Two Articles on Haiti

Following two articles below are taken from www.socialistworker.co.uk. It is inspirational (and equally frightening) to see the other side of the picture. The side that major news agents do not show and major rulers of the world want to hide...

If you want to read them in the source, you can click on:

1. http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=20069


2. http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=20077

3. http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=20076

Hell in Haiti as aid turns to occupation

A UN soldier on Port-au-Prince

Charlie Kimber examines what has happened since the disaster

For all the talk of aid, ordinary people in Haiti are still waiting for basic supplies – and many have had nothing. Geographer Kenneth Hewitt coined the term “classquake” when examining the 1976 earthquake in Guatemala, because of the accuracy with which it hit the poor.

It cost the lives of 23,000 people. The classquake in Haiti today, in which at least 150,000 people have died, is even worse.

The earthquake was a natural event. Yet the scale of the suffering is about the way society is organised.

The US could use its vast resources to help people. Instead it is using the catastrophe to intensify its control in Haiti.

It is preparing a long-term occupation that will be justified as a “humanitarian mission”.

Haiti’s poverty, following generations of imperialist and capitalist oppression, is the backdrop to the overcrowded and fragile housing that has proved so disastrous.

And now poor people’s interests are coming second to those of the US and the Haitian elites.

IRIN, the official United Nations (UN) news agency, distributed a press release last Saturday headlined “Haiti: hungry and angry”.

It quoted one woman who said that two large camps hosting 30,000 homeless people had received no organised food aid since the earthquake on the 12 January.

Port-au-Prince resident Jean-Marc Duvert told IRIN, “We are hungry and tired of elected officials taking food intended for us”.

Aid is distributed in a way that keeps UN and US control – and takes power away from Haitians. Racist attitudes mean Haitians are treated like children.

Some 60,000 Haitians have set up a temporary shelter at the Pétionville golf club in Port-au-Prince. The US 82nd Airborne division polices every drop of water and morsel of food they receive.

It distributed 10,000 meals each day until Saturday, making this camp the US military’s largest distribution point in Port-au-Prince.

The military then decided that “the food attracted too many people to a volatile site” – and suspended it.

Behaved

Lieutenant Brad Kerfoot said, “We told them we wouldn’t give any food away today, because of the way they behaved yesterday.

“My soldiers and I think they’re ungrateful”.

While hundreds of thousands starve and go thirsty, the US-controlled Port-au-Prince airport and neighbouring UN compound have ice-cold beers, internet access, food, blankets, generators and other aid relief from around the globe.

Journalist Caroline Graham wrote last weekend, “Never, in more than 20 years of covering disasters, has the void between the might and power of the Westernised world and the penniless and pitiful people they have been mobilised to ‘save’ been so glaringly obvious to me.”

This gulf is causing entirely justified resentment. On at least two occasions Haitians have marched on the UN compound demanding aid and jobs.

The UN’s answer is repression.

A Cuban television team filmed scenes of UN troops firing rubber bullets and tear gas grenades at crowds of Haitians.

The Haitian police are using the chaos after the earthquake to murder activists who oppose the present regime.

There are dozens of reports of bodies in the streets, hands tied behind their backs – the signature of state death squads.

There are constant media stories about “looters”. The reality is that desperate people are doing whatever is necessary to survive.

Journalist Rebecca Solnit writes, “After years of interviewing survivors of disasters, and reading first-hand accounts and sociological studies from such disasters as the London Blitz and the Mexico City earthquake of 1985, I don’t believe in looting.

“The great majority of what happens you could call emergency requisitioning.

“Someone who could be you, someone in desperate circumstances, takes necessary supplies to sustain human life in the absence of any alternative. Not only would I not call that looting, I wouldn’t even call that theft.”

While there are not enough flights to get aid and medical supplies into Haiti, the parasitical rich are still arriving for their photo-ops.

Princess Haya of Jordan flew in last week in her role as a UN goodwill ambassador. She met her country’s troops then flew back to the Dominican Republic – in a private 747.

US officials claim to be helping Haiti’s people. Yet they are making a huge effort to make sure that any Haitians who flee the island are driven back – or drowned.

“Operation Vigilant Security” backs up a small fleet of navy and coastguard vessels with aircraft.

Repatriation

“The goal is to interdict them at sea and repatriate them,” said the US Coast Guard Commander Christopher O’Neil, of the Haitians who may be driven to risk the 681-mile sea crossing to Miami.

Raymond Joseph, Haiti’s ambassador to Washington, recorded a public information message in Creole warning his countrymen not to “rush on boats to leave the country”.

“If you think you will reach the US and all the doors will be wide open to you, that’s not at all the case,” he said.

