This essay was written back in September, 2021, when the U.S. Border Patrol slipped back into Antebellum mode in dealing with Haitian refugees. In 2022 the Ukrainian neo-Nazi Border Patrol was doing similar things to Africans and South Asians at its borders with Poland, Romania and Slovakia. Today, the rotten, broken-down plantation that is the United States is rapidly pushing towards a Fourth Reich under the tutelage of lunatics such as RonDeSantis and Majorie Taylor Green, a piece of trailer trash masquerading as a Congresswoman.
I am preparing a new essay entitled America, 2023. It will highlight my thoughts on the current fascist takeover in the United States and the Western World in general. One thing we must remember about American fascism is that not only did it inspire the Nazis of Germany and the fascists of Italy, but that Europe took American fascist ideas to levels that even racist white Southerners did not dare tread. After all, Theodore Bilbo, James Vardaman and Strom Thurmond did not start any of the previous World Wars. Europeans did.
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Foreign readers, beware: I could just as easily write the same words about any nation in Europe–including Germany. Particularly Berlin, where I unfortunately still live, and which is a state in itself (and everyone who lives here and can think would wholeheartedly agree that Berlin is a grotesque, dysfunctional failure run by bigots, junkies, potheads and sex maniacs who flock to the bathrooms of Berghain to let some random White dude piss in their mouth).
Actually, this short screed is about that other failed state across the pond called the United States of America, and above all about its inability to deal with its Black citizens as people.
In fact, let’s just tell it like it is. America, as far as the majority of African Americans are concerned (and this goes for all the Black immigrants who have been taught to see themselves as superior to African Americans), is just a fucking joke. It’s not even a country; it never was, really. It’s just a dirty-ass plantation run by gold- and power-junkies. It’s not the last, best hope on earth, as it loves to pretend to be. As far as we Black people are concerned it’s simply the biggest stumbling block that we in North America have to get over to come to full recognition of our collective humanity. As long as this *thing* called the United States (and everything adjacent to it) is not openly and aggresively confronted with its cruelty and inhumanity towards Blacks, the bullshit you see in the above picture will continue unabated for the foreseeable future.
Smokey Joe Biden’s attitude towards Haitian refugees (as opposed to his predecessor Trumps attitude towards Mexican/Salvadoran refugees, wherein he locked them up in steel cages like animals) doesn’t surprise me in the least. I didn’t expect shit from this geriatric motherfucker when he won the White House back in November and I definitely expect nothing from him now. This is the same old shriveled-up lace-curtain clown who was cozying up with old-school Southern Segregationists back in the 1970s, so why is anyone surprised?
As for the Haitian refugee crisis itself, this does not surprise me, either. It’s yet another of several that I’ve witnessed in my lifetime. I remember clearly that in the late 70s-early 80s, there was a deep reluctance to allow Haitians to immigrate to the United States (I also remember that an obscene number of them actually drowned trying to make it to Florida) as opposed to Cubans and El Salvadorans. And we all know why, don’t we? It’s because the Haitians, in the eyes of the Last Best Hope on Earth, are just a bunch of stupid, dirty, inferior, ignorant nappy-headed “Negroes”. (This is actually quite ironic because Haitian immigrants in the United States–especially in Florida–also see African-Americans as a bunch of inferior, ignorant, oversexed, smelly, drug-addled, nappy-headed “Negroes”!)
(And why wouldn’t they? Why not? It’s the only cultural frame of reference by which the Haitian can view the African American: through that of a drunken Klannie. It’s the American way, always has been and always will be until somebody has the balls to seriously confront Yank bullshit. The American “Dream” is nothing but divide and rule, nothing but setting “niggers,” “spics,” “gooks,” “fags,” “ragheads,” “injuns,” “trailer trash,”* etc., against each other and watch them fight to the death for the chicken bones Colonel Sanders or IBM or McDonalds or Amazon or some other dipshit multicorporation tosses our way every now and then.)
Speaking of Joe Biden’s America: I have had the good fortune of avoiding it myself, since I’m too busy dealing with the detritus of Angela Merkel’s increasingly racist, dysfunctional, provincial and insane Bore-lin, Germ-many. Smokey Joe is not that Orange thing; the Orange thing was too obvious. Smokey Joe on the other hand is the perfect manifestation of the banality of neoliberal evil. He really doesn’t seem like such a bad guy at all, which is precisely what is wrong about his picture.
