"When was the last time you saw you piles of dead white people?"

[LLStarks]

While talking about Haiti, Mike Malloy mused about this for a good 5 minutes last night and couldn't think of anything.

With all due respect, has he forgotten about 9/11?

[leftstreet]

1. We didn't really 'see' 9/11 victims

Although I remember some footage that first day of a few people, but then they stopped showing it

[thunder rising]

4. It's cruel, but that's the fact. The pile of dust was read last rites in every religion.

As for this OP, when it's as bad as Haiti, there are going to be some very ugly things happen in order to protect the living from the dead.

[nadinbrzezinski]

2. I have but I was a medic so it comes with the territory

[Fumesucker]

3. It wouldn't be tasteful to show piles of dead white people..

Someone might complain..





























:sarcasm:

[nadinbrzezinski]

5. Somebody DID complaint to CNN over Haiti

Serious.

Death, for historic reasons, has been removed from our lives... and pretty much sanitized.

[Fumesucker]

18. I'm not surprised..

But imagine the uproar if it had been dead melanin-challenged Americans shown piled up on the TV screen..

[nadinbrzezinski]

20. They complained because it was too... troublesome

and they did not want to WATCH that... they actually commented on that

It was not just one person by the way... but many...

I am sure MSNBC got calls too.

No, not color of skin, philosophy... I can see this all the time in my local news

Same exact scene, where there is a dead body. The local Spanish Channel shows the body, at times with blood on it... the local English channels no way, no how.

In mexico we make fun of death... and accept it. In the US we try to escape from it.

[Fumesucker]

24. And yet killing and dead bodies are all over the place in fiction..

And often very realistically gruesome.

Sometimes I just don't get people although I am reminded of Barbara Bush's quip about troubling her beautiful mind.

I fear our culture is headed for a nasty fall but I can't quite put my finger on it.

[Leopolds Ghost]

44. The fact that this thread is unrec'ed almost makes me want to leave DU again. Can you even imagine

The news anchors showing footage of unclothed dead white firefighters?

NO GODDAMNIT because all the prissy voyeurs who have been continually lecturing and tut-tutting us about how

"the world is a horrible place"

and how we should "get over it" and not criticize the scope of the relief effort,

and how "thousands more will die, there is no happy ending here"

and how "I don't care how the bodies are treated, the important thing is the living"

as if the relief crews really gave a shit about saving every life (the above statements contradict themselves!)

-- trust me, when it comes to people who are not like them, they have a very utilitarian attitude -- In hospitals, it's called keeping your detachment.

These people would NEVER Countenance seeing unclothed dead 9/11 firefighters bodies in closeup on the multimedia slideshow.

They would NEVER countenance how the bodies of the dead are being treated -- if done here at home, in the modern era -- or the lack of response from relief workers to assist with BODY DISPOSAL

(always the FIRST PRIORITY along with search and rescue for the past 1000 FUCKING YEARS).

Ask a fucking question of yourselves, "we're doing everything we can over there so STFO" haters:

You got angry at Sanjay Gupta for not helping. Why aren't the photographers helping with the bodies?

[Maru Kitteh]

79. What if all the photographers set down their cameras? What if there were no pictures?

No. The photographers can do much more with a lens than they can with just two hands.

[EFerrari]

6. In high school watching films about the Holocaust.

[Name removed]

8. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Jamastiene]

13. It is not about the disaster itself.

It is about the media coverage.

[KharmaTrain]

61. My Father Saw It First-Hand

It was something he couldn't talk about until his final days and he still felt guilt that nothing was done. Didn't hurt we're Jewish and it could have been members of our own family in those piles.

Overall I think this post is insipid...black, white, green, orange...death is death and not pretty.

:hi:

[bertman]

7. Jesus H. Christ. Get over it, LLStarks.

[proteus_lives]

9. Photos of the massacres in Yugoslavia in the early 90s.

[Touchdown]

40. They were muslin. How many Americans consider them white?

:shrug:

[proteus_lives]

41. Not all of them were muslim.

Everyone was slaughtering everyone.

[Odin2005]

65. I know some Bosnians, Most are lighter-skinned then Greeks and Italians.

So that is a really stupid post.

[Name removed]

72. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Fire_Medic_Dave]

77. You think religion somehow changes their race?

[Touchdown]

87. No.

Next question?

