The New Indian Express ·
Time for America to recompense
One hundred dead Indians is equal to one dead American. It is almost the rupee-dollar exchange rate, reflecting the relative worth of the Third World. Pretty much the same dynamic plays out in West Asia. Likely worse, as American lives lost are disproportionately few. Yet this is an American war. The world at large picks up the bill in human and material cost. Should the world then demand reparations from the US?
In the 1958 political novel The Ugly American—which my father brandished as an exposé of American capitalist-imperialism—Homer Atkins is an engineer-protagonist. In the imaginary Southeast Asian country of Sarkhan, Atkins remains skeptical of his overbearing nation: “You ever hear of a food shortage being solved by people building a military highway designed to carry tanks and trucks?” Atkins eases the lives of the colonised by inventing bicycle-powered water pumps even as fellow expatriates embrace a self-blinding exceptionalism.
Today, that American ugliness has deteriorated like a fatal contagion into a mental deformity symbolised by a rich, obese and seemingly senile leadership. Though the fable of America promises a land of freedom facilitating the pursuit of happiness, it rests upon John Winthrop’s 1630 Puritan formulation of a ‘city atop of a hill’. This neo-Biblical phrase claimed America was divinely ordained to be superior to the rest of the world.
