by Suzy Hansen
The Pakistani economist known as Inayatullah said at a conference in the late 1950s that the Americans were measuring the world “like the person who measures the competence of everybody on terms of his own special competence.” Just as American settlers had defined their idealized selves against the prejudiced image they had of African Americans, our Cold War, empire-building intellectuals and politicians had very consciously pitted the modern American self against backward foreigners, this time with the same mistaken sense of its superiority. And like African Americans, the foreigners on the receiving end of these desperate demands would come to know the Americans far better than Americans would ever know them: as people with a myth about themselves they would do anything to prove.
In the twentieth century, the United States embraced autocrats willing to impose American ideas of modernization on Iran, Afghanistan, South Korea, South Vietnam, Taiwan, much of Latin America, and, indeed, my new home, Turkey. One of the most influential books on American foreign policy and modernization theory, one funded by the State Department, was Daniel Lerner’s The Passing of Traditional Society, which was published in 1958. Most of Lerner’s research was collected in a tiny village in Anatolia. In Turkey.
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IN THE 1950S, Lerner had spent months in the Turkish Anatolian town of Balgat in order to study how new methods of media and propaganda could induce Turkish villagers—and uneducated peoples all over the Middle East—to embrace the United States as the quintessence of modernity. An epigraph from André Siegfried appears early in the book: “The United States is presiding at a general reorganization of the ways of living throughout the entire world.”
My adopted home of Turkey, as it turned out, had been the Americans’ original model modern country. They admired that Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was one of the first non-Western leaders to popularize the word “modernization.” Turkey’s and America’s conception of themselves indeed evolved in tandem; in 1954, Senator J. William Fulbright would say that the Vietnam they were intent on transforming needed a leader “after the fashion of Kemal Atatürk, who made Turkey over” because it was “the best example of what should be done in an undeveloped country that I can think of in the last 30 years.” No wonder so many Americans admired Atatürk; Atatürk was us.
The Americans recognized that they had to tread carefully in Turkey. “The Turk is a proud man. We must proceed with a reasonable caution to avoid surfeiting him with American omnipresence,” one State Department briefing read. The first free elections in Turkey, which were held in 1950, had come as a pleasant surprise to the Americans: a largely peasant society had decided to vote for a party, the Democrat Party, that had been overtly praiseful of American capitalism. Soon the State Department, the Joint American Military Mission for Aid to Turkey (JAMMAT), and the CIA set up in Turkey and got to work on their modernization projects, around the same time that Engin Cezzar was studying theater in America, where he observed how little Americans knew about Turkey at all.
In reality, the Americans were busy in Turkey tackling all sorts of military, educational, and cultural deficiencies. In fact, the Americans almost completely remade the Turkish military, an institution I had imagined impervious to foreign interference: they founded an engineering school in Ankara, a commando training camp in Izmir, and schools that taught how to build artillery and ordnance. Turkish soldiers even took the same classes that American soldiers took. “American advisors wanted to replace Oriental obedience,” writes the historian Nicholas Danforth, “with a more modern, liberal American ethos.” Cultural programs cropped up in Turkey to promote a certain America-centric worldview. One radio show called Hazırcevap invited contestants to call in and try to win a trivia game, which revolved around questions like these: “Where are the longest bridges and tunnels in America?” “Among the weapons invented until now, are there any that are useful to human beings or nations?” “Where in America are the Redskins located?” “Do they make Turkish movies in Hollywood?” The Americans, it turned out, had also built the roads I loved so much in Turkey. The Turks had wanted to build roads that linked four major cities so they could easily transport their armies throughout the country in case of a Soviet attack, but the Americans overruled them and instead began building a different network of roads designed for economic efficiency. “It was more than a decade,” Danforth writes, “before an unbroken paved road linked even such major cities as Istanbul and Ankara.”
What, ultimately, were the Americans even trying to do? “U.S. officials believed that wanting to be modern was the first step toward being modern, and that being modern meant appreciating modernity,” Danforth writes. “That is, showing off how modern America was would encourage Turks to be more modern themselves, and as they became more modern, they would develop an even greater appreciation for America, the most modern country of all.” The Americans were creating a world in which no other future would be considered but the American one, which was both the source of change and the unattainable ideal.
When Rana had said much of her life had been defined by America, I had not understood what she meant. I had scoffed at the ways Turkish secularists used the word “modern,” thinking they were snobs using some bastardized conception of the word, having no clue from where it came. I also unwittingly used that language of modernization when I moved to Turkey, and when I thought about Turkey, and sometimes when I wrote about Turkey. But I had not known, and did not suspect, the degree to which this way of thinking had been premeditated, developed, deployed, and enshrined in so many facets of American life by a handful of men. I had not even known it was a “way of thinking” that could be challenged, that could be flawed. I thought, indeed, that it was simply reality.
In retrospect, in my quest to break down the myths of America, to discern the outlines of its empire, I was also looking to defend my country. The idea of our good intentions must have had some basis in history. The British writer Anatol Lieven calls this imaginary period the “state of noble innocence.” I kept looking for that moment, that moment when the state of innocence was real.
