"When the Media Is the Disaster": a brilliant piece of writing by Rebecca Solnit

 

[photo of Rebecca Solnit is from here]

THANK YOU, REBECCA SOLNIT, 

FOR THIS COMPELLING AND COMPASSIONATE PIECE OF WRITING. 

-- Julian Real

 

 

[image/logo is from here]

Tomgram: Rebecca Solnit, In Haiti, Words Can Kill

Posted by Rebecca Solnit at 10:18am, January 21, 2010. Copyright 2010 Rebecca Solnit

 

Just before Haiti was devastated by the most powerful earthquake to hit the island in more than 200 years, when, that is, it was only devastated by the hemisphere’s worst poverty, there were but one or two full-time foreign correspondents in the country.  No longer.

Within days, the networks, CNN, and Fox had more or less transferred their news operations (already slimmed down by years of attrition) onto the island.  CNN’s Anderson Cooper made it first on Wednesday morning.  Katie flew in later that day.  By the time Diane made it out ofKabul and into Port-au-Prince, Brian had already long since hit “the tarmac.”  (All but Anderson were gone again by the weekend.)  Along with them, in a situation in which resources were nearly nonexistent, went at least 44 CNN correspondents, producers, and technicians, a crew of 25 from Fox, and undoubtedly similar contingents from CBS, NBC, and ABC.  Other than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the Los Angeles Times, this was “the biggest U.S. television news deployment to an international crisis since the 2004 Southeast Asian tsunami” -- at a cost that can only have been obscene.

In the process, as happens on our obsessionally eyeball-gluing, single-event, 24/7 media planet, “world news” essentially became Haiti with the usual logos, tags, and drum rolls (“Earthquake in Haiti”).  The three networks even briefly expanded the length of their half-hour news shows to an all-Haiti-all-the-time hour, with just bare minutes leftover for the rest of the planet.  In a sense, as the earthquake had blotted out Haiti, so the news coverage blotted out everything else with an almost religious fervor and the language to match.

In place of the world came endless stories of a tiny number of riveting rescues from the rubble (“miracles”) by international rescue teams -- less than 150 saved when possibly tens of thousands of buried Haitians would not be dug out and conceivably up to 200,000 had died.  Along with this went the usual self-congratulatory reporting about American generosity and the importance of American troops (they secured the airport!) in a situation in which aid was visiblynot getting through, in which people were not being saved.

And of course, with the drama of people pulled from the rubble went another kind of drama:  impending violence -- even though the real story, as a number of reporters couldn’t help but notice, was the remarkable patience and altruistic willingness of Haitians to support each other,help each other, and organize each other in a situation where there was almost nothing to share.  It might, in fact, have been their finest hour, but amid the growing headlines about possible “violence” and “looting,” that would have been hard to tell.

The coverage has been beyond massive, sentimental, self-congratulatory, and not anyone’s finest hour -- and a month or three from now, predictably, Haiti will still be utterly devastated and there will be but one or two foreign correspondents on hand.  Anderson, Diane, Brian, Katie?  They’ll be somewhere else, 24/7.  Of course, much of what happened might have been far better prepared for, if any of the anchors or correspondents had read Rebecca Solnit’s revelatory book, A Paradise Built in Hell, which offers news from the past on what people, again and again, in the worst of times, actually do without the help of the authorities.  The answer:  generally, they take care of each other in remarkably creative ways.  Tom

When the Media Is the Disaster 
Covering Haiti 
By Rebecca Solnit

Soon after almost every disaster the crimes begin:  ruthless, selfish, indifferent to human suffering, and generating far more suffering. The perpetrators go unpunished and live to commit further crimes against humanity. They care less for human life than for property. They act without regard for consequences.

I’m talking, of course, about those members of the mass media whose misrepresentation of what goes on in disaster often abets and justifies a second wave of disaster.  I’m talking about the treatment of sufferers as criminals, both on the ground and in the news, and the endorsement of a shift of resources from rescue to property patrol. They still have blood on their hands from Hurricane Katrina, and they are staining themselves anew in Haiti.

Within days of the Haitian earthquake, for example, the Los Angeles Times ran a series of photographs with captions that kept deploying the word “looting.” One was of a man lying face down on the ground with this caption: “A Haitian police officer ties up a suspected looter who was carrying a bag of evaporated milk.” The man’s sweaty face looks up at the camera, beseeching, anguished.

Another photo was labeled: “Looting continued in Haiti on the third day after the earthquake, although there were more police in downtown Port-au-Prince.” It showed a somber crowd wandering amid shattered piles of concrete in a landscape where, visibly, there could be little worth taking anyway.

A third image was captioned: “A looter makes off with rolls of fabric from an earthquake-wrecked store.” Yet another: “The body of a police officer lies in a Port-au-Prince street. He was accidentally shot by fellow police who mistook him for a looter.”

People were then still trapped alive in the rubble. A translator for Australian TV dug out a toddler who’d survived 68 hours without food or water, orphaned but claimed by an uncle who had lost his pregnant wife. Others were hideously wounded and awaiting medical attention that wasn’t arriving. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, needed, and still need, water, food, shelter, and first aid. The media in disaster bifurcates. Some step out of their usual “objective” roles to respond with kindness and practical aid. Others bring out the arsenal of clichés and pernicious myths and begin to assault the survivors all over again.

The “looter” in the first photo might well have been taking that milk to starving children and babies, but for the news media that wasn’t the most urgent problem. The “looter” stooped under the weight of two big bolts of fabric might well have been bringing it to now homeless people trying to shelter from a fierce tropical sun under improvised tents.

The pictures do convey desperation, but they don’t convey crime. Except perhaps for that shooting of a fellow police officer -- his colleagues were so focused on property that they were reckless when it came to human life, and a man died for no good reason in a landscape already saturated with death.

In recent days, there have been scattered accounts of confrontations involving weapons, and these may be a different matter.  But the man with the powdered milk? Is he really a criminal? There may be more to know, but with what I’ve seen I’m not convinced.

What Would You Do?
Imagine, reader, that your city is shattered by a disaster. Your home no longer exists, and you spent what cash was in your pockets days ago. Your credit cards are meaningless because there is no longer any power to run credit-card charges. Actually, there are no longer any storekeepers, any banks, any commerce, or much of anything to buy. The economy has ceased to exist.

