How does the United States of America. combine democratic practice and dreadful cruelty with so little self-consciousness? How do Americans hold on to the conviction that America is principled, innocent, naïve and good when so much in its history indicates that America has been self-serving, cynical and wicked? How can America be both without noticing? What insulates American goodness from American badness? The commitment of America to liberty and its willingness to ignore the liberty of others would not normally be parad-oxical or intriguing - most nations place their interests above the interests of others. What makes America interest- ing is its self-image and its example as a democracy. It's self-image has been regularly aired in the aftermath of the recent tragedy. President Bush has characterized his campaign against Osama bin Laden and the taliban as a defence of Western Civilization and Democracy. American commentators have begun to reach for Hitler and Nazism in their attempt to put bin Laden and his brand of terrorism in context. Predictably, critics have cited America's violence in Japan,Vietnam, Cambodia and Iraq and asked why the deaths of American civilians should count for more in the assault on liberty or the reckoning of evil than the deaths America inflicts upon the civilians of other countries. The cynical answer would be that America has been on the winning side in the major conflicts of the twentieth century and winners write the history books. There is some truth to this - had Japan won World War II, Truman would have been remembered in the textbooks of the world as one of the wickedest men in history. As things are, Americans feel little or no guilt for Hiroshima or Nagasaki and Truman is remembered in the history books as a cut-rate statesman. But most of us who value democracy and deplore Hiroshima, accept that the right side won. We also accept that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the authoritarianism that it represented was a good thing. But we resent the use of democracy as an alibi for atrocity and sometimes wonder if there isn't a Jekyll-and-Hyde quality to American democracy, whether selective concern and cruelty aren't built into the political experiment that began with the American Revolution two hundred and twenty-five years ago. To understand the peculiarities of American democracy, it's useful to remember that America started life as a set of white settler colonies. Thanksgiving, America's national festival, celebrates the survival of early white settlement. The Pilgrims and Puritans of the New England colonies in the early seventeenth century had come to America seeking freedom from religious restraint but not in the name of religious tolerance; they intended to establish a 'Zion in the wilderness' where deviation from their interpretations of orthodoxy would be severely punished. The liberalism and eclecticism of William Penn who favoured religious toleration and opposed slavery quickly lost out to the self-righteous authoritarianism of those who balanced equality within the chosen community with genocide and slavery outside it. Early treaties with Native Americans were torn up as white settlements expanded in their hunger for land. White settlers saw 'Indians' as fauna: they were, depending on context and mood, either noble savages or savage vermin. The extermination of Native American communities and the systematic integration of slaves into the economies of the cotton producing states forced white Americans early in their history to create justificatory distinctions between civilized and savage, Christian and heathen, freeman and slave. The 1776 Revolution created a slave-owning democracy. Slavery and radical inequality weren't unique to the young American republic; what was unique was that the modern world's first republic, modelled on the pattern of Classical democracy and secularized by a tradition of religious dissent had to reconcile universalist principles of liberty, equality and freedom with a discriminatory practice that routinely denied non-white people their humanity. Jefferson, for example, declared that he was unalterably opposed to slavery but also believed that blacks and whites couldn't live together because of inherent racial differences. What he meant of course, was that they couldn't live together in equality which is why, unfortunate though it was, slavery had to continue. Lincoln had an emancipation plan according to which the slaves were to be freed by state action, the slaveowners were to be compensated and the freed men were to be colonized abroad. Americans can justifiably argue that discrimination, dreadful though it was, was gradually overcome. This is something that we should all acknowledge; few countries have invested more effort in the institutionalization of individual liberty. But the early history of a republic founded on radical discrimination left its mark on America's democratic culture. America admitted its minorities to full citizenship grudgingly and the condition of this admission was assimilation. Martin Luther King was a great man but he was also a middle-class, English-speaking preacher in a suit. Educated blacks became honorary whites and as the vocabulary of political correctness changed, countries and peoples were granted admission into a mainly white free world - thus Japan became a honorary Western country. When assimilation doesn't work, when an antagonist is culturally and ideologically different enough to be threatening, America behaves like a laager democracy, circling its wagons to defend real but selectively applied Western values, against circling hordes of kafirs or gooks. Loss of civilian life beyond the assimilationist pale ceases to count as human suffering, it becomes collateral damage in a worthy cause. We see this in Hiroshima, in Cambodia, in Vietnam, in Iraq, in the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, in Bush's 'crusade' and his generally sub-biblical rhetoric, in the greater value placed on Israeli lives in the west Asia conflict (Israel being a western port in a sea of Arabs) and today, in the barely denied 'civilizational' hostilities between the 'West' and 'Islam'. The point of this argument is not to deny the critical importance of American democracy for the rest of the world, but to suggest that the cause of liberty and the taint of discrimination are joined at the hip in the evolution of democracy in America. mukulkesavan@hotmail.com