Monday 18 January 2010

We're All Black Jacobins Now - Jeremy Bullivant

"Eh! Eh! Bomba! Heu! Heu!
Canga, bafio te!
Canga, moune de le!
Canga, do ki la!
Canga, do ki la!
Canga, li!"

“We swear to destroy the whites and all they possess; let us die rather than fail to keep this vow”

C.L.R. James: "Such a mass of ignorance and falsehood has surrounded these [Caribbean] islands for so many centuries that obvious truths sound like revelations.

Daddy Comes Home In A Coffin - US Explorer's Last Journey by Mr M. Biswas (Vidia Naipaul)

On Ice by M. Biswas

"...Less than a year ago Daddy - George Elmer
Edman, the celebrated traveller and explorer -
left home to explore the Amazon.
Well, I have news for you, kiddies.
Daddy is on his way home.
Yesterday he passed through Trinidad.
In a coffin."

James: "In 1789 the French West Indian colony of San Domingo [Haiti] supplied two-thirds of the overseas trade of France and was the greatest individual market for the European slave-trade. It was an integral part of the economic life of the age, the greatest colony in the world, the pride of France, and the envy of every other imperialist nation. The whole structure rested on the labour of half-a-million slaves."

As usual when the US takes advantage of an Act of God Terror, it turns it into an Act of Uncle Sam Terror - "Blackwater Before Drinking Water!" according to Danny Schechter. Apply geopolitical strategy, enforce security through marines and mercenaries and only then allow the aid through.

James: "Christopher Columbus landed first in the New World at the island of San Salvador, and after praising God enquired urgently for gold. The natives, Red Indians, were peacable and friendly and directed him to Haiti, a large island (nearly as large as Ireland), rich, they said, in the yellow metal. He sailed to Haiti. One of his ships being wrecked, the Haitian Indians helped him so willingly that very little was lost and of the articles which they brought on shore not one was stolen.
The Spaniards, the most advanced Europeans of their day, annexed the island, called it Hispaniola, and took the backward natives under their protection. They introduced Christianity, forced labour in mines, murder, rape, bloodhounds, strange diseases, and artificial famine (by the destruction of cultivation to starve the rebellious). These and other requirements of the higher civilisation reduced the native population from an estimated half-a-million, perhaps a million, to 60,000 in fifteen years."

As Greg Palast noted, the Chinese with their sniffer dogs arrived in Haiti within 48 hours of the disaster unfolding. China is 8,500 miles from Haiti. The US took a day longer just to reach the airport and Florida is just 700 miles away while Guantánamo Bay lies just fifty miles from Haiti. In a blaze of PR 'news', the USS Carl Vinson and the marines turned up replete with sidewinder missiles and without any emergency relief supplies.

James: "... the marines... invaded Haiti in 1915. The whole nation resisted. A General Strike was organised and led by the literary intellectuals who had discovered the Africanism of their peasants as a means of national identity."
The Americans occupied the island for two decades.

Financial Times: "Alain Joyandet, French Co-operation Minister, told reporters... he had protested to Washington via the US ambassador about the US military's management of the airport where he said a French medical aid flight had been turned away."

James Walvin: "In 1791, inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution, the slaves of San Domingo rose in revolt. Despite invasion by a series of British, Spanish and Napoleonic armies, their twelve-year struggle led to the creation of Haiti, the first independent Black republic outside Africa. Only three years later, the British and Americans ended the Atlantic slave trade."

US intervention opposed the Haitian revolution for independence from France - "Goodbye To The Marseillaise". The US refused to recognise Haiti in 1804 as they couldn't countenance revolution so close to the Land of the Free, while it continued to enslave millions of its own citizens and fearing that "recognising Haiti would encourage slave revolution in the US" - Bill Quigley.

Wilson Harris offers this monologue from a young Guianese, half-Chinese, half-Negro man on the run from the police at the point when he realises that all previous generations, Dutch, English, French, capitalists, slaves, freed slaves, white and Black, were expatriates.
"... All the restless wayward spirits of all the aeons (who it was thought had been embalmed for good) are returning to roost in our blood. And we have to start all over again where they began to explore. We've got to pick up the seeds again from where they left off. It's no use worshipping the rottenest tacouba and tree-trunk in the historic topsoil. There's a whole world of branches and sensations we've missed, and we've got to start again from the roots up even if they look like nothing. Blood, sap, flesh, veins, arteries, lung, heart, the heartland, Sharon. We're the first potential parents who can contain the ancestral house. Too young? I don't know. Too much responsibility? Time will tell. We've got to face it. Or else it will be too late to stop everything and everyone from running away and tumbling down. And then All the King's Horses and all the King's Men won't be able to put us together again. Like all the bananas and the plantains and the coffee trees near Charity. Not far from here, you know. A small wind comes and everything comes out of the ground. Because the soil is unstable. Just pegasse. Looks rich on top but that's about all. What do you think they say when it happens, when the crops run away? They shrug and say they're expendable crops. they can't begin to see that it's us, our blood, running away all the time, in the river and in the sea, everywhere, staining the bush. Now is the time to make a newborn stand, Sharon; you and me; it's up to us, even if we fall on our knees and creep to anchor ourselves before we get up."

