Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World

by Suzy Hansen

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.

Americans believe people must be subjugated so that they themselves can be free.

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.

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

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

order for Americans to believe in their own superiority, they also had to avoid questioning their own lives and the system in which they lived. I wasn’t sure I believed that American faculties, during this comparatively rebellious era of the 1950s and 1960s, could have been so easily disabled, until I came across a book called Workshops of Empire.

the University of Iowa founders sought out specific types of American writers. They disregarded people who were devoted to social justice and leftist causes that, in their view, were juvenile. They encouraged, instead, those writers whose work was “preoccupied by family and self.”

University of Iowa’s philosophy of fiction privileged the sanctity of personal experience—the preciousness of the individual—over the idea that our identities are shaped by the community or political systems or larger historical forces.

was possible that our highly valued American individualism might have been the ultimate force that detached citizens from the actions of their government, and from the fate of the country as a whole.

The hotel magnate Conrad Hilton was, like Henry Luce, a fervent Christian, capitalist, and anti-Communist. He believed that the Cold War should be fought not only with bombs but with room service. Hilton

As an advertisement for the modern ways of American life, the Hilton in Istanbul was a magnet to local aspirants. The hotel was where the wealthy Turkish secular classes held their weddings and social engagements and, as Hilton had hoped, learned to admire America.

Hilton’s hotels were intended not only to fill foreigners with dreams of America. They were also meant as a refuge for Americans when traveling abroad. Hilton wanted the hotels to remind all Americans of their paradise back home, their own polished, peaceful modernity: enormous, clean-lined, and spic-and-span foyers, ice water (rare in Istanbul then), the latest technological gadgetry, and unsurpassable hamburgers.

Claus Offe writes, “The United States is no longer a spatially distant entity but a military, commercial and cultural presence, here and now, in a common space. American realities have in part become our reality.” This global system, this common space, was no doubt in part due to American efforts during the Cold War, in which control, influence, and warfare needed to be unacknowledged in order to fully succeed in creating a global citizenry of American moderns who believed they came to their admiration for America on their own.

expats, intellectuals and novelists, scientists and doctors, imbued with the wisdom of older civilizations, sensed deeper problems in American society. They were, after a while, alarmed.

America was a “country where everything is done to prove that life isn’t tragic.”

foreigners could see this American tidal wave enveloping their lives. Along with the CIA and the State Department propaganda schemes came the NGOs and the military, even to places as unfamiliar as Pakistan.

Americans suddenly found themselves able to take advantage of a ready-made empire of formerly colonized peoples that would come to be known as the “Third World.” In response, the Truman administration conceived of what is known as his Point Four Program, a plan ostensibly meant to aid the benighted countries of the planet.

“Modernization” would end up being the Americans’ cleverest euphemism for empire building after 1950, and though the history of “modernization theory” has been deconstructed in countless academic books—Nils Gilman’s Mandarins of the Future, Hemant Shah’s The Production of Modernization, among many others—this most indestructible of American Cold War mentalities still seems to underpin Americans’ fundamental sense of reality.

“irresistible and obviously superior path” to modernity. The Americans decided not to use the word “Westernization” to describe their theory, so as to appear neutral. As Gilman writes, the difference between the Europeans and the Americans was that the Europeans never even imagined that colonized peoples were capable of being as modern as Europeans. The Americans wholeheartedly believed they could make anyone into an American.

The United States didn’t tolerate military dictatorships; it fostered them.

Kennedy’s advisor, Rostow’s academic faith in America’s missionary role in the modernization of other countries led to the invasion, occupation, and destruction of Vietnam. At

Americans were measuring the world “like the person who measures the competence of everybody on terms of his own special competence.”

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.

“The United States is presiding at a general reorganization of the ways of living throughout the entire world.”

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.

