A Cautionary Tale for Americans By Pankaj Mishra

The Bullet's Song: Romantic Violence and Utopia by William Pfaff Simon and Schuster, 368 pp., $27.95

In the early 1920s, during the first of his long spells in prison, Mohandas Gandhi read The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Many of his British friends had recommended it to him; they probably thought it a useful book for Gandhi to read while confronting a powerful empire. But Gandhi was only partly impressed by Gibbon. He admired Gibbon's marshaling of "vast masses of facts." But, as he put it, "facts are after all opinions." He claimed that his Indian ancestors had done well to ignore history and seek philosophical wisdom in the Mahabharata, the account of a terrible war that apparently occurred in India in the first century BC. For, as he wrote, "that which is permanent and therefore necessary eludes the historian of events. Truth transcends history."[1]

Malraux A Life Olivier Todd, translated from the French by Joseph West Alfred A. Knopf: 544 pp., $35
William Pfaff. Los Angeles Times. Mar 27, 2005.

(Copyright (c) 2005 Los Angeles Times)

Screenwriter Philip Dunne, a member of the Hollywood left , said that when the Spanish Civil War began in 1936, "all of a sudden people like Ernest Hemingway and Andre Malraux, who were gods, came to Hollywood."Malraux came in 1937, to lecture on Spain -- a "god," or certainly a hero, to the international left since 1933, when "Man's Fate," his novel on the Chinese revolution, was published.

The American Mission?

  By William Pfaff

The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership

by Zbigniew Brzezinski

Basic Books, 242 pp., $25.00


   1. Zbigniew Brzezinski's The Choice is superficially an election-year foreign policy tour d'horizon, more sophisticated in analysis and recommendations, and certainly more statesmanlike in temper, than current writings by the Bush administration's supporters. It is a nuanced expression of the conventional wisdom among American foreign policy experts, and a condemnation of the self-defeating arrogance of the Bush administration's conduct during the past two and a half years.
"'Globalization' in its essence means global interdependence," Brzezinski writes. Therefore the American choice today is between attempting to create "a new global system based on shared interests," or attempting to "use its sovereign global power primarily to entrench its own security." The latter risks ending in "self-isolation, growing national paranoia, and increasing vulnerability to a globally spreading anti-American virus." There would even be a risk of the United States becoming a garrison state.