Hundreds of immigration detainees have been moved from a South Florida detention centre to clear space for Haitians who do manage to reach the US.

In addition, a large tented city, initially capable of holding 1,000 people, has been readied at the infamous Guantanamo Bay to hold Haitian refugees.

People are needlessly dying in Haiti because those in positions to help are refusing to do so.

Just like the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005, the Haitian earthquake is a condemnation of the world’s rulers.

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How could Haiti win its freedom?


Haiti has an incredible history of resistance – but could it go further? Mark L Thomas argues that, even in the poorest countries, the working class can spark revolutionary movements that can transform society

The people of Haiti have a powerful record of resistance. They have fought back even in the most appalling conditions – from the great slave rebellion in the 1790s, to the movement that destroyed the brutal regime of “Baby Doc” Duvailer in the 1980s.

They are not alone. People in some of the poorest countries have driven out hated rulers.

But could they go further? Could they defeat the power of US imperialism and make a revolution?

And even if a revolution did take place, aren’t countries like Haiti – or Somalia, or Bangladesh – simply too poor to develop a socialist society?

The revolutionary Karl Marx argued that capitalism creates the preconditions for socialism.

Capitalism creates enormous wealth compared to previous societies. There is now enough food, shelter, clothing and so on in the world to end poverty.

At the same time capitalism gives birth to a new class: the working class. Forced together in large workplaces, the collective production by this class is the source of capitalism’s vast wealth.

Workers occupy a unique position at the heart of the capitalist economy. Without them, no buses or trains run, no steel is made, and virtually nothing can be produced.

Marx saw workers as the force that could use their power to create a classless, socialist society.

Yet there are many countries in the world, like Haiti, where workers are a minority of the population – in some cases a tiny minority. How can they lead a revolution under such conditions?

Socialists have debated similar problems for centuries, and their arguments can offer valuable insights for today.

As capitalism spread out from Western Europe and North America from the 19th century onwards, the rest of the world was increasingly drawn into the global market.

The big capitalist powers like Britain and France, and later the United States, carved up Africa and Asia between them. The remaining independent states were forced to rapidly industrialise to survive and fend off predators.

But the pattern of capitalist development in these countries did not simply repeat that of Britain or France a century earlier.

Some older industries were destroyed – a flood of cheap machine-made cotton goods from Lancashire ruined India’s once prosperous textile producers.

In other countries, small pockets of advanced industry grew up alongside millions of peasants who continued to till the soil with rudimentary tools.

This was the situation in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century.

Old meets new

The Tsarist regime turned to promoting modern industry from the 1880s onwards to ensure it could compete with its rivals in Western Europe as a major military power.

The new industry that was created often employed the latest technology.

By the First World War, the Putilov armaments factory in St Petersburg was one of the largest and most advanced in the world.

Yet Russia’s population was still made up overwhelmingly of peasants.

The Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky called this “combined and uneven development” – old and new methods of production coming together. It remains an important feature of 21st century capitalism.

Today, China’s coastal regions have become one of the great workshops of global capitalism, supplying vast quantities of consumer goods to the world market.

Yet only 30 percent of rural households in China own a fridge, in large part because of the lack of electricity.

The Democratic Republic of Congo, one of the poorest countries in the world, has over a million mobile phone users. Street vendors use car batteries to recharge phones, despite often patchy and limited power supplies.

In such situations countries which have only very recently industrialised will leap to the most advanced techniques without going through all the previous stages of development. And the working class can equally move forward at a rapid rate.

But didn’t Marx argue that the working class must become the majority before it can act as the agent of socialism?

The Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky argued that the revolution against the Tsar would have to be led by workers even though they were still only a minority of Russian society.

Russia’s capitalists were too weak and too tied to the old order to lead a revolution. The peasantry could strike blows, but were too dispersed and politically backward to play a central role.

The new working class, on the other hand, was concentrated in big factories and was capable of leading the peasantry. Having overthrown the Tsar, workers were not prepared to stop and allow the creation of a capitalist state founded on their own exploitation.

Trotsky put it well­ – “The political domination of the proletariat is incompatible with its economic enslavement”.

This raised an immediate contradiction. The material wealth to build socialism did not yet exist in Russia, a point Trotsky fully accepted.

The solution lay in spreading the revolution, above all to more industrialised countries.

“How far, however, can the socialist policy of the working class go in the economic conditions of Russia?” he wrote.

“Only one thing we can say with certainty… without direct state support from the European proletariat the working class of Russia cannot remain in power.”

A revolution could begin on a national scale in a country with a small working class, but could succeed only if it linked with the global working class.

