Haiti: You Did This

Oh, those poor Haitians, so unfortunate, their city destroyed, tens or hundreds of thousands dead and now the survivors are dying one by one from injuries, thirst and starvation ... or by the hands of their maddened machete-wielding countrymen, desperate to stave off that fate for themselves. Road blocks made of dead bodies, constructed, we're told, by enraged Haitians protesting the lack of aid are littering the streets, which doesn't make sense except in the sick sort of way in which everything Haitian must be understood. About the only doctors on the scene are either from Cuba or sans frontiers, but never fear for the US military has already secured the airport and a carrier group is en route.

I bet you feel so, so sorry for those poor blighted bastards down on that smashed cesspool of an island. Yeah, I'm sure you do, and you can take your self-righteous preening pity and swallow it like the poison it is. Truth is this is your fault. This happened because you let it happen. I don't care whether your name is John D. Rockefeller or Joe S. Shmoe, I don't care if your name is spelled with Chinese characters or printed in CAPITA DIMINUTIA MAXIMA on your birth certificate, I don't care who precisely it is that you are: this is your fault.

It is all our fault, but don't let that distract you from the very personal and immediate responsibility that you have for it. Sure, some are more responsible than others: the reason Haiti's an open sore on the planet is that it suits certain, ah, international entities that it remain so. The cheap labor is a nice bonus but I think it's a fair guess that the main thing is to have a nice, hollow, corrupt failed state as a way-point for the drug trade. If keeping things that way has meant enforcing the most desperate of conditions on an entire country full of people, well I guess that serves them right for making that voodoo pact with the devil way back when in exchange for helping them cast of the chains of the blancos and their bloodthirsty God. Can't let those heathen niggers get ideas, understand: an example must be made, pour encourager les autres.

Ever wonder why it is that Liberia's so fucked up? But I digress.

So, sure, some have been more responsible than others, but even if you were never on a UN peacekeeping mission in Port au Prince, never worked for the CIA or the IMF, or never even bought a Haitian baseball sewn in a sweatshop by a scrawny slum-rat whose dead-at-30 peasant father moved to the slum looking for non-existent work because he couldn't survive by farming anymore, even if you are completely clean on all these levels you still turned a blind eye. Don't be coy, now. You could have made more of an issue over the way Haiti was being systematically raped by the global order but, hey, it's a tough world and it's just one, small country, right? Just a few people, and they're black, and besides, look at the Dominican: they're fine and it's the same island, so it's gotta be the Haitian's own fault for being a bunch of savages, after all.

Yeah, you thought it. Admit it. I did, many times over the years. It's the sum of such thoughts, over many moments, over many people, that enables the sordid behaviour of those who claim to act for us (and if we do not stop them, they do act for us) to continue all the way to its inevitable denoument: a land sucked dry by vampires where the daybreakers bring catastrophe with the dawn.

So that's how we got here. The question that now confronts us is where do we go from here?

You know the script the Obamanoids will unleash: the same one used in Katrina. Private disaster relief firms will descend on Port au Prince like vultures. The survivors will be warehoused in toxic, controlled pens, with the streets patrolled by foreign mercenaries enforcing curfews and no-go zones while the US military and the UN hover nearby, ready to cruise missile any objections that get too organized. Of course the country's broke, so to pay for all this their shell of a government will be armlocked into selling off what's left of its country's soul in perpetuity. In practice this means the people will be put to work as slaves rebuilding their island not for themselves but for corporations, and this time the slave collars (now made of silicon rather than iron) will never. Ever. Come off.

This is all symbolism, see. Haiti was the first slave country to free itself; its brutal history since then has corresponded to the fact that while slavery per se might have ended, the oppression of the colored races never really did. The planned (and you know it's planned) re-enslavement of Haiti by the disaster capitalists will similarly symbolize the re-enslavement of the whole rest of the planet. More disasters, natural and not, are sure to come this year, perhaps in staggering quantities. Each one of these emergencies will present an opportunity to reconfigure the local order into the New World Order and ... I'm sure you know where that ends.

Well, that's the script.

It's not what's going to happen. I'll get to that.

I imagine things are well in hand. I mean 'imagine' literally, in the sense of 'this is what I'm creating within my holographic reality projector'. For the past few days, ever since Haiti got Acted by God, I've been putting Haiti into my meditations: seeing the people, the land, reaching out to them with my soul and becoming them, becoming all of them, feeling their hearts as they chose to cooperate and help one another rather than turn on one another like wolves, to face the fear the world has thrown at them with courage and clarity rather than cowardice. Last night I called down a loa for a chat, offering it some sex magick in exchange for its help in helping the people who now call on its kind with a fevered desperation they haven't projected since perhaps they summoned the strength to fight off the French. This time, I asked it, help them for free. If you must have payment take it from us. From me.

So, I've been visualizing Haiti's recovery. I expect a lot of other people have been doing the same thing; I expect, in fact, that as I write these words, all over the world there are thousands of people doing exactly that. If there's any truth to the notion of intention having an appreciable effect on outcomes within unfolding reality, well, this is all to the good. For all the stumbling and shame I have a feeling the aftermath of this will turn out a whole lot better than now looks possible.

Yes, well, nice thoughts are all very good but they'll do no good at all without actual action.

Here is how it is going to go down.

Soon, probably within a couple of weeks, there's going to begin a Haitian diaspora. The fact is Port of Prince was marginally inhabitable as it was: now, it's a death trap. Rebuilding will take generations, and in the meantime there is absolutely nothing left for those people but rubble. They have to get out.

I don't much want to wait for our governments to volunteer to take in a massive influx of shell-shocked, unskilled, uneducated immigrants from a deeply troubled culture whose idea of religion strikes the more conventionally minded as a particularly queasy form of black magic ... just doesn't seem the sort of thing the Harperites here in Canada are likely to latch onto. This means that, much in the way my grandparents sponsored Vietnamese boat people into the country back in the seventies, there has to be a volunteer immigration sponsorship movement of some kind.

Yeah, those boat people lived in their floating hell for years, though. We don't have years. We don't even have weeks, although weeks is what it will take. We have to get on top of this thing now.

It's not enough just to send nice thoughts, any more than it's enough this time to send money. We have to let them into our countries, all over the world, because their country isn't there any more.

And we will. I've seen it.

It won't be nearly enough to make up for what we've done. It never is. History can't be atoned for: it can only be acknowledged, learned from and moved past, into the past where it belongs, so that we can point the Now at a better When. One where, maybe, we don't let countries like Haiti happen.