As we idly watch Haiti burn we cannot but be struck by how things always seem to go awry and then for some reason they return to balance if left alone....or at least if we can keep our fingerprints off it and don't look like we had anything to do with it. I realize that this is impossible given the feckless idiots we have running and manning the State Department, USAID, the CIA and the other nullwits and halfwits that tend to barge into any given situation and make them orders of magnitude worse. That said, have a look at the demons in our old United Fruit Stomping Grounds and further south and wonder with me as something extraordinary is happening.
The Argentine's appear to have elected a President who is essentially nothing at all like any other president in history and appears to be doing a bang up job of bringing order out of the chaos engineered by every clown government since Peron. In El Salvador the people have done the same thing and made enormous and dramatic and positive changes to what used to be a hellhole.
Contrast with Venezuela which is now a hopeless basket case and playing the games such places always do and trying to make their problems disappear in a cloud of smoke and angry meaningless war. And finally there is Haiti, there is always Haiti and to be honest the rest of the Caribbean isn't looking so good these days.
Did things work and appear more civilized and like one could do business and survive the day to day activities of a normal state back when people like Samoza and Baby Doc and Noriega were running their little pocket empires of graft and corruption? I think so but then the Congress got involved and screwed those countries so thoroughly that I'm sure some people thought could be fixed only by the likes of the Clintons and the likes of Obama.
We know how that turns out. Still it won't turn totally to crap until Europe goes all feckless and stupid like they did in 1914 and again in 1939 and again in 1956 and again in 1968 and again when the Wall came down and for a brief shining moment everyone stopped demonizing the Russians.
What's that you say? Europe even more stupid and feckless now than all those periods put together, laid end to end, stacked on top of each and covered with napalm?
You don't say.
6 comments:
Haiti, in all its history, has had exactly one fair and competent government. That would be the US Marine Corps.
I viewed our less playdate in Haiti as an eye opener for all. The USMC and USA patrolled different parts of the country under the same rules of engagement. With the Marine patrols they'd load up anybody who even looked like they had a weapon and were trying to point it at them. The Army waited until someone started shooting at them. Oddly enough, as I recall, nobody ever fucked with the USMC patrols anymore. The Army got shot at a lot. I think it's why the Marines went with their very own unique,//no copying damn you!// pattern cammo.
re Argentina and El Salvador:
Socialists (and others) become very jealous of success non-socialist governments and employ whatever means are available to put an end to them.
I sincerely hope Milei and Bukele Ortez are taking care for their security.
HMS Defiant, I think perhaps Captain Steve was referring to our early-20th-century Haiti excursion. I may be wrong.
-Tennessee Budd
I'm going to reread Smedley Butler's great book again. It's been a long time since I found it in the school library in Newport.
I don't see it as our duty to fix the broken countries out there. The idiot youth of today call people like that colonists as if it is an epithet. Those far more familiar with history can laugh at them but some people seem to cherish their idea that stone age savages lived a simple, peaceful and pastoral life. You could direct them to the heaadhunters in New Guinea or the natives of the south seas but I don't think youth today really believe that there really were cannibals in most of the places the missionaries hadn't reached.
Tennessee Budd: Exactly right.
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