ABSTRACT
In March 2010 Jaap Smit, Director of a Dutch non-governmental organization (NGO) in aid of victims (Slachtofferhulp), lamented the increasing tendency to call unfortunate events ‘disasters’. He noted a worrying inflation of the ‘disaster’ label; a decreasing acceptance that, as his colleague Leferink and Sardemann (2010) has it, ‘shit happens’; and the overblown demand that, when it happens, ‘never again’. Smit strongly argued for the deflation of catastrophic discourse: we need to put ‘disasters’ into perspective. By international standards, he claimed, the Turkish Airlines crash in the Netherlands in February 2010, killing seven, was more like a major traffic accident, not a disaster.