By day three, you’re pretty hungry and the water you grabbed on your way out of your house is gone. The thirst is far worse than the hunger. You can go for many days without food, but not water. And in the improvised encampment you settle in, there is an old man near you who seems on the edge of death. He no longer responds when you try to reassure him that this ordeal will surely end. Toddlers are now crying constantly, and their mothers infinitely stressed and distressed.

So you go out to see if any relief organization has finally arrived to distribute anything, only to realize that there are a million others like you stranded with nothing, and there isn’t likely to be anywhere near enough aid anytime soon. The guy with the corner store has already given away all his goods to the neighbors.  That supply’s long gone by now. No wonder, when you see the chain pharmacy with the shattered windows or the supermarket, you don’t think twice before grabbing a box of PowerBars and a few gallons of water that might keep you alive and help you save a few lives as well.

The old man might not die, the babies might stop their squalling, and the mothers might lose that look on their faces. Other people are calmly wandering in and helping themselves, too. Maybe they’re people like you, and that gallon of milk the fellow near you has taken is going to spoil soon anyway. You haven’t shoplifted since you were 14, and you have plenty of money to your name. But it doesn’t mean anything now.

If you grab that stuff are you a criminal? Should you end up lying in the dirt on your stomach with a cop tying your hands behind your back? Should you end up labeled a looter in the international media? Should you be shot down in the street, since the overreaction in disaster, almost any disaster, often includes the imposition of the death penalty without benefit of trial for suspected minor property crimes?

Or are you a rescuer? Is the survival of disaster victims more important than the preservation of everyday property relations? Is that chain pharmacy more vulnerable, more a victim, more in need of help from the National Guard than you are, or those crying kids, or the thousands still trapped in buildings and soon to die?

It’s pretty obvious what my answers to these questions are, but it isn’t obvious to the mass media. And in disaster after disaster, at least since the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, those in power, those with guns and the force of law behind them, are too often more concerned for property than human life. In an emergency, people can, and do, die from those priorities. Or they get gunned down for minor thefts or imagined thefts. The media not only endorses such outcomes, but regularly, repeatedly, helps prepare the way for, and then eggs on, such a reaction.

If Words Could Kill
We need to banish the word “looting” from the English language. It incites madness and obscures realities.

“Loot,” the noun and the verb, is a word of Hindi origin meaning the spoils of war or other goods seized roughly. As historian Peter Linebaugh points out, “At one time loot was the soldier's pay.” It entered the English language as a good deal of loot from India entered the English economy, both in soldiers’ pockets and as imperial seizures.

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. Two things go on in disasters. The great majority of what happens you could call emergency requisitioning. Someone who could be you, someone in the kind of desperate circumstances I outlined above, 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.

Necessity is a defense for breaking the law in the United States and other countries, though it’s usually applied more to, say, confiscating the car keys of a drunk driver than feeding hungry children. Taking things you don’t need is theft under any circumstances. It is, says the disaster sociologist Enrico Quarantelli, who has been studying the subject for more than half a century, vanishingly rare in most disasters.

Personal gain is the last thing most people are thinking about in the aftermath of a disaster. In that phase, the survivors are almost invariably more altruistic and less attached to their own property, less concerned with the long-term questions of acquisition, status, wealth, and security, than just about anyone not in such situations imagines possible. (The best accounts from Haiti of how people with next to nothing have patiently tried to share the little they have and support those in even worse shape than them only emphasize this disaster reality.) Crime often drops in the wake of a disaster.

The media are another matter.  They tend to arrive obsessed with property (and the headlines that assaults on property can make).  Media outlets often call everything looting and thereby incite hostility toward the sufferers as well as a hysterical overreaction on the part of the armed authorities. Or sometimes the journalists on the ground do a good job and the editors back in their safe offices cook up the crazy photo captions and the wrongheaded interpretations and emphases.

They also deploy the word panic wrongly. Panic among ordinary people in crisis is profoundly uncommon. The media will call a crowd of people running from certain death a panicking mob, even though running is the only sensible thing to do. In Haiti, they continue to report that food is being withheld from distribution for fear of “stampedes.” Do they think Haitians are cattle?

The belief that people in disaster (particularly poor and nonwhite people) are cattle or animals or just crazy and untrustworthy regularly justifies spending far too much energy and far too many resources on control -- the American military calls it “security” -- rather than relief. A British-accented voiceover on CNN calls people sprinting to where supplies are being dumped from a helicopter a "stampede" and adds that this delivery “risks sparking chaos.” The chaos already exists, and you can’t blame it on these people desperate for food and water. Or you can, and in doing so help convince your audience that they’re unworthy and untrustworthy.

Back to looting: of course you can consider Haiti’s dire poverty and failed institutions a long-term disaster that changes the rules of the game. There might be people who are not only interested in taking the things they need to survive in the next few days, but things they’ve never been entitled to own or things they may need next month. Technically that’s theft, but I’m not particularly surprised or distressed by it; the distressing thing is that even before the terrible quake they led lives of deprivation and desperation.

In ordinary times, minor theft is often considered a misdemeanor. No one is harmed.

Unchecked, minor thefts could perhaps lead to an environment in which there were more thefts and so forth, and a good argument can be made that, in such a case, the tide needs to be stemmed. But it’s not particularly significant in a landscape of terrible suffering and mass death.

A number of radio hosts and other media personnel are still upset that people apparently took TVs after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in August 2005.  Since I started thinking about, and talking to people about, disaster aftermaths I’ve heard a lot about those damned TVs. Now, which matters more to you, televisions or human life? People were dying on rooftops and in overheated attics and freeway overpasses, they were stranded in all kinds of hideous circumstances on the Gulf Coast in 2005 when the mainstream media began to obsess about looting, and the mayor of New Orleans and the governor of Louisiana made the decision to focus on protecting property, not human life.

A gang of white men on the other side of the river from New Orleans got so worked up about property crimes that they decided to take the law into their own hands and began shooting. They seem to have considered all black men criminals and thieves and shot a number of them. Some apparently died; there were bodies bloating in the September sun far from the region of the floods; one good man trying to evacuate the ruined city barely survived; and the media looked away. It took me months of nagging to even get the story covered. This vigilante gang claimed to be protecting property, though its members never demonstrated that their property was threatened. They boasted of killing black men. And they shared values with the mainstream media and the Louisiana powers that be.