James: "The distinction between a white man and a man of colour was for them [the colonists] fundamental. It was their all. In defence of it they would bring down the whole of their world... For over a century after independence the Haitians attempted to form a replica of European, ie French, civilisation in the West Indies."
With a good dose of Negritude thrown in...

Following a pseudo-recognition of Haiti, the US shifted to the dark arts in their undermining of a state of free slaves just off their coast - better Duvalier rather than another Castro at the low tide level. Papa Doc and Baby Doc were US puppets for 29 years and the US supported and energised the 1991 and 2004 coups against Aristide, placing another puppet, President Preval, in office instead. Preval is dependent on US largesse and this power shift is all too evident in the usurption of occupational control from the island to the Pentagon.
Across the region, always the same template - think Trujillo being esconced in the Dominican Republic for over a quarter of a century with the help of US marines and the friendship of Washington throughout.
Incidentally, Aristide was also banned from next month's elections which, in a further democratic roll of the dice, will, of course, now no longer take place.


Hillary Clinton tells Americans that Haiti is "our friend" and CNN has launched a "Saving Haiti" PR exercise.

Howard Zinn: "For the United States to step forward as a defender of helpless countries matched its image in American high school history textbooks, but not its record in world affairs. It had opposed the Haitian revolution for independence from France at the start of the nineteenth century. It had instigated a war with Mexico and taken half of that country. It had pretended to help Cuba win freedom from Spain, and then planted itself in Cuba with a military base, investments, and rights of intervention. It had seized Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, and fought a brutal war to subjugate the Filipinos. It had 'opened' Japan to its trade with gunboats and threats. It had declared an Open Door Policy in China as a means of assuring that the United States would have opportunities equal to other imperial powers in exploiting China. It had sent troops to Peking with other nations, to assert Western supremacy in China, and kept them there for over thirty years.
"While demanding an Open Door in China, it had insisted (with the Monroe Doctrine and many military interventions) on a Closed Door in Latin America - that is, closed to everyone but the United States. It had engineered a revolution against Colombia and created the 'independent' state of Panama in order to build and control the Canal. It sent five thousand marines to Nicaragua in 1926 to counter a revolution, and kept a force there for seven years. It intervened in the Dominican Republic for the fourth time in 1916 and kept troops there for eight years. It intervened for the second time in Haiti in 1915... Between 1900 and 1933, the United States intervened in Cuba four times, in Nicaragua twice, in Panama six times, in Guatemala once, in Honduras seven times."

The linking of the social revolutions of Toussaint L'Ouverture, Boukman, Rigaud, Moise and Nazimbo to the later Marcus Garvey, Padmore, Nkrumah and the independence of Ghana and Fidel Castro is evidently far too frightening for intrinsically weak white power.

James: "They divided the offspring of white and Black and intermediate shades into 128 divisions. The true Mulatto was the child of the pure Black and the pure white. The child of the white and the Mulatto woman was a quarteron with ninety-six parts white and thirty-two parts Black. But the quarteron could be produced by the white and the Marabou in the proportion of 88 to 40, or by the white and the Sacatra, in the proportion of 72 to 56 and so on all through the 128 varieties. But the sang mêlé with 127 white parts and one Black part was still a man of colour."

James: "He himself [de Wimpffen] had sat at a table with a woman, beautiful, rich and very much admired, who had had a careless cook thrown into the oven."

Of course, we must expect US geopolitical policy to get carried away within itself when the twin goals of a neo-conservative agenda and military expansionism share strategic loci. And, what, with a chance to air the good ol' fashioned folksy racism inherent in the shareholder capitalist system too?
Far too good an opportunity to miss.

Ainsi Parla L'oncle...

Zionist Rahm Emanuel - Obama's White House Chief of Staff - and his advice to the First Man: "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste."