[Maru Kitteh]

80. What? They were all made out of finely-woven cotton cloth?

[XemaSab]

71. This is the correct answer

n/t

[TxRider]

88. chechnya as well

[Jamastiene]

10. Never

They did not show piles of dead white people on 9/11. Faux News showed a few jumping. That's it. All the other bodies they had were covered.

And there were especially no uncovered and unclothed from the waist down bodies like we are seeing right now. I can't get over how many of the bodies are unclothed from the waist down (especially females) in some of the footage. There is something screwy with that, imo. I don't know who did it or why, and I'm not making any assumptions. I just think it's weird.

I've never seen any piles of white bodies though, ever.

[Tx4obama]

16. Then you have lived a sheltered life. Go to a Holocaust museum and learn something. n/t

[Kalun D]

25. Modern Times

Not over 50 years ago

Malloy has a point, not all the bodies at ground zero were pulverized yet I don't recall seeing ANY of them. There def had to be footage of the jumpers on the ground before the collapses.

You can't even imagine them showing that, much less females with no clothes on like now in Haiti.

It is because their lives aren't as valued. Just like the war in Iraq and Afghan where they don't even count the dead on the other side anymore.

What do you want to bet the Corporate news is doing it because it drives ratings and they make more money that way.

[Jamastiene]

28. Not only that but most of the

footage back then was grainy old black and white film. In modern times, we have HD and color video. It's a little different now.

[Leopolds Ghost]

42. +100 You can't even imagine them showing the 9/11 bodies that WERE THERE.

It is because their lives aren't as valued.

That is why they get dumped haphazardly in piles in the first place instead of bagged, tagged, covered in lime, and laid out for several days to be identified.

[Jamastiene]

27. Thanks for the insult.

Of course, I've seen that footage. It's not current. I thought the discussion was about current footage, not degraded grainy old black and white footage. Thanks for reminding me of Hitler and that horrible shit.

Thanks for insulting me though. Made my night.

[cali]

36. please see post 9. the poster is quite right.

there were grotesque pictures out of the former Yugoslavia. And if you've never seen piles of white bodies, you clearly know less than nothing about the Holocaust. Those pictures are still widely published in books every year.

[Name removed]

11. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Fumesucker]

19. Welcome to DU..

Didn't take you long to start attacking someone who is liked by a great many here..

[tkmorris]

30. Mike would eat your face and spit out tea bags

I'm normally in favor of being civil to those who hold a different opinion than my own but if you walked around with a glow-in-the-dark tattoo on your forehead announcing your trolldom you'd actually be LESS obvious.

[Touchdown]

38. Go ahead. Think of one natural, non-war disaster where white bodies...

were left to rot and become carrion for scavenging animals?

That's what he was thinking about, and that's what his question was, so the Holocaust/Bosnia/Belfast doesn't count.

You must've been the guy who said the Oakland Earthquake in 1989 when he handed your ass to you.

[CakeGrrl]

12. I think the point is that NATURAL disasters prey on the impoverished

and in modern times, mass casualties are only suffered by predominantly black and brown communities.

But in addition to that, the coverage has a sort of "National Geographic looks at the Third World" curiosity, as in showing native African women topless when it would be worthy of censorship to show a white woman with bare breasts.

We didn't see 9/11 victims laid out end to end, or bare feet sticking out of the rubble of the World Trade Center, but we have plenty of pictures of black corpses floating in the waters or lying dead in the streets of New Orleans and now the mass remains in Haiti. It's as if nonwhites are an 'acceptable curiosity' to document in death.

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

21. Oh, good lord.

Look, the reason you don't see a lot of white people dying horribly in natural disasters is because most white people live in either Europe or the United States. White people occupy a very very small part of the land on this planet, and by a quirk of fate most of it happens to be areas where major natural disasters haven't occured in the past couple of hundred years. Most of Europe isn't prone to the two major high-casualty types of natural disasters - hurricanes and earthquakes. However, if Mt. Vesuvius decided to blow its top tomorrow, you would have a very large number of very dead white people. If there's a megathrust earthquake anywhere in the pacific northwest you're going to have tens if not hundreds of thousands of dead white people.

We didn't see 9/11 victims laid out end to end, or bare feet sticking out of the rubble of the World Trade Center

There is not going to be much left of a body if a 110 story skyscraper falls on it. There weren't any pictures of feet sticking out of the remains of the world trade center because the feet were pulverized, along with everything else.

