A Paradise Built in Hell (51 page)

83 “the effort of the instinctive to overpower the rational”:
Le Bon,
Psychology of Revolution
, 37.

84 Kropotkin’s father had bought two fine first violinists “with their large families”:
Peter Kropotkin,
Memoirs of a Revolutionist
(New York and Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1930); previously serialized in
Atlantic Monthly,
1898-99), 30.

85 “Personally Kropotkin was amiable to the point of saintliness”:
In George Woodcock,
Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements
(Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1962), 185.

85 “The five years that I spent in Siberia”:
Kropotkin,
Memoirs
, 168.

85 “Siberia is not the frozen land”:
Ibid., 168.

86 “Catastrophe and the sudden termination of the normal”:
Prince,
Catastrophe and Social Change
, 55.

86 “Communication has transformed mutual aid”:
Ibid., 57.

87 “the preference upon the part of the refugee”:
Ibid., 49.

88 EMAC . . . is “an interstate mutual aid agreement”:
In
http://www.fema.gov/government/grant/pa/9523_6.shtm/
, VII, 4, and elsewhere with the same wording.

88 “Two aspects of animal life impressed me most during the journeys”:
Peter Kropotkin,
Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution
(London: W. Heinemann, 1902; published in facsimile by Dover Books, 2006), vii.

89 “strove with their enemies and their competitors”:
Thomas Henry Huxley, reprinted in ibid., 272-73.

89 “the elements of civilized society were broken down”:
Michael J. Bird,
The Town That Died: A Chronicle of the Halifax Disaster
(London: Souvenir Press, 1962), 88.

89 “The very persistence of the clan organization”:
Kropotkin,
Mutual Aid
, 71.

90 “For thousands and thousands of years, this organization”:
Ibid., 153.

91 “And the life of man”:
Thomas Hobbes,
Leviathan
(New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 196.

92 Shelley E. Taylor and Laura Cousino Klein:
In “You May Always Have Suspected It, but a Study Suggests That Women
Do
Cope with Stress Differently Than Men,”
http://www.psu.edu/ur/2000/womenstress.html/
.

92 The Diggers [advocated] “working together, and feeding together”:
Ger rard Winstanley, et al.
True Leveller’s Standard Advanced: or, The State of Community Opened, and Presented to the Sons of Men
(London: 1649;
http://www.bilderberg.org/land/diggers.htm#True
, and many other sites).

94 “and for a longer period in several of the American States”:
Thomas Paine,
Rights of Man
, in Virginia Hodgkinson and Michael W. Foley eds.,
The Civil Society Reader
(Medford, MA: Tufts University Press, 2003), 64.

96 “a will to meaning in contrast to the pleasure principle”:
Viktor E. Frankl,
Man’s Search for Meaning
(1959; repr., Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), 99.

96 “a dangerous misconception”:
Ibid., 105.

98 Over the course of the war about sixty thousand British civilians:
Richard M. Titmuss,
Problems of Social Policy
(London: Longmans, Green, 1950), 224.

99 “The experts foretold a mass outbreak”:
Ibid., 338.

99 Eighteen “eminent psychiatrists . . . privately warned”:
In Ben Shephard,
A War of Nerves
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 175.

99 “Once a raid has been experienced”:
In Tom Harrisson,
Living Through the Blitz
(New York: Schocken Books, 1989), 21.

99 “The British working class was thought to be particularly susceptible”:
In Mark Connelly,
We Can Take It!: Britain and the Memory of the Second World War
(Harlow, England: Pearson, Longman, 2004), 138.

100 “The people’s role in their own defense”:
Ibid., 140.

100 “On the first night of the Blitz I put out an incendiary bomb”:
In Olivia Cockett,
Love and War in London: A Woman’s Diary 1939-1942
, ed. Robert W. Malcolmson (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005), 150.

101 “I feel much more certainty”:
Ibid., 151.

101 “from the time when she literally:”
Quentin Bell,
Virginia Woolf
(Fort Washington, PA: Harvest Books, 1974), 217.

101 “in particular, been a massive, largely unconscious cover-up”:
In Harrisson,
Living Through the Blitz
, 13.