Somehow, when the Bush administration subcontracted emergency services -- like providing evacuation buses in Hurricane Katrina -- to cronies who profited even while providing incompetent, overpriced, and much delayed service at the moment of greatest urgency, we didn’t label that looting.

Or when a lot of wealthy Wall Street brokers decide to tinker with a basic human need like housing…. Well, you catch my drift.

Woody Guthrie once sang that “some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen.” The guys with the six guns (or machetes or sharpened sticks) make for better photographs, and the guys with the fountain pens not only don’t end up in jail, they end up in McMansions with four-car garages and, sometimes, in elected -- or appointed -- office.

Learning to See in Crises
Last Christmas a priest, Father Tim Jones of York, started a ruckus in Britain when he said in a sermon that shoplifting by the desperate from chain stores might be acceptable behavior. Naturally, there was an uproar. Jones told the Associated Press: “The point I'm making is that when we shut down every socially acceptable avenue for people in need, then the only avenue left is the socially unacceptable one.”

The response focused almost entirely on why shoplifting is wrong, but the claim was also repeatedly made that it doesn’t help. In fact, food helps the hungry, a fact so bald it’s bizarre to even have to state it. The means by which it arrives is a separate matter. The focus remained on shoplifting, rather than on why there might be people so desperate in England’s green and pleasant land that shoplifting might be their only option, and whether unnecessary human suffering is itself a crime of sorts.

Right now, the point is that people in Haiti need food, and for all the publicity, the international delivery system has, so far, been a visible dud.  Under such circumstances, breaking into a U.N. food warehouse -- food assumedly meant for the poor of Haiti in a catastrophic moment -- might not be “violence,” or “looting,” or “law-breaking.”  It might be logic.  It might be the most effective way of meeting a desperate need.  

Why were so many people in Haiti hungry before the earthquake? Why do we have a planet that produces enough food for all and a distribution system that ensures more than a billion of us don’t have a decent share of that bounty? Those are not questions whose answers should be long delayed.

Even more urgently, we need compassion for the sufferers in Haiti and media that tell the truth about them. I’d like to propose alternative captions for those Los Angeles Times photographs as models for all future disasters:

Let’s start with the picture of the policeman hogtying the figure whose face is so anguished: “Ignoring thousands still trapped in rubble, a policeman accosts a sufferer who took evaporated milk. No adequate food distribution exists for Haiti’s starving millions.”

And the guy with the bolt of fabric? “As with every disaster, ordinary people show extraordinary powers of improvisation, and fabrics such as these are being used to make sun shelters around Haiti.” 

For the murdered policeman: “Institutional overzealousness about protecting property leads to a gratuitous murder, as often happens in crises. Meanwhile countless people remain trapped beneath crushed buildings.”

And the crowd in the rubble labeled looters? How about: “Resourceful survivors salvage the means of sustaining life from the ruins of their world.”

That one might not be totally accurate, but it’s likely to be more accurate than the existing label. And what is absolutely accurate, in Haiti right now, and on Earth always, is that human life matters more than property, that the survivors of a catastrophe deserve our compassion and our understanding of their plight, and that we live and die by words and ideas, and it matters desperately that we get them right.

At the dawn of the millennium, three catastrophes were forecast for the United States: terrorists in New York, a hurricane in New Orleans, and an earthquake in San Francisco. Rebecca Solnit lives in San Francisco with her earthquake kit and is about to make her seventh trip to New Orleans since Katrina.  Her latest book, A Paradise Built in Hell, is a testament to human bravery and innovation during disasters. 
Copyright 2010 Rebecca Solnit

The Lakota on Pine Ridge are in need of food and heat: consider donating to assist people in South Dakota surviving the brutal North American winter and the ravages of classist racism and genocide

Cross-posted from Censored News, *here*. Thanks so much, Brenda Norrell!!!! All that follows is from her blog, linked to both above and by clicking on the title of this post below.

Thursday, January 21, 2010

Lakota Desperate, Ignored in Relief Efforts

Censored News makes a special appeal to musicians and actors raising funds for Haiti. Please continue this important effort, but please consider doing the same for the Lakota who are cold and hungry and in need of heat, on Pine Ridge in South Dakota.
Madonna, Julia Roberts, Jackson Browne, Susan Sarandon and all the others, you could bring hope to those who are cold and hungry, especially the elderly and children. -- Censored News
INDIGENOUS RIGHTS RADIO

Host: Wanbli
Special edition. Electric and propane needs at Pine Ridge with winter storms closing in. Autumn Two Bulls was born on the Pine Ridge Lakota reservation . Autumn will be my guest and explain in detail the problems going on at this time at Pine Ridge concerning the electric and propane needs of people and ways to help. Please let your friends know to listen and please have a pen and paper handy because a lot of information on who needs the help and how you can help individual families immediately will be given. Please , please come and listen and most of all please come and help. (At noon today, Jan. 21, Central time, in archives afterwards)
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/wanbli/2010/01/21/indigenous-rights-movement-radio

Posted by brendanorrell@gmail.com at 11:09 AM

And when WHITES engage in LOOTING, what is THAT called? Ah, yes: expansionism, colonisation, manifest destiny, globalisation, "securing freedom and democracy for all [white people]", "free trade", health insurance premiums, ATM and other banking fees, pharmaceutical price gouging, internet music file sharing, and "morally good". (WRONG! That's all LOOTING.)

Revised on 21 January 2010 ECD.

I'm introducing this post with one cracker-ass, mutherfucking, white supremacist, classist, anti-Black IMAGE AND CAPTION which was found--or was it looted??--*here*.

 

Members of WHAT race of people gets to offer themselves million dollar bonuses, annually, for doing a shitty job at work AND getting fired? Whites or Blacks? What groups of people are enslaved globally and genocidally killed, with all their cultures appropriated and natural resources LOOTED? Whites or Black and Indigenous people? Who benefits from capitalism's corporate welfare programs to aid Families With Independent Children? Rich folks or poor folks? Of the Global North and the Global South, which one is rich and which is poor because one LOOTED THE HELL OUT OF THE OTHER? (And which one did what?) In which hemisphere are resources continually being LOOTED to allow the other to thrive while people across other hemisphere barely survive and die?

