getting ready to go home this summer.
perhaps if I really wanted to help, I wouldn't ever come to Haiti to begin with. I'd keep my fight at home in the United States, rallying people to try and build awareness that places like Haiti suffer because of policies benefitting our government, our corporations, and ultimately, ourselves. Policies created by our politicians, sometimes with our consent (the Iraq War) and sometimes as a result of special interests (the Supreme Court's campaign finance reform ruling), result in massive problems for other people in the world. Sometimes I wonder if that truly ever can be remedied....
I often think we will have to evolve to the point that the idea of religion is cast aside, that the idea of nation is cast aside, that the way we define ourselves (white, black, Christian, Muslim, American, Haitian) have to be abandoned. Without first accomplishing that, we will always have a way to cordon ourselves off from others, to group up, and to grow to believe that our group is the most important group. Those groups must be broken for us to advance.
It makes me think of something a friend of mine who works in Rwanda told me recently. She told me that the majority of Rwandan children today do not know if they are Tutsi or Hutu. Their parents do not tell them. She told me that it is illegal to ask someone if they are Tutsi or Hutu. She told me that all forms of personal identification no longer have the words "Tutsi" or "Hutu" on them. She also told me Rwanda is one of the more progressive and advanced countries she's visited in Africa. That came at an incredibly high cost, but maybe that's what it takes. The EU, flawed though it is, and in and of itself a group, was born out of the desire for integration that was the result of two devastating wars that killed entire generations of Europe's people. I'd like to think we can learn enough from our history to be able to continue that process of integration without the prerequisite of mass suffering, but maybe that is indeed a prerequisite. If so, there's certainly suffering enough to go around.
Yes, imagine! Israel with ID-cards which do not say (or hint or imply) “Jewish” or “Muslim” or “Arab” or “Christian” — maybe just “Israeli” and “occupied”.
The hint is not the problem. Palestine’s ID-cards until 1948 said “Jew” or “Arab” under “race”.
I laughed and laughed, and kept on laughing while reading this post. After wiping a blessed tears from my eyes, I’ve decided to respond. Here it is:
First, after 2005 there is no ethnicity being mentioned in the ID card. But that is a minor error. The big one is that it just shows how delusional the poster is and how detached is he from the real world both Israelis and Palestinians live in. How about if I tell you that a majority of Israelis can tell whether the person is Jewish, Arab or Bedouin just after shortly speaking and looking at them? The ID issue is the problem here? The differences between people are huge starting from the cultural to the social aspects of their life. Even among the Palestinians themselves there are a huge gaps between East Jerusalem residents, Schem, Jenin and Gaza for that purpose.
“I laughed and laughed, and kept on laughing while reading this post. ”
Of course you did. Fascists always do.
Didn’t an Israeli Jew sue an Israeli Arab for rape because she was convinced he was Jewish? LOL
It was a criminal conviction, not a lawsuit. Apparently, in Israel, you aren’t allowed to lie your way into women’s beds. A dangerous precedent for people who pretend to be richer (or different in some other way) than they are. Actually, there has been a rape conviction in Israel for getting consent by pretending to be a rich neurosurgeon. And one for getting consent for pretending to be a housing authority official.
That’s even worse.
It’s definitely worse. It’s like racial hygiene. And isn’t it in most cases one person’s word over the other?
He said he was a rich neurosurgeon!
No, I didn’t!
Yes you did…
“It was a criminal conviction, not a lawsuit. Apparently, in Israel, you aren’t allowed to lie your way into women’s beds.”
Except he didn’t lie and they didn’t do it in her bed (an exposed rooftop in the afternoon was okay with this woman). It is enough in Israel that she was a Jew and he was an Arab and she was a racist. She apparently mistakenly believed he was Jewish because he spoken Hebrew. I guess to you and the your Zio-pals, Arabs should simply assume that all Jews are bigoted assholes and should start every conversation with “Hey, did you know I’m an Arab???” lest any unwary Jew be contaminated with Arab cooties.
Or maybe Israel should just make them sew a Yellow
Star of DavidIslamic Crescent on all of their clothes.“Apparently, in Israel, you aren’t allowed to lie your way into women’s beds.”
There go my chances, then.
I didn’t say I agree with the ruling. I don’t actually. I think that as long as you aren’t impersonating another individual (like the case in the U.S. a while back where a guy pretended in the dark that he was his brother in order to sleep with the brother’s girlfriend, come to think of it, he didn’t lie either, she just assumed he was his brother when he started feeling her up in the dark), you shouldn’t be criminally liable for lying to women to get them to sleep with you, unless it’s about something like an STD you carry. But he did lie. He gave her a Jewish name instead of his real name.
