The Cosmopolitan Response

Commenting in Yezhednevnyi Zhurnal (in Russian) on the two major disasters that have featured prominently in Russian news media during the past week - Beslan and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina - Leonid Radzikhovsky sees a large degree of convergence in the way that Russia and the U.S. have confronted these defining catastrophes. Dismissing the schadenfreude showed by some of his fellow countrymen - the notion that now the U.S. is receiving some "well-earned retribution" for its "arrogance" and its intervention in Iraq is widespread in certain Russian circles - Radzikhovsky perceives a psychological and temperamental similarity. A short excerpt from a long and fascinating essay:

I think that the "patriots of anti-Americanism", and the "patriots of America" are united by something. Namely: both see the world divided as before along “racial-tribal” (more characteristic of nationalists) or "state" (more typical of Democrat-occidentophiles) lines. Meanwhile it seems to me that Beslan and, to an even greater degree, the tragedy in New Orleans, prove something else entirely: the world is in the main united.

How is this unity ensured? By the unity of human nature, when, after falling into extreme conditions, without the control of authorities, all nations act in many respects similarly? Or by a unity in something central and basic, a unity of social systems? Authoritarian "semi-democracy" in Russia, "model democracy" in the USA? In actuality there is the united network of the global, very complex hierarchic world which consists of different intersecting sets (countries with their governments and parties, professional associations, intermingling nations, oil companies, information or financial flows).