I have no idea how these stories escaped me 2 years ago, as the author of this article says a conspiracy bug is going around and it must have bitten me when I was born because people wouldnt think of this craziness unless at least parts of it were true....read on my friends.
Chasing a Katrina Conspiracy
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Pacific News Service. Posted September 28, 2005.
The latest conspiracy theory making the rounds is that New Orleans' levees were deliberately destroyed.
In the weeks since Katrina hit, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, a slew of activists, and bloggers have spun a huge tale of wicked intrigue about the hurricane. Katrina, so the conspiracy theory goes, provided the perfect and long awaited pretext for either the Army Corp of Engineers, secret government agents, the Klan, FEMA operatives, corporate real estate interests, or unnamed forces to blow the levees in New Orleans and send torrents of waters raging through the city's poorest black neighborhoods.
The aim of the plot, depending on who spoke, was to kill blacks, protect the white, upper income areas from flooding, gut political strength in New Orleans, or grab black homes and land at fire sale prices and dump pricey condominiums, townhouses, upscale malls and gallerias in their neighborhoods.
To prove their point, the conspiracy theorists cited random remarks made by a handful of tired, distraught and bitter evacuees camped in the Houston Astrodome. They claimed to have heard explosions immediately before the levees broke, and they lambasted Bush and the federal government for their inaction.
This conspiracy theory would have been relegated to a fringe corner on obscure websites if Farrakhan hadn't fanned it in a speech in North Carolina a couple of weeks after Katrina struck. A bevy of conservative talk show jocks quickly pounced on it. That gave them yet another foil to use to deflect heat from Bush's bungled relief response. They railed at Farrakhan for stirring black paranoia and anti-white hatred.
There is absolutely no proof that the levees were deliberately blown. The predominantly black 9th Ward in New Orleans was not the only section of the city flooded. The flood devastated racially mixed residential areas, some white middle-income neighborhoods in New Orleans, and other Gulf Coast towns. The levees broke because of age, poor maintenance, and the millions that Bush slashed from the 2005 budget earmarked for their repair. Experts also note that explosions and sudden noises can occur during maximum force hurricanes. They attribute it to the tremendous build up of water pressure, high winds, and power outages.
During the past two decades, redevelopment agencies, developers, land speculators and young, white, middle income home buyers have transformed deteriorating inner city neighborhoods into gentrified, upscale residential and business areas complete with lofts, townhouses and trendy shops. They didn't need a hurricane or natural disaster to do that.
The belief that the Katrina disaster was anything other than a confluence of Bush bungling, budget cutting folly and nature's wrath is no surprise. The conspiracy bug has long bit many Americans. There are packs of groups that span the political spectrum that include Aryan Nation racists, Millennium Christian fundamentalists, anti-Semitic crackpots, and fringe left radicals. Their Internet sites bristle with purported official documents that detail and expose alleged plots.
These groups and thousands of individuals believe that government, corporate, or international Zionist groups busily hatch secret plots, and concoct hidden plans to wreak havoc on their lives. Hollywood and the TV industry have also honed in on the conspiracy act. They churn out countless movies and TV shows in which shadowy government groups topple foreign governments, assassinate government leaders and brainwash operatives to do dirty deeds.
A near textbook example of that was the theory spun by an Idaho meteorologist. He claimed that a Japanese Yakuza crime group used a Russian Cold War era generator to trigger Katrina. This supposedly was punishment for the Hiroshima atom bomb attack. The theory was fantastic nonsense, but the Associated Press and USA Today took it seriously enough to treat it as a legitimate news item, with quotes from experts to refute it.
The conspiracy bug bit many blacks especially hard in the 1960s. They claimed that murky government agencies flooded the ghettoes with drugs, alcohol, gangs and guns to sow division and disunity among black organizations, eliminate militant black leaders, jail black politicians and quash black activism.
