little somalia?

September 3, 2005 7:41 PM

"Little Somalia" is how The Army Times has characterized post-Katrina New Orleans. And this isn't about race?
posted by brookish (35 comments total)

From the Army Times article:

“You have to think about whether it is worth risking your neck for someone who will turn around and shoot at you. We didn’t come here to fight a war. We came here to help.”
posted by mr_crash_davis at 7:43 PM on September 3, 2005

So why are they bothering? Can't they just nuke it from orbit? I mean, really...
posted by fungible at 7:56 PM on September 3, 2005

posted by fleetmouse at 7:57 PM on September 3, 2005

Perhaps they wrote this before they actually had troops on the ground?

Met by Despair, Not Violence - As they begin to patrol the chaotic city, troops are surprised by what they don't find.
posted by ewagoner at 7:57 PM on September 3, 2005

Hopefully instead of looking for people stealing shoes and DVDs they'll take a look at this current list of people trapped in their homes and needing help.
posted by Stuart_R at 8:05 PM on September 3, 2005

Just to clarify a common misconception: the Army Times is privately owned, and is not an official publication.
posted by kickingtheground at 8:06 PM on September 3, 2005

Where's Hunter Thompson when you need him?

This catastrophe is beginning to look more and more like a neocon version of urban renewal. Got a persistent black underclass in a major port city that you can't get rid of? Underfund its defenses until a hurricane floods the entire city. Get all the law-abiding people huddled in the Superdome and starve them until they're nearly dead. Meanwhile, let the others go on a looting spree (on national television) until all the gun shops have been cleared out. When the people in the Superdome are too weak to cause any trouble, bus them out of town, then send in the army to hunt down and kill everybody else. Drain the city and start again.

This is satirical, but only barely. I'm genuinely surprised there aren't riots breaking out in other cities by now. Firehoses and attack dogs seem so quaint at this point.
posted by Armitage Shanks at 8:07 PM on September 3, 2005

Just to clarify the clarification, the words “[t]his place is going to look like Little Somalia,” were chosen by Brig. Gen. Gary Jones, commander of the Louisiana National Guard’s Joint Task Force, and not to the Army Times.
posted by tomharpel at 8:09 PM on September 3, 2005

Genocide by complacency?****

(1) Whites"finding things in grocery stores"/ Blacks "looting"

(2) "They are shooting at us" as Kayne West said.

(3) The city (what's left of) is in lockdown.

(4) Blacks vote 90% Democrat and easily identifiable/The more dead help Republicanize the country.

****DISCLAIMER: Just some food for thought.
posted by j-urb at 8:15 PM on September 3, 2005

I hope they can call in some airstrikes, because the tanks and M-16's sure aren't stopping the starving people from dying.
posted by Balisong at 8:15 PM on September 3, 2005

Rather poor choice of words on General Jones's part, hmm? Tells me a lot though.

He, like Bush, may not even be considering New Orleans as part of America.
posted by zoogleplex at 8:17 PM on September 3, 2005

Met by despair, not violence
posted by jb at 8:20 PM on September 3, 2005

Xeni Jardin's take on things at Boing-Boing:

Al-Cajun? Army Times calls NOLA Katrina victims "the insurgency"

An article in the Army Times is referring to American citizens in New Orleans as "the insurgency".

...[these are] Junkies and desperate people in dehumanizing conditions without homes, hope, or the most basic resources for survival. The context doesn't make crime acceptable. It doesn't lessen the very real dangers for military and law enforcement personnel tasked with the daunting job of restoring security. But it doesn't make an entire population "insurgents" either.
We often hear the term used by military leaders or politicians to refer to armed entities in Iraq and other war zones overseas.

We are talking about fellow American citizens here -- in America.

Not insurgents. Not refugees. Not enemies. Americans.
posted by cenoxo at 8:24 PM on September 3, 2005

Go Xeni! Absolutely right.

i so have a crush. sorry to put that here
posted by zoogleplex at 8:27 PM on September 3, 2005

Soldiers follow orders. The Army Times is NOT an official Army publication. It does however, talk some pretty damn straight stuff about situations and what it is to be a soldier.