[jesus_of_suburbia]

26. The Natural disasters are bigoted! Shame on them!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

:eyes:

:eyes:

:eyes:

:eyes:

:eyes:

[Raineyb]

62. It's not the disaster areas that's bigoted it's the coverage of the dead. There's nothing natural

about that. The point, which you seem rather insistent on missing whether it is deliberate or not I'll refrain from injecting my opinion on that, is that you don't see the piles because the lives of white people are valued and those of black and brown people, not so much. That's why they have no qualms about showing piles of bodies, many of which unclothed, without bothering with the pixelation they'd do for white women, on TV while they're claiming to cover the disaster. Meanwhile the coverage itself is rather shallow with the same footage being shown over and over again with anchors acting as though they're seeing some kind of specimen rather than human beings.

[voc]

32. [phone] nt.

[krispos42]

14. The former Yugoslovia, perhaps.

Lots of ethnic cleansing and genocide there.

[Touchdown]

39. That was war. Natural disasters are the criteria.

[Leopolds Ghost]

47. The issue is what is considered socially acceptable to show, or to physically leave lying in piles.

Piles of dead white folk outside a morgue.

If they're Haitian, it's acceptable because "many more will die if we take the time to treat the dead with respect"

Which is bullshit because the same people say "many more will die no matter what we do, so best focus on providing
security for the relief workers so THEY are treated with respect."

What would be the first priority of the entire US Military if a relief worker was shot and their body left lying in the street for all to see?

[malaise]

89. Interesting thread

What I can tell you is that the bodies at the Montana Hotel are being placed in coffins. That said most Haitians covered their dead. The real indignities were the way the dead were thrown into the dump trucks (the trucks should have been covered and the media going to the mass graves and taking those awful pictures) but I don't know how we escape seeing the dead in such a catastrophe.

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

15. The Balkans conflict(s)

Plenty of piles o' dead people there.

[krispos42]

17. GMTA

:D

[kentauros]

22. Although not exclusively white, the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami

did kill 9000 foreign tourists, most of them from Nordic countries. I don't recall them piling up the bodies (that were found) according to color, though...

http://blogs.reuters.com/photo/2009/12/28/the-2004-tsunami-a-singapore-perspective

[Kalun D]

23. K & R

K & R

[PacerLJ35]

29. Are you saying that natural disasters like earthquakes only pick dark-skinned victims?

Most european people live in the western world, where building codes and disaster response is very good or excellent. Thus most of the time when natural disasters strike these areas, the dead are counted in the dozens rather than the thousands. The exception was New Orleans, which is predominantly black. Again, however, it wasn't planned that way as part of a global disaster conspiracy. There were plenty of while people dead in neighboring MS and AL, which took a pretty hard hit as well.

Trying to make racial hay out of Haiti being struck by an earthquake is pretty pitiful. Most of the western world is still to this day and hour rushing to save those people, and the fact that they are black really has no bearing.

[Jamastiene]

34. I believe the reference is not to the disasters themselves, but to

what the mainstream media will show on television.

[cali]

37. I believe it's your selective viewing- you see what you want to see.

you ignore what doesn't fit your frame.

[Leopolds Ghost]

46. Which is why people ignore piles of haphazardly displayed African American bodies.

It holds a gruesome aesthetic fascination for most Americans.

Not only are they not offended by the way the bodies are being treated,

They criticize people on DU for saying they shouldn't be treated that way.

[cali]

55. why don't YOU go down to Haiti and lay out bodies respectfully?

No? How unsurprising, hero.

[Kalun D]

56. The Question

The question is not how their laid out or who or if someone should fix that.

The question is taking photos/vids of them and putting them on the news.

[Thothmes]

52. San Francisco Earthquake, 1906

Estimated deaths 3,000. Homeless 200 - 300 Thousand. Tent cities still occupied in 1908.

[Cirque du So-What]

31. I interpret Malloy's question more rhetorically

It's not so much about the actual images that come across TV screens, but rather the conditions that create piles of non-white bodies in the first place. In New Orleans, it was a willfully, woefully neglected system of levees that was breached by floodwaters; would this have happened if the basin was choc-a-bloc with McMansions? I seriously doubt it. In Port-au-Prince, building construction was obviously inadequate for an earthquake zone; would those buildings have been built with unreinforced ticky-tacky if rich, industrialized nations - under the auspices of the World Bank - hadn't been exacting their pound of economic flesh? The capitalistas tend not to impose draconian terms upon nations populated with lots of white people.