The racial conspiracy theorists at least had a suspect to point the finger at, and that was the FBI. For years, it waged a disgraceful, relentless, and illegal war against Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights leaders. That was hardly the case in the Katrina catastrophe. There was no single suspect that anyone could blame the disaster on. Farrakhan declined to finger any person or group that he believed blew up the levee. It would have required hard evidence and expert testimony to boost the contention that Katrina was an anti-black plot.
New Orleans was the culmination of a half-decade of the Bush administration's costly and reckless war, as well as fiscal policies that have resulted in the neglect and deterioration of the nation's roads, bridges, tunnels and levees. That neglect forced thousands of poor blacks in New Orleans to flee for their lives. And there was no hidden hand in that.
I totally agree that there is a little paranoia a little truth to all of these stories they mention in this article. But going back to the main point, the Katrina levee issue. I have found another article talking about how at one point in time the levees were blown up intentionally and by the government nonetheless. History repeats itself. The history of the world repeats itself, the history of war repeats itself, even the history of our own teeny tiny lives repeats itself. Everything is cyclical. Take a lot at this article now and let me know what you think!
Another Flood That Stunned America
For days, the rain fell. The rivers swelled, the lakes rose. And when the water could no longer find a place to go, it battered the weakest parts of the levees that had protected thousands of people and blew through, sending a surge of white-capped brown water faster than the spill of Niagara Falls.
So began the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, the most catastrophic deluge ever to hit the South and one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history.
The seminal event of pre-integration southern politics, the 1927 flood inundated an area about half the size of New England. It killed as many as 1,000 people and displaced about 700,000 more. At a time when the entire federal budget was barely $3 billion, it caused an estimated $1 billion in damage.
Most significant for the course of America, however, the tragedy hastened the mass migration of African-Americans to northern cities and marked the beginning of the end of southern sharecropping. "You'd say, 'I'd like to talk to you about the 1927 flood,' and you didn't need to explain anything else," says Pete Daniel, author of Deep'n As It Come: The 1927 Mississippi River Flood. "It was the most significant event of their lives."
The 1927 flood spared New Orleans, yet parallels to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina are hard to miss. Authorities were ill-prepared to deal with refugees, and the brunt of the damage was borne by poor blacks unable to get to high ground.
Like Katrina, the tragedy was in many ways born of man's hubris--fitting because New Orleans itself grew out of man's assumption that he could control nature, no matter how stubborn nature was. The city was founded in 1718 by Jean Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville on a piece of high ground between the Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain. It was built below grade, against the advice of engineers. Pumps and canals, its founders thought, would handle the water.
Over the centuries, the same attitude would direct development of the rest of the lower Mississippi. Earthen levees rose ever higher to corral the river in its channel. But they have come at a price: The same volume of water just moves faster through a smaller space, scouring the channel and weakening the levees from below.
When the rains broke records in April 1927, the Gulf of Mexico was full and worked as a stopper to the Mississippi. The Mississippi was full, too, pushing its own waters up tributaries, breaking levees and causing flooding as far as Ohio and Texas. All that water had to go somewhere.
It couldn't go to New Orleans, panicky city fathers told the Army Corps of Engineers; it would devastate the regional economy.
To save New Orleans, the leaders proposed a radical plan. South of the city, the population was mostly rural and poor. The leaders appealed to the federal government to essentially sacrifice those parishes by blowing up an earthen levee and diverting the water to marshland. They promised restitution to people who would lose their homes. Government officials, including Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover, signed off.
On April 29, the levee at Caernarvon, 13 miles south of New Orleans, succumbed to 39 tons of dynamite. The river rushed through at 250,000 cubic feet per second. New Orleans was saved, but the misery of the flooded parishes had only started. The city fathers took years to make good on their promises, and very few residents ever saw any compensation at all.
The water, which had started rising on Good Friday, would not recede until July. Many victims would never return to their homes. Hoover, who won support for leading relief efforts, went on to win the presidential election. And the Corps of Engineers, who had said the levees would hold, was humbled. Says Daniel: "People complained about the corps . . . but they never blamed the river. They understood: 'That's the river. That's nature. That's what it's supposed to be doing.' "
This story appears in the September 12, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
No comments:
Post a Comment