When he visited New York for the first time in 1946, Albert Camus wrote in his journal that America was a “country where everything is done to prove that life isn’t tragic.” In his view, “one must reject the tragic after having looked at it, not before.” Here again was Baldwin’s accusation that white Americans had no sense of tragedy, which I had begun to see operating in tandem with the country’s terrible innocence about its own deeds. When they met in New York, an elderly Alfred Stieglitz, the photographer, told Camus, “Don’t hope for anything from America. Are we an end or a beginning? I think we’re an end. It’s a country that doesn’t know love.”
Baldwin once explained that what he meant when he said Americans lacked a sense of tragedy was that they couldn’t grasp that life itself was a risk, that there was no such thing as safety, that eventually we all suffer and die, and that the acceptance of this fact is precisely what empowers us to struggle and endure. Black spirituals, he said, conveyed this sense of tragedy. I can only guess that Camus and Stieglitz sensed that a country in denial of its own history of slavery—that had in fact, as I knew, defined its own best qualities against a prejudiced and hateful image of blacks—would become a country that at its root was hollow. Because the Americans had never looked their tragic history in the face, they could delude themselves into believing that their own comparable superiority might create a better world, a life so ideal that tragedy wouldn’t even exist. It was an American dream that demanded the denial of all those who suffered from its hopeless pursuits, and could only be achieved if Americans stopped feeling. Octavio Paz, writing from Mexico, observed that the Americans’ “self-assurance and confidence” didn’t prevent self-criticism necessarily, but only as long as it was the kind of criticism “that respects the existing systems and never touches the roots.” The sense of tragedy that Baldwin had been talking about would have been one Americans carried with them if they were aware that their miraculous country had been founded on a crime. The love that they couldn’t feel, as Stieglitz had said, was the love they didn’t manifest for all of their compatriots. Octavio Paz, as a Mexican well acquainted with the American way of empire, watched the coming half of the century with dismay. “It is impossible to hold back a giant,” Paz writes. “It is possible, though far from easy, to make him listen to others; if he listens, that opens the possibility of coexistence.”
From a distance, foreigners could see this American tidal wave enveloping their lives. Along with the CIA and the State Department propaganda schemes came the NGOs and the military, even to places as unfamiliar as Pakistan. There, observers recognized that something unprecedented was happening throughout the world; that their own lives would be affected by this new form of empire rising in the West. In 1954, a man from the American consulate in Islamabad asked Saadat Manto, a well-known short story writer, to contribute to the consulate’s “magazine,” which it published in order to sway Pakistani sympathies toward the United States. In his “Letters to Uncle Sam,” Manto told a different story. As early as the 1950s, Manto saw that the demonization of communism in Asia would empower the only social and political force that might have the will to defeat it: Islamic fundamentalism. “I think the only purpose of military aid is to arm these mullahs,” he writes. “I can visualize the mullahs, their hair trimmed with American scissors and their pajamas stitched by American machines in strict conformity with the Sharia.”
But Manto knew the Americans only wanted to hear about their achievements, and so with the same sarcasm and faux flattery Malaparte employed about the good-natured, careless American soldiers of Naples, Manto praised the Americans like a schoolteacher.
“You have done many good deeds yourself and continue to do them,” he writes. “You decimated Hiroshima, you turned Nagasaki into smoke and dust, and you caused several thousand American children to be born in Japan.”
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AFTER THE WAR, and the defeat of the European powers, the Americans suddenly found themselves able to take advantage of a ready-made empire of formerly colonized peoples that would come to be known as the “Third World.” In response, the Truman administration conceived of what is known as his Point Four Program, a plan ostensibly meant to aid the benighted countries of the planet. “We must embark on a bold new program,” Truman said, “for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas.” Truman’s words had the magical effect of turning a colonial endeavor into a humanitarian mission, in effect saying to the developing world, “We can help you be like us.” “Modernization” would end up being the Americans’ cleverest euphemism for empire building after 1950, and though the history of “modernization theory” has been deconstructed in countless academic books—Nils Gilman’s Mandarins of the Future, Hemant Shah’s The Production of Modernization, among many others—this most indestructible of American Cold War mentalities still seems to underpin Americans’ fundamental sense of reality.
In the 1950s, a group of sociologists, economists, and political scientists that would over time include Daniel Lerner, Lucian Pye, Walt Rostow, and to a lesser extent “clash of civilizations” theorist Samuel Huntington, gathered under the auspices of the Center for International Studies (CIS) at MIT in Boston—at the behest of the CIA—in order to conceive of a new Cold War foreign policy. These white men knew better than to formulate foreign policy based on old racist notions of genetic superiority as the Europeans had done. Colonialism had gone out of fashion. Instead these white men conjured new racist notions in order to justify their involvement and expansion throughout the postcolonial world.