So... hey brookish; ever serve any time for your country, or are you just slinging mud from a distance?

BTW, I don't care for your website. Loosely translated that is several notches below 'it sucks'. I hope you retain more than 10% of my comments.
posted by buzzman at 8:52 PM on September 3, 2005

Buzzman: You're right. Only those with time on-the-ground can understand. Let me serve so I can help defend our country.

Oh, wait, I'm married in Massachusetts to another woman. That is an "automatic disqualifiying event" according to the local recruitment office. (This skips over don't ask don't tell.)

Us queers aren't good enough. (Or is it "U.S. queers aren't good enough?")
posted by andreaazure at 8:58 PM on September 3, 2005

Did it occur to anyone that there *are* some other similarities here, like A) massive infrastructure damage, B) heavily armed people that don't want to be 'rescued', mixed in with C) real victims, that most emphatically DO need rescuing and protection?

That sounds like a pretty darn good clone of Somalia right there. Skin color is completely unnecessary to explain this particular comment.

I see no evidence, in fact, that it was there until you added it.

The Army is one of the most thoroughly integrated of all America's institutions, and it strikes me as pretty darn unlikely that there's much racism left in anyone of general rank.
posted by Malor at 9:28 PM on September 3, 2005

unfortunately, i am also gay and not allowed to serve my country. I really don;t think that's important though. I wasn't criticizing the military - I was expressing shock at a choice of words by a military person and suggesting that perhaps it exposed a racial undercurrent. Was that too subtle for you?

until this week, i haven't posted to my website because i'm writing a book about three guys from New Orelans who have been in solitary confinement for 34 years for a crime they didn't commit. do YOU ever write anything worthwhile?
posted by brookish at 9:34 PM on September 3, 2005

why not use Kosovo as a comparison, Malor?
posted by brookish at 9:36 PM on September 3, 2005

Insights from Iraq veterans now assigned to the New Orleans rescue effort:

Guard Sees Parallels to Iraq in Louisiana

Nothing's simple, not here or in the Middle East, the soldiers said.

Spec. Ricardo Richards, also of the Arkansas unit that had been in Iraq, stood squinting in the sun, armed with flak jacket, webbed helmet, assault rifle pointed to the ground.

"They're clapping on one side, because they see the security. On this side they're not clapping, they're hungry and thirsty," Richards said. "It's like Baghdad all over again ... The only thing different about this is there's no car bombs, no IEDs, nobody shooting at you."

No matter where you go, there you are...
posted by cenoxo at 9:44 PM on September 3, 2005

If only they had known, Exercise TRUEX might have been postponed for greater realism:

Marines train for urban warfare [Google cache]
Drills in New Orleans area include helicopters
Saturday, December 04, 2004

About 600 Marines and sailors will participate in intense urban warfare training in the New Orleans area for the next two weeks, but the low-flying helicopters and other military activity should be no cause for alarm, a Marine spokesman said.

To make the exercise as realistic as possible, the troops will not know where the simulated trouble will break out and those locations will not be publicly announced...
posted by cenoxo at 10:21 PM on September 3, 2005

This catastrophe is beginning to look more and more like a neocon version of urban renewal. Got a persistent black underclass in a major port city that you can't get rid of? Underfund its defenses until a hurricane floods the entire city. Get all the law-abiding people huddled in the Superdome and starve them until they're nearly dead. Meanwhile, let the others go on a looting spree (on national television) until all the gun shops have been cleared out. When the people in the Superdome are too weak to cause any trouble, bus them out of town, then send in the army to hunt down and kill everybody else. Drain the city and start again.

I think this is, in fact, the plan. Destroy & Rebuild is the technique that's been tried and true, especially in wars where huge construction companies are involved, say. The one thing the President has emphasized this week is how much rebuilding there is going to be along the Gulf Coast (he didn't mention anything about the people, but I guess that's not his department). Even if I am just being overly paranoide, it is a fact that a few companies are going to get very very very rich rebuilding New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.
posted by nromanek at 10:22 PM on September 3, 2005

Just when you think this can't get any more heartbreaking...
posted by leftcoastbob at 10:35 PM on September 3, 2005

nromanek: just to make sure I understand you correctly. Do you actually believe that, at any point during this entire crisis, some member of the Bush administration...from the FEMA chief on up, actually said: "let it burn"?

