I don’t find it too far-fetched that they tried to displace all the black people out of New Orleans.
So says Spike Lee, who’s planning a “documentary” film for HBO.
I can’t wait to see the documentation.
But for now, I’ll just have to stick with the director’s words.
Starting with the word “they.” Who are these they, and precisely what did they do? Was the Mayor of New Orleans among the they? The Governor? The President? Or maybe arch-villain Charlton Heston? Lee doesn’t say, but I’m sure it’ll all be, er, documented.
To help me discern more, I had to look abroad, and found a longer quote in the Guardian:
During an appearance on CNN this week, to promote his memoir That’s My Story and I’m Sticking To It, Lee was asked about the conspiracy theories that the largely black Ninth ward of the city had been deliberately flooded by authorities.
He said: “I don’t put anything past the United States government. I don’t find it too far-fetched that they tried to displace all the black people out of New Orleans.”
The film will be Lee’s second documentary for the cable TV and film producer HBO. It follows 1997’s 4 Little Girls, which revisited the 1963 bombing of a black Alabama church that killed four children.
Was Hurricane Katrina in any way comparable to a church bombing?
Wasn’t it in reality a whole lot worse because of the number of people killed?
Yes, it was. As it turns out, Hurricane Katrina was Genocide. I exaggerate not; you can buy the T-shirts here. As the T-shirt site proclaims:
The New Orleans and Louisiana governments got the rich people out in time, but left the poor with no resources and transportation to die. Where were the special trains, the busses, the trucks to move them. Why did the media let them get away with killing the inner city of a national treasure? Who is covering it up now! Ten of Thousands Have Died, don’t let the bastards get away with genocide, here in America!
To return to Lee (who I hope would condemn those T-shirts), I try to be fair, but I think it’s safe to assume that because he singles out “the United States government,” Lee would consider Bush to be the primary engineer of displacement (under the not too far-fetched theory).
If we assume for the sake of this exercise that George W. Bush sought to “displace all the black people out of New Orleans,” I’m wondering when the idea occurred to him. Was it a longterm plan of deliberate neglect, during which Bush was waiting and hoping that a hurricane would come and the neglected levees would break? Or was it an act of political opportunism, brought on by the convenience of the hurricane? Did Bush cause the hurricane? The flood? Or did he merely blow up the levees, as many have have suggested?
Considering the longstanding charge that Bush engineered the destruction of the Twin Towers, blowing up levees ought to have been child’s play.
After all, he’s a “menace to mankind.”
Correction! In the interest of fairness, I should point out that Lee apologized for that remark, right after he made it:
He’s just a menace to mankind in general. I’m sorry, a menace to humankind in general.
Being a menace to humankind in general is less sexist, but it’s still definitely not nice.
Ultimately, though, it’s a more egalitarian plan than simple genocide.
Here’s the T-shirt.
Sheesh.
And all this time, I thought the culprit was sodomy…. And alligators! Hope they make the cut!
Comments
13 responses to “W! W! You can’t hide! We charge you with genocide!”
Kooky, but not surprising. The wide acceptance of conspiracy theories among the black community serves only to avoid introspection – this is a culture suffering numerous internal pathologies – & to self-marginalize blacks from the rest of America. But this is their choice
From what I can see, these ideas seem to be held by a few people like Louis Farrakhan, Randall Robinson, and Spike Lee. The followers of such idiocy act pretty much the same way as the followers of Michael Moore. I can’t figure out for the life of me which is worse: a leader or a follower!
The bombing of a Negro church, killing four little girls, was morally worse than the worst hurricane because it was deliberately perpetrated by human beings. We can’t do anything about the weather, but can choose to behave morally or immorally, and to punish those whose immoral behavior extends to murder.
Perhaps it’s alligator sodomy.
Nothing makes God angry like two boy alligators doin’ it, after all.
Alli”gay”tors cannot reproduce, so they must RECRUIT!
But Steven, nothing can be morally worse than Bushitler’s Genocide.
I’m holding out for the “Nuclear Holocaust in New Orleans.”
For two days, CNN has been showing police torture in New Orleans. Under the Bush occupation things are clearly worse than Abu Ghraib. Nukes would be kinder than the sadistic violence being visited upon the Katrina survivors.
I think you could make a pretty entertaining argument about how the New Orleans disaster was the fault of sodomy. No metaphysical arguments allowed (god hates sodomites is a cop out). It’d have to be something along the lines of “all the sodomy created a low pressure situation which drew the hurricane into a northward turn” or some such.
Now all I have to do is figure out how the levies collapsed because of butt sex.
These are not fringe ideas in the black community but the norm. I worked in a large corporate office full of intelligent, middle-class blacks. Every one of them vociferously defended OJ Simpson (one told me he was framed by the Mafia) & every one of them vilified Condi Rice. You think their kids aren’t absorbing the subtext of those values?
“all the sodomy created a low pressure situation which drew the hurricane into a northward turn”
Ross Perot warned of a “giant sucking sound” years ago….
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_sucking_sound
The issue was free “trade.”
And the “levys” were removed.
Jeff, what you said about “absorbing values” really troubles me, as I am an individualist and abhor groupthink and identity politics of any sort. Individuals who are unwilling to be rational, think clearly for themselves and defend their thinking frighten me, and if they base their thinking on their membership in a group, that’s even more irrational. It can lead to a lynch mob mentality. Race offers no excuse. Nor does membership in any other group, nor even fear of death; I’ll never forget having to listen to some of the most brilliant people I’ve known carry on at length about how “they knew” AIDS was created in government laboratories in Ft. Detrick, MD.
A blog seems to be the only place to argue against such nonsense.
If you Google the phrase genocide in New Orleans, you’ll get 14,000 hits now, the top sites being Indymedia.
A typical article is this one by Kirsten Anderberg:
http://www.indybay.org/news/2005/09/1764294.php
I cannot state with any confidence that this meme is necessarily limited to or spread exclusively by black activists.
Jeff — what bothers me even more is that I suspect many of the people spouting these theories do not truly believe in them. Especially activists like the Harvard-trained Randall “Cannibal” Robinson.
(I cannot prove my suspicions, of course….)