The face of Miss Liberty is changing. On her radiant visage, the world is beginning to see the scowl of a John Rambo.
Time was when the lesser billions who inhabited a world ruled by Stalins, Francos, Idi Amins and Pol Pots looked to the new world, and saw there the serene face of Miss Liberty. She held a tablet of liberty in one hand, her other hand holding up the torch of justice and knowledge, and told the world silently: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.”
Knowing she meant her words, millions made it to the new world. Most found not just room to breathe free, but rights to enjoy, freedoms to indulge in, liberties to celebrate, opportunities to toil, avenues to prosper, and wise minds to learn from.
Imaging: Deni Lal
Ever since Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman gave a bomb-dug burial to James Monroe’s isolationist doctrine, America has been poking its nose into every ‘messpot’ in the world from Afghanistan to Yemen. It armed tyrants, funded wars, and sent out its GIs and gunboats to cause death, destruction and devastation across the world. Like the arms-selling philanthropist Andrew Undershaft in Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara, it thought its mission was “to give arms to all men who offer an honest price.... To aristocrat and republican, to nihilist and tsar, to capitalist and socialist, to Protestant and Catholic, to burglar and policeman, to black man, white man and yellow man…. To all faiths, all follies, all causes and all crimes.”
As it made money by selling boats and bombs, cars and cannons, machines and missiles, America also shelled out much of the profits to benefit the world. Ever since its Marshall Plan saved Europe from the miseries of its wars, America also emerged as the biggest funder and sponsor of the world’s noble causes.
Thus America radiated what Joseph Nye would later call a ‘soft power’. Every film that Hollywood made, every word that the VoA broadcast, every face that CNN telecast, every line that the NYT printed, every scholar that Harvard sent out, every medal that its Olympians picked up, every song that Elvis Presley sang, every skirt that its models wore, every Nobel that its scientists picked up, every play that Broadway staged, every book that its writers published was lapped up by an admiring world that envied the liberties Americans enjoyed, and the culture of creativity America nurtured.
Even as it raced bomb-for-bomb and missile-for-missile with the Soviet superpower, the American state also encouraged its rich to invest in institutions that promoted knowledge and enlightenment, and invite denizens of the poorer and less fortunate world to come and partake of the values it was imparting. Just like well-meaning 19th century Englishmen thought it was the ‘white man’s burden’ to civilise the world (read Kipling), 20th century Americans carried notions that it was the Yankee's burden to save the world from the communist spectre that Karl Marx had threatened it with.
It’s all changing under Donald Trump. The tired, the poor and the huddled masses are no longer welcome to America; if they come they will be chain-ganged, bundled into military cargo planes and flown back. It’s no longer the serene visage of Ms Liberty that the world sees in America. On the contrary, they see the scowl of a Rambo who yelled incoherently at the civil world in First Blood: “Don't push it! Don't push it, or I'll give you a war you won't believe.”
Trump means it. He is giving the world a war it thought America would never give.
prasannan@theweek.in