Making a Pariah
THIS IS WHAT EUROPEAN PROGRESS MEANS FOR ANY NATIVE POPULATION IN A FOREIGN LAND; LOOK AT 21ST CENTURY IRAQ, SYRIA AND LIBYA
There is right, there is wrong, then more importantly, there is the reality of power:nbsp; He who controls the levers of power, usually provides the answer to questions of right and wrong.
Chapter 3: The Makings of a Pariah
There is right, there is wrong, then more importantly, there is the reality of power:? He who controls the levers of power, usually provides the answer to questions of right and wrong.
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As a child and as a man I can recall my mother using the phrase “from here to Timbuktu”. It was a phrase she used – often - in a derisive manner to voice her frustration with me. Now, as a man whose curiosity has led him to research the phrase, I am now more enlightened. I am now familiar with the countries of Africa - both northern and western. I am now familiar with the countries of the African continent.
Timbuktu is located in Mali (West Africa,) at the edge of the Sahara Desert. It was the crossroad of commerce in sub-Saharan Africa. This country was also the site of the world’s first university; a significant cultural and religious destination, a place without equal for its known brilliance. This country was known throughout the academic world for its academic and intellectual progressiveness. ...
Chapter 6: A Pariah
“To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one's thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one's mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.” Ayn Rand
?Before I began my research on Haiti, I was inclined to believe everything negative told to me about that nation; anything I read in newspaper columns or coming over the airwaves via television or radio. I viewed the Haitians as malingers and the society culturally regressive. ?A people? who, for centuries,? seem to lack the capacity to move their country forward – in tandem - with European society, since their birth as an independent Republic in 1804. After I completed my research, I had to disabuse myself from the grip of my ignorance.
To understand Haiti’s demise, I had to journey back to Spain before the Moors arrived (711), ?view the period of the Moorish Caliphate (711 – 1492), then comprehend what these Africans had accomplished in Spain. After I had done this, I understood – better – what James Burke meant when he wrote, “The intellectual community which the northern scholars found in Spain was so far superior to what they had at home that it left a lasting jealousy of Arab culture, which was to color Western opinions for centuries" (Burke, 1985, p. 41). And it is still being done today. The Berbers had managed Spain well. Knowledgeable Europeans were not about to let this happen in Haiti. Other cultures (non-European) were to be brought underfoot.? “Caliphate” became a word, used with derision and meant to instill fear.
Note:
In 2008 after the first African American, Barack Obama, was elected President of the United States of America, Senate Opposition Majority leader Mitch McConnell convened a meeting of Republican leaders and a vote was taken to impede the President’s agenda; the President’s election by the people and their reasons for electing him, notwithstanding . Their goal was to ensure that this African American will not have a successful Presidency, to keep alive a false narrative that Africans are inferior and incompetent.
In Ramey Clark’s writing on, “Haiti's Agonies and Exaltations” he noted the following:
The history of Haiti will break your heart. Knowing it, the weak will despair, but the caring will strive to break the chains of tragedy.
When Columbus landed on the island in December 1492, he found a native Arawak, or Taino, population of three million people or more, well fed, with cultivated fields, lots of children, living in peace. It had by far the largest population of any island in the Caribbean. Twenty-two years later, there were fewer than 27,000 who had not fallen victim to the sword, the ravages of forced labor, and diseases heretofore unknown to them. The Spaniards called the island La Ysla Espa?ola, which in use became Hispaniola.
This is what European progress means for any native population in a foreign land; look at 21st century Iraq and Syria. ..
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