From New Orleans to Hiroshima

The inappropriate contextualisation of events by politicians (and media) makes the greatest distortion. They can only get away with this because we are almost completely a historical, forward looking, short-termist, blind to the past. And no, re-runs of documentaries about Hitler don’t count. That’s geno-porn.

As Katrina lay waste to the Southern seaboard of America, Bush was in Iraq claiming the moral authority of World War II for the current U.S. occupation of Iraq. I think this is what the Italians call “baloney”. There is no moral equivalence, it’s just morally and factually incorrect to compare the two ‘wars’.

Across the globe Mississippi's Governor, the former head of the Republican National Committee, Haley Barbour, was up to the same trick. "It looks like Hiroshima is what it looks like," she muttered describing the devastated county before her.

Er, hang on a minute, Hiroshima was a human act that caused the death of 200,000 people. Several hundred people have died in New Orleans. It’s a tragedy who’s human agent is one step removed.
It’s as if Americans are willing themselves into this world in an act of forced solidarity where they are victim not conqueror. ”Look we suffer to.”

Now New Orleans is being compared to Baghdad:

“It was no surprise, then, to see the juxtaposition of the following morning's (Wednesday, August 31st) split-screen front page headlines on MSNBC.com. A story on the "Nightmare" of Katrina refugees was paired with the "Baghdad Stampede" that killed 800 or more Iraqis. Panic, disaster, public disorder, the mass movement of refugees, tightening military occupation, combined with the key linkages between the disruption of oil production and refineries and long-term economic dislocation and debt accumulation; these are just the initial components of Katrina-Baghdad as a "strange attractor." This emergent strange attractor we now call Katrina-Baghdad will spin off and/or accelerate a series of complex economic, political and social iterations over the near and longer term.”

More at CTheory.

Watching the Americans debate and locate Katrina is also telling. Some have openly lodged this as an economic story such is the affect on oil prices. Ross Gelbspan, writing in the International Herald Tribune, argues that a warming atmosphere is generating more droughts, more intense downpours, more frequent heat waves and more severe storms - including Katrina.

"Although Katrina began as a relatively small hurricane that glanced off southern Florida, it was supercharged with extraordinary intensity by the high sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico," he writes.

He goes on to lambast the US press for failing to educate the American public to the dangers of global warming, partly because of heavy lobbying from the fossil fuel industry. Gelbspan's somewhat hyperbolic verdict is that "the press bears a share of the guilt for our self-induced destruction with the oil and coal industries".