Notes on a Foreign Country

by Suzy Hansen

  Of course, it wasn’t only religious fervor that led the Americans to seek resources in foreign lands. In his influential 1959 book The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, William Appleman Williams argued—for which he was excoriated by Kennedy acolytes such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. for being pro-Communist—that the United States, from the beginning, needed to expand its borders to keep the economy growing. Unless the nation tapped into new markets in which to acquire natural resources, as well as to sell American goods, American factories would close, jobs would be lost, people would riot, and civil unrest would ensue. Peace and prosperity, the twin promises of American life, would wither without expansion. Williams was one of the first figures urging Americans to look more honestly at their foreign policy, and to accept what it was becoming—a different kind of empire, one that asserted itself first through economic means, not necessarily full-scale physical appropriation of territory (although often that, too). The book was popular at the time of its publishing, even receiving endorsements from newspapers such as The New York Times. The historian Greg Grandin believes such prescient warnings disappeared into the fervor of America’s post–Cold War self-congratulation; surely, there was no longer any reason to worry about empire now that the United States had proven its own political system’s superiority over the rest.

  But back then, even an alleged critic of American empire like Williams had been gentle in his assessment of American ideals, writing that, for example, the Americans had been “sincere” in their intentions to transform Cuba into a mini-America. They believed they could “ultimately create a Cuba that would be responsibly self-governed, economically prosperous, and socially stable and happy,” he writes. “All, of course, in the image of America.” His usage of the word “sincere” was the sort of thing that Americans, eager for affirmation, likely took the wrong way.

  The idea of good intentions would obscure the racism that enabled expansion. In a more sophisticated formulation of my college-girl realization that black and white identities were defined in relation to each other, Grandin explains that the ideal of a “rational man who stood at the center of an enlightened world,” that is, the white man, was conceived against “its fantasized opposite: a slave, bonded as much to his appetites as he was to his master.” Presidents McKinley, Taft, and Roosevelt alternately referred to their new foreign subjects as little brown men, savages, and bandits, and our supposed idealist crusader Woodrow Wilson argued that while the European subjects of former empires didn’t require American tutelage, brown subjects in the Middle East certainly did. Once racist ideology seeped into the rationale for American diplomacy, it would be difficult to ever snuff it out. Among the highest levels of government, racism hid behind innocuous words of charity and imperialist actions that no one dared call by their name.

  I grew up with little sense of this history, and didn’t incorporate it into my assessment of American foreign policy, or myself. The born-again experience that characterized the very founding of America would later be reenacted by millions of immigrants like me, whose freedom also meant severing from their past. In Turkey, when I would bring up the Armenian genocide, the foundational slaughter of a Christian minority that allowed for the creation of the Turkish state, Turks would often remind me of the elimination of the Native Americans. This was a defensive rhetorical trick on their part, but my reflex, even if only in my mind, was to reply that “that was many hundreds of years ago,” which was how I actually felt. Technically, it was true: my family didn’t own slaves either. About the appropriation of land, the plundering of resources, the taming of rivers, the enslavement of people, and the destruction of plains and mountains—all of which contributed to making my country the wealthiest and most powerful on earth, and myself a beneficiary of it—I could say, “I had nothing to do with that and it is not a part of me.”

  The suppression of the Native Americans, the insistence on slavery in a constitution that otherwise proclaimed the liberation of a people, and the economic necessity of territorial expansion would forever connect America’s racial history to its foreign policy, its African American communities to Cubans and Filipinos, James Baldwin to Turkey. As early as 1959, Williams went as far as to say that America needed a kind of truth and reconciliation commission about the history of twentieth-century American foreign policy and the relationship between that foreign policy and the domestic economy, a reckoning with the fact that America’s much vaunted prosperity and peace at home would simply not have been possible without its violence at home—and abroad. If Americans didn’t face such realities, Williams warned, they would continue to believe that “world power was thrust upon” them, and that “a unique combination of economic power, intellectual and practical genius, and moral rigor” enables America “to build a better world—without erecting an empire in the process.” The Americans were in active denial of their empire even as they laid its foundations. They saw themselves as helpless and ingenuous first responders to fate, a feeling that would deepen with the siren call of World War II.