Trotsky called this the theory of “permanent revolution”.

The events of the 1917 revolution in Russia vindicated it brilliantly.

Workers gave leadership to the peasant rebellions on the land and in the army, overthrowing the Tsarist regime and establishing a workers’ state.

Revolutions swept the whole of Europe in the following years­ – but their defeat left the Russian Revolution tragically isolated.

The spread of global capitalism and the emergence of new centres of development, from China to Brazil, mean the process of one revolution sparking others can be repeated today. The global working class has grown massively since Trotsky first developed the theory of permanent revolution in 1905–6.

Decisive

In Haiti the working class is small, and globalisation has left the economy ravaged by neoliberalism. But even here, workers can still play a crucial role.

The wealth workers create remains vital to the ruling class – and workers possess the capacity for effective collective action, like mass strikes.

A militant workers’ movement can pull behind it the thousands of former peasants pushed off the land into vast slums, often in close proximity to the industrial centres.

Haiti’s biggest slum, Cité Soleil on the edge of the capital Port-au-Prince, is home to up to 300,000 people.

Workers there could pull peasants behind a revolutionary movement. But it’s only by looking to allies beyond Haiti’s borders that the workers’ movement could turn such revolts into successful socialist revolution.

Haitian workers will find allies if they look to the working class across the Caribbean – in big capitalist states like Mexico and Brazil in Latin America, and the working class of the United States itself.

This does not mean simply waiting for revolution to break out in more developed countries.

Revolutionary crises can develop more quickly in weaker states, and then radicalise workers in stronger ones.

The mass movements in Venezuela and Bolivia that have developed over the last decade are still a long way from socialist revolution. Nevertheless, they have inspired those fighting back across Latin America and beyond.

Imagine the impact of a revolution in Haiti that swept aside the US and the local rich and started to create a society run by ordinary people.

In the 19th century Haiti inspired people across the world. The slave rebellion led by Touissant L’Overture mattered far beyond the Caribbean. It struck a blow against slavery as a global system.

Today a revolution against capitalism, even in the poorest states, can have huge resonance.

And Trotsky made one final point. He insisted that the process of permanent revolution ultimately rests on the strength of workers’ “tradition, initiative, readiness for struggle”.

This is what socialists must direct themselves to fostering, wherever they live.

Avatar: An anti-imperialist saga or a technical self-indulgence?

Most of the times what you hear about a movie before you have chance to see it makes you disappointed at the end. Once you see it you realize that it did not deserve any of the praise you have heard in advance. Yes, I saw it and I did not like it as many movie-goers suggested that it has a strong and unique message against the current imperialist system. Avatar carries a very classical and extremely cliché story with technological decorations and a few imaginative powers (floating mountains, colorful big birds, instantly blossoming flowers, a planet that lives like a colossal organism, the giant neural network, pantheist harmony which reminds the uniting power of religion etc…) sprinkled around it to make it look pretty and impressive. It is like an old motorbike painted with glowing colors. Yes, it is shining but it does not go anywhere!!! Yes, it would be an amazing experience to see 3D images but unfortunately I saw it in 2D because the tickets for 3D have been sold out till March. It is successful as a technological thriller but it is definitely a failure as a movie to offer something new, as a story which is told millions of times in the exactly same way and as a theme which leads to an incomplete, immature conclusion on the nature of wild capitalism that actually seems the true reason behind the problems mentioned in the movie.




First of all, I should start with director’s obsession with J. Jack in Titanic, John Connor in Terminator and now Jake in Avatar. Can we say this is a coincidence or would James Cameron really like to see his own initial as a hero in the movies? Does he want to create an alt-ego like Kafka’s K? But what we see in this movie is another imperialist look in which the salvation of Pandora people is provided by the human race. They are not capable enough to protect their lands from exploiters because what they believe is harmony and some sort of pantheistic approach to the nature. This makes them weak against power-crazy, profit-oriented human minds. Then they need a hero, a human-navi hybrid, or a body of navi (strong but not smart enough) with human mind (smart but not strong enough). What will happen to them after they defeat the humans? Will they keep their simple life or will start developing weapons against them so that they will be able to defend their land during the prospective invasion attempts?

