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I’ve been trying to formulate my thoughts on 45’s latest comments disparaging Haiti, El Salvador, and a number of African countries…and the overwhelming outrage from the public regarding his sentiments. I was not surprised, nor did his comments seem unfamiliar in their message … it has been the message to third world (read: brown) countries for the longest time.
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I remember the first time it all made sense to me. How the same means our country uses to marginalize people and then blame them for that marginalization is used by the first world toward the third world.
Pick a brown country, the pattern persists…
I had decided to do a 25-page research paper I was assigned in undergrad on the Rwandan genocide. I dug deeper than I had ever dug to research with the goal of understanding how such a terrible genocide of almost 1million people could happen in the matter of 100 days time. How Hutus and Tutsis could find themselves so at odds that such a bloodbath could be realized.
And then I found how, in an act of colonization, first world nations like Belgium had gone into Rwanda and measured head circumferences, noses, and other physical attributes to determine that the very few who had more European-like features (even though they were no different racially or ethnically than anyone else in the country) would be separated out to be educated, given political power, and given the designation of Tutsi. The rest, roughly 85%, would be Hutu and all citizens would carry their ethnicity on their identification cards.
A nation of people who carried the same religion, culture, language, and race, were split into a small elite class and a large impoverished class, where extremism and hatred were propagated through the media. Later, we would find that these same first world nations would supply weapons and supplies to various militias.
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I say all of this to mention that I had also come across the information that there were UN peacekeepers on the ground from the US and France who were pointedly told to not stop the killings. But that was after the genocide had begun.
This revolt was planned, well-organized, and prior to the shooting down of a plane that served as the pretext to justify the slaughtering, the peacekeepers on the ground had sent desperate requests to Bill Clinton, detailing what was about to occur in the country and asking for help (documented by Human Rights Watch). Our administration turned a blind eye and then, to make matters worse, coordinated the mass exodus of US citizens and peacekeepers out of Rwanda (which is depicted in the movie, Hotel Rwanda), and this only fueled the bloodbath.
Now, some might say that the US had every right to pull out as a matter of self-interest or to keep their nose out of African matters. I would argue that the US, along with France and Belgium, knew what was going to happen as it was the intention all along…sow discord within a nation rich with natural resources, utilizing puppet governments to impoverish the masses, then allow them to go to war with themselves so that in the end, they must go to IMF and World Bank to beg for financial help to rebuild the country that was destroyed…the IMF and World Bank being run by who? That’s right, these same first world (white) countries.
And how does a country as small as Rwanda, wrecked by civil unrest and ethnic cleansing, repay a 3.4 trillion debt? It relaxes its trade and tax regulations, allowing first world nations to come in, cheaply harvest, and then export the country’s natural resources. Stepping in as white saviors of the very discord they propagated.
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So, that long story was to say that when someone like Donald Trump refers to these nations as sh*tholes, he is not the first. The first world has been calling these nations and their people shitholes for centuries. Bill Clinton is guilty.
I forget which president, I believe it was GW Bush, who said that stepping in to help Liberia during the second civil war was of no economic value to the US. The country that was ‘founded’ and ruled by former US slaves, Americo-Liberians (5% of the population) until a coup in 1980. Blood diamonds, rubber, and more have been stripped from the land and the country has arguably been America’s stepchild since inception.
Pick a brown country … the (white) first world has been pillaging their resources and culture, then publicly shaming and blaming them (or calling them sh*tholes) for it for-ever. Meanwhile, the resiliency of the people in these nations continues to embody superhuman quality, unjustly so.
Don’t believe me? Check the World Bank and IMF and see what countries owe the most money, take a look at what natural resources those countries have within them, check their history of colonization, particularly in African countries. Then, go research how machiladoras, especially in Latin American countries, have forced local business owners and farmers to work in foreign-owned factories, only to export the produce or products to the first world. Meanwhile, the factory workers make pennies a day and are inhumanely mistreated due to lax regulations.
Pick a brown country … the pattern persists.
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Trump is a scourge to our world, but if we’re really honest, he is speaking explicitly to a system that long predates him – patriarchy – that we all participate in at various levels, where sexism, racism, classism et al are used to dominate, divide, and conquer. He said, with clarity, how he sees brown countries by comparison to his choice of favorites, Norway, a predominantly white country…but the first world has been treating these countries as ‘sh*tholes’ for centuries, most recently under the sanitize label of ‘globalization’.
Forgive me if my outrage is muted by this knowledge. As a dear friend of mine always says … “Welcome to the sh*t show. The work continues.”
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