To imagine willful intent behind this entire fuckup is, to my mind at least, beyond the pale. Entrenched racism? Sure. Neglect of the urban poor? Absolutely. Horrible misappropriation of government resources? Undeniably.

To my mind (and others will disagree, no doubt), the sort of conspiracy-mongering you engage in here is manifestly unhelpful. It makes you sound, frankly, like an unhinged loon. Let's zero in on the actual incompetency and the measurable, horrific neglect that caused this crisis. And let's keep in mind that speculation on nefarious motives and secret cabals only makes that task more difficult.
posted by felix betachat at 11:02 PM on September 3, 2005

I think this fits the Problem Reaction Solution paradigm for conditioning the public for martial law and weather control / modification. Deny it all you want, but Scalar technology does exist and is being used TODAY. Katrina was likely created and steered toward its intended target, thus manufacturing the 'problem' for which there was/is a predicted 'reaction,' for which the 'solution' all along would be to push legislation for Weather Modification! If you think this is all lunacy, tell that to the crazy person who proposed bill S. 517,Weather Modification Research and Technology Transfer Authorization Act of 2005, in the Senate of the United States.
posted by augustweed at 11:11 PM on September 3, 2005

*gives up*
posted by felix betachat at 11:15 PM on September 3, 2005

Bills in the House or Senate search site. Search for "517." It's no joke.
posted by augustweed at 11:20 PM on September 3, 2005

SEC. 9. EFFECTIVE DATE.

This Act shall take effect on October 1, 2005.

Honestly, if you think this was a planned disaster (*begs mind to stop boggling*), don't you think there would have been a lot more photo-ops showing the president looking heroic?
posted by felix betachat at 11:30 PM on September 3, 2005

Honestly, if you think this was a planned disaster

I believe the correct phrase is "catastrophic success".
posted by Armitage Shanks at 11:58 PM on September 3, 2005

Honestly . . . do you think this bill would have been proposed if the technology weren't already in place? Sure . . . the "powers that be" are going to tell us they are planning a disaster. And do you you mean heroic photo ops like this? Or this . Don't forget the turkey.
posted by augustweed at 12:03 AM on September 4, 2005

Look, as a historian of empire in Africa, I'm very quick to spot overtly and covertly racist thinking. But to be quite honest, and this comes from also having trained in military history and coming from a long line of military types, they most often think about the logistical and operational similarities of any group of cases. The "race" aspect, if it exists in any meaningful sense, is so subordinate to every other analogical point as to lose all power as a point of analysis. Be conscious, certainly, but don't reduce this all to "racism."

You might as well blame Gilliard for racism for saying "IT LOOKS MORE LIKE ANGOLA THAN NOLA" (which I also believe cannot be said to be racist). But the class demographics, issues of public order, and logistics are most certainly similar, and in terms of operations, Somalia is the closest analogue at the outset. It's an unfortunate one, of course, given the way that turned out, but there it is.

While racial thinking is a powerful part of the western habitus, not everything immediately reduces to it, even some things that seem like they could.
posted by trigonometry at 12:03 AM on September 4, 2005

A commenter (I think on a BBC or CNN blog) used a phrase that has resonated with me all day..."economic cleansing". Wish I could find the reference...
posted by cookie-k at 12:06 AM on September 4, 2005

Oh noes!!!111 It must be Bush's fault!!!!!111 Quick, my tinfoli hat!
posted by mrblondemang at 1:47 AM on September 4, 2005

Boing Boing: All Race Baiting, All The Time.
posted by Mick at 6:17 AM on September 4, 2005

Katrina was likely created and steered toward its intended target,

That page is hilarious: "Ivan and Katrina. These are both very Russian sounding names. It has been established that the former Soviet Union (fSU) developed and boasted of weather modification technology during the 1960's and 70's with deployment against the United States coming in 1976 with the audible arrival of the woodpecker grid. These weather operations continue to this day."

You don't really believe that stuff, do you augustweed?
posted by jack_mo at 7:41 PM on September 4, 2005