On a more individualistic and less systemic level, all the white men I know but two: myself and one friend--just one, steal music all day long using their computers. LOTS of white young women steal from clothing stores and other businesses while the clerks and cashiers keep their eyes focused on the people of color with dark skin in the store at the same time. Middle and upper middle class white "shoppers" in mall stores across the U.S. utilise this awareness of anti-Black racism to get away with looting. And should some white upper class person be caught, don't worry; daddy has a lawyer and a doctor who will call it a serious addiction-level compulsion and brain chemistry imbalance.  

What does the media call an upper class white woman who steals from a store? A looter? Nope. 

White media defines her as someone--name not released yet by her attorney--who is a victim of a mental illness, "Experiencing a formerly undiagnosed manic phase of a bipolar disorder". (I'd call it acting on class and race entitlements, mental illness or no mental illness.)

What do white folks call a Mexican man crossing the boarder into the U.S.? Racist answer: one 'illegal alien' who 'shoulda-been-shot already' who has criminally arrived here to take away all our jobs!!!

An alternative answer: an Indigenous man coming home after his family and his people were forced out years ago, by whites.

What do white folks call an African American and Chippewa man in a walking around at noontime in a white gated community in an Ohio suburb? Answer: First they identify him as a trespassing dangerous criminal burglar, and then they call 9-1-1. 

An alternative answer: paying respects to where generations of his family were buried before the sacred ground was paved over for the comfort of land-looting whites.) 

I've added to the title below because as it was stated, it's fucked up. Unless we're going to say ALL colonised nations in the last 500 years are [white] man-made disasters. (That would include the WHM supremacist U.S. and the continental nation of white Australia. And yes, those nations too, are disasters for Indigenous people, people of color, the poor, women, queer folks, children, non-human animals, and the Earth.) And we'd have to include "man-made" suffering that is systematic for women experiencing battery and rape, among other forms of gendered violence experienced by women everywhere around the world, by patriarchal men known or unknown to them.

I find this article to be racist and classist as hell. But it makes a one or two important points. And afterwards, I'm placing another article on WHY what you're about to read is FUCKED UP RACIST AND CLASSIST (among other oppressive things) about it. But see if you can pick it out as you read along. I may help you along by putting some bits in bold and brackets. 

What that follows next is from *here*. (I've added quite a bit in bold and in brackers, actually.)

Much of Haiti[an Suffering Prior to and Following the Earthquake] Is a [White] Man-Made Disaster 

Recovery will require a profound cultural and political change.

By Anne Applebaum
Posted Saturday, Jan. 16, 2010, at 12:13 PM ET

Read more about the Haiti earthquake in Slate.

For the past several days, I have found myself unable to look at the photographs from Haiti. I have also found that when I start reading an article datelined Port-au-Prince, I have to force myself to read to the end of it. I have donated money to Doctors Without Borders, on the grounds that it has been in Haiti a long time and will be able to use the cash quickly. However, I have no illusions about my tiny donation, or about the organization's ability to help. I have no illusions about anyone's ability to help, for this is not just a natural disaster: It is a man-made disaster first and foremost, and so it will remain. [Yes, I agree. But which men made it so? THAT'S important to answer, and Anne doesn't.]

Though the earthquake was a powerful one, its impact was multiplied many, many times by the weakness of civil society and the absence of rule of law in Haiti. [This is all coded gringo lingo for a call to quickly bring in the white supremacist soldiers!] As Roger Noriega has written, "You can literally see [the] dysfunction [wtf???] from space": Satellite photos of Hispaniola, the island split between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, show green forests on the Dominican side and bare, deforested hills on the Haitian side. [I did not know that, and appreciate Anne putting that information in her article. AND, that's not 'dysfunction', and if she can bracket the "the" she can bracket the word "dysfunction" and replace it with "ecocidal, genocidal destruction". That's white supremacist corporate capitalist greed, Anne. So please say so.] Mudslides and collapsing houses were routine in Haiti, even before this disaster. Laws designed to prevent erosion [laws don't prevent erosion. Trees prevent erosion], and building codes designed to prevent criminally shoddy construction, were ignored [by the moral, anti-criminal U.S. white supremacist military and paramilitary forces, like Blackwater?]. [And who benefited from those forests being removed?] The rickety slums of Port-au-Prince were constructed in ravines and on steep, unstable hills. When they collapsed, they collapsed completely. [And what might we call the fucked up, environment-destroying, multimillion dollar dwellings built on the slopes in California? Stupidity-by-design? See, when you're poor, you have limited resources, so when you build, you build with materials you got. When you're uber-rich, you can build with anything and you can build anywhere. So calling poor people's homes "rickety slums" is just a reinforcer of stereotypes and an invisibiliser of rich white folks rank stupidity.]

So weak were Haiti's public institutions, literally and figuratively, that nothing is left of them, either. [This is more of that coded talk for "HURRY UP and bring in the white supremacist colonising soldiers!!!!!"] Parliament, churches, hospitals, and government offices no longer exist.* [Really? EVERYWHERE in Haiti???] The archbishop is dead. The head of the U.N. mission is dead. [FOR THE LOVE OF A WHITE-MALE-SUPREMACIST SKY-GOD, SEND IN THE U.S. MILITARY!!!] There is a real possibility that violent gangs will emerge [OH YES, SHE WENT THERE!] to take their place, to control food supplies, to loot what remains to be looted. [Wait. Isn't that what white people and their corporations do: control food supplies and loot what remains to be looted?] There is a real possibility, within the coming days, of epidemics, mass starvation, and civil war. [And possibly toads and frogs falling like hail from the sky. U.S. MILITARY: GET YOUR WHITE SUPREMACIST ASSES DOWN THERE NOW!!!!]