It may be an exaggeration to say that the magazines of Henry Luce still influence magazines of today, or that the recent currents of American literature still draw upon the University of Iowa’s Cold War curriculums. By now, Daniel Lerner has been refuted by both foreign and American academics who recognized his book as a blueprint for imposing the American way of life on “traditional” people. And yet so much of what I read about Cold War programs has a deeply familiar ring of truth: so-called modernity trumped up as the antithesis of Islamic societies; globalization and neoliberalism accepted as natural, inevitable phenomena, just like modernization. I had a Cold War mind. The reason that I was not thinking about Erdoğan’s economic policies—the reason I was not, as Rana said, thinking about money—was that deep down I had found Erdoğan’s pro-business, American-sounding rhetoric deeply comforting, the obvious path forward for Turkey. The reason I thought myself uniquely capable of objectivity was that sixty years ago, American intellectuals and leaders declared America the greatest, most modern and evolved country on the planet—the end of the spectrum of evolution, as I had myself thought—all the while neglecting to inform Americans that that belief was itself an ideology, a form of nationalism, one no different from the Kemalism I scorned.
The American empire was harder to see because it had no beginning and no end. Ours was an empire that had not begun with conventional invasions. Our empire began with an invasion of itself. We were rebels against tyranny who made a nation out of tyrannizing others, we were the revolutionaries who exalted self-determination while robbing it from others. No romantic image was without its darker underbelly, as Caner had shown me was true of Turkey’s myths, too—even during that romantic time of the nation’s birth, whole civilizations were destroyed. Even during the “good war,” the Americans had been a source of terror. There was no state of noble innocence. But that hadn’t stopped American intellectuals during the Cold War from inve
nting one, thereby keeping the country’s own citizens constantly in search of something they would never find.
4.
BENEVOLENT INTERVENTIONS: GREECE AND TURKEY
To defend your own reality and then impose it forcefully on the outside world is paranoia.
—THOMAS MERTON
ONE OF THE GREATEST POSTWAR novels about Americans abroad, Don DeLillo’s The Names, takes place in Greece, in the late 1970s and early ’80s, when the Vietnam War and the Iran hostage affair brought about an unprecedented crisis of faith in American power. The novel is set in Athens, the expat characters’ latest stop on their tour of an unacknowledged empire connected by mysterious corporate postings: in Egypt and Nigeria; Panama and Turkey; East Africa, the Sudan, Lebanon, and finally Greece. When it was published in 1982, the British critic Michael Wood observed that for American writers, America “is not a place or a nation but a condition of the soul tied to a habit of the possession of power.” DeLillo’s novel might have come too early in the spread of the empire for individual Americans to grasp the ways in which their own identities were connected to this possession. I could only begin to understand the novel now that I lived in Turkey.
The Names, in fact, is a study in American ignorance; then as now, few Americans knew the difference between Sunni and Shiite, or how to pronounce Iran (“E-ron”). DeLillo’s protagonist, Axton, is a risk analyst for an insurance company that counsels multinational corporations on pressing questions about the world. Which country is risky? Where will the next bomb go off? Who creates the risk? Axton is also, as my Turkish friends liked to imagine I was, an unwitting agent for the CIA, the spy who doesn’t know he’s a spy. “Are they killing Americans?” is his main question. Axton and the Americans abroad can’t make sense of the world, can’t grab onto anything. They are not so much arrogant as confused. They perceive their vulnerability, their noses wrinkling at smells in the air: “Wasn’t there a sense, we Americans felt, in which we had it coming?”
A Greek man named Eliades, with the aspect of a grumpy sage, says to the Americans:
I think it’s only in a crisis that Americans see other people. It has to be an American crisis, of course. If two countries fight that do not supply the Americans with some precious commodity, then the education of the public does not take place. But when the dictator falls, when the oil is threatened, then you turn on the television and they tell you where the country is, what the language is, how to pronounce the names of the leaders, what the religion is all about, and maybe you can cut out recipes in the newspaper of Persian dishes. I will tell you. The whole world takes an interest in this curious way Americans educate themselves.
DeLillo’s expatriates exaggerate their shame, apologize for not speaking languages, for not being able to figure out their own addresses or phone numbers in a foreign land. They survive on the “humor of personal humiliation,” but there are worse humiliations. “‘All countries where the United States has strong interests stand in line to undergo a terrible crisis so that at last the Americans will see them,’ Eliades says. ‘This is very touching.’”
I wonder now how deliberately DeLillo chose Greece as the setting for his novel about the American empire. In the late 1940s, Thomas Mann wrote in his diary that he considered what was happening in Greece under the Americans worse than what was happening in Czechoslovakia under the Soviets. To me, Greece would come to seem like the beginning and the end of everything.
