Travelers and Terrorists: Advice for Americans

There are many penalties to being a citizen of a Great Power, and one of them is this: that all over the world you have vicarious enemies.

I speak from experience, as a British citizen. When I wandered the world of the 1940s and 1950s I suffered often for the sins of Empire--the “red-necked Brutish Empire,” as its less amenable subjects liked to call it. But now that the empire is all but gone and Britain is at best a second-class power, no foreigner ever thinks of blaming me for my country’s policies.

Americans are of course still in the very thick of Great Powerness, and most endure as individuals the opprobrium they get as citizens. Obviously there are parts of the world where it is distinctly unhealthy to declare oneself an American--and there must be many people who wonder how best to conduct themselves when traveling abroad these days, and for that matter whether it makes sense to travel abroad at all.

I have to travel--it’s my trade--and so I venture to offer you some presumptuous advice. If you are contemplating travel to openly hostile regions, to countries where at the moment the very name of America makes the local blood boil, don’t go. Bravado for bravado’s sake is foolish, could cost you your life, and worse still might cost other people theirs. But if you are just thinking about travel in a world generically suspicious of Great Powers, and apparently swarming with trigger-happy gunmen, then I believe a proper frame of mind, as against recourse to the nearest U.S. consul or an immediate summons of the Delta Force, can get you through most difficulties.

Let us consider the worst possibility first--the possibility of direct violence against your person. This is just as likely to happen on Sunset Boulevard as it is at a foreign airport, and either way there’s not much most of us can do about it, except keep our fingers crossed and make a fuss if security is inadequate.

It is true that in foreign confrontations boldness, rather than bravado, sometimes pays. In Egypt once, at a time of fierce guerrilla fighting against the British, an English colleague and I had occasion to walk straight into a violently Anglophobic gathering near Suez. A threatening covey of young men instantly accosted us. “Are you British or American?” they demanded with menace. In those days to be American was popular almost everywhere, and for a moment at least I was tempted to lie. Not my companion. “Extremely British,” he replied, noticeably stiffening his upper lip, and so amused were the Egyptians that they did not tear us to pieces after all.

Egyptians, though, are not violent by nature, and they are also blessed with a sense of humor. In other places it is generally wiser to run away. When in a mosque in Istanbul a most sinister-looking man detached himself scowling from the congregation and hissed at me to beat it, nobody could beat it faster than I did through the exquisite door of the fane. The old analogy of the bully who is always supposed to cringe in the face of honest courage certainly does not always apply to terrorists.

A better bet is always reason. Even the fanatic, or at least the bigot, is often amenable to argument. What is more, like it or not--like him or not--occasionally he is right. Just causes are often pursued by loutish boors: Christian evangelists, animal lovers, ecologists, supporters of minority languages, even true-blue American patriots have been known to present their views with unwarrantable savagery.

I hope I will not cause offense if I suggest that by the nature of things Americans are especially liable to political fallacy. Your historical traditions--instincts too, perhaps--are introspective. Your geographical situation, even in the jet age, is remote from most of the world power centers. Your ethnic composition means that generically you embrace all the passions of that notoriously unreliable witness of human affairs, the exile. Even now, as citizens of the greatest of all the Great Powers, you still travel in many ways as innocents abroad.

A few years ago I happened to declare to some Midwesterners my reluctant conviction that U.S. power was more dangerous to the peace of the world than Soviet power. They were astonished. It was not only that the notion seemed new to them, altogether topsy-turvy. They were no less bewildered that such a heretical view should be uttered by an old friend and admirer of America.

The world looks very different from another hemisphere, out of another culture or another historical background. Things that seem despicable from Kalamazoo may seem morally justifiable to perfectly decent minds elsewhere, and one way to insure yourself against unpleasantnesses abroad is honestly to try to see all other points of view. You need not crawl, perjure yourself or betray your principles. And you never know, just as you are beginning to see that the pig-headed zealot has a point after all, he may find himself agreeing with you !

For Americans the best self-protection of all, though, is to forget about being Americans. There are some peoples in this world, and yours and mine are pre-eminent among them, who are always conscious of their citizenship. They carry it like an invisible carapace wherever they go, and they color every passing scene, impregnate every conversation, even flavor every foreign food with their convictions of nationality.

Most peoples, however, are not half so conscious of Flag, Queen and Passport. To some, nationality is a concept very new, to others an allusion almost meaningless, and the vast majority of people in this world don’t greatly care if you are American or Omani, British or Papuan. In any case nationality is a purely artificial conception--especially for Americans, all of whose forebears, after all, once possessed some other nationality altogether.

For myself, as an old professional of travel, I scarcely think about my nationality from one airport to the next. I try not to look at the world through Western eyes, or democratic eyes, or anarchic eyes, or eyes of any particular religion, or even eyes from Wales--just human eyes, seeing fellow humans, judging them for themselves and hoping they will judge me likewise. The technique has seldom failed me, and during my past quarter-century of incessant wandering I can count the alarming incidents of travel on the fingers of one hand (not one of which, knock on wood, has yet been chopped off by ring-robbers or mutilated by torturers).

But I have been looking on the dark side, anyway. The world is not swarming with trigger-happy gunmen, and the chances are that when you travel abroad nobody will be nasty to you for a moment. As an American, in any case, you are never altogether abroad. Half the world wants to be American, really; half of it has relatives in Brooklyn, and the real glory of America is that it is a sublimated essence of all of us, whatever its government does--”America thou half-brother of all the world!”

Besides, if you suffer vicarious enmities as a citizen of a Great Power, the converse also applies--when your nation behaves honorably and generously, you make vicarious friendships too. Be a devil, take no notice of me, wave the old Stars and Stripes from the rental-car window and see what happens!