The same is true in Indonesia. [i.e., all those places in where the darker people live are the same, really.]  It is even possible to read assessments of the worst-hit places, such as the province [check at the bottom to see why these asterisks are here in blue] of Aceh*—from the World Bank, for example—that describe life there as better than ever before. [Well, that's the job of the World Bank: to make themselves look good while committing genocide and ecocide.] I am certain that many disagree. However, there are no scenes there of what everyone always calls "biblical" tragedy. Indonesia is not a society of utopian perfection, and neither is the United States. [Well you've got that right.] But both have enough social cohesion to support indigenous charities, [Exsqueeze me? The U.S. does WHAT?!! Anne, the U.S. commits GENOCIDE and IMPERIALISTIC RACIST WARS and GLOBAL CULTURAL DESTABILISATION of Indigenous people. Those are three of the things it does most, actually (in terms of what it spends the most money on)--and routinely. I know you mean "local charities" but please read INCITE's book on NGOs and other pro-corporate schemes to find out why "charities" don't do anything that is sustainable or that stops globalisation and white male supremacy, including, particularly, the virulent spread of white Christianity.] both have enough educated people [because going to colleges means you know how to live sustainably, doesn't it? Uhhhhhh, no.] to plan reconstruction, both are capable of absorbing lessons learned [unlike who, Anne? The intellectual two year-olds who apparently live in Haiti?], of rebuilding villages and cities [Anne, please read Derrick Jensen's work and learn how fucked up that statement is] with an eye to future floods, of helping their own refugees resettle. [And please WHM sky-god, don't let them come to the U.S.! We whiteys are more and more of a minority as it is!!!]

Haiti does not have these kinds of internal resources, which means that all the reconstruction expertise will have to come from outside. Most of it will come from the United States. [And not with any morality of generosity, I assure you. With economic and political interests firmly in place. Yes, the U.S. does that well.] Yet for all the obvious historical reasons, this outside expertise will be unacceptable to many Haitians, who will see it as a colonial imposition, unwarranted interference in local affairs, cultural imperialism. [That would be "unacceptable", yes. And "see it" means, in this case, "WHAT IT IS"] Armed U.S. Marines may wind up in fire fights with those violent gangs [Oh she didn't go there did she?? Yup, she did. Hey Anne, you racist bigot, the white supremacist military is the world's most powerful GANG.] Local elites—those who remain—may plot to swindle the aid missions out of their food and money. [Because there's no such thing as morality on an island like Haiti--in case you don't catch Anne's drift.]

I hope I am wrong. [I hope Anne doesn't write racist, seemingly pro-humanity but blatantly xenophobic bullshit in the future.] I am sure there are optimists out there, people who think this is Haiti's chance to reconstruct itself, literally and figuratively, to rebuild government institutions, to attract donors and investment. Bill Clinton is such an optimist [no, Anne. He's a sexual abuser of women, and an opportunist who represents white male supremacist corporate interests], and I am very, very glad that he and his wife spent their honeymoon in Haiti. How fortunate, at this moment, that the country has such powerful friends. [Yes. Cynical sarcasm. But you miss the point.] Yet I also know that a successful recovery and reconstruction will require not just friends [does "friends" include the U.S. white supremacist colonising military as well as "FOB"s (friends of Bill)?], not just money, and not just optimism, but a profound cultural and political change, the kind of change that normally takes decades. And Haiti does not have decades, it has days—maybe hours—before fresh disasters strike. [It has less time than that to be described rather than stereotyped in a non-white supremacist way by the U.S. media.]

Correction, Jan. 17, 2010: This article originally stated that Haitian President René Préval was out of the country. (Return to the corrected sentence.) It also incorrectly described Aceh as an island. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

*     *     *
Did  you get it? Here's part of the problem, from *this wonderfully named feminist blog, The Pursuit of Harpyness*.

Stop using the word “looting!”

Posted by SarahMC in Thoughts, Language Matters, Racism, The Media on Jan 15, 2010, 2:02pm | 50 comments

So this morning I decided to check in on What The MSM Is Up To, just out of morbid curiosity. At MSNBC I found this image.

The implication is that Haitians are ungrateful, uncivilized thieves.

Right now, this is the top story over there. “Looters roam Haiti streets as aid trickles in.” Is that so? To “loot” is to rob. What constitutes “looting” in an area that has been reduced to rubble? Not waiting in front of a collapsed grocery store for the cashier to return? I suppose people should not eat until they have the opportunity to pay someone for food? Is that what “civilized” people would do? As Tom Scocca said at The Awl, if there is no other way to get provisions, it’s not looting.

Consider the specific needs of Haitians with Disabilities in the Aftermath of the Earthquake: Physical Disabilities, Post-traumatic Stress, Blindness, and more

[image is from here]

Above, able-bodied Haitian children

display colorfully painted crutches which are now ready

to distribute to people with disabilities.

Haitian Citizens with Disabilities: Not discussed much in the dominant media why? 

Because white folks assume being Haitian is a disability. Poverty, racism, sexism, capitalism, and imperialism are disabling systems of oppression to people. But being a citizen of Haiti means you are human. Some humans have disabilities and some do not.

Thank you to FWD/Forward: feminists with disabilities for a way forward blog. All that follows is from *there*.

As you’re likely aware, an immensely destructive earthquake struck Haiti on January 12, 2010. It was centered in the capital city Port-au-Prince, home to over 2 million residents, and destroyed buildings, food and water systems, hospitals, and seemingly the national government. The information and photos coming out of the country have been disturbing and heartbreaking. The full scope of the damage – to the people, to the country – has yet to be determined, but it is surely catastrophic.

The effect of the disaster on Haitians with disabilities is similarly devastating. Although the earthquake and subsequent building collapses happened so quickly that neither PWD nor TAB had an opportunity to get to safety, conditions after the quake are likely disproportionately difficult for PWDs. The streets are covered in debris and destruction, there is no electricity, and people need to scavenge for any available food and water. Additionally, literally all of the medical facilities in the city were destroyed in the quake, so there is no access to medications, doctors, anything. Even now, four days after the quake, there is extremely limited emergency care in Port-au-Prince, with people traveling 6 hours by car to one of the few undamaged hospitals in the country for emergency surgery.

In addition, there are an untold number of people who are newly disabled due to the catastrophe and its aftermath. Most of the injuries are open compound fractures, where broken bones have penetrated the skin. These require immediate surgery to re-set the bone and close the wound to prevent infection – which injured patients haven’t been able to get. These people haven’t gotten food and water, much less antibiotics.

