Time for another plan to recreate humanity! (or at least a part of it)

(Note, Feb 14: many more comments have been posted in this entry.)

We’ve been talking a lot lately about how liberal gnostics construct an imaginary world which is the opposite of reality, and then seek to turn this wholly imaginary world into actual reality.

Here’s the latest example. A rock musician named Steven Van Zandt has an article at Politico in which he proposes the real solution to Haiti’s problems (emphases are mine):

As I watched “Meet the Press” host David Gregory recently ask former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush what it’s going to take to restore Haiti to how it was, my heart started paying attention.

Gregory was asking the normal questions, and Clinton and Bush gave the appropriate answers. But it occurred to me that, my God, unless something radical is done, that’s exactly what’s going to happen. Haiti will be restored to what it was. And that’s the last thing Haiti needs….

Haiti doesn’t need to be rebuilt. Haiti needs to be reimagined.

The Haitian people need a partnership with a group of individuals that will help them, for the first time in their existence, establish a state-of-the-art infrastructure that will last 100 years, unencumbered by political and economic corruption. Then let the ingenuity, work ethic and spirit of the people do the rest.

So it’s time to call on Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Michael Dell, Jeff Bezos, Oprah Winfrey, Steve Jobs, Paul Allen, George Clooney, Robert Johnson, Angelina Jolie, Jay-Z, Brad Pitt, Wyclef Jean, John W. Thompson, Bono, Bruce Springsteen, the Beatles, Sean Combs, the Rolling Stones, Jonathan Demme, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, David Geffen, James Cameron, John Lasseter, futurist architects and engineers, and anybody else with expertise, vision and passion to organize a summit of Haitian leaders, with Clinton as chairman, and design a new Haiti. Let’s make it the high-tech capital of the world.

We need to start solving problems permanently on this planet instead of wasting time, money and energy on temporary Band-Aids that make us feel good.

This horrible event will be all the more horrible if we don’t learn from it. Either tens of thousands of lives have been lost in vain, or they have left us the one chance to begin to build the archetypal country of the future.

There will never again be an opportunity so obvious or a people more deserving of a chance to prove what they can do.

All the symbolic gestures are nice—and even important—but they will come and go.

Whatever money gets raised is vitally important right now, but it, too, will come and go.

For once, let’s do all those things, and then let’s do something that helps permanently.

Let’s not rebuild Haiti; let’s reimagine it.

And then make it happen.

[end of article]

Van Zandt neglected to add that the only thing standing in the way of his proposal to turn Haiti into the archetypal country of the future is the political will to make it happen.

- end of initial entry -

A Canadian reader writes:

Maybe we should also replace the population of Haiti with a set of Western Traditionalists.

Larry—want to be the next Papa Doc?

Posted February 14

Reader continues:

Not worth posting, unless we be accused of genocide.

LA replies:

I thought it was amusing, and posted it—but from a “Canadian reader” since you had doubts about it.

Reader replies:

I thought it amusing too, but no need to invite accusations on the basis of a good joke. Haiti would be nice actually, if we could start afresh.

LA replies:

But you’re not seriously proposing that the population of Haiti be removed; you’re parodying Van Zandt with a right-wing version of his proposal. He thinks a bunch of celebrities can put their heads together and remake Haiti from the bottom up. So you’re saying, we can remake Haiti by replacing its population with traditionalists. Your proposal is just as off the planet as his. It’s a right-wing utopian version of his left-wing utopian fantasy.

Reader replies:

True that it was a parody, but I was inferring, that in order to “fix” Haiti, Haiti needs a significant influx of “new people”, people who can take control and build a society that can feed and protect its population, in the form of a new (to Haiti) dominant culture, based on hard work and thrift, investment and savings, law and order, education, individual responsibility etc. Only then can Haiti become a member of the civilized world. Until then it will remain a third-world basket case. And since my little “proposal” would require a system of “apartheid” it would instantly be rejected.