There are other examples of conditions conducive to piles of non-white bodies: the location of dangerous industrial processes in neighborhoods where white faces aren't so prevalent; Bhopal ring a bell? Look at the neighborhoods surrounding any oil refinery. If one of those babies goes ker-fucking-boom, you can bet no McMansions will be harmed in the making of that disaster. The major stockholders, who live far from danger, won't lose a night's sleep over it, seeing that the company's financial liabilities are well-insured.

I could go on, but I think you get the idea: capitalism and its byproducts are inherently more conducive to disaster for non-white people. That's what comes to mind when Mike Malloy observes that piles of white bodies - unless they're poor white bodies in the aftermath of a tornado ravaging a trailer park (in which case I invoke the economic thingie again) - are relatively far more rare. I saw it as a rhetorical question that asks why Haiti was purposely kept as an economic basket case lo these many years. It would have been far less costly - both in economic and in human terms - to have given Haiti more favorable terms on WB loans and taken a smaller share of their GDP, permitting them to build structures to earthquake code instead of pouring relief funds into the nation after all their buildings get shaken down.

[Leopolds Ghost]

50. A-men. But more than that, it's socially acceptible to show piles of dead non-whites.

If you see a pile of dead white bodies, as people said above, left there deliberately in a war or genocide, it is to demonstrate the "horrors of war" and proclaim "never again".

If you see a pile of dead non-white bodies in a natural disaster, the reaction of 90% around the world (only slightly less in the US) is to demonstrate "the unfortunate condition of those people, this will happen again and again, if only we could help them but we can only give money and hope."

[Quantess]

33. Maybe, in a way, Americans are interested in seeing piles of dead people from a third world country.

We get to be voyeurs and yet not feel so threatened that it could happen to us.

Seeing brown skinned people in a third world country may be easier to accept? Because, at least it couldn't happen here, not like that.

[Leopolds Ghost]

43. It wouldn't happen here. The bodies would be treated more respectfully.

No organized relief effort + people left to fend for themselves + curious Western photographers with no taboo against showing non-white corpses = what you are seeing.

[Quantess]

49. It wouldn't happen here for many reasons:

#1 USA has building construction standards, and everyone says Haiti has none, which I believe is true.

#2 Does it really matter if dead bodies are treated respectfully, if the corpses are disease carrying and stenchful (I started to to type stinky, but I knew I'd get in trouble for that).

Anyway, I know what you are saying, and I agree with you.

[JI7]

35. a lot of white people died during the Tsunami

although there were a lot more non whites because of the countries it happened in.

there were pics of bodies and hard to tell which ethnicity they were .

[Leopolds Ghost]

45. Does any of the people unrec'cing this thread understand what it is about?

I'm beginning to question the downslide of humanity here.

It's fucking obvious what's going on and even fellow liberals don't want to see it, or maybe DU is getting less and less liberal since the new generation is supposed to be twice as conservative as Gen X on all but social issues so maybe that's why things are shaping up the way they are.

[cali]

48. your opinion is not some hallowed decree of truth from on high, dear.

It's obvious to me that you ignore anything that runs counter to your frame. I didn't unrec however.

[Leopolds Ghost]

51. To tell you the truth, the OP seems to take an odd perspective on the whole thing

Their message ended with a criticism of Malloy for his statement, as if to suggest that it was offensive to proclaim that white people or the bodies of white people are in general more protected from the aftermath of horrible accidents

(although the Yugoslav genocide is indeed a good counter-example, I suppose, as it proved that we would, indeed tolerate the deliberate killing and desecration of white people as long as they weren't native to the West).

[LLStarks]

53. *wakes up and sees that his topic has ballooned*

I posted this topic not so much to criticize Malloy, but to ridicule the fact that he spent so much time pondering the question he posed to himself and then challenged his listeners to call in and share instances of "piles of dead white people".

BTW, I define a pile of dead people as a pile of rubble and bodies created by a disaster or simply a pile of bodies brought on by improper cadaver management.

[hedgehog]

83. Did Mr. Malloy mention the many photos of people cheering as

living black people were carried out of the rubble by rescue teams from all over the world? Did anyone who saw the photo sequence of the 2 year old reunited with his mother feel any less emotion because the child is black?

From what I can make out, Mr. Malloy is, to put it delicately, attempting to prove his moral superiority by stirring up shit even if he has to search high and low to find any.


People are dead. Show a crumpled building and people will merely see a pile of broken concrete. Show a pair of feet or a hand extending from beneath the building and people understand what happened.

