Haiti: A lootin’ an’ a burnin’?

By William Bowles, Creative-i

It was obvious from the getgo that media 'coverage' of the earthquake in Haiti was heading in the same, predictable direction, namely down the same racist path that Western media coverage of things 'darker than blue' always travels.

“Relief efforts have also been hampered by supply bottlenecks, leading to security concerns over looting and violence amid increasing desperation.

“There are concerns about the safety of aid workers, with reports of gunfire and youths carrying machetes. Some charities have taken security guards, while others are supported by UN security forces.” — 'UK government Haiti earthquake aid to treble to £20m', BBC News 18 January, 2010

And yet again in another BBC 'news' item:

“Many are trying to leave the city, and there are security concerns amid reports of looting and violence.” — 'UN chief Ban Ki-Moon calls for Haiti aid patience', BBC News, 18 January, 2010

Meanwhile, the US has de facto occupied Haiti, no doubt to preserve its sweatshop investments, amongst which are Walt Disney and Walmart[1]. And no wonder aid can't get through, the US seemed to have moved Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) to Haiti, even blocking the organization of Caribbean states, Caricom, from landing badly needed assistance.

The attitude of the West towards people of colour is best illustrated by the following, also from the preceding BBC story:

“The US and Dutch authorities have said they are speeding up the process of flying orphaned children away from Haiti to adoptive parents abroad.

“Six Haitian children adopted by Dutch families arrived in the Netherlands on Sunday and the justice ministry said it was expediting the adoption process and paperwork for about 100 others.”

So whilst people are dying because the US military is blocking aid flights coming in, it seems it has no problem stealing babies and flying them out!

The Times of London continues in the same, racist vein (with the predictable image of a 'looter' holding a knife that I will not reproduce here):

“Six days after the Port-au-Prince earthquake large areas of the city remain untouched by the global aid effort as bottlenecks continue to clog the airport and looting threatens to descend into wholesale violence.” — 'Lynch mobs turn on looters amid Haiti aid crisis', The Times, 18 January, 2010

Hoisted by their own, racist pétard

By contrast, a report from Canada Haiti Action Network reveals where the 'aid' went first:

'Thus far…the rescue teams cluster at the high profile and safer walled sites and were literally afraid to enter the barrios. They gravitated to the sites where they had secure compounds and big buildings.

'Meanwhile, the neighbourhoods where the damage appears to be much wider, and anywhere there were loose crowds, they avoided. In the large sites, and in the nice neighbourhoods, and where the press can be found, there would be teams from every country imaginable. Dogs and extraction units with more arriving, yet with 90% or more of them just sitting around.'

'Meanwhile, in the poor neighbourhoods, awash in rubble, there was not a foreigner in sight.”

[...]

“News crews are looking for the story of desperate Haitians that are in hysterics. When in reality it is more often the Haitians that are acting calmly while the international community, the elite and politicians have melted down over the issue, and none seem to have the remotest idea what is going on.” — 'Where is the aid in Haiti' — by Roger Annis, 16 January, 2010

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~ Video: Inside A Failed State - Haiti ~

The Air Force versus Hollywood

To refute early 1960s novels and Hollywood films like Fail-Safe and Dr. Strangelove which raised questions about U.S. control over nuclear weapons, the Air Force produced a documentary film--"SAC [Strategic Air Command] Command Post"--to demonstrate its  responsiveness to presidential command and its tight control over nuclear weapons.

During the crisis years of the early 1960s, when U.S.-Soviet relations were especially tense, novels and motion pictures raised questions about the Air Force's control over nuclear weapons and the dangers of an accidentally or deliberately-triggered nuclear war. Foremost were Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler's novel Fail-Safe (1962) (later turned into a motion picture) about an accidental war and the film Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, a brilliant satire about a nuclear conflict deliberately sparked by a psychotic Air Force general. Both Dr. Strangelove and Fail-Safe may have created enough worries in the Air Force about its image to lead the service to produce a film--"SAC [Strategic Air Command] Command Post"--designed to confirm presidential control over the "expenditure" of nuclear weapons and the difficulty of initiating an 'unauthorized launch" of nuclear bombers.

Never used publicly by the Air Force for reasons that remain puzzling, "SAC Command Post" is premiered online today on the National Security Archive Web site. Produced during 1963-1964, this unclassified film tried to undercut Dr. Strangelove's image of a psychotic general ordering nuclear strikes against the Soviet Union by showing that nuclear war could not be "triggered by unauthorized launch." To reinforce an image of responsible control, "SAC Command Post" presents a detailed picture of the communications systems that the Strategic Air Command used to centralize direction of bomber bases and missile silos. With the film's emphasis on SAC's readiness for nuclear war, higher authorities may have finally decided that it was off-message in light of the Johnson administration's search for stable relations with Moscow.

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Haitian earthquake: Made in the USA

Earthquakes are random events. How many people they kill is predetermined. In Haiti this week, don't blame tectonic plates. Ninety-nine percent of the death toll is attributable to poverty.

So the question is relevant. How'd Haiti become so poor?

The story begins in 1910, when a U.S. State Department-National City Bank of New York (now called Citibank) consortium bought the Banque National d'Haïti--Haiti's only commercial bank and its national treasury--in effect transferring Haiti's debts to the Americans. Five years later, President Woodrow Wilson ordered troops to occupy the country in order to keep tabs on "our" investment.

From 1915 to 1934, the U.S. Marines imposed harsh military occupation, murdered Haitians patriots and diverted 40 percent of Haiti's gross domestic product to U.S. bankers. Haitians were banned from government jobs. Ambitious Haitians were shunted into the puppet military, setting the stage for a half-century of U.S.-backed military dictatorship.

The U.S. kept control of Haiti's finances until 1947.

Still--why should Haitians complain? Sure, we stole 40 percent of Haiti's national wealth for 32 years. But we let them keep 60 percent.

Whiners.

Despite having been bled dry by American bankers and generals, civil disorder prevailed until 1957, when the CIA installed President-for-Life François "Papa Doc" Duvalier. Duvalier's brutal Tonton Macoutes paramilitary goon squads murdered at least 30,000 Haitians and drove educated people to flee into exile. But think of the cup as half-full: fewer people in the population means fewer people competing for the same jobs!

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Voz Alta - 40th anniversary of the student massacre in Tlatelolco

"Voz Alta" (Loud Voice), by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, is a memorial commissioned for the 40th anniversary of the student massacre in Tlatelolco, which took place on October 2nd 1968. In the piece, participants speak freely into a megaphone placed on the "Plaza de las Tres Culturas", right where the massacre took place. As the megaphone amplifies the voice, a 10kW searchlight automatically "beams" the voice as a sequence of flashes: if the voice is silent the light is off and as it gets louder so does the light's brightness. As the searchlight beam hits the top of the building of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, now Centro Cultural Tlatelolco, it is relayed by three additional searchlights, one pointed to the north, one to the southeast towards Zócalo Square and one to the southwest towards the Monument to the Revolution. Depending on the weather, the searchlights could be seen from a 15Km radius, quietly transmitting the voice of the participants over Mexico City. Anyone around the city could tune into 96.1FM Radio UNAM to listen in live to what the lights were saying.

When no one was participanting the light on the Plaza was off but the three lights on the building played back archival recordings of survivors, interviews with intellectuals and politicians, music from 1968 and radio art pieces commissioned by Radio UNAM. In this way the memory of the event was mixed with live participation.

Thousands of people participated in this project, without censorship or moderation. Participation included statements from survivors, street poetry, shout-outs, ad hoc art performaces, marriage proposals, calls for protest and more.

Muslim rap by ZHN1: War end peace