President Bill Clinton with Nelson Mandela (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Ta-Nehisi Coates

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 the Times 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.”

Read More Mandela and the Question of Violence – Ta-Nehisi Coates – The Atlantic.