Haiti - The Right Testicle Of Hell

The Right Testicle of Hell:
History of a Haitian Holocaust

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 Haiti@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.