"All the world has been converted and Washington is the modem Mecca"
About this Quote
A line like this works because it flatters and indicts at the same time. Calling Washington the "modern Mecca" borrows the aura of sacred pilgrimage, then snaps it onto the administrative capital of an empire. The phrase "All the world has been converted" isn’t celebratory; it’s acidic. Conversion implies pressure, spectacle, and the quiet violence of insisting there is one true way to organize modern life. James is naming a new faith: not Christianity or Islam, but American power as creed, complete with rituals (summits, aid packages, military alliances) and a priesthood (diplomats, technocrats, policy intellectuals).
The subtext is classic James: empire doesn’t just conquer territory; it colonizes imagination. People don’t merely obey Washington; they learn to want its approval, to read their own political possibilities through its categories. That’s why the metaphor lands. Mecca isn’t a place you stumble into; you go there because your worldview tells you you must. James is suggesting that by the mid-20th century, global elites and anti-colonial leaders alike were forced into a Washington-centric orbit, compelled to present their struggles in a language legible to American interests.
Context matters: James, a Trinidadian Marxist thinker and journalist, watched decolonization unfold under the shadow of the Cold War. The United States sold itself as the anti-imperial alternative while building a system of economic and military dominance that looked, to James, like empire by other means. The wit is in the bait-and-switch: a holy city turned into a bureaucracy, a pilgrimage reduced to power-seeking, devotion measured in access.
The subtext is classic James: empire doesn’t just conquer territory; it colonizes imagination. People don’t merely obey Washington; they learn to want its approval, to read their own political possibilities through its categories. That’s why the metaphor lands. Mecca isn’t a place you stumble into; you go there because your worldview tells you you must. James is suggesting that by the mid-20th century, global elites and anti-colonial leaders alike were forced into a Washington-centric orbit, compelled to present their struggles in a language legible to American interests.
Context matters: James, a Trinidadian Marxist thinker and journalist, watched decolonization unfold under the shadow of the Cold War. The United States sold itself as the anti-imperial alternative while building a system of economic and military dominance that looked, to James, like empire by other means. The wit is in the bait-and-switch: a holy city turned into a bureaucracy, a pilgrimage reduced to power-seeking, devotion measured in access.
Quote Details
| Topic | Freedom |
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