So you don’t need ID cards to discriminate against different cultural groups. Well done. Yes, that is hilarious, isn’t it? I believe in S Africa it was easy to discriminate based on skin colour and appearance, perhaps you don’t understand the principle of universal human rights and equal treatment under the law of all citizens, regardless of their appearance. Side splitting stuff.
>> The ID issue is the problem here? The differences between people are huge starting from the cultural to the social aspects of their life.
Having failed to resolve cultural and social differences in Mandate Palestine by means of terrorism, ethnic cleansing and the establishment of an oppressive, expansionist, colonialist and religion-supremacist state right in the thick of things, the Jewish state of (Greater) Israel moved to Plan B: A 60+ years, ON-GOING and offensive campaign of aggression, oppression, theft, colonization, destruction and murder.
It’s a shame the Jewish state couldn’t / can’t just kill them all (and let gawd sort ‘em out). You just know that would fix everything.
How about if I tell you that a majority of Israelis can tell whether the person is Jewish, Arab or Bedouin just after shortly speaking and looking at them?
Of course they can, bunky. How else can one promote racial hygiene? And racism is the byproduct of eugenics. Look at the strong jaw, or the dark eyes. Isn’t Darwinism something to marvel at?
Dimadok, “the majority of israelis can tell if a person jewish or arab just by looking at them….”
I made the same claim only a few days ago, that I recoignise ashkenazy jews by their looks, at least most of them, and I was attacked for it. I am glad an israeli confirms my statement.
I was put to a test about 20 years ago, room full of 25 persons of all ages, both sexes and all unknown to me. Within a minute I picked 4 out, but missed the 5th with blue eyes and blond hair. Not bad to prove a point, after all, who is perfect!
Do you have dima Hebrew date of birth in your ID ?
Everyone does-Jew , Arab or anyone else who has Israeli ID
Zimmerman’s link is worth reading for the problems he encounters, although well intentioned. Resentment is going to build when you’re the one driving around town with cell phones and laptops while they live in broken huts. Many of the problems in Haiti are a result of US policies over decades. Take the Creole pig and what occurred after the Asian swine flu in the 1978. This was an poor solution to a complex problem.
The white savior complex may get more mileage if it was called the ‘american (media funded) savior complex’. And many churches across America have always participated in aid and support to countries like Haiti.
Teju Cole seems to seems to spurn the publicity of aid and those who package it. I can see why, when Kristof makes such condescending remarks.
Teju Cole:“The White Savior Industrial Complex is a valve for releasing the unbearable pressures that build in a system built on pillage. We can participate in the economic destruction of Haiti over long years, but when the earthquake strikes it feels good to send $10 each to the rescue fund. I have no opposition, in principle, to such donations (I frequently make them myself), but we must do such things only with awareness of what else is involved.”
Haiti is beyond soundbites
link to nybooks.com
The Haitian worldview allowed multiple causes for the grounding of the Trois Rivières. Sorcery motivated by a personal grudge was a necessary condition for the accident; in the absence of black magic, the ship might have sailed tranquilly. It had after all sailed without incident under similar conditions so many times before. But the effectiveness of the sorcery required bad governance. The ship was old and in poor shape and still on the seas; it sailed from port without inspection; the owners were assured of legal impunity should an accident happen; the wharf was too shallow for a ship the size of the Trois Rivières and required dredging; there was no decent road to Port-au-Prince—all of this was subsumed in the phrase gouvman pa bon, by now almost a Creole proverb: the government isn’t good.
The phrase as used by Haitians describes not only the chronic political instability of the capital and the weakness of the state but also the inability of Haitians to take collective action. Haiti is not only anarchic at the top, at the level of the presidency, where power has historically passed from hand to hand by revolution and coup d’état; it is anarchic at every level of society. From village to town to city to state, community resources are poorly managed; what worked once has fallen apart.
