An American Scholar

A long time ago, I was traveling from London to New York. Next to me, on the plane, was an American woman who was a schoolteacher. We started talking and time seemed to have been passing very fast (I believe this is what Einstein was thinking about with his “theory of relativity”). We conversed about international affairs. As the plane was about to land at JFK airport, she asked the ultimate question.

“Mr. Shah,” she said, “We Americans are never able to understand this. We help the entire world. If there is a famine anywhere in the world, we rush over there with food. When a major earthquake strikes a country, we send our dollars and nurses to aid the affected people. I know that we are the world’s superpower and, thus, exert great influence over it. People around the world know about the power of our currency, too. However, everyone hates us. Whenever they hear our name, they get uncomfortable and even angry. What is the reason behind such animosity?”

I explained to this woman that we do not hate the American public. We hate the American government whose chief leader sits in the White House in Washington, D.C. After the world wars, many Western countries were deprived of their colonies, which became independent states. However, America, after those wars, knew about the vulnerable conditions of these new African and Asian countries and wanted them to become its colonies; it wanted to become their police officer.

There was a time when America implemented policies such as the Monroe Doctrine and “Splendid Isolation,” policies through which it maintained a neutral position and refused to interfere in the affairs of other countries. It is true that after the world wars, some countries that were weak before emerged as powerful and vice versa. But regardless of which country comes out on the top, we should never forget that power “should be used judiciously and not capriciously.”

She then asked me, “if Pakistan were as powerful as the U.S. is today and were a superpower, how would it act and govern?” I told her that I did not have an answer to this hypothetical question, but that if Pakistan were a superpower and did what America is doing today, it would be doing wrong things, as “wrong is always wrong.” Her inquiries did make me wonder about the nature of power and I pondered more about America. I then thought of famed philosopher John Dalberg-Acton’s astute observation: “All power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

We can learn many great lessons about power from human history (study Alexander the Great’s large empire and conquests). America’s power also reminds one of the power of rulers such as Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Genghis Khan and Hitler, people who committed barbaric atrocities in the name of power; they would chop people like carrots and construct towers out of human skulls. Then why are we so enamored of these people and of the concept of power in general? Why do we talk about power in such a positive way and ignore its inherent evils? I guess the answer is that powerful countries (America) and people (Cesar, Napoleon, Hitler, Khan) write their own historical narratives, narratives suited to their own agenda. These narratives inform us about the “problems” in the world and then each goes about providing its own “solutions” to those problems.