New Orleans: How Lies Justified Murder. posted by Richard Seymour

Yes, you remember how the story of alleged 'snipers' taking aim at aid relief workers was used to justify withdrawing aid and launching a military campaign to take the city and quosh the 'insurgency'? I was a little bit suspicious about this story at the time, as indeed were quite a few others. Comrades, friends, brothers and sisters - we were right:

Even in the desperate days after Hurricane Katrina, the news flash seemed particularly sensational: Police had caught eight snipers on a bridge shooting at relief contractors. In the gun battle that followed, officers shot to death five or six of the marauders.

Exhausted and emotionally drained police cheered the news that their comrades had stopped the snipers and suffered no losses, said an account in the New Orleans Times-Picayune. One officer said the incident showed the department's resolve to take back the streets.

But nearly three months later — and after repeated revisions of the official account of the incident and a lowering of the death toll to two — authorities said they were still trying to reconstruct what happened Sept. 4 on the Danziger Bridge. And on the city's east side, where the shootings occurred, two families that suffered casualties are preparing to come forward with stories radically different from those told by police.

A teenager critically wounded that day, speaking about the incident for the first time, said in an interview that police shot him for no reason, delivering a final bullet at point-blank range with what he thought was an assault rifle. Members of another family said one of those killed was mentally disabled, a childlike innocent who made a rare foray from home in a desperate effort to find relief from the flood.

The two families — one from New Orleans East and solidly middle class, the other poorer and rooted in the Lower 9th Ward — have offered only preliminary information about what they say happened that day. Large gaps remain in the police and civilian accounts of the incident.

...

"Five men who were looting exchanged gunfire with police. The officers engaged the looters when they were fired upon," killing four, said Steven Nichols, the police official, according to the Reuters news agency.

In the following weeks, the official account would be modified again. It turned out, police said, that only two of the suspects had been killed.

Although not disclosed by police, one of the dead was the mentally retarded man, 40-year-old Ronald Madison, family and friends said. The other was a 19-year-old man. Four others were injured: Leonard Bartholomew, 44; his wife, Susan, 39; their daughter, Leisha, 17; and their nephew, Jose Holmes Jr., 19.

Now, who would have believed that desperate residents of New Orleans were busily shooting at those who were trying to help them - unless their faces were black? As it happens, violent crime fell during the post-Katrina catastrophe. And that's quite predictable: it is what you would expect. In 2001, not including the mass murder on 9/11, New York's murder rate was the lowest since Kennedy was killed. In fact, just about every kind of crime was down (except for the crimes to self-respect inflicted by the retailers of kitsch and tat). I'm not saying all of it was down to post-9/11 solidarity, but one thing that does stand out is that the disaster did not result in Hobbesian war of all against all, or in the city being "raped". Yet, the stories that enabled the government to block aid from getting into the city, and prevent people from getting out as they prepared for their "little Somalia" were somehow widely enough believed that there was not mass protest about what was being done. I was widely remarked at the time that New Orleans seemed to have joined the Third World. Well, then, think of Haiti:

The atmosphere itself is the explanation, and specifically the blackness of the inhabitants of the atmosphere makes the perfectly implausible and preposterous fragments of 'news' seem reasonable and expected, slipping neatly in to an implied colonial fable, and averts all impulse to inquiry into the identity, motives, funding, agenda of the protagonists of the violence and the identities, agenda and situation of its victims.

...

But for Haiti, of course, it would be impossible without flagrant and easily debunkable lies to tell the story without revealing the monstrous criminality of the US, France, Canada and its puppet dictatorship(s). But racism solves this problem; by the evocation of its whole elaborate framework, its myths, it literary clichés, and faux social science, the glaring lack of explanation, of indeed actual reporting in the traditional genre, is entirely concealed. A hot, banana-growing place inhabited by black people left to their own devices (having violently, arrogantly thrown off their custodians and tutors before they could be taught to control and govern themselves like Christians) is simply like this, poor, dirty, precarious, menaced by violent 'gangs' with no particular motive for their violence other than the unfettered expression of their nature - for this is what 'young black men' do when they don't make the NBA. This is how they behave on the shitpile their delusional Kings leave after embezzling all the money to dress up in feathers and dine with real royalty.

Nothing further need then be said about the unidentified 'gangs' of Haiti than that they are the cause of an uncontrollable mayhem and chaos. The edifice of racist ideology looming in the shadows of every report, fully present though only very subtly hinted at with a sprinkling of key words and the evocation of a few key images, creates an illusion of comprehension and coherence in reportage that is entirely incoherent, contradictory, nonsensical and fragmentary; there doesn't seem to be any story missing, any information suspiciously withheld. Where they got their guns and ammunition - this is not a mystery, for these kinds of beings know how to get those things. It's what they do. And its for "us" to argue among ourselves about whether we can best help them by the tough love of incarceration or the gentle patronage of charity and education.

That we are the 'gangs' terrorizing Haiti, that the personnel have been trained and armed at our expense and with our expertise, and are terrorizing on our payroll and under our direct orders, a portion of them in blue helmets, for the benefit of shareholders trading on our stock exchange; that 'we' seduce and coerce individuals laboriously into this profession, and that they would, and do, delightedly retire to Fresh Meadows, Queens given adequate pensions, is the inadmissible, obvious fact which the ancient, ornate racist discourse allows journalists to entirely avoid, leaving us concerned and puzzling over how we, in our moral and political maturity - we the enfranchised citizenry of the hyperpower dictatorship who are certain that we are not a 'basket case', that the Haitian people who overthrew their dictator and sustain their political organizations and resistance against relentless, murderous terror, are the basket case and that we are an able-bodied politic - can find a way to tame these wildmen and help lift 'them' from their savage condition in which 'they' prey, irrationally and ruthlessly, 'on their own. '

Le Colonel Chabert.