[News] The Right Testicle of Hell: History of a Haitian Holocaust
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Sun Jan 17 13:30:47 EST 2010
http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Right-Testicle-of-Hell-by-Greg-Palast-100117-242.html
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January 17, 2010
The Right Testicle of Hell: History of a Haitian Holocaust
By Greg Palast
Blackwater before drinking water
by Greg Palast for The Huffington Post
Sunday 17 January 2010
1. Bless the President for having rescue teams in
the air almost immediately. That was President
Olafur Grimsson of Iceland. On Wednesday, the AP
reported that the President of the United States
promised, "The initial contingent of 2,000
Marines could be deployed to the quake-ravaged
country within the next few days." "In a few days," Mr. Obama?
2. There's no such thing as a 'natural' disaster.
200,000 Haitians have been slaughtered by slum
housing and IMF "austerity" plans.
3. A friend of mine called. Do I know a
journalist who could get medicine to her father?
And she added, trying to hold her voice together,
"My sister, she's under the rubble. Is anyone
going who can help, anyone?" Should I tell her,
"Obama will have Marines there in 'a few days'"?
4. China deployed rescuers with sniffer dogs
within 48 hours. China, Mr. President. China:
8,000 miles distant. Miami: 700 miles close. US
bases in Puerto Rico: right there.
5. Obama's Defense Secretary Robert Gates said,
"I don't know how this government could have
responded faster or more comprehensively than it
has." We know Gates doesn't know.
6. From my own work in the field, I know that
FEMA has access to ready-to-go potable water,
generators, mobile medical equipment and more for
hurricane relief on the Gulf Coast. It's all
still there. Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, who
served as the task force commander for emergency
response after Hurricane Katrina, told the
Christian Science Monitor, "I thought we had
learned that from Katrina, take food and water
and start evacuating people." Maybe we learned
but, apparently, Gates and the Defense Department missed school that day.
7. Send in the Marines. That's America's
response. That's what we're good at. The aircraft
carrier USS Carl Vinson finally showed up after
three days. With what? It was dramatically
deployed -- without any emergency relief
supplies. It has sidewinder missiles and 19 helicopters.
8. But don't worry, the International Search and
Rescue Team, fully equipped and self-sufficient
for up to seven days in the field, deployed
immediately with ten metric tons of tools and
equipment, three tons of water, tents, advanced
communication equipment and water purifying capability. They're from Iceland.
9. Gates wouldn't send in food and water because,
he said, there was no "structure ... to provide
security." For Gates, appointed by Bush and
allowed to hang around by Obama, it's security
first. That was his lesson from Hurricane
Katrina. Blackwater before drinking water.
10. Previous US presidents have acted far more
swiftly in getting troops on the ground on that
island. Haiti is the right half of the island of
Hispaniola. It's treated like the right testicle
of Hell. The Dominican Republic the left. In
1965, when Dominicans demanded the return of Juan
Bosch, their elected President, deposed by a
junta, Lyndon Johnson reacted to this crisis
rapidly, landing 45,000 US Marines on the beaches
to prevent the return of the elected president.
11. How did Haiti end up so economically
weakened, with infrastructure, from hospitals to
water systems, busted or non-existent - there are
two fire stations in the entire nation - and
infrastructure so frail that the nation was
simply waiting for "nature" to finish it off?
Don't blame Mother Nature for all this death and
destruction. That dishonor goes to Papa Doc and
Baby Doc, the Duvalier dictatorship, which looted
the nation for 28 years. Papa and his Baby put an
estimated 80% of world aid into their own pockets
- with the complicity of the US government happy
to have the Duvaliers and their voodoo militia,
Tonton Macoutes, as allies in the Cold War. (The
war was easily won: the Duvaliers' death squads
murdered as many as 60,000 opponents of the regime.)
12. What Papa and Baby didn't run off with, the
IMF finished off through its "austerity" plans.
An austerity plan is a form of voodoo
orchestrated by economists zomby-fied by an
irrational belief that cutting government
services will somehow help a nation prosper.
13. In 1991, five years after the murderous Baby
fled, Haitians elected a priest, Jean-Bertrand
Aristide, who resisted the IMF's austerity
diktats. Within months, the military, to the
applause of Papa George HW Bush, deposed him.
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as
farce. The farce was George W. Bush. In 2004,
after the priest Aristide was re-elected
President, he was kidnapped and removed again, to the applause of Baby Bush.
14. Haiti was once a wealthy nation, the
wealthiest in the hemisphere, worth more, wrote
Voltaire in the 18th century, than that rocky,
cold colony known as New England. Haiti's wealth
was in black gold: slaves. But then the slaves
rebelled - and have been paying for it ever since.
From 1825 to 1947, France forced Haiti to pay an
annual fee to reimburse the profits lost by
French slaveholders caused by their slaves'
successful uprising. Rather than enslave
individual Haitians, France thought it more
efficient to simply enslave the entire nation.
15. Secretary Gates tells us, "There are just
some certain facts of life that affect how
quickly you can do some of these things." The
Navy's hospital boat will be there in, oh, a week or so. Heckuva job, Brownie!
16. Note just received from my friend. Her sister
was found, dead; and her other sister had to bury
her. Her father needs his anti-seizure medicines.
That's a fact of life too, Mr. President.
***
Through our journalism network, we are trying to
get my friend's medicines to her father. If any
reader does have someone getting into or near
Port-au-Prince, please contact
<http://www.opednews.com/populum/mailto:haiti@gregpalast.com>Haiti at GregPalast.com
immediately.
Urgently recommended reading - The Black
Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San
Domingo Revolution, the history of the successful
slave uprising in Hispaniola by the brilliant CLR James.
Author's Website: http://www.gregpalast.com
Author's Bio: Greg Palast, winner of the George
Orwell Courage-In-Journalism Prize, is the author
of the New York Times bestsellers The Best
Democracy Money Can Buy and
"<http://www.gregpalast.com/madhouse/index.php/order-the-book/>ARMED
MADHOUSE: Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China
Floats Bush Sinks, the Scheme to Steal '08, No
Child's Behind Left and other Dispatches from the
Front Lines of the Class War."
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