Let’s start with the story. What is good about the story? Didn’t we see the same story before at “Dances with Wolves”, “Robinson Crusoe”, “The Mission” or many other post-colonial / anti-imperialist novels / movies? Couldn’t the director create something better than repeating the well-known stories? The only difference in this story is this one is set in a different planet and it has some elements which are related to today’s political agenda. So what? There is love in the story like all other blockbusters. Of course! It is the engine of the plot as usual although “hatred” is supposed to be the engine of this story once we think what the movie is dealing about. There are good ones and bad ones! Despite movie’s three dimensions the characters are one dimensional. This makes the movie very predictable. Of course the natives are irrational –or rational in a way that rational human beings cannot understand and can have right to call them “savages”- and humans are scientific, advanced in medicine, defense mechanisms etc…




Second problem was the “happy end”. In one scene, the soldier shouts with anger “We will fight terror with terror” (reminding Bush) although the story does not need a statement like this because there is no terrorism in the story, there are navis trying to save their land from exploitation. So there is war and it is justified for the navis as they are about to lose their soil. This part of the story has a historical value and can be considered as a realistic approach. But the more the story advances, the more it loses its real point. At the end, again with the help of humans, the navis can fight against the human soldiers. Isn’t it surprising? But in reality, the exploiters do not give up until they consume all the exploitable materials. Movie is optimistic, therefore not realistic. In reality, things happen in a different way. Exploiters leave the exploited lands only after they use up all the materials they need. So a sad ending would be better as it can give people to think about the future of the world and its residents… If we look at the world as it is now, there is not much to hope for the future. Happy ends are good for common movie-goers but at the same time it makes people’s mind numb in a way they stop seeing the movie as a reference to the reality. It just stays in minds as pretty images with heroic actions.



Thirdly, the movie is misleading people’s mind by showing Bush or his war policies as the main target. Now, Bush has gone, any change in US policies in Iraq or Afghanistan happened during last year? Nobel Peace prize is given to Obama and he ironically justified the war in his Nobel lecture in the most fashionable way. I think even Bush must have felt very happy when he listened to Obama’s speech because if he has said the same things, he would have been hit by a shoe. But Obama was clapped and considered as a hero. So what changed in the world? Nothing changed and nothing will change in the future either. The reason is simple: It does not matter if it is republican or democratic; the American imperialism has the same agenda around the world. Since they lost in Vietnam, they keep losing the wars. Because they keep losing wars, they keep waging new wars as well. It is scary for a power-driven economy like US. It is like a wounded bear trying to bite more and more while losing power. The more it loses, the more it gets angry. The more it gets angry, the more it attacks…

I understand that the director does not like Bush or he has moderately left views. But making a block-buster movie whose success is heavily based on its technical extravaganzas is not the way for an artist to show his anger. For me I look at the sincerity of the artist if s/he is criticizing something. The movie made more than a billion dollars so far. It will probably exceed two billion dollar in the near future. So how much of this money will go to the people who have been suffering in the exploited lands? I am not talking about only Iraq and Afghanistan; I am talking about almost every third world country where the huge corporations of developed nations play their dice on human lives since they cannot do it in their own homelands where human lives are costly.

These days it is fashion to criticize Bush and his warriors as he has gone away. It is also fashion to talk about how white man wiped out American Indians in the past, how European powers divided the nations of Africa and Asia on tables, how England left India after consuming up all the resources. All these sound like a old sad story which we like to talk about when we want to look smart among our modern friends. But imperialism is not a past story, it is going on right now, everywhere we look. Avatar is this kind of movie in which exploiters behave like thieves, like bad people who are evil by nature. In reality, exploiters are also fathers of innocent children and they too have pretty wives, they too laugh at good jokes and they too help poor when they want to purify their souls. Nothing is black and white as shown in the movie and this makes the movie failure in another way. I believe Avatar is another form of cultural imperialism where we are forced to think that exploitation comes from outside, from those who are bad people with bad characteristics. But in reality, exploitation comes in the form of money, debt, unregulated foreign investments which benefit only a few rich people in the country, IMF, World Bank etc… Exploitation is everywhere there is a huge gap between poor and rich. Exploitation is on the street where we see beggars, poor people who are forced to sell their kidneys to organ mafia to have some pocket money, poor villagers who work hard not to lose their lands to the big corporations… It is in the factories where the cost of the lunch for a Vietnamese worker is less than 5000 VND while their boss spends thousands of dollars for a sumptuous dinner at 6 star hotels. There is no need to go to Pandora or any other planet to see how things went wrong in the last few centuries… We just need to open our eyes and see the real pictures in 4D (fourth dimension will be “heart” if you would like to call it) because the movies made in 3D are made to mislead us to believe that enemy is outside although it is actually living with us…



Finally, if you would like to see a sci-fi saga with vivid colors and extremely lavish settings, Avatar is there. It is a movie which deserves some Oscars in technical areas. Just do not expect any originality from it as it is not original at all... And the message given in the movie is not something more than you can get from a Tom and Jerry cartoon. Bad cat deserves to be humiliated and good mouse enjoys its smart moves.