OK, so everybody must have heard about Katrina and the lootings in New Orelans, that were connected with it by now.

However, it seems that the news picture is differing quite a bit depending on where on the planet you are. I first encountered this when I send a mail to a bunch of US Americans about my analysis of the situation, in which I was referring to the shoot-at-sight orders, that I had heard had been issued to the National Guard by Democratic governor Kathleen Blanco of Louisiana. The replies I got from some, made me dig further into the difference of the news picture in the US and the rest of the world.

I had argued to begin with:

[I]t seems that the administration not only has no moral problems
extinguishing the people living in cities far away – like Fallujah; also the
people of New Orleans seem to be an OK target:

1. First they tell everyone to get out, while they know that a lot of people have no car, and own to little money to buy a bus ticket.

2. Then they don’t manage to get bus people into safety, after the disaster has happened.

3. As shops are closed, people start starving after a few days. This is when the order is given to “shoot looters upon sight”.

Now also the administration should know pretty well, that the decisions they made necessarily meant that people would starve. The right for property seems to be going above the right to stay alive.

However, the reaction I got by some showed that the “shoot looters upon sight” orders were not something everyone had heard about, so I tried looking through the international press. Searching for “shoot at sight” and “New Orleans” at Google news gave me a bunch of results – although all from India. Looking for “shoot looters on sight” instead gave me a few posts, including one from Australia. However, most western media uses the term “shoot to kill”, and so this is what I get from the BBC:

‘They have M-16s and are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot
and kill and I expect they will,’ Kathleen Blanco said.

That does not sound like it’s in the case of self-defense at all to me. However, the wording seems to have a somewhat different connotation to some, as I received the following email from a US American friend:

Johannes, they’re weren’t told to shoot looters on sight, they were told to shoot looters if necessary. Yesterday some of them started robbing ammunition stores and randomly shooting people.

What a difference these words can make, huh? Especially the US media seems to be using nothing but the term “shoot to kill”, and in the foreign media it is only every now and then that you can findn references to terms such as “shoot-on-sight”, as the following example from ABC Australia:

Rapper Kanye West has surprised viewers of an NBC benefit concert for
Hurricane Katrina victims by accusing President George W Bush of racism.
“George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” West said from New York during
the show aired live on the US East Coast on NBC, MSNBC, CNBC and Pax, just
before cameras cut away to comedian Chris Tucker.
[…]
He was apparently referring to shoot-on-sight orders issued to National Guard
troops to halt violence and looting in New Orleans.

However, the idea about the right for property going above the right for life is also seen by radicals in the USA, such as Malik Rahim, a veteran of the Black Panther Party in New Orleans, as he notes:

We have Amtrak here that could have carried everybody out of town. There were enough school buses that could have evacuated 20,000 people easily, but they just let them be flooded. My son watched 40 buses go underwater – they just wouldn’t move them, afraid they’d be stolen.

People who could afford to leave were so afraid someone would steal what they own that they just let it all be flooded. They could have let a family without a vehicle borrow their extra car, but instead they left it behind to be destroyed.

All this stands in contrast with the way Cuba evacuated 1.5 million people a year ago when the hurricane hit – and no one died.