Dr. Jennifer Ashton reported that “most of these patients have not eaten in three days. They are profoundly dehydrated and they have crush injuries to their long limbs, upper arms, body and, in some cases, open pelvic fractures, which set the scene for some very serious and life-threatening infection. In addition, when limbs get crushed like that, if they don’t have surgical management immediately, they risk losing that limb as the swelling and infection really take off and that’s what we’re seeing.” Ann Curry reported that desperate doctors were performing surgery on injured children without anesthetics. It is also likely that a number of survivors will develop Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. After the tsunami of 2004, PTSD rates averaged about 10% in the population.

It’s important to note that not everyone injured in the quake is subject to these conditions. American citizens were evacuated by U.S. Air Force planes and other chartered planes to be treated in United States hospitals. This Anchorage woman had her lower right leg crushed by rubble and was then evacuated to a hospital in Miami, where her foot was amputated. These conditions are affecting people without the money or resources to get adequate care. And they are exacerbated by the poverty and unstable infrastructure that existed prior to the quake. (Which the U.S. and France and other colonial powers created and sustained, but that’s more than I can get into with this post.)

It is easy to feel overwhelmed by this, but there are things you can do to help:
FINANCIAL DONATIONS

• Portlight Strategies, Inc. focuses on Haitians with disabilities. It works with a community of Catholic nuns who will be opening shelters in Port-au-Prince for PWDs, and donated funds will go to “defray shipping costs of medical and clinical equipment … and for the purchase of food and other shelter supplies.”
• Healing Hands for Haiti has been providing prosthetic and orthodic services and supplies to Haitians with disabilities since 1998 and will be deploying staff and equipment to help PWDs.
• Christian Blind Mission, an organization focused on PWDs in the developing world, partners with local organizations in a number of medical facilities throughout Haiti. Donations will “support its Partners in the affected area with emergency assistance and long-term rehabilitation and reconstruction efforts.”

IN-KIND DONATIONS

• Aid for AIDS is collecting medical supplies, including unused medications. They are especially interested in antiretrovirals to help Haitians with AIDS whose treatment has been interrupted by the disaster. There are drop-off points throughout the US, or you can send them to Aid for AIDS at 120 Wall Street, 26 Floor
  New York, N.Y. 10005.
• Partners in Health is also seeking donations of these specific items: “need specific items urgently:  orthopedic supplies, surgical consumables (sutures, bandages, non-powdered sterile gloves, syringes, etc), blankets, tents, satellite phones with minutes, and large unopened boxes of medications. No small quantities or unused personal medications will be accepted.“

Please also remember to take care of yourself during this time. It’s been easy for me to spend hours reading articles, looking at photos, watching footage, and feeling increasingly overwhelmed and helpless. Don’t lose track of your own health and well being.

MADRE is working with women in Haiti, MADRE works to stop violence against women

[MADRE logo image is from here]

Haiti: Emergency Relief for Earthquake Survivors

Earthquake in Haiti

The worst earthquake in 200 years struck Haiti on Tuesday, January 12, causing catastrophic destruction in the hemisphere’s poorest country.

The quake struck near the capital of Port-au-Prince, the most densely populated part of Haiti.

Providing Disaster Relief

We are working closely with our partners in Haiti to meet these urgent needs of women and their families in this crisis:

1. We are raising funds for emergency medical supplies, broad-spectrum antibiotics, water purification tablets and food. We heard a report this morning that 90 percent of the population of Port-au-Prince is now homeless. We are working to supply tents as temporary shelters.

2. We are collaborating with organizations in the US (Partners in Health and Circle of Health International) to send teams of care workers, including Creole-speakers and reproductive healthcare providers.

3. We are working to send support to women’s human rights defenders. We are hearing reports of a horror that often accompanies disasters like this – namely, an upsurge of violence against women. It's critical that women human rights defenders in Haiti have the support they need to help survivors and reach out to women who are trying to keep themselves and their children safe in the chaos that has gripped Port-au-Prince.

4. It is critical that women have opportunities to communicate with the international community to talk about what is happening to them. We are working with press and with women's organizations on the ground to create such opportunities for women in Haiti.

Zanmi Lasante's Earthquake Relief

MADRE is partnering with Zanmi Lasante Clinic to get emergency supplies to Haiti. 
Zanmi Lasante is one of Haiti's largest nongovermental health care providers – and the only clinic that delivers comprehensive primary care, regardless of people's ability to pay.

Thanks to its deep roots in the community and its years of experience confronting the frequent disasters that plague Haiti, Zanmi Lasante knows what to do in this crisis. They immediately identified the most urgent needs of women and families devastated by the earthquake and began mobilizing direct aid, such as bandages, broad-spectrum antibiotics and other medical supplies, as well as water tablets to prevent cholera outbreaks.
More on the Zanmi Lasante Clinic

Donate Today.

If you also wish to donate to MADRE's fund to stop violence against women, you may do so by clicking here.

Sexist Backlash Against Gender-Responsive Aid in Haiti Shows Some Men Really Don't Get It

[image is from here]

The title of this blogpost and all that follows is from *here @AlterNet*.

 

Posted by Lucinda Marshall, RH Reality Check at 7:34 AM on January 18, 2010.

News flash: In addition to food, water, shelter, and medical care, there are needs that are specific to women, particularly pregnant women and new mothers.

In Haiti, as is always true in the aftermath of a major disaster, in addition to the urgent need for what we traditionally consider the pillars of immediate aid -- food, water, shelter, medical care -- there are needs that are specific to women, particularly for pregnant women and mothers with new babies and the need to address the added vulnerability to violence that women face when government infrastructures are dysfunctional.
According to the International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (UN-INSTRAW) and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA):

(W)omen of reproductive age face limitations in accessing pre-natal and post-natal care, as well as greater risk of vaginal infections, pregnancy complications including spontaneous abortion, unplanned pregnancy, and post-traumatic stress. An increase in violence against women was also recorded…

…(I)n natural disaster situations and in post-disaster recuperation, the cases of violence may increase. "Given the stress that this situation caused and the life in the refuges, men attacked women more frequently.

Additionally as the MIndanao Commission on Women and Mothers for Peace Movement points out:

women suffer most from the impact of climate change and natural disasters because of discrimination and poverty. The same happened to women victims of Hurricane Katrina and the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami as documented in a report on "Gender and Climate Change."