“Examples abound of the reticence, not to say incapacity, of rural communities to take charge of the global rela- tionship to the environment, which can only be collective by nature,” writes the Haitian anthropologist Gérard Barthélemy. “Thus, water from the source is not captured…; thus, the only irrigation canal that survives is underground; thus, the road network that supposes a collective will of travel and maintenance is not cared for while it exists.”2
I frequently visited the rural town of Carrefour Charles, about five kilometers from the nearest spring. The town was effectively divided into two castes: the upper caste consisted of those families who could afford to hire the vastly larger lower caste to haul water for them, at five gourdes, or about 15 cents, per bucket. Lack of water dramatically aggravated poverty: children failed to attend school because they needed to fetch water; local gardens depending exclusively on rainwater failed to yield cash crops.
I spoke with a local engineer who estimated that it would cost about US$15,000, between pipes, pumps, cement, and labor, to build a rudimentary aqueduct to transport water to the town center. Even in a place as poor as Carrefour Charles, this was economically feasible, should the enterprise be undertaken collectively. I learned later that the project had been broached numerous times, but the community had been unable to reach consensus on how to proceed. The lack of clean water in Carrefour Charles was essentially a political problem, not a problem of poverty. The aqueduct in Carrefour Charles, like any action in Haiti that required an effective institutional structure, was doomed from the outset.
It is the custom in Haiti, when commencing some charitable intervention, to erect a large wooden placard at the site of a proposed project. On these placards is written the name of the project, the bureaucratic entity responsible for the project’s completion, and the bailleur de fonds, the foreign donor whose generosity will make possible the proposed work. These hand-painted signs line the roads of rural Haiti, an unmistakable feature of the landscape, one after the other, every several hundred meters or so. So on the road to Dame Marie, we see a scheme to help farmers affected by hurricanes, paid for by the government of Japan and executed by the World Food Program. A kilometer down the road, there is a pilot project to protect the banks of the Grand’Anse River, paid for by the European Union. In a large open field, the Inter-American Development Bank was proposing to fund the construction of sixty latrines. The project was scheduled to begin in May 2005, and would last four months. The field was still barren and rocky years later. I could continue this list for some considerable time. Haiti has not suffered the indifference of the world.
These projects are almost all specific in their intent, limited in scope, and created by institutional bodies staffed by transient employees. They all attempt to remedy some specific failure of Haitian government, grafting a foreign idea onto a community profoundly resistant to foreign intervention, even an idea as desirable as clean drinking water. When they work with local governments, the foreign sponsors are working with governments in no way representative of the will of the people; and when they work with the national government, they work with people considered as alien as Tibetans. Some of these projects work; some don’t. They are valuable insomuch as they ameliorate suffering for as long as they endure.
the hutu Tutsi thing- without a fair distribution of resources and especially access to education and social protection what’s to say it won’t all blow up again after a generation? Yugoslavia was an attempt to build a communal – identity- less country and it worked for about a generation…
Amazing story about Rwanda.
“Amazing story about Rwanda.”
With countries like Israel, China, France, Belgium and South Korea getting in on the genocide, it was more disgusting than amazing. All the Tutsis and Hutus had until then were the machettes but thanks to countries like Israel, uzis and grenades were introduced and that’s when the massive killings really started. Must have been very profitable for Israel.
Amnesty International had something to say about it in 1995:
link to grandslacs.net
“perhaps if I really wanted to help, I wouldn’t ever come to Haiti to begin with. I’d keep my fight at home in the United States, rallying people to try and build awareness that places like Haiti suffer because of policies benefitting our government, our corporations, and ultimately, ourselves.”
The author starts out fine, then goes berserk: “I often think we will have to evolve to the point that the idea of religion is cast aside, that the idea of nation is cast aside, that the way we define ourselves (white, black, Christian, Muslim, American, Haitian) have to be abandoned.”
That Haiti has suffered grievously due to European colonialism and American neo-colonialism is beyond dispute. His “solution,” however, invites ridicule. And it goes downhill when he discusses the EU and Rwanda. He seems confused. Why am I bothering to comment?
Perhaps to take the opportunity to point out the impact that European and American imperialism has had on the people of the Third World. Many of their problems are a consequence of Western intervention and exploitation, which continues today with the subjugation of their economies to the Washington consensus. Most of the nations which the West arrogantly refers to as “failed states” would be more properly called “victim states.” Furthermore, this whole process is unsustainable and unless a radical restructuring takes place soon, the future of humanity is in peril.
“She told me that the majority of Rwandan children today do not know if they are Tutsi or Hutu. Their parents do not tell them. She told me that it is illegal to ask someone if they are Tutsi or Hutu. She told me that all forms of personal identification no longer have the words “Tutsi” or “Hutu” on them. ”
Then they aren’t Tutsi or Hutu any more. They are Rwandans.