N. writes:

Reading the babblings of Steve Van Zandt (is this him?) is a very retro experience. It reminds me of the claims made about the Concert for Bangladesh and other such efforts. But what really leads me to suspect that Van Zandt has been dipping into some really old drugs is his list of people to call upon. Who will break the bad news to him that the Beatles are not available, as two of them have been dead for years? And what, exactly, is Sean “Puff Daddy / P. Diddy” Combs supposed to do for Haitians, introduce them to New York City gangsters?

Then there’s the notion of an infrastructure to last 100 years … this is a wonderful example of magical thinking:

although to be honest, the entire babblefest fits that description. Roads do not repair themselves, nor do water systems, nor do electrical generation & distribution grids. To believe otherwise is simply absurd.

Truly you have found a sterling example of gnosticism at work.

Rick U. writes:

Sorry, but I just could not stop laughing at some of the names on the list; Oprah, Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Bono, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, and The Beatles? Is John Lennon coming back to sing “Imagine” while this group of deep thinkers conjures up Haiti’s god-less future?

Mark Jaws writes:

I am all for liberals becoming pre-occupied with building a new Haiti. As long as it is their money—and not ours—such an effort could keep them busy for the rest of their lives, and keep them out of the American political system. Of course, that won’t happen. Dreams will confront reality and within five fruitless and frustrating years Auster’s Law will take hold—they will blame the Haitian situation on the White Man.

Jake Jacobsen writes:

You say …

Van Zandt neglected to add that the only thing standing in the way of his proposal to turn Haiti into the archetypal country of the future is the political will to make it happen.

Yes, that and the truly inconvenient fact that Haiti is filled with Haitians!

It is ironic that just this week an ad came on a program we were watching on Hulu asking that we “save Haiti,” I turned to my wife and noted that all we could possibly do was return Haiti to status quo ante, saving Haiti? How delusional do you have to be?

Mike Berman writes:

Steven Van Zandt said:

There will never again be an opportunity so obvious or a people more deserving of a chance to prove what they can do.

What does Mr. Van Zandt mean by, “a people more deserving?” Is it the fact that the black Haitians slaughtered every white in the country when they took over?

Sage McLaughlin writes:

The Politico column has to be the stupidest thing I’ve ever read there. A question for Mr. Lennon, er, Van Zandt:

Do you think that Haiti’s current status as one of the world’s most abominable pits of squalor and human misery was what some omnipotent planner imagined?

Wait—perhaps that’s exactly what he believes. The basic thrust of modern leftist thought about conditions in the wider world is that black countries are poor because they’ve been conspired against. Still, it demands some explanation—if what is required is imagining a thing to be, why do whites have to do all the imagining? Especially given the “work ethic, ingenuity, and spirit” for which Haitians are so famous?

February 16

Steven N. writes:

At a very high level what Mr. Van Zandt is proposing is Good Ol’ Colonization: A superior nation taking over a lesser nation for the mutual benefit of conqueror and conquered. Mr. Van Zandt would, of course, strenuously object to this characterization, believing as he does in the inherent ability of ordinary Haitian’s to become competent contributors to a New Silicon Island. But in spite of this objection, and aside the patent implausibility of Haiti becoming a high-tech capital, a version of what he’s saying makes perfect sense: Import competent leadership to take over the country, who will, as a natural matter of course, partner with the best and brightest (who have not already been brain-drained away) to ensure the security of persons and property, without which no meaningful economic growth can occur. Productive industries can then be built on the island (half) which take advantage of Haiti’s natural abundance of cheap and unskilled labor, the better and more productive portions of which will become, with time, less cheap and more skilled, and correspondingly more rich. It could work. It has worked … in even less likely places.

Daniela writes from Romania:

Why create a high-tech society in a place with such a low IQ? It’s like I’m amused when Americans talk on TV about how the US economy is based on ideas which get exported all over the world, but they don’t seem to understand that if that was true (which would have made the U.S. economy have a trade surplus) low IQ immigrants would be useless in terms of economic benefits (considering they would be able to do just unskilled labour). If Haiti was such a great place for a high-tech society, why didn’t they create it, especially since they are so ingenious and have a great work ethic and spirit? No matter what kind of society will get created in Haiti by outsiders, it will crumble exactly because of the ingenuity, work ethic and spirit of the people—or lack of them.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 13, 2010 03:25 PM | Send