Natural Disaster Survival: A Function of Society

Christopher Hitchens does it again, by succinctly pointing out the fact that the stability of a society goes far more towards determining the relative stability upon encounter with natural disaster than anything else.

Thesis here:

"     Professor Amartya Sen made a reputation some decades ago for pointing out that in the 20th century no serious famine had occurred in an open or democratic society, however poor. In the classic case that he studied—that of Bengal under British colonial occupation in the 1940s—tens of thousands of people had starved to death in areas that had overflowing granaries. It was not a shortage of food, but of information and of proper administration (cough, Monty cough, Gregor), that had led to the disaster. The Ukrainian famine of the 1930s, as was pointed out by Robert Conquest in his book The Harvest of Sorrow, was the result of a dictatorial policy rather than any failure of the crops.
     Taking this as an approximate analogy or metaphor, people are beginning to notice that the likelihood of perishing in an earthquake, or of being utterly dispossessed by it, is as much a function of the society in which one lives as it is of proximity to a fault."


Most Quotable Quote here:

"     But the Iranian regime, as we know, has other priorities entirely, and it has worked very hard to insulate not its people from earthquakes, but itself from its people. I remember sitting in one of Tehran's epic traffic snarls a few years ago and thinking, "What if a big one was to hit now?" This horrible thought was succeeded by two even more disturbing ones: What if the giant shudder came at night, when citizens were packed tightly into unregulated and code-free apartment buildings? And what would happen to the secret nuclear facilities, both under the ground and above it? I know what the mullahs would say—that the will of Allah was immutable. But what would the survivors think when they looked around the (possibly irradiated) ruins and saw how disposable their leaders had considered them to be?"

Full article found here