101 “blitz was a terrible experience for millions”:
Ibid., 280.

101 “The courage, humor, and kindliness of ordinary people”:
Molly Panter-Downs,
London War Notes 1939-1945
, ed. William Shawn (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971), 105.

101 “Once you’ve been through three nights”:
Shephard,
War of Nerves
, 176.

102 “The tune for today is
Serenade in the Night,
please”:
Cockett,
Love and War
, 133.

102 “the English were discovering each other”:
Ibid., 133.

102 “New tolerances are born between people”:
Titmuss,
Problems of Social Policy
, 350.

102 “just for something to do”:
In Harrison,
Living Through the Blitz,
78-81.

104 “As a captain in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II”:
Charles Fritz, “Disasters and Mental Health: Therapeutic Principles Drawn from Disaster Studies,” University of Delaware Disaster Research Center, 1996, 2. This report is available online at
http://www.udel.edu/DRC/preliminary/hande10.pdf
.

104 “Under those conditions, one might expect to find”:
Ibid., 3-4.

104 “my access to British family life was greatly enhanced”:
Ibid., 2.

105 “Under ruthless Nazi control they showed surprising resistance”:
“United States Strategic Bombing Survey: Summary Report (European War), September 30, 1945” (available at
http://www.anesi.com/ussbs02.htm/
), 16.

105 “people living in heavily bombed cities had significantly higher morale than people in the lightly bombed cities”:
Fritz, “Disasters and Mental Health,” 6.

105 “neither organic neurologic disease nor psychiatric disorders”:
Ibid., 7.

106 “Herd Reaction, Panic, Emergence of Leaders, and Recommendations for Guidance and Control of Masses”:
in E. L. Quarantelli, “The Earliest Interest in Disasters and the Earliest Social Science of Disasters: A Sociology of Knowledge Approach,” (University of Delaware Disaster Research Center, 2005), 24. This report is unpublished, but is available from the research center.

106 “From oral histories obtained later from key officials involved”:
Ibid., 30.

106 “there are mass panics and wild stampedes. People trample one another”:
Charles Fritz, “Disaster,” in
Contemporary Social Problems: An Introduction to the Sociology of Deviant Behavior and Social Disorganization
, ed. Robert K. Merton and Robert A. Nisbet (New York: Harcourt, 1961), 672.

107 “these malleable moments, when we are psychologically unmoored and physically uprooted”:
Naomi Klein,
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
(New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), 21.

107 “profound disorientation, extreme fear and anxiety, and collective regression”:
Ibid., 42. Klein is talking about the effects of the September 11, 2001, disaster on New Yorkers.

107 In a public talk:
Sponsored by City Lights Books and held at the First Unitarian Church, San Francisco, September 26, 2007. She can also be seen on
The Colbert Report,
October 2, 2008, where she opened with a comparison of societies in crisis to a tortured prisoner who will “do whatever you want.” “Whole societies go into shock, they don’t know what’s going on and they’ll do whatever people in authority want them to do. What happens to you when you’re in a state of shock is you regress, you become childlike and you start thinking Rudy Giuliani is your daddy and Dick Cheney will take care of you,”
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/186550/october-02-2008/naomi-k
lein/.

107 “The traditional contrast between ‘normal’ and ‘disaster’ almost always ignores”:
Fritz, “Disasters and Mental Health,” 25.

108 “Thus while the natural or human forces that created or precipitated”:
Ibid., 68.

108 “Disasters provide a temporary liberation”:
Ibid., 63.

108 “An essential feature of disaster is that the threats and dangers”:
Ibid., 55.

109 “Disaster provides a form of societal shock which disrupts habitual, institutionalized patterns”:
Ibid., 57.

109 “The prevention and control of panics in time of attack are important tasks of civil defense”:
In Andrew D. Grossman,
Neither Dead nor Red: Civilian Defense and American Political Development During the Early Cold War
(New York: Routledge, 2001), 59.

110 “the thin veneer”:
Kenneth D. Rose,
One Nation Underground: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture
(New York: New York University Press, 2001), 111.

