Friday, January 15, 2010

HAITI

We all want to see international support for a people suffering a catastrophe, do we not? The sudden outburst of sympathetic promises for Haiti after its earthquake is, however, extraordinary. There is a positively orgiastic international outpouring, led by the United States, for a poor little shit country nobody knows anything about. The spectacle of the last three U.S. presidents spear-heading a fundraising campaign is strange indeed. What is going on? What we are told is that Haiti is the poorest nation in the region, but at the same time it is a special little friend of the United States. How can a nation be both these things at the same time? Not a case of child abuse?

Omnipotent Obama has declared many a thing for Haiti but especially a contingent of paratroopers to protect Haitians from their own natural propensity for criminality. He is acting to protect Haiti in the awesome image of its big special friend. He has commissioned his special envoys, the Celestial Clintons, to do what has to be done. Indeed Beelzebub Bill has a personal interest in Haiti, He sent in the United States military when He was Himself the Omnipotent One, and did what had to be done when an elected government threatened to go astray. He is personally affronted that God should visit such a catastrophe upon His own Haiti. He takes it very personally.

I cannot say it any better than Carl Dix: "The United States has promised $100 million, sounds like a lot, but that is about 1% of the US military budget for occupying Iraq and Afghanistan for one month. What have they done so far? What they have mainly brought in are paratroopers to help secure the situation and to control things as opposed to focussing on what people really need which is food, water, access to healthcare and relief operations. I think about Afghanistan where they have helicopter gunships going around firing missiles at villages, think about what those helicoptors could do if they had been deployed to Haiti where they are talking about how the roads are down and nobody can get supplies through, well a helicoptor could airlift rescuers, airlift food or water or doctors.
So there is a question of what the priorities are here, as well as the history of US-Haitian relations. The problem is when you talk about Haiti's lack of infrastructure you have to talk about the political and economic strangulation of Haiti historically by the US going all the way back to the founding of Haiti. The US and France attempted to isolate and blockade Haiti when the Haitian slaves rose up and chased the French out because the US felt it would be a very bad example for all the African slaves in the US to hear that the slaves in a neighbouring country had gotten free.
You need a rescue and supply effort that doesn't suppress the Haitian people but actually unleashes and helps them in doing this because there has been a portrayal of Haitians as thugs and criminals just as the way they tried to portray the people in New Orleans after Katrina as criminals who were looting and killing everything, when people were actually saving themselves because the government at all levels, local, federal and state had refused to do that, people were stealing food to get something to eat, taking boats to save other people.
You need a relief effort that is backing up the Haitian people and doing that, not one that is suppressing them in order to maintain Haiti as a low wage area where people can be paid starvation wages to produce goods for export, and not an area where globalisation can destroy the domestic agriculture as US efforts have done in Haiti since the 1980s."

I just know that this analysis is going to be proven correct. Already the US is a military presence controlling who else can land in Haiti. Just today two aircraft carrying medical equipment were turned away by the US military whose helicoptors appear to patrol the skies not to be helpful but to survey the country for trouble, which given the US approach is almost guaranteed to occur.

Update: As the hysterical goodwill towards poor little obedient Haiti continues, one has to wonder when comparing this to the complete indifference toward Gaza which was hit in similar fashion not by an act of God, but by an act of fascist man. I realise that the world's establishment media is comfortable expressing compassion for Haiti and indifference for Gaza but what about the people of the world? Do they really have compassion for one set of people and indifference for another set? because if they do, then the compassion has to be completely phoney. Pretty scarey.