Землетрясение на Гаити

[credentes]

"Death was everywhere in Port-au-Prince. Bodies of tiny children were piled next to schools. Corpses of women lay on the street with stunned expressions frozen on their faces as flies began to gather. Bodies of men were covered with plastic tarps or cotton sheets."

http://beta.thehindu.com/news/international/article79800.ece

На этом фоне человеческого горя особенно впечатляют "Христианские" заявления о том, что землетрясение -  результат "соглашения с дьяволом"
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/01/14/2792164.htm?section=world

В любом случае, такой мир не может быть создан Богом

Comments

[ramendik]

Вот эти условия точно не Богом созданы, и не ещё чем-то напрямую сверхъестественным. Людьми они созданы.

Землетрясение такого же уровня в другой стране вызывает на порядки меньшие жертвы.

The New York Times

January 15, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist
The Underlying Tragedy
By DAVID BROOKS

On Oct. 17, 1989, a major earthquake with a magnitude of 7.0 struck
the Bay Area in Northern California. Sixty-three people were killed.
This week, a major earthquake, also measuring a magnitude of 7.0,
struck near Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The Red Cross estimates that
between 45,000 and 50,000 people have died.

This is not a natural disaster story. This is a poverty story. It’s a
story about poorly constructed buildings, bad infrastructure and
terrible public services. On Thursday, President Obama told the people
of Haiti: “You will not be forsaken; you will not be forgotten.” If he
is going to remain faithful to that vow then he is going to have to
use this tragedy as an occasion to rethink our approach to global
poverty. He’s going to have to acknowledge a few difficult truths.

The first of those truths is that we don’t know how to use aid to
reduce poverty. Over the past few decades, the world has spent
trillions of dollars to generate growth in the developing world. The
countries that have not received much aid, like China, have seen
tremendous growth and tremendous poverty reductions. The countries
that have received aid, like Haiti, have not.

In the recent anthology “What Works in Development?,” a group of
economists try to sort out what we’ve learned. The picture is grim.
There are no policy levers that consistently correlate to increased
growth. There is nearly zero correlation between how a developing
economy does one decade and how it does the next. There is no
consistently proven way to reduce corruption. Even improving governing
institutions doesn’t seem to produce the expected results.

The chastened tone of these essays is captured by the economist
Abhijit Banerjee: “It is not clear to us that the best way to get
growth is to do growth policy of any form. Perhaps making growth
happen is ultimately beyond our control.”

The second hard truth is that micro-aid is vital but insufficient.
Given the failures of macrodevelopment, aid organizations often focus
on microprojects. More than 10,000 organizations perform missions of
this sort in Haiti. By some estimates, Haiti has more nongovernmental
organizations per capita than any other place on earth. They are doing
the Lord’s work, especially these days, but even a blizzard of these
efforts does not seem to add up to comprehensive change.

Third, it is time to put the thorny issue of culture at the center of
efforts to tackle global poverty. Why is Haiti so poor? Well, it has a
history of oppression, slavery and colonialism. But so does Barbados,
and Barbados is doing pretty well. Haiti has endured ruthless
dictators, corruption and foreign invasions. But so has the Dominican
Republic, and the D.R. is in much better shape. Haiti and the
Dominican Republic share the same island and the same basic
environment, yet the border between the two societies offers one of
the starkest contrasts on earth — with trees and progress on one side,
and deforestation and poverty and early death on the other.

As Lawrence E. Harrison explained in his book “The Central Liberal
Truth,” Haiti, like most of the world’s poorest nations, suffers from
a complex web of progress-resistant cultural influences. There is the
influence of the voodoo religion, which spreads the message that life
is capricious and planning futile. There are high levels of social
mistrust. Responsibility is often not internalized. Child-rearing
practices often involve neglect in the early years and harsh
retribution when kids hit 9 or 10.

We’re all supposed to politely respect each other’s cultures. But some
cultures are more progress-resistant than others, and a horrible
tragedy was just exacerbated by one of them.

Fourth, it’s time to promote locally led paternalism. In this country,
we first tried to tackle poverty by throwing money at it, just as we
did abroad. Then we tried microcommunity efforts, just as we did
abroad. But the programs that really work involve intrusive
paternalism.

(продоолжение)

[ramendik]

These programs, like the Harlem Children’s Zone and the No Excuses
schools, are led by people who figure they don’t understand all the
factors that have contributed to poverty, but they don’t care. They
are going to replace parts of the local culture with a highly
demanding, highly intensive culture of achievement — involving
everything from new child-rearing practices to stricter schools to
better job performance.

It’s time to take that approach abroad, too. It’s time to find
self-confident local leaders who will create No Excuses
countercultures in places like Haiti, surrounding people — maybe just
in a neighborhood or a school — with middle-class assumptions, an
achievement ethos and tough, measurable demands.

The late political scientist Samuel P. Huntington used to acknowledge
that cultural change is hard, but cultures do change after major
traumas. This earthquake is certainly a trauma. The only question is
whether the outside world continues with the same old, same old.

Re: (продоолжение)

[credentes.livejournal.com]

Разумеется. Природные эксцессы такого масштаба только обнажают ужасную ситуацию в стране.
Я прекрасно понимаю, что человеческая солидарность способна этому противостоять, и когда ее нет, то проблемы возрастают многократно. Но на _сам факт подобного эксцесса_ люди повлиять неспособны. Вспомните Таиланд 2004 года.

С уважением