31 January 2011 Is looting a univeral instinct?

Over the past decades, in nearly all natural or man-made disasters, news agencies have presented video after video of stores and government buildings being looted. It doesn’t seem to matter where the disaster occurs, when it occurs, or how it occurs. Someone will decide that the time is right to help their self to whatever they can pick up and carry away.

I can recall seeing new footage of looting in Detroit, in Washington D.C., in Los Angeles, and in many other places visited by disaster.

After the Hussein government was over thrown in 2003, Iraqis took to the streets. They were not celebrating their “freedom from tyranny,” they were looting. They could be seen in countless videotapes ripping plumbing from the walls, carrying off furniture from offices, and, of course, irreplaceable antiquities from the national museum. Part of the responsibility belongs to the Bush Administration officials who fired the police and the military, leaving no agency to prevent lawlessness.

Today, in Iraq and Afghanistan, infrastructure improvement projects remain incompleted and unlikely to be completed due to continual looting of building and storage sites. Pointing out the theft to Iraqis and Afghanis seems to make no impression upon the citizenry or the governments involved.

When Israel evacuated its citizens from Gaza it left behind a fully functioning hydroponic greenhouse operation designed to grow salad greens for human food. The evacuation agreements hammered out included donations to fully pay for the greenhouse farms. These buildings would have provided both food and employment for Gazans for decades. Yet before the last IDF vehicle crossed the border they farms were looted and then absolutely destroyed.

In the U.S., most recently looting occurred in New Orleans. Food and clothing were taken first – since none was being provided for sale or by FEMA. It did not take long for alcohol, firearms, and electronics to become the items of choice. People who have no electrical power have no way to use stolen electronics.

A friend of mine, a professor of Classical Studies, who has been excavating historical sites in Greece for years, expressed his concern for the Egyptian antiquities. It seems that not only is urban looting and looting of museums taking place but that organized teams are pillaging those historic sites that have previously been protected from wanton looting and careless excavation by the Egyptian government. Those items that are found and sold on the black market are likely to be lost forever to Egypt and to posterity.

Poverty, crushing poverty in the Middle East and in South West Asia, are powerful motivators, driving many to engage in looting for survival. But in many cases what we see taking place seems to be looting for the sake of looting. It’s not confined to any ethnic group. All religious groups have prohibitions regarding theft. It may result in being killed by property owners or by government agencies tasked with stopping looters. It seems to transcend all social and cultural boundaries.

I have no sympathy for looters who take advantage of civil unrest to destroy, who carry off items they have no need for nor use for. I’m equally repelled by those black marketers who intend to get rich selling pieces of history that then fail to be catalogued and incorporated into our human history. For looting history, shooting the looters on sight has a well deserved historical continuity.