Tracy Clark-Flory addresses these issues relative to providing aid in Haiti in a piece on Salon's Broadsheet:

It isn't just that women often require special care and resources post-disaster; human rights organizations say that they could also play a critical role in distributing much-needed aid. Women "are central actors in family and community life," says Enarson, and are more likely to know "who in the neighborhood most needs help -- where the single mothers, women with disabilities, widows and the poorest of the poor live." Diana Duarte, a spokesperson for MADRE, an international women's rights organization that has joined the relief effort, put it this way: "Women are often more integrated and more aware of the vulnerabilities of their communities."

Even beyond the initial emergency response, there lies a long road to recovery that holds other unique challenges for women and girls. They are "at increased risk of gender-based violence, especially domestic violence and rape but also forced marriage at earlier ages" due to their increased dependence on men for protection and support, says Enarson. After a disaster of this magnitude, there will also be scores of “newly disabled, widowed or homeless women" in need of help. MADRE’s Duarte points out that women’s generally higher "level of poverty negatively effects their ability to access resources to rebuild."

Clark-Flory also points to the work of the Gender and Disaster Network which calls for a gender-responsive approach to aid in Haiti and has a wealth of resources on the topic here.
Madre's Marie St. Cyr and Yifat Susskind offer this excellent view of what such an approach needs to look like in Haiti,

All Haitians are suffering right now. But, women are often hardest hit when disaster strikes because they were at a deficit even before the catastrophe. In Haiti, and in every country, women are the poorest and often have no safety net, leaving them most exposed to violence, homelessness and hunger in the wake of disasters. Women are also overwhelmingly responsible for other vulnerable people, including infants, children, the elderly, and people who are ill or disabled.

Because of their role as caretakers and because of the discrimination they face, women have a disproportionate need for assistance. Yet, they are often overlooked in large-scale aid operations. In the chaos that follows disasters, aid too often reaches those who yell the loudest or push their way to the front of the line. When aid is distributed through the “head of household” approach, women-headed families may not even be recognized, and women within male-headed families may be marginalized when aid is controlled by male relatives.

It is not enough to ensure that women receive aid. Women in communities must also be integral to designing and carrying out relief efforts. When relief is distributed by women, it has the best chance of reaching those most in need. That’s not because women are morally superior. It is because their roles as caretakers in the community means they know where every family lives, which households have new babies or disabled elders, and how to reach remote communities even in disaster conditions.

Moreover, women in the community have expertise about the specific problems women and their families face during disasters.

Unfortunately, in big relief operations, already-marginalized people are usually the ones who “fall through the cracks.

None of this sits too well with the men’s rights movement.  Robert Franklin, Esq. has this to say at Men's News Daily:

(A)ccording to Clark-Flory, "women in general will be in need of ‘hygiene supplies…"  Men and boys apparently will not need those things.  And “women often require special care and resources post disaster.”  Men and boys don’t need those things either.  Is that because men and boys are supermen who don’t need help?  Or is it because they’re less deserving of it than are women and girls?

First of all, the piece did not say that men and boys don't deserve aid, it said that women have some needs that men don’t have that  also need to be addressed. Secondly (having hopefully given female readers time to pick themselves up off the floor from laughing) -- apparently Mr. Franklin, Esq. does not go to the grocery or drug store very often or he would know that hygiene is our oh so clean euphemism for sanitary products -- oh wait, that is a euphemism too -- okay, excuse my indelicacy -- it means tampons and pads that women use when they MENSTRUATE (there, I said the word). As a general rule, most of the people who use those products are FEMALE.  But if Mr. Franklin, Esq. really feels that he needs them, I’m sure we can send him a box with explicit instructions on where to shove them.

As for special care, unless men get pregnant and have babies, they probably do not require that assistance either.

Over at Spearhead (they're not subtle are they?), they also object to Gender and Disaster Network’s "Elaine Enarson (probably a Swedish woman)" saying that,

They are "at increased risk of gender-based violence, especially domestic violence and rape but also forced marriage at earlier ages" due to their increased dependence on men for protection and support.

with this,

So now when men provide women with protection and support they are suspected rapists, child molesters and batterers? Are these strange, foreign women more trustworthy than Haitian girls' fathers, brothers and grandfathers? I try to refrain from inserting my opinion when I am writing these news pieces, but Ms. Enarson is making one of the most offensive insinuations possible with the above statement, and she is dead wrong. It is matriarchal societies where women cannot rely on men for support in which women face the most danger.

Really?  Name one matriarchal society where this is or was so.  And yes, women who are in general more likely to be victims of intimate violence are far more likely to be victimized when they suddenly become more physically vulnerable.
International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (UN-INSTRAW) and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) offer this framework for re-prioritizing the way we offer aid:

In the face of obstacles and the needs that have been identified, the evaluation proposes a series of concrete recommendations, amongst which are to: improve the sexual and reproductive health of women and adolescents in natural disaster situations and in post-disaster recovery; ensure access to contraceptive measures, particularly condoms for the prevention of transmission of HIV; provide post-natal care; medicine to combat infections and post-traumatic stress; provide an adequate response to cases of violence against women, girls and boys; include the provision of health and legal services; and improve the security situation of shelters to prevent cases of abuse of power by guards.

The UNFPA is currently working to rush maternal health supplies to Haiti.
As Bill Quigley puts it so eloquently, we need to:

Prioritize humanitarian aid to help women, children and the elderly. They are always moved to the back of the line. If they are moved to the back of the line, start at the back.

There are several organizations that are working to provide aid to meet women’s specific needs in Haiti.  The women’s human rights organization Madre is,

working to send support to women’s human rights defenders. We are hearing reports of a horror that often accompanies disasters like this – namely, an upsurge of violence against women. It’s critical that women human rights defenders in Haiti have the support they need to help survivors and reach out to women who are trying to keep themselves and their children safe in the chaos that has gripped Port-au-Prince.

