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09/05/2005: "After the flood"

There's a lot worth saying about the fate of New Orleans and surrounding areas, & a lot of it is being said by better bloggers & writers than me. For now, I'll restrict myself to two, fairly trite, observations.

One: what does it say about a society's priorities, & the relative values it attaches to life and property, when it imposes a 'shoot-to-kill' policy for looting? Never mind that some of the 'looters' were better characterised as 'foraging for food'; even an opportunist helping himself to a wide-screen TV doesn't merit a cop bullet in the brain, surely.

Two: predictably, perhaps, the terms 'anarchy' and 'anarchic' have been bandied around to describe the chaos, confusion & savagery that has descended on the city. But would an anarchist system, operating along Bakuninist or Makhnovian ideas, have produced any worse outcome than this? Truly, I don't know. Were I to speculate, I might suggest that a society used to bottom-up self-organisation might have coped rather better than one used to a rigid hierarchy imposed by an unaccountable elite, & enforced on a daily basis by armed police. A society held together by rigid external restrictions will fall apart when those are removed, whether in the aftermath of a declining empire or folowing a natural catastrophe. A society held together by a sense of belonging to, and participating in, something that benefits all might just, conceivably, produce a populace better able to organise & co-operate when the the lights go out & the police walk off the job.

But there again, it's hard to hear of the creatures who took advantage of the tragedy to gang-rape a 14-year-old to death (assuming this & other lurid horrors turn out to be true) while retaining much faith in humankind to behave in a remotely decent manner without a gun at our collective head.