The arrogance of Americans,’ she wrote, ‘is not their will to power; it’s the will to impose Good.’ And, she added, to fight evil: intellectuals told her that ideas ‘detrimental to democracy’ should be suppressed and spoke with resignation, even fatalism, about the inevitability of war with the Soviet Union. For all America’s vaunted freedoms, the people she met were strikingly conformist, expressing an optimism about their country that not even ‘the sight of Buchenwald could shake’.