I have yet to see a single report that doesn't end with a plea for donations and a place to send money to help.

[rasputin1952]

54. Just my opinion here, but "piles of dead people"...

regardless of skin color, religion, area of the globe from which they hailed or any other "criteria", means only one thing...human tragedy.

We should never use any of the "criteria" we have become accustomed to, the only "criteria" is that these people were human beings. They loved, were loved, they breathed, ate and drank just like other people. It is the same with all tragedies of this scale, either natural or man made. Those who died in the Holocaust or the Killing Fields in Cambodia were no less precious than those lost in this disaster. The Chinese lost in their earthquakes are no less precious than those lost in other disasters.

We are always shocked by carnage, and while the dead must be tended to, it is to the living where we should focus our major concern. Their welfare is of paramount importance, we do not want to see the number of deaths increase because of a failure on our part to alleviate the suffering.

Skin color is irrelevant, religion is irrelevant, gender is irrelevant, language is irrelevant. The only thing that is relevant is that these are our fellow human beings, and they need help. I am proud of the world, they have come together to provide help, it renews my belief that we can overcome our differences...sadly, it took a catastrophe to bring us together.

[LLStarks]

57. I wish I could K&R individual comments. nt

[bertman]

69. Thank you for an eloquent answer to this bullshit question by the OP. I had a thread

deleted yesterday because my visceral reaction was a bit caustic.

[rasputin1952]

85. Thanks...Don't feel alone about being visceral in these times...

There seems to be quite a bit of it around here these days.

I just hate to see people suffering so...regardless in what part of the world they are in. Now if we could just put an end to the killing on worldwide, we'd be getting somewhere...:hi:

[The Straight Story]

58. Nature is a bigot. (nt)

[Raineyb]

59. If you're going to complain you should at least get the context correct.

Malloy's argument was that you don't see piles and piles of dead white people when there's this coverage of natural disaster. He deliberately left out war in his question, a fact you rather ignored.

In addition, we didn't see piles and piles of bodies from the attacks on September 11, 2001.

Malloy's point was that the coverage was bordering on porn and that it was obvious whose lives are valued by how they are covered. And I damn sure can't come up with a modern example of piles of dead white people piled up in such a matter after a natural disaster.

[Enrique]

60. what's his point? n/t

[timeforpeace]

63. The Resident Evil movies.

[Odin2005]

64. Holocaust documentaries.

[LostInAnomie]

66. That does it! I'm not recycling or buying fuel efficient cars anymore!

No way I'm going to help Mother Nature's racist ass again!

[undeterred]

67. Earthquakes are such bigots.

[xchrom]

68. 'i see dead white people.' nt

[KittyWampus]

70. Coal mine collapses under Bush, 9/11, Oklahoma, Bosnia, Yugoslavia, Germany

[hfojvt]

73. semms to me

that we can now pile Mike Malloy next to Rush Limbaugh and Pat Roberts as people who have said really dumb things in response to the Haiti disaster.

[merh]

With all due respect, white people were not the only people killed

on 9/11.

People of all faiths and skin colors, from different nations were killed on 9/11.

And for the most part they didn't show the bodies or there were no bodies to show.

.

[beam me up scottie]

74. Jonestown, Guyana 1978 *warning - graphic*

[Roon]

81. I think if people want to kill themselves..i guess that's their right

but don't kill the innocent doggies. :-(

[beam me up scottie]

84. I know.

They killed their kids too. I can't even imagine...

[MadMaddie]

75. Americans need to spine up and see what the rest of the world

is seeing.

Death is real, not computer games and movies.

So many Americans live in an isolated protected world and think that bad things only happen to other people and other countries even after 9/11 and Katrina.

I am actually surprised the networks and cable are showing what is really happening in real time.

9/11 resulted in 3000+ deaths and it was a horrendous event. I am not trying to be insensitive to our loss.

In Haiti they are talking about 100,000 lives lost and that is from the primary event, they are talking an additional 50 - 100+ in secondary infections etc.


The bottom line is it's not the tone of skin that matters it's lives lost. Whether it's 3000 or 200,000 it's still too many.:rant:

[Fire_Medic_Dave]

78. The networks did the same thing after the tsunami.

[Fire_Medic_Dave]

76. With all due respect has he ever taken a history class.

[vadawg]

82. BOSNIA for one....

[deaniac21]

86. The Holocaust

http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&source=hp&q=the+holocaust+pictures&gbv=2&aq=0&oq=the+holocaust&aqi=g10