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WHEN MY FELLOWSHIP finished in 2009, the financial crisis whittled away any desire of mine to go home either in the short term—there were no jobs—or in the long term. The financial crisis made me stop looking at my future as I once had. My generation, somewhere between delayed adolescence and starting a family, felt the new economic limits in America acutely; it was no longer clear that our lives would get exponentially better, as our country had always promised us. It is a testament to how deeply capitalism had sunk into the Americans’ consciousness that the financial crisis—the failure of capitalism—seemed to undo us more than September 11. If the economy was a sham, if the money was a sham, if the dream was a sham, then was anything they ever told us about ourselves true?
I stayed in Istanbul, where it was cheaper, and where, oddly enough, things were flourishing financially, because after the collapse of so many economies throughout the world, investors began directing their money to Turkey. The country, however, was still one that few magazines wanted to know about. I spent the last months of my fellowship studying the international activities of the Gülen movement. Just like the American missionaries of the nineteenth century, the Gülenists had built schools everywhere from Kabul to Nairobi, Japan to Indonesia, Mexico City and across the United States of America: Houston, Chicago, Washington, D.C. Many American policy makers embraced the Gülenists as a necessary moderating Islamic force in a world besieged by Islamic terrorism. I wanted to know whether the West’s preoccupation with terrorism might have made them blind to the Gülenists’ normal human flaws: destructive ambition, a desire for state power. But few editors were curious about Gülen, the imam who lived in America. One told me that he couldn’t see why the Gülen movement, being peaceful and nonthreatening, had anything to do with American interests.
So I went to Greece. The financial crisis had gotten stuck there, drawing strength from the country’s many dysfunctions. Everyone, at the time, looked down on Greece. Pundits scoffed that the Greeks had brought their stupendous crisis upon themselves, as if some deficit in their collective southern character, some deeply embedded depravity, had compelled them to destroy Europe. Just as with the investment bankers who couldn’t muster any empathy for Americans who had lost their houses to bum mortgages, there was an international assumption that only an inferior (crazy, irrational, corrupt) people would have allowed such a calamity to befall them, not that the calamity might have been part of a larger calamity, and certainly not that the calamity might have begun, at least somewhat, in the United States. This was the strange way our sense of identity worked; we were omnipotent, and yet when a global financial crisis happened, we contemptuously shifted the blame onto other people, other countries. I didn’t know much about Greeks, except for the remnants of the community in Istanbul, and I knew few growing up. It might have been their insignificance in my imagination that led me—perhaps unconsciously—to imbibe the spectacularly insidious prejudice of the time: the lazy, crazy Greeks. This silly tiny country. I arrived in Athens expecting a circus.
Though because I, too, was bewildered—horrified, ashamed—by the financial crisis in my own country, I felt myself more vulnerable to new ideas, and from the unlikeliest sources. On one of my first days in Athens, I interviewed a member of the Communist Party who sat near a painting of Lenin and peppered his speech with “comrade,” all of which seemed absurd to my American sensibilities. But something in his sentiments, maybe just the outrage, felt wholly logical as well. “We deny this government propaganda that everyone is responsible for this situation,” he said. “We don’t agree with the EU idea that the banks are too big to fail, because they are still making millions in profits. It’s an illusion that it’ll be in the favor of people if we return to growth and development.”
Greece, I discovered, was a place where hammers and sickles and “Fuck the Police” graffiti decorated the city walls; where references to civil wars and world wars and an American intervention came up in daily conversation; where immigrants fleeing war and economic plunder scrambled atop the life raft of European shores and festered in Athens. To Americans, the Greek crisis seemed separate from the Arab Spring, which seemed separate from, say, East Africa, but later I would meet a Kenyan activist who had been incorporating such diverse movements as Occupy Wall Street, Syriza, gay marriage, and political stirrings from Cairo to Jakarta into her own development of Kenyan activism. We don’t count the early Greek protests as part of Occupy or the Arab Spring, but that wave of dissent might have kicked off in Athens, as early as 2008. Ideas
and images were ricocheting around the world at new speeds, but they also settled in people’s psyches forever. In Greece, their rage was broad, bigger than Greece. Their rage, like that of so many others during that time, was against history.
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THE STREETS OF CENTRAL ATHENS are lined with tables and in spring, when the sun is still pale yellow and soft, they are full of people. Greece is a café civilization, and yet visitors seeing this for the first time react defensively: What financial crisis? Look, every table is filled with Greeks. Shops were still open, crowds ballooned out of the Metro exits, cars clogged the streets. People were laughing. They gave street dancers their coins. The Acropolis hadn’t fallen down. How could we measure this new suffering in beautiful, quaint Europe when everything looked so nice? Only the Greeks themselves, as my friend Olga explained to me, would look at that souvlaki joint with the tables outside and tell you that a souvlaki and Coke cost only four euros, that that young man sitting there for hours was unemployed and didn’t want to sit in his apartment or he would kill himself, and that that elderly pensioner sitting with him had lost his pension and probably had been nursing that same draft of beer all day. The foreigner, the German bureaucrat, and the IMF representative couldn’t see that, and so for the young man and the old pensionless pensioner, there would be no limit to their suffering.
