"The Security Situation"

Rebecca Solnit's book A Paradise Built In Hell is timely. It reminds us that people are always cooperative and altrustic in times of crisis, and that elites always "panic", defame, aggressively repress and terrorise the victims of calamities like this. As Naomi Klein's hit book also stressed memorably, elites are every day better prepared to exploit situations like the one created by the earthquake that rocked Haiti; think tanks are full of experts hired to do nothing but prepare plans to be put into effect when opportunity knocks. Those plans include the preparation of propaganda and pr tactics to be rolled out in the ways which plentiful research has proven most effective. PR, publicity and journalism professionals know what they are doing, how to telegraph, seed, introduce and develop a story, themes and motifs, how to spin, select and manipulate reality as it is processed into spectacle. They are proactive not re-active; they have experience; foreseeable events do not take them by surprise.

The propaganda is starting already to imply the criminality and dangerousness of the victim population,setting the stage for the wild scary stories to come with which the imperialists will jusify the escalated militarisation of Haiti. The US ruling class and its comprador Haitian elites will be looking to make a lot of militants and leftists disappear under cover of this mass death, and to fix the boot even more firmly down on a population with a long tradition of revolutionary commitment, courage and perseverance. Our credulity is being counted on.