while urging other people to arms. 

 

I was right to be wrong, while you and your kind were wrong to be right.

—Pierre Courtade

 

I have the misfortune of being near the end of Tony Judt’s Postwar at a moment when of the great figures of our history, Nelson Mandela, has passed. Judt’s gaze is relentless. He rejects all grand narratives, skewers Utopianism (mostly in the form of Communism), and eschews the notion that history has definite shape and form. States are mostly amoral. In one breath he will write admiringly of the Nordic countries. In the next he will detail their descent into eugenics in the mid-20th century.

This is what I mean when I say that Judt has an atheist view of history. God does not care about history, and history does not care about humans. There is no triumphalism, in Postwar, about Western values and democracy. What you see is a continent at war with itself. The upholding of democratic values is a constant struggle, often lost—in the colonies, in the Eastern bloc, in Greece, in Portugal, in Spain. Even among the great Western powers there is the sense that no one is immune to the virus of authoritarianism.

There is great humility in Judt’s portrait of Europe, a humility that is largely absent from the portrait of the West foisted upon the darker peoples of the world. Non-African writers love to congratulate Nelson Mandela on not becoming another “Mugabe,” as though despotism is something Africans are uniquely tempted toward; as though colonialism was not, itself, a form of kleptocratic despotism. I too am happy that Mandela did not become another Mugabe. I am happier still that he did not become—as far as these analogical games go—another Leopold.

 

This Western arrogance is as broad as it is insidious. There was a well-reported piece in theTimes a few days ago on the disappointment that’s followed Mandela’s presidency. A similar note has been sounded in seemingly every obit and article concerning Mandela’s death. It’s not so much that these stories shouldn’t be written, it’s that they shouldn’t treated the subject as though a man were biting a dog. That people are shocked that South Africa, almost 20 years out of apartheid, is struggling with fairness and democracy, reflects a particular ignorance, a particular blindness, and a peculiar lack of humility, about our own struggles. 

On the great issue of the day, the generations that followed George Washington offered not just disappointment but betrayal. “The unfortunate condition of the people whose labors I in part employed,” Washington wrote, “has been the only unavoidable subject of regret.” Americans did not simply tolerate this “unfortunate condition,” they turned it into the cornerstone of the American economic system. By 1860, 60 percent of all American exports came from cotton produced by slave labor. “Property in man” was, according to Yale historian David Blight, worth some $3.5 billion more than “all of America’s manufacturing, all of the railroads, all of the productive capacity of the United States put together.”

In short order, Washington’s slaveholding descendants went from evincing skepticism about slavery to calling it “a positive good” and “a great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.” And they did this while plundering and raiding this continent’s aboriginal population. For at least its first 100 years, or perhaps longer, this country was a disappointment, an experiment which—by its own standards of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness—failed miserably. America is not unique. It is the product of imperfect humans. As is South Africa. That people turn to the country of Nelson Mandela and wonder why it hasn’t magically transformed itself into a perpetual font of milk and honey is a symptom of our blindness to our common humanity. 

Nowhere is that blindness more apparent then in the constant, puerile need to critique Mandela’s turn toward violence. The impulse is old. “Why Won’t Mandela Renounce Violence?” asked a New York Times column in 1990. Is that what we said to Savimbi? To Mobutu? 

Malcolm X understood:

If violence is wrong in America, violence is wrong abroad. If it is wrong to be violent defending black women and black children and black babies and black men, then it is wrong for America to draft us, and make us violent abroad in defense of her. And if it is right for America to draft us, and teach us how to be violent in defense of her, then it is right for you and me to do whatever is necessary to defend our own people right here in this country.

Martin Luther King Jr. agreed:

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems … But, they asked, what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government.

As did Mandela. Offered the chance to be free by the avowed white supremacist P.W. Botha if he would renounce violence, Mandela replied, “Let him renounce violence.” Americans should understand this. Violent resistance to tyranny, violent defense of one’s body, is not simply a political strategy in our country, it is taken as a basic human right. Our own revolution was purchased with the blood of 22,000 nascent American dead. Dissenters were tarred and feathered. American independence and American power has never rested on nonviolence, but on the willingness to do great—at times existential—violence.

 

 

Perhaps we would argue that Malcolm X, Mandela, and King were wrong, and that states should be immune to ethics of nonviolence. But even our rhetoric toward freedom movements which employ violence is inconsistent. Mandela and the ANC were “terrorists.” The Hungarian revolutionaries of 1956, the Northern Alliance opposing the Taliban, the Libyans opposing Gaddafi were “freedom fighters.” Thomas Friedman hopes for an “Arab Mandela” one moment, while the next telling those same Arabs to “suck on this.” The point here is not that nonviolence is bunk, but that it is is bunk when invoked by those who rule by the gun.

In the shadow of our conversation, one sees a constant, indefatigable specter which has dogged us from birth. For the most of American history, very few of our institutions believed that black people were entitled to the rights of other Americans. Included in this is the right of self-defense. Nonviolence worked because it conceded that right in the pursuit of other rights. But one should never lose sight of the precise reasons why America preaches nonviolence to some people while urging other people to arms. 

Jimmy Baldwin knew:

The real reason that nonviolence is considered to be a virtue in Negroes—I am not speaking now of its racial value, another matter altogether—is that white men do not want their lives, their self-image, or their property threatened. One wishes they would say so more often.

The questions which dog us about Mandela’s legacy, his relationship to other African autocrats, the great imperfections which remain in his country, and his insistence on the right of self-defense ultimately say more about us than they do about Mandela. “I cannot sell my birthright,” Mandela responded to calls for him to renounce violence. “Nor am I prepared to sell the birthright of the people to be free.” 

This is a universal appeal, and our inability to see such universality in those who are black, or in those who oppose our stated interests, reveal the borders of all our grand talk about democratic values. That is the next frontier. A serious embrace of universality. A rejection of selective morality.