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  IN THE YEARS after September 11 and the financial crisis, and after the moral and military failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, I noticed that writers and pundits had become increasingly nostalgic for World War II—what they called America’s “good war.” To them, World War II wasn’t a war of military and economic dominance, a bid for power, but a seamlessly executed rescue operation for which the Americans won the world’s fealty and gratitude. We still saw ourselves as friendly GIs handing out Hershey bars, someone giving stuff out to a crowd of delighted supplicants. In recent years, there was a sense that America had somehow gotten “worse” at the business of warfare, which suggested that the Americans had ever been good at it in the first place. I, too, caught myself sometimes thinking that in contrast to the gloomy present day, the Americans once held the admiration of the world, especially in the 1940s. This kind of language, aquired no doubt from countless history lessons in school, or on the nightly news, or from my parents, had hardened into truth. Our victory in World War II is more crucial to Americans’ ideas of themselves than they may even realize, but I wanted to understand what this self-image left out. Among many omissions were two glaring realities: that the vanquished populations of the Axis powers did not much enjoy the humiliation of American occupation, and that during World War II, the supposed “good war,” the Americans dropped the nuclear bomb.

  That the American liberators behaved badly after World War II has been well established: from Paris to Cairo, American soldiers were allowed to run riot through the streets and prey on the women. But rarely do Americans read foreign testimonies of how American occupation was experienced by its victims, nor are they exposed to the Japanese, German, or Italian versions of this history, as in Curzio Malaparte’s satrirical novel The Skin.

  When the American military arrived in Italy in 1943, the writer and aristocrat Curzio Malaparte was living in Naples. The city, wrecked from Allied bombs and artillery, was in ruins, its people sucking pieces of leather for nutrients, women selling themselves for a sip of wine. In The Skin, the American soldiers know nothing about Italy, nothing about the politics of the war; they laughed a lot, “like children, like schoolboys on holiday.” Malaparte, at first, seems to find the Americans amusing. One soldier he befriends “would blush crimson” when he saw misery because Americans were embarrassed by it, like innocents. That concept, Baldwin’s word, “innocent,” I was finding, was all too common in foreign writings about the Americans.

  But over time, Malaparte begins to discern something dangerous in the American soldiers’ simplicity in the face of horror, their faith that “men can recover from misery, hunger and pain, that there is a remedy for all evil,” much as Baldwin’s Italian character in Giovanni’s Room once accused an American expat of not believing in death, of believing “as though with enough time and all that fearful energy and virtue you people have, everything will be settled, solved, put in its place.” The Skin is often grotesque satire,
but in many ways, it is difficult to distinguish the American soldiers Malaparte is describing in the 1940s from those in Vietnam, or in the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan sixty years later. The Americans succumb to the typical depredations of occupiers everywhere: they abuse local women publicly, go to obscene lengths for a good meal. For Malaparte, the Americans do not have good intentions at all; they come from a society, which he recognizes as a distinctly capitalist one, that was “founded on the conviction that in the absence of beings who suffer, a man cannot enjoy to the full his possessions.” In other words, the Americans believe people must be subjugated so that they themselves can be free. They cannot recognize the irony inherent to the concept of an “army of liberation” because “they believe that a conquered nation is a nation of criminals, that defeat is a moral stigma, an expression of divine justice.” As Christians, the Americans believe that the loser in the war deserved its lowly state, that the winners had been sanctified by heaven. Christianity, Malaparte writes, as Baldwin would, too, was often the Americans’ “alibi” for their war making.

