Shit holes

January 15. 2018

President Trump started yet another firestorm if you can believe the unnamed sources the questionable Washington Post have quoted.

Trump apparently speculating about why so many immigrants come from “shit hole countries” like Haiti and why so few come from places like Norway or Amsterdam.

Move-on and Credo have sent out their usual pleas to raise money for Democratic candidates calling Trump a racist for his stating the obvious in clearly vulgar terms.

History has a similar misconception about France's Marie Antoinette, who once asked why the starving poor simply did not eat cake?

Trump and the French queen have the same problem – being so isolated by their wealth they fail to realize the realities of the world, and the irony that allows super rich countries to live side by side with super poor such as Haiti does with the Dominican Republic and countries like El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua do with Costa Rica.

This is not racist to claim that poor countries racked with crime and poverty cause people to flee – especially when American Foreign Aid tends to go to rich countries, not poor, and so instead of our helping to solve the refugee problems at the source, we have to help people when they arrive in the U.S.

Haiti and some African countries have become “shit holes” out of a different kind of racism, a remaining condition of Colonialism, in which countries such as France and Belgium stripped these places clean of modern infrastructure, so as the French often said, leaving those places as the French found them.

With Haiti it is even worse, because France still collected reparations from what many consider the poorest country on earth.

Trump's remark like Marie Antoinette's simply reflects the ignorance of wealth – which is also problematic for most Americans who pay so little attention to the real world, living in our own little bubble while we let the rest of the world rot, waking up only when we suddenly have an immigration problem.

The attack's on Trump are very much political, the need for Democrats to rally its ethnic and racial base the way smear tactics did in Alabama, with the hope of taking back the Senate later this year.

The fact every Administration, Democratic or Republican, have largely ignored the source of the problem, and continue to send money and weapons to strategic allies, rather than to send real aid to countries from which most of the immigrants come from.

Syria is a perfect example. Hillary Clinton as secretary of state called for the overthrown of the Syrian government, and later she and Obama walked away from the massive human tragedy the encouragement caused – and yet Clinton and Obama are first to claim Russians interfered with American elections when we clearly helped with the overthrow of countries throughout the world. But there is one big difference, if the Russians actually did what the Democrats claim, they did not leave a landscape filled with “shi holes” the way American policy often does.

Trump's question, no matter how vulgar, is a good one.

What makes people flee countries like Haiti and not places like Amsterdam?

The answer is simple: most people like living in Amsterdam, a modern country filled with success and good services. Most people hate living in countries where gangs kidnap their children, where people live in shacks and mud, where food is scarce. Most people in Amsterdam do not look across the wide oceans and contemplate these shores as a place of salvation, they have made their own nation over into a place to be admired.

But since our foreign policy rarely looks at how to help countries like Haiti make conditions better, people flee because to tell you the truth, those places really are shit holes.