The WEEK ending 4 September 2005
GLOATING OVER NEW ORLEANS
'Third World America,' declared the headline in the Daily Mail. 'Law and order is gone, gunmen roam at will, raping and looting, and as people die of heat and thirst, bodies lie rotting in the street.' According to the Observer 'urban American society revealed its fragility, its vast inequalities, its racial fault lines and its ready propensity to violence'. Le Devoir reported that Cuba had promised aid.
Official response to the hurricane and subsequent flooding of New Orleans was woefully inadequate. But which government could have evacuated a city of half a million people - bigger than Liverpool, Nice or Bradford - with ease? The difficulties that New Orleans faced were compounded by the destruction of the surrounding hinterland, but still the great majority of the population, black as well as white, did get out.
True, as it is, that the government response was negligent, the people of nearby towns reacted with generosity, giving up time, resources, church halls and homes to refugees. While the European press scoured weblogs for signs of race prejudice in Houston, the city provided emergency relief.
The media in America and beyond, preoccupied with anxieties about social breakdown and race violence readily found, or invented examples. But on closer inspection the defining characteristic of the people trapped in New Orleans' stadium were their low incomes.
It was the willingness to cast the tragedy in terms of race that made it possible for Federal Government to identify the remaining people of New Orleans as 'looters', and send, not aid, but troops to make war upon them. As the waters stilled, the stories coming out of the New Orleans Superdome of rule by armed gangs raping with impunity have been shown to be wildly over exaggerated.
In Britain the horror stories from more modest evacuations still reverberate. The explusion of 50 000 British-passport holding Ugandan Asians in 1972 presaged the rise of the National Front in Britain, even though only 27 000 were allowed into the UK. The majority of children evacuated from British cities during the Second World War were so badly treated that the majority preferred to return to face the Blitz. And while French newspapers gloat at the treatment of US blacks, a succession of migrant hostels has been burnt down.
The destruction of New Orleans is a tragedy. The failure to invest in floodwater engineering is a disgrace, as were the state preparations for those unable to evacuate themselves. But the indictment of American society at large is something that already existed in the minds both of the elite there, and in Europe that exercises itself over the dead bodies of the people of New Orleans.