America’s underside exposed.

United States

Is this America? asked Paris’ Le Monde in an editorial. The entire world watched as American women and children wailed for help, as sick people expired of thirst on hot sidewalks. Such scenes of blacks fleeing devastation and despair are familiar from Somalia or Angola. Yet the images came from the world’s richest country. “America is discovering, or rediscovering, that it harbors the Third World in its own bosom.” The national shame must surely prompt some soul searching. “Is it reasonable to spend hundreds of millions to wage war on Iraq when America can’t even protect its own citizens?”

Most stunning was the utter collapse of civic order, said Jutta Kramm in Germany’s Berliner Zeitung. Looters fought with one another. Gangs attacked fleeing victims, stealing cars and boats. Doctors treating the survivors reported evidence of beatings and rapes. Such violence was not inevitable. “Natural disasters need not destroy all values, shatter all boundaries, turn people into beasts.” In the aftermath of the tsunami, we saw no selfish savagery, even though the countries hit—Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka—were much poorer than the U.S. It turns out that in America, “the veneer of civil society is thin and fragile.”

That’s because America doesn’t value community, said Doug Saunders in the Toronto Globe and Mail. It has never been a country of people pulling together in a joint project, but a pioneer land of self-reliance. Those “individualistic, egalitarian, anti-authoritarian values” have made the United States succeed. But the flip side of that virtue is “an every-man-for-himself ethos that can destroy the system itself.”

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Jonathan Freedland

Guardian