18 January, 2010
It was obvious from the getgo that media ‘coverage’ of the earthquake in Haiti was heading in the same, predictable direction, namely down the same racist path that Western media coverage of things ‘darker than blue’ always travels. Continue reading
15 May 2005
“I only saw three murdered (homeless) children between 1995 and the beginning of 2004,” says one missionary who works with homeless children and asked that her name not be used. “Since Feb. 29, I have seen or heard of over 150 murders of street children and have personally witnessed the attacks on more than a dozen occasions.” – ‘Too Tired to Cry’ by Lyn Duff, January 12, 2005
Whilst the world rushed to the aid of the victims of the Tsunami and the leaders of the ‘free world’ pontificated on how humanitarian they are, children, in all likelihood, hundreds of children are being exterminated by death squads, aided and abetted by US/UN occupation forces in Haiti. But if you wanted to find out about this outrage in the corporate or state-run media, you’ll look in vain as it’s yet another example of how the media fails to report events that will disturb the carefully constructed illusion that surrounds the armed overthrow of the first and only democratically elected leader, Jean Bertrand Aristide, Haiti has ever had.
24 March 2004
Virtually all of the headlines in the corporate press about Haiti and Jean Bertrand Aristide centred on his failures: corruption, economic collapse, Aristide’s use of thugs and gangsters: Continue reading
8 March 2004
The overthrow of the democratically elected government of Jean Bertrand Aristide of Haiti is the latest example of the power of the corporate media to influence – through its presentation of events – the outcome. Over the past several weeks, Aristide and his supporters have been consistently portrayed as ‘gangsters”, drug dealers, out-of-control mobs and to have generally degenerated to the level of the previous decades of Haitian dictators (all propped up by the US of course).
4 March 2003
“The bourgeois class believes it has the right to rule and its authority is based on its long history of ‘dramatic victories’ and his education of how to forbid the rise of those who would dare to question the power and glory it has brought to the world. The bourgeois is the only legitimate master and a shepherd of souls who must be guided through the evils that threaten to overwhelm them.” – Patricia Murphy Robinson
3 March 2004
In a piece in Dissident Voice, the author proposes that Aristide may not have been abducted and forcibly deported by the US Marines. Instead it says:
“After making spirited verbal comments about how he would stay and fight the rebels to the end, Aristide, now safely in the CAR, had to put forth some face saving story for his supporters about his departure, while taking the opportunity to make a claim that would embarrass the Bush regime and possibly lead to international pressure for his reinstatement. So he contacts his most ardent supporters in the US, and now the Bushites are on the defensive.”
‘Aristide – Not Kidnapped?’
2 March 2004
“Tell the world that it’s a coup. That American soldiers abducted (me).”
Jean Bertrand Aristide“”Aristide would “leave Haiti in a Lear Jet or in a pine box.””
James Foley, US Ambassador to Haiti
No matter that the corporate media have done their best to cover up the outrage that has been committed against the people of Haiti, things have a way of working their way out into the light of day.
The telephone conversation between Randall Robinson of the TransAfrica Forum and Jean Bertrand Aristide has blown the lid of the gangsters game plan. And it might well be that the phone call saved Aristide’s life, as more information about how the abduction took place comes to light.
1 March 2004
The tragedy that is Haiti unfolds once more in this, the 35th? coup since the world’s first black republic was founded in 1804 and once more the US role in the removal of Jean Bertrand Aristide is patently obvious to anyone who cares to dig deeper than the headlines that have flooded out of ‘propaganda central’ (see “BRINGING HELL TO HAITI – PART 1“).
26 February 2004
“[In 1825] Haiti was obliged to repay more than it received…. France’s King Charles X ordered former French slaves to pay 150m francs [over $2 billion at today’s prices] before France would grant diplomatic recognition to Haiti, Latin America’s oldest republic. A French diplomat recently told me, without irony, that during François Mitterrand’s presidency, “Haiti still owed us part of that debt”.” [1]
So what else has changed in the following 179 years? Not very much and predictably, the media is doing a hatchet job on Haiti’s Aristide. A piece by Andrew Gumbel in Saturday’s Independent (21/02/04 p. 21) is pretty typical. Headed “The little priest who became a bloody dictator like the one he once despised” is an outrageous rewriting of the history of Haiti with nary a mention of the role that the US has played in the island’s sorry history for the past 179 years including refusing to recognise the world’s first independent Black republic until 1864, fearful of the example it set for its own enslaved African population.
19 February 2004
The National Endowment for Democracy that ‘celebrated’ its 20th anniversary this year has a long and less than illustrious past. It’s dead hand has descended on a number of countries over the past two decades including Nicaragua, El Salvador, Venezuela (currently also on-going) and of course Haiti.
Investigating Imperialism 