You can make a donation to help their efforts here.
In addition, the U of t Feminist Law Student’s Association reports that,

V-Day is trying to reach our sisters in Port au Prince who run the V-Day Haiti Sorority Safe House, which provides shelter to women survivors of violence and their children, as well as psychological, legal and medical support. While we have not been able to reach the staff at the Safe House, it is clear that increased help will be needed for women survivors of violence in the aftermath of the earthquake. Reports state that over 50,000 lives have been lost, and that Port Au Prince has been “flattened.”

You can donate to VDay’s Haiti Rescue Fund here.

Tagged as: women, aid, haiti

Lucinda Marshall is the Founder and Director of the Feminist Peace Network. She is the author of the FPN blog as well as Reclaiming Medusa.

Remembering Miep Gies (1909-2010), the brave woman who kept Anne Frank alive in her attic during the Nazi Occupation of Holland

In the early 1940s, the German Nazis deported and murdered most of Holland's Jews.

Miep Gies, who died on January 11 aged 100, was
one of a Dutch couple who hid and sustained the family of
Anne Frank for more than two years in an Amsterdam attic;
later she helped to save Anne Frank's diary for posterity.

What follows is from the Telegraph.co.uk, *here*.

Miep Gies in 1998, with a copy of her book "Anne Frank Remembered". On her left hand she is wearing a black onyx ring with a diamond in the center, a gift from Auguste von Pels, one of the doomed Jews she helped shelter. Photo: AP

1940: Anne Frank at the age of 12 years, sitting at her desk at the Montessori school in Amsterdam. Photo: AFP/GETTYIMAGES

Published: 6:02PM GMT 12 Jan 2010

 

1940: Anne Frank at the age of 12 years, sitting at her desk at the Montessori school in Amsterdam. Photo: AFP/GETTYIMAGES

Miep Gies and her husband Jan in Amsterdam in 1987, beside the bookcase which led to the Frank family hiding place. Photo: EPA

1945: Miep Gies, front row left, with Otto Frank, front row center, and other 'helpers' Bep Voskuijl, front row right, Johannes Kleiman, back row left, and Victor Kugler, back row right Photo: AP

She was born Hermine Santrouschitz on February 15 1909 into a German Roman Catholic family in Vienna, but was sent to the Netherlands when she was 11 to escape the food shortages in Austria. The family with which she lived in Leiden gave her the nickname Miep and later adopted her. By the outbreak of the Second World War she was working as an assistant to Otto Frank, the owner of a pectin manufacturing company in Amsterdam.

After the Nazi invasion of 1940, Frank prepared a secret annex behind a swinging bookcase in a room above the firm's offices at 263 Prinsengracht; and in July 1942 the family of four – Otto, his wife Edith and their daughters Margot and Anne – went into hiding, leaving a false trail indicating that they had fled to Switzerland. Soon afterwards they were joined by other Jews, the van Pels family and Miep Gies's family dentist, Fritz Pfeffer – eight people in all.

For two years Miep Gies and her husband Jan, a municipal employee whom she had married in 1941, risked their lives to smuggle in food and provisions and news from outside, begging, buying and bartering what they needed from farmers and shopkeepers. They were helped throughout by her colleagues Victor Kugler, Johannes Kleiman and Bep Voskuijl.

Miep acted as a confidante for the adolescent Anne, bringing her paper for her diary and, on one occasion, a pair of second-hand high-heeled shoes. The Gies's heroic feat of humanitarianism ended on August 4 1944, when the Frank family were betrayed (by a person whose identity remains unknown), arrested and sent to concentration camps.

When the Gestapo arrived, Miep Gies was at her desk in the office below. She recognised from the voice of one of the arresting officers that he was Viennese, and she managed to charm him, perhaps saving her own life.

She never saw her Jewish friends again but "could tell from the sound of their feet on the wooden steps that they were coming down like beaten dogs".

Later, at considerable personal risk, she went to Gestapo headquarters to try to bargain for their release – but to no avail. Eventually she returned to their hiding place and found Anne's diary, its pages scattered over the floor.

She intended to return it to its author, knowing how important the diary had been to her, and locked it away without reading a word. Nearly a year later, Anne's father Otto returned from Auschwitz. He knew his wife and friends had not survived, but still hoped that his two daughters, Margot, 18, and Anne, 15, had been spared.

Two months later he received a letter that confirmed that both girls had died in Bergen-Belsen in March 1945, less than a month before the camp was liberated by British soldiers.

Miep Gies was with him when he received the news and could not find the words to comfort him. Then she remembered Anne's diary. She took it out of the desk and gave it to him, saying: "Here is your daughter Anne's legacy to you."

Eventually published in 1947, The Diary of Anne Frank became, after the Bible, the best-selling non-fiction book in the world.

Miep Gies recalled Otto Frank's dignified refusal to seek revenge. He declined ever to identify the man who had arrested them, telling her: "Miep, that man may have children. Those children should not have to live with such a thing."

For two years she resisted all Otto Frank's efforts to persuade her to read his daughter's diaries, but eventually relented and was glad that while Anne had invented pseudonyms for everyone else, Miep's name was unchanged.

For the rest of her life, Miep Gies devoted herself to sustaining Anne Frank's legacy, answering letters from all over the world. In 1987 she published a book, Anne Frank Remembered. In it she observed: "I am not a hero. I stand at the end of the long, long line of good Dutch people who did what I did and more – much more – during those dark and terrible times years ago, but always like yesterday in the heart of those of us who bear witness."

She was decorated by Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands for her heroism and dedication and the Israeli Holocaust museum Yad Vashem bestowed on her the title of "Righteous Gentile". She was also honoured by the German government.

On August 4 every year, the day of the arrest, Miep Gies would shut herself away in her house and see no one. "I act as though the day does not exist. It is my personal memorial to my people," she explained.

In 1996 Jon Blair's film Anne Frank Remembered won an Oscar for best documentary feature. Blair took Miep Gies to the ceremony in Hollywood, and as they were on their way to the awards in their limousine she remarked that she had agreed to come because Anne Frank had always wanted to be famous, and that she had loved Hollywood. Blair took Miep Gies on to the stage when he made his acceptance speech, and the audience gave her a standing ovation.

Jan Gies died in 1993, and she is survived by a son.

1945: Miep Gies, front row left, with Otto Frank, front row center, and other 'helpers' Bep Voskuijl, front row right, Johannes Kleiman, back row left, and Victor Kugler, back row right.
Photo: AP

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