Another indecent proposal
In the wake of the Haiti disaster, we are hearing the usual demands for increasing aid to that unhappy country. Yet reputedly, even before the earthquake some 10,000 aid organizations had been active in Haiti. But it isn't working. Apparently, they have been handiing out fish, but not teaching people to fish.
It is time now to think outside the box. We should arrange to turn the country over to China. The Chinese will establish clean, well-lit factories. Wages will be very low, but some wage is better than none.
And there will, for a while at least, be none of that nonsense about freedom of speech and human rights. Trouble makers will be dealt with.
Moreover, once the system gets rolling there would be no problem of arrogant white people telling black people what to do.
We tried it our way. Let's try another way.
It is time now to think outside the box. We should arrange to turn the country over to China. The Chinese will establish clean, well-lit factories. Wages will be very low, but some wage is better than none.
And there will, for a while at least, be none of that nonsense about freedom of speech and human rights. Trouble makers will be dealt with.
Moreover, once the system gets rolling there would be no problem of arrogant white people telling black people what to do.
We tried it our way. Let's try another way.
Labels: Haiti
posted by Dyneslines at 7:08 AM
5 Comments:
Nice post, i appreciate your efforts which you have done to share information with others.
Dissertation Proposal
With all due respect, we can teach them to fish once they have recovered the use of their limbs and the energy needed to get to the shore or start up their boats. Right now, even the aid organizations themselves need aid.
Usually "history can only explain so much" is a comment that might be directed at you, but having lived through an earthquake of the same magnitude that brought down relatively few buildings, I have to agree with David Brooks that rampant corruption rather than 19th-century indemnities to France account for much of the loss of life and buildings in Haiti. I'm not sure that the PRC is a role model in that regard. Maybe turn it over to another island government: Singapore's?
My posting was not meant entirely seriously.
Beginning in the 1920s, as the allied victors began to try to digest the territories they had acquired with the breakup of the German and Turkish empires, the dubious notion of mandate appeared. Syria was a French mandate; Palestine (with all the dire consequences that later ensued) was a British mandate. Of course the m-term was just a mask, a feeble one, for naked colonialism.
Now the US has acquired mandates for Iraq and Afghanistan. Can we afford another in Haiti?
Can we afford another mandate? No, though I was at least somewhat serious in suggesting Singapore administering Haiti rather than your somewhat jocular suggestion of the PRC.
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