On top of the military adventurism and the seemingly ever-present economic sanctions, the impositions of the Caribbean Basin Initiative that robbed Haiti of it's rice industry so that they now have to import US rice instead, the migration from the countryside to the resultant shanty towns, the sweatshops where wage slaves earn just $2 per day, comparatively well off against the national average of just $1 per day, the abusive US sex trade tourism, the stamping on the 'Third World' in general under the (dis)guises of the Doha trade lectures and the lack of action regarding climate change, it is, apparently, VITAL to US interests to impose this neo-con agenda on a land where between one and two hundred thousand people have just died.

No different than the punishments for the Hamas 'democratic revolt'.

And what does the Mulatto-In-Chief have to say (never Black, always Mulatto in the White House)?

"But above all, we act for a very simple reason: in times of tragedy, the United States of America steps forward and helps. That is who we are. That is what we do. For decades, America’s leadership has been founded in part on the fact that we do not use our power to subjugate others, we use it to lift them up—whether it was rebuilding our former adversaries after World War II, dropping food and water to the people of Berlin, or helping the people of Bosnia and Kosovo rebuild their lives and their nations."

As James Mackintosh says in the Financial Times: "US government aid amounts to 0.19% of gross national income: the largest foreign aid in dollar terms, but one of the stingiest in proportion to the country’s wealth of all the developed countries."

Mackintosh continued: "US officials have blamed security concerns for holding up providing relief. Yet a team of Cuban doctors were seen Monday treating hundreds of patients without a gun or soldier in sight. The deputy chief of mission at the American Embassy in Haiti, David Lindwall, said the U.S. had done a lot, but that some teams and supplies “aren’t getting out as broadly as we’d like because of security” concerns."

Still after eight days, the US military finally neohyperrealised that, as they control every single action of President Preval, they might land their helicopters in the grounds of the presidential palace and distribute the aid.

State Terror At A Time Of Humanitarian Crisis.
Get the Strange Idiot Child From Texas in to help co-ordinate the relief effort following his success in New Orleans.
How Terroristic Do You Wish To Be?

And that is one of the two biggest questions of Our Time.

All aid organisations tell us that the first 48 hours are the most critical regarding the prevention of further deaths due to the earthquake and the spread of disease.
The US were in control of the airport and, therefore, distribution and failed to co-ordinate the process in any meaningful manner whatsoever.
There was no justification for the "lack of action" other than the overall strategy of inaction in itself.

This secondary genocide was State Terror.
Righteous indignation is not revolutionary enough.
It is of little use filming PR exercises dropping Caterpillars into the most damaged areas now Uncle Sam, unless the bidding for future reconstruction has already been decreed.

Week One - Genocide by Inaction.
Week Two - Enforce Mirror of Consumption Template ("We are saving you both from yourselves and from Death. Have a cupcake. Learn to consume").

Cahier D'un Retour Au Pays Natal - Aimé Césaire

"...my Negritude is not a stone, its
deafness a sounding board for
the noises of the day
my Negritude is not a mere spot of
dead water on the dead eye
of the earth
my Negritude is no tower, no cathedral

it cleaves into the red flesh of
the heavens
it penetrates the seamless bondage of my unbending patience

Hoorah for those who never invented
anything
for those who never explored anything
for those who never mastered anything

but who, possessed, give themselves up
to the essence of each thing
ignorant of the coverings but possessed
by the pulse of things
indifferent to mastering but taking the
chances of the world...

...But in doing so, my heart, preserve
me from all hate
do not turn me into a man of hate of
whom I think only with hate
for in order to protect myself into
this unique race
you know the extent of my boundless
love..."

Quigley reckons that the US owes Haiti billions of dollars: "This is not charity. This is justice. This is reparation. The current crisis is an opportunity for people in the US to own up to our country's history of dominating Haiti and to make a truly just response."

But what is Real Justice?

The Friemanist Hyperimperial State-Based Economic Juggernaut will not halt of its own accord - its air-brakes are fucked.
As the temporal narratives of climate change stare us out, is it to (eventually) be Negritude or Eh! Eh! Bomba!?

Or both...

The incremental 'justice' of Amartya Sen is merely a sign in the code - such justice doesn't function at all at extreme times and functions only partially at other times as the psychopathic system is never still.

In San Domingo, both incremental justice and social revolution succeeded in parallel in 1793, although it was only when Toussaint trained his private army of slaves that France was forced to listen.

C.L.R. James was in no doubt of the answer: "The rich are only defeated when running for their lives."

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