Chicago stampede climaxed a week of feverish propaganda about imminent chemical attacks

national | miscellaneous | news report Tuesday February 18, 2003 16:46 by Deborah Orr - Independent UK

The Regime repeatedly threatened the public with warnings about attacks against 'soft targets'

Far from being braced for the worst, Americans are full of fear that an attack could hit them at any time. This fear may itself be their most terrible enemy of all. A fearful crowd is a dangerous crowd. And so is a fearful country. http://argument.independent.co.uk/regular_columnists/deborah_orr/story.jsp?story=379336

Even in these times of terror, don't panic
There are questions to be asked about how the threat of terrorism should be managed by government
Deborah Orr
The Independent
February 18, 2003
http://argument.independent.co.uk/regular_columnists/deborah_orr/story.jsp?story=379336

How a minor incident, reportedly the outbreak of a fight between two or three women, led so quickly to the deaths of more than 20 people and the injury of many others, is not yet clear. But in the early hours of yesterday morning, security staff at the Epitome Nightclub in Chicago appear to have made a dreadful decision – to employ pepper spray or mace in a building containing 1,500 people in order to control the argument.

The result of this action was mass panic, and as the clubbers tried to get out of the place – through the main front doors – people found themselves trampled, crushed, suffocating or succumbing to heart attacks.

As is all too familiar in such tragedies, it turned out that an emergency door was locked, forcing people to jam themselves towards a single exit. But what is less usual in such scenes is that until the stampede came, no one was in any real danger. Disasters do happen in crowded nightclubs, sometimes because of the hysteria that appearances by celebrities can induce. But they are usually the result of fires, or occasionally, as recently in Bali and in Israel, bombs. In short, more often than not, panic comes in response to a genuine threat.

This disaster is so shocking partly because it was so utterly unnecessary. There was no fire, no bomb, no risk at all – just the release of a fairly harmless if fairly unpleasant chemical into the atmosphere. This is certainly enough to make revellers decide it is time to go home. But in this situation, a terrible panic out of all proportion to the situation gripped the crowd.

Would they have reacted with less hysteria had they not been told so forcibly the week before to be on the alert for "chemical, biological or nuclear attack"? Is it possible that a partial contribution to this tragedy was made by sheer fear of terror among a gathering of people trying and failing to forget the horrors that had been hinted at all week by a Homeland Security Department seemingly bent on concentrating American minds on possible scenarios of upcoming attack?

Last week it seemed to some people that the US was going slightly barking with fear and had lost all sense of proportion in the face of possible attack. We heard how Americans, responding to advice from Tom Ridge, the Secretary of Homeland Security, were going to hardware stores to buy plastic sheeting and sticky tape in order to create sealed rooms in their homes. We heard how they were stocking up on bottled water, tinned food, torches, battery-powered radios and first-aid kits in case they had to stay inside these taped up rooms for several days.

Their government insisted, with the entire nation under orange alert, that it did not mean to panic people, but to reassure them. These preparations, however, seemed certain to make people feel not that they were safe in the unlikely event of an attack, but vulnerable in the likely event of one.

It doesn't seem unreasonable to assume that the people in that Chicago club, who had been living all week with such pressures and had been warned for days that something dreadful could happen at any moment, were jittery and particularly susceptible to reaching a state of huge, unreasoning panic far more quickly than they might have been under normal circumstances.

They had been told, after all, that chemical attacks might be unleashed on "soft targets". Since nightclubs are certainly soft targets and chemicals had been released into the air, the idea that such a catastrophe was likely would have been in the forefront of many minds.

If such a mindset did indeed contribute towards the grisly and awful scenes in Chicago yesterday morning, then the dead in this disaster are in a real sense victims of terror, the terror that people feel in their minds as much as the terror that threatens from al-Qa'ida. There has been a lot of talk in the last few days about how changing our habits, cancelling flights and staying away from areas designated to be likely targets is simply "doing the terrorists' jobs for them".

Here, at the climax of a week of feverish propaganda about the imminence of attack, it seems that in Chicago, at least, the job of the terrorists has been done horribly well. The scenes of shocked and injured people on the streets outside the nightclub, the interviews with eyewitnesses who had been inside, the sight of paramedics administering first aid and the setting up of states of emergency in the local hospitals were reminiscent of scenes of terrorist outrage.

At the root of these fears, of course, are the real acts of terrorism and the real threat of terrorism that have constantly to be faced and borne. But there are questions to be asked about how the threat of terrorism should be managed by government. Last week, when troops were called in to guard Heathrow, the real shock was how quickly people reached the conclusion that the step was manipulative, designed to frighten people into support for the war on Iraq.

"Old Europe" tends to have similar suspicions about the run on duct tape and plastic sheeting in the US. Such civic distrust is indeed a dreadful indictment of how cynical people have become about their leaders, and how warily we now look at the motives of the administration in the US. But when a nation is so fearful that a minor ruckus in a nightclub can turn into a stampede causing death and injuries to dozens of people, it is clear that the right balance between keeping people informed and filling them with dread has not been struck.

It is unlikely, during the current climate in the US, that there will be much of a rush to link the events in the Epitome club with the state of heightened anxiety that the Homeland Security Department has been fostering among the population. And perhaps even without the backdrop of real or imagined terror, this tragedy would have unfolded in much the same way.

But one lesson should be drawn from the horror in Chicago none the less. It is that instead of busying people with the work of stockpiling supplies for disaster, it would be more profitable to tell them how important it is to resist, in these times of terror, letting terror invade one's mind and dictate one's actions.

Instead of being told to seal up a room in case of contaminated air, the people who found themselves in that nightclub would have been better served by warnings telling them not to panic, to cover their mouths with their clothing and to move slowly holding on to the persons in front and behind them.

The people of America need to be told not to panic and never to panic, especially if they find themselves in a situation that involves crowds of people. Instead they are being driven to a state of mind where panic is always the most likely option, and chaos the most likely outcome. At least 21 people died of panic last night in Chicago, while many others have suffered the most awful physical and mental trauma.

Whatever the chain of events that led to Sunday night's stampede, the reactions revealed by such events were not the reactions of people who had been properly prepared for chemical or biological attack, no matter what the Secretary for Homeland Security imagines his advice is doing. Tragically, the very opposite of such a situation was true. Far from being braced for the worst, Americans are full of fear that an attack could hit them at any time. This fear may itself be their most terrible enemy of all. A fearful crowd is a dangerous crowd. And so is a fearful country

d.orr@independent.co.uk

http://argument.independent.co.uk/regular_columnists/deborah_orr/story.jsp?story=379336

Chicago stampede climaxed a week of feverish propaganda about the imminence of attack with chemical, biological or nuclear weapons against ''soft targets''