Smokey Joe (like Obammy with his fake Chicago Boule glamour: picture a slightly reconstructed Iceberg Slim as president, without the profanity, and essentially, that’s Obammy in a nutshell) is just another schlub occupying the Oval Office. Smokey Joe with his geriatric Alfred E. Neumann smile, presiding over a nation that–at least from the vantage point of Europe–appears to be trying very hard to clean up the trash that Trump’s baboons left behind on January 6th. By withdrawing from Afghanistan–a nation that America had no business invading to begin with–he also appears to be cleaning up the mess that that other clown left behind. (That would be Dubya, who is still irredeemable, no matter how badly the Orange thing fucked up.) Actually, his withdrawal from Afghanistan was a low-key and tacit admission of total failure in confronting Islamic extremism in that nation, for the extremists now have total control over that nation. Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya–all disasters that happened under Obammy’s watch–are all a shambles; Iran is facing economic ruin; Israel is even more reactionary and apartheid-driven than ever before, and Turkey (under Erdogan) thinks that it can revive a decadent, evil and nationalistic Ottoman regime that no one in the Mid-East (in his right mind) is going to accept.
All of this shit is happening because some decades ago, the United States made the cardinal mistake of trying to “democratize” the Middle East–that is, reshape the region in its own ugly image. Typically, the United States almost always brought total disaster. There should be no surprise as to why this happens since the so-called “civilization” that is the United States is “total disaster” personified–except, of course, for the upper- and upper-middle-class whites (and select coloreds) who benefit from said disaster.
We can easily segue back into talking about Haiti again because much of what Haiti is going through at the moment is directly the result of Yank meddling in Haiti’s affairs. Ofay-American Fuehrer Woodrow Wilson (in his “wisdom”) began fucking with Haiti in 1915 by sending troops to occupy the nation (as well as the Dominican Republic). It is no accident that 1915 was the same year that this ignorant Ofay screened “The Birth of a Nation,” America’s first “blockbuster” in cinematic history, in the White House, thereupon reigniting a long-dormant Ku Klux Klan. The Americans held on Hispaniola until 1934, by which time the elites of both Haiti and the Dominican Republic were sufficiently perverted enough to allow monsters such as Trujillo and the Duvalier wackos to run trains* on the people of both nations.
Haiti, of course, came out the biggest loser politically, socially, economically, structurally, ecologically, culturally. And once again, it is no mystery why this is so. It’s not that the island of Haiti is bereft of resources or incapable of supporting itself. Under French occupation in the 17th and 18th centuries Haiti (then Sainte-Domingue) was France’s most profitable colony in the world. It is no accident why the French fought tooth and nail to hold onto Sainte-Domingue. We can let C.L.R. James explain why, in his book The Black Jacobins:
Never for centuries had the Western World known such economic progress. By 1754, two years before the beginning of the Seven Years’ War, there were 599 plantations of sugar and 3,379 of indigo…In 1767 it exported 72 million pounds’ weight of raw sugar and 51 million pounds of white, a million pounds of indigo and two million pounds of cotton, and quantities of hides, molasses, cocoa and rum. Smuggling, which was winked at by the authorities, raised the official figures by at least 25 percent. Nor was it only in quantity that San Domingo excelled but in quality. Each coffee tree produced on an average a pound weight, equal sometimes to that of mocha. Cotton grew naturally, even without care, in stony ground and in the crevices of the rocks. Indigo also grew spontaneously. Tobacco had a larger leaf than in any other part of the Americas and sometimes equaled in quality the produce of Havana. The kernel of San Domingo cocoa was more acidulated than that of Venezuela and was not inferior in other respects, experience proving that the chocolate made of the two cocoas in combination had a more delicate flavor than that made from the cocoa of Venezuela alone. (James, C. L. R.: The Black Jacobins, Vintage Books, New York, 1963, p. 46)
This partly explains why the blackfaced comedian/gangsters who control Haiti today have no interest in revitalizing any of these economies. Economic revitalization, of course, would make Haiti one of the most prosperous countries in the American Hemisphere…providing that such industrialization proceed in an intelligent and socialistic fashion. Nobody in the world today could even dream of such a thing, not even Haitians themselves. Haitian Negroes, prosperous? And socialist, to boot? Nope. Not having it. Not as long as there is a France or above all, a United States. We don’t need a Caribbean haven for darkies the world over unless WE own it. Better to have Haiti lay in a perpetual shitty shambles than to let that happen.
One can very easily say of the Murkan what the late Hermann Broch once wrote of the Germ-man: “(He)… regards himself as a bringer of salvation and yet is inevitably a harbinger of disaster, because his doctrine is murder.”
P. Lewis, Berlin, November-December 2021
*A note to the KancelKulture Krowd (Twitter BlueCheckstm): these words, which were invented by your ancestors (and still used by you motherfuckers in private) are used within a specific context: to expose and ridicule the racist/classist contempt that the white oligarchs of the USA have for their non-white, non-Christian, non-hetero countrymen. Having said that, you can go back to your “safe spaces,” your private kitsch-worlds where poverty, exploitation, sexism, racism, war, disease, insanity, vulgarity, etc., etc. never existed. Sleep on.
A Black Writer in Berlin 