  After a while in The Skin, a mysterious plague settles over Naples, the source of which Malaparte locates, darkly, in wide American grins. “The source of the plague was in their compassion,” Malaparte writes, “in their frank, timid smiles, in their eyes so full of sympathy, in their affectionate caresses.” The Americans’ belief in their own mission on earth, in other words, kept them in Naples, obliviously occupying its people. In one of the last scenes of the book, Italians cheer on the sidewalks during an American victory parade, and amid the commotion, one of the U.S. tanks barrels into an Italian local, turning him into a “carpet of human skin,” and then dumbly ambles on. “It is a shameful thing to win a war,” Malaparte writes. But Americans rarely feel that way, certainly not about the war in Europe—not even about the fate of Japan.

  In the period after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the terrified world wrestled with the meaning of those events. Writers did not doubt the shadow it would cast over future generations. Mary McCarthy called the nuclear bomb “a hole in human history”; William Faulkner, in his 1950 Nobel Prize speech, wondered: “When will I be blown up?”; Doris Lessing’s heroine in The Golden Notebook says to her psychoanalyst, “I don’t want to be told when I wake up, terrified by a dream of total annihilation, because of the H-bomb exploding, that people felt that way about the cross-bow. It isn’t true.” In 1946, The New Yorker magazine devoted an entire issue to the writer John Hersey’s reportage from Hiroshima. “The eyebrows of some were burned off and skin hung from their faces and hands,” Hersey writes. “Others, because of pain, held their arms up as if carrying something in both hands. Some were vomiting as they walked. Many were naked or in shreds of clothing. On some undressed bodies, the burns had made patterns, of undershirt straps and suspenders.”

  Hersey’s Hiroshima is an astonishingly effective catalogue of horror. But one critic at the time believed it left something out. In his review of the book, Gore Vidal pointed to a moral failing: that because it recorded the effects of the bomb in standard, objective American journalistic style—for which American journalists are usually lavished with praise—it had, crucially, avoided the larger political questions surrounding the bomb’s discharge. Hiroshima did not, Vidal wrote, “even touch on the public debate as to whether or not there was any need to use such a weapon.” Hersey likely believed that his spare representation of the terrible facts was itself the answer to the question of the bomb’s “necessity,” but Vidal’s critique raises the question of whether the American style of journalism merely records history, rather than reckoning with it.

  Vidal’s point was that many people at the time, including members of the Truman administration, sensed that the Japanese, already devastated by the Americans’ firebombing of Tokyo, which killed a hundred thousand people, were ready to surrender. Yet somehow, years after the publishing of Hiroshima, the conventional myth among Americans—including myself—became one in which, once again, the Americans had been driven by unfortunate events to do unfortunate things. Hiroshima, wrote Garry Wills, was “the moment when total war was turned into a way of waging peace.” But I wonder how many Americans become what Wills called “Hiroshima liberals” by choice, by passive education, or by omission of facts—the particular kind of ignorance that Baldwin had once observed.

  In 1994, the Smithsonian Institution sought to ask hard questions about Hiroshima in its fiftieth-anniversary exhibit of the bombings. Were the nuclear bombs unnecessary at that stage of the war? Did American justifications hold up to scrutiny? In the year of the Rwandan genocide, and the Bosnian war, and three years after the fall of communism, the Americans were finally facing their own most consequential violent act. But the plans for the exhibit were met with an uproar. Congress held hearings. Smithsonian employees resigned. John Dower, an American historian of Japan who would later win the Pulitzer Prize, had two of his lectures canceled. “In retrospect,” he writes in an essay called “How a Genuine Democracy Should Celebrate Its Past,” “it was naïve to imagine that serious treatment of the dropping of the first atomic bomb would be possible in a public space in the United States.”