110 “Gun Thy Neighbor”:
Time
, August 18, 1961.

110 “slowly but surely millions of Americans were coming to the conclusion”:
Walter Karp, “When Bunkers Last in the Doorway Bloomed: The Fallout-Shelter Craze of 1961,”
American Heritage,
February-March 1980. Accessible at
http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1980/2/1980_2_84.shtml/
.

111 “The indirect effects [of] the bombing on the will of the North Vietnamese”:
In a document whose front page reads “TOP SECRET—NOFORN U.S. BOMBING IN VIETNAM” and stamped “DECLASSIFIED 8/26/96.” Supplied by the brilliant Vietnam War historian Nick Turse to the author. The second-page title is “The Effects of U.S. Bombing on North Vietnam’s Ability to Support Military Operations in South Vietnam and Laos: Retrospect and Prospect,” with more assertions about its top-secret status. The passage appears on p. vi11. Fritz is credited as one of four researchers who prepared the report.

123 “I wrote a master’s thesis”:
Enrico Quarantelli, in interview with the author, June 2007.

123 “In fact, most of the disaster funding”:
Ibid.

123 “If by panic”:
Ibid.

124 “instead of ruthless competition”:
E. L. Quarantelli, “The Sociology of Panic,” 8. Available online from the University of Delaware Disaster Research Center, labeled “to be published in Smelser and Baites, eds., International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences in 2001.”

124 more than seven hundred studies:
Quarantelli, cited in Lee Clarke, “Panic: Myth or Reality?” in
Contexts
(Fall 2002): 24.

124 two thousand people in more than nine hundred fires:
Erik Auf der Heide, “Common Misconceptions About Disasters: Panic, the ‘Disaster Syndrome,’ and Looting,” in
The First 72 Hours: A Community Approach to Disaster Preparedness
, ed. Margaret O’Leary (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse Publishing, 2004), 343.

125 “Bureaucracy depends on routine and schedules and paperwork and etc.”:
Quarantelli, in interview with the author, June 2007.

125 “reinforce our cultural belief in individualism”:
E. L. Quarantelli, “The Study of Disaster Movies: Research Problems, Findings, and Implications” (Newark: University of Delaware Disaster Research Center, 1980), 11.

125 “Disaster movies . . . usually portray the problem”:
Ibid., 12.

127 “Elites fear disruption”:
Kathleen Tierney, notes by the author from talk at University of California, Berkeley, 2006.

127 “fear of social disorder”:
Ibid.

127 “The media emphasis on lawlessness”:
Kathleen Tierney et al., “Metaphors Matter: Disaster Myths, Media Frames, and Their Consequences in Hurricane Katrina,”
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
(2006). Available at
http://ann.sagepub.com/cgi/framedreprint/604/1/57/
.

128 “whereas, in the poor immigrant sections”:
Judith W. Leavitt, “Public Resistance or Cooperation? Historical Experiences with Smallpox,” transcript of talk from the conference “The Public as an Asset, Not a Problem: A Summit on Leadership During Bioterrism,” Center for Biosecurity, published online at
http://www.upmc-biosecurity.org/website/events/2003_public-as-asset/leavitt/leavitt_trans.html/
.

128 “There were signs and buttons”:
Ibid.

128 “The drug companies”:
Ibid.

128 in 2005, federal officials
speculated that a militarily enforced quarantine would be required. See Jennifer Loven, “Military Might Enforce Quarantines in a Flu Epidemic,” Associated Press, October 4, 2005, opening, “President Bush, increasingly concerned about a possible avian flu pandemic, revealed today that any part of the country where the virus breaks out could likely be quarantined and that he is considering using the military to enforce it.” Also see Jeanne Guillemin, “Terrorism and Dispelling the Myth of a Panic Prone Public,”
Journal of Public Health Policy
(2006). “In 1999, the new Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense (reinvented later as the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh) took the lead in defining the bioterrorism threat as distinct from either chemical or radiological attacks. In the Center’s published scenarios, the unwitting public succumbs to panic when the necessary vaccines or antibiotics prove insufficient; invariably the military is called in to restore order.”