Mariborchan

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Haiti, the poorest nation in the western hemisphere, is one of those countries that only makes the news when it is struck by disaster. But despite the images of desperation that are now zooming around the globe — not to mention the periodic stories of abject poverty that filter out of the country — its people are not passive victims.

This is a good moment to reread Slavoj Žižek’s review of Peter Hallward’s Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment, which New Statesman first published in 2008. Žižek traces Haiti’s predicament, from the French Revolution to the downfall of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004.

‘Our Role in Haiti’s Plight’
Peter Hallward’s article about the disaster:

Any large city in the world would have suffered extensive damage from an earthquake on the scale of the one that ravaged Haiti’s capital city on Tuesday afternoon, but it’s no accident that so much of Port-au-Prince now looks like a war zone. Much of the devastation wreaked by this latest and most calamitous disaster to befall Haiti is best understood as another thoroughly manmade outcome of a long and ugly historical sequence…

Adam Kotsko mentioned that “Peter Hallward recommends this charity as being very good.”

Haiti: getting the picture

…As Obama sends in the marines and the 82nd Airborne, precisely to deal with the above-mentioned “security situation”, the American Enterprise Institute insists that such forces are used to “ensure that Haiti’s gangs—particularly those loyal to ousted President Jean‐Bertrand Aristide—are suppressed.”…

See also:
Déjà vu
Peter Hallward – Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment
Haiti Didn’t Become a Poor Nation All on Its Own – The U.S’s Hidden Role in the Disaster
Haitians React to Televangelist Pat Robertson’s ‘Devil Pact’ Remarks
Slavoj Žižek – Democracy Versus the People
Slavoj Žižek – Against Charity