  Censorship in America comes in quieter forms. It doesn’t announce itself, as it seemed to in Turkey. In Istanbul, I had disparaged the mythmaking performed by museums and art spaces funded by a Turkish government more interested in preserving the nationalist ethos than in supporting the exploration of ideas. But in criticizing the Turks, I was comparing them to the United States, whose state institutions’ independence and amply funded research is hardly ever called into question. I had never thought that American institutions, as Dower writes, had a mission “to praise, exalt, beautify, and glorify all that America has been and has done.”

  It is perhaps for this reason that Americans gradually became unemotional about mass death. Hillary Clinton once famously pledged on national television to “obliterate” Iran, Trump supporters speak casually of “annihilating” the Islamic State. The Americans ended World War II. They did what they had to do to save the world. Few Americans likely have any idea what happened after the bomb exploded, or the way straps of suspenders burned into the victims’ skin.

  One even lesser-known consequence of World War II was that the countries of Europe, and the nation of Japan, were broken, easily taken over by full-scale occupations in which the Americans rebuilt the cities they had destroyed, developed their capitalist economies, reminded them, at every turn, of why America was the greatest country on earth, and instructed them on the finer points of how to be free. The helpless pliancy of the Europeans and Japanese made Americans assume that the rest of the world, including Asians and Arabs emerging from their own colonial nightmares, would tolerate a new bunch of white Westerners dropping their bombs and telling them what to do.

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  AFTER THE WAR, the Truman administration passed the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan to much fanfare. They also pushed through a considerably less famous document called the Smith-Mundt Act, which enabled the State Department to engage in pro-American propaganda operations throughout the world. The act was a reaction not only to what were considered Soviet disinformation campaigns, but to the perceived anti-Americanism in Hollywood films. The American government declared that their propaganda would be the truthful kind of propaganda, the kind that was not actually propaganda. As the writer Frances Stonor Saunders has written, from 1950 to 1967 the State Department presided over a propaganda program in Europe, the central feature of which “was to advance the claim that it did not exist.” Its partner in this endeavor was the CIA. The agency’s cultural activities abroad—its funding of Encounter, The Kenyon Review, and Radio Free Europe, its infiltration of labor unions such as the AFL-CIO, and of international student organizations such as the National Student Association—are by now well-known. But what is harder to understand is the era that the Smith-Mundt Act ushered in for Cold War entrepreneurs, so to speak, who saw themselves as crucial civilian
foot soldiers in the fight against communism.

  Years before the war ended, in 1940, Henry Luce published an essay called “The American Century,” in which he exalted America as, in the historian Robert Herzstein’s words, “a way station in humankind’s attempt to build the City of God on earth,” in order to strengthen American support against communism. “If we had to choose one word out of the whole vocabulary of human experience to associate with America—surely it would not be hard to choose the word,” Luce once explained, sounding like George W. Bush, or Barack Obama. “For surely the word is Freedom … Without Freedom, America is untranslatable.” Luce’s family had been missionaries in China, and viewed themselves as not only converting a backward people but generously bestowing on them all the benefits of modern medicine and hygiene. Luce himself had lived on missionary compounds and barely interacted with the Chinese people. What he took away from China instead was the missionaries’ idealized image of America and of its people as saviors.

  It was this worldview that Luce disseminated to the American people in Time, an unabashedly patriotic weekly magazine. By 1945, before television and the ubiquity of the Internet, thirty million people read one of Henry Luce’s publications, Time, Life, or Fortune, each week. According to Herzstein, what they found were stories that fueled the cruelty of the McCarthy era and harangued American politicians about “who lost China” to communism—for Luce almost a betrayal of his divine cause. Luce and his magazines had a similar kind of impact as Roger Ailes and Fox News. He often threatened anyone who didn’t despise the enemy as much as he did, once even warning John F. Kennedy’s father that if the president showed “any sign of weakness ‘toward the anti-Communist cause,’ then Time Inc. would ‘clobber him.’” Herzstein recalls that Robert M. Hutchins, the president of the University of Chicago, once argued that Time Inc. did more to mold the American character than “the whole education system put together.”