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-determinati...

than a societal revolution that would upend the way people usually operated: from doctors and tax collectors and lawyers who took bribes to cabdrivers who didn’t give receipts. Greece also had a bloated, mismanaged public sector and a stunted private one, both legacies of a political system prone to clientelism and corruption, which had caused the demon-word “socialism” to creep into the censorious Western rhetoric about the country. I wondered how the West had ever allowed Greece, a member of NATO, to become so Socialist in the first place.

that the new flood of money from the West had not filtered down to their own lives, or to the services and universities they needed. “The flames may die down but the coals will simmer,” one young protestor told The Guardian at the time. “One little thing, and you’ll see it will ignite again. Ours is a future without work, without hope. Our grievances are so big, so many. Only a very strong government can stop the rot.”

The state was at fault, but his words conjured notions of forces too big, of changes too massive, coming from places too mysterious.

“We’ve lived through many things,” Spiridou said. He looked heartbroken for a moment, and then angry. “Civil war, a dictatorship, the fall of communism. Now what I hope is that I live to see the fall of capitalism. That’s my dream. And I will see it.”

His leftist language surprised me then, but soon everyone would be discussing capitalism in this way, like any other phase of history, one that would pass.

“Many Greeks view the state with a combination of a sense of entitlement, mistrust, and dislike similar to that of teenagers vis-à-vis their parents. They expect to be funded without contributing.

later realized, was because it recalled the language of modernization theory, whose intellectual proponents thought of postcolonial nations as rebellious adolescents. According to Nils Gilman, the image of foreign nations as “‘young’ or ‘immature’ appears throughout the literature on modernization.” At the time of my interview with Kalyvas I hadn’t known anything about modernization theory. But I hadn’t needed to. Mainstream newspapers such as The New York Times, a million television news broadcasts, likely even most of my college history courses all used the same language of the maturity and immaturity of nations. That rhetoric was not only condescending, but a kind of Trojan horse: it implied progress and hope—

U.S. intervention in Greece…” “Didn’t you know the first U.S. intervention of the post–Cold War period was in Greece?”

THE AMERICANS’ AFFECTION for fascism in the 1930s fell disproportionately on the small country of Greece. (The Americans at that time also supported Mussolini.)

One of the less famous examples of Nazi horror during World War II was its occupation of Athens. During their three-year occupation of the country, the Nazis wreaked havoc on Greek society, subjecting the population to starvation, torture, imprisonment, and death, and forever rending the bonds among the Greek people. Inevitably, the terror gave way to an insurgency by Greek rebels who were, to varying degrees, leftists and Communists. When the war ended, those who organized the leftist resistance continued fighting with the royalist Greek army that had tolerated, and at times collaborated with, the Nazis. It was, as the Greek novelist Nikos Kazantzakis, put it, a fratricide. The Greek Civil War was also one of the first battles of the Cold War.

As they saw it, all of the countries around Greece had fallen: Czechoslovakia, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania. Greece would be the place where the West would take its stand. The Americans’ “domino theory,” introduced to American students in lesson plans about Vietnam, originated with Greece, which was seen as the first piece to fall before knocking down Iran in one direction and Italy in the other. Greece would stay anti-Communist at any price. In 1947, Truman went to Congress and pleaded with them to pass the Truman Doctrine.

The United States must supply this assistance. We have already extended to Greece certain types of relief and economic aid but these are inadequate. There is no other country to which democratic Greece can turn. No other nation is willing and able to provide the necessary support for a democratic Greek government. I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.

exceptionalism: the idea that America’s duty to the world was to liberate foreign peoples.

ONE OF THE FIRST VICTIMS of the Cold War era was the American journalist George Polk,

“We have to stand for decency and for freedom,” he said. “We’re no better than the Russians otherwise.”

His reporting undermined American aid to Greece and threatened America’s collaboration with the Greek government against the Communists. When his body washed up in a Thessaloniki bay, the authorities pinned the murder on the reds.

In the late forties, the United States was giving hundreds of millions of dollars a year to Greece in economic and military aid.

The rest of the American money went to the military, with which the Greek government began a series of emergency measures to purge Communists and disloyal citizens from society. On some of the thousands of islands strewn across the Aegean Sea, the Greeks constructed internment camps, where citizens were “reeducated” and forced to renounce communism. The government tortured them with truncheon beatings, and gave them electric shocks, and bound their skin with wire. So-called and supposed Communists—or anyone who criticized the regime—were regularly executed, cities locked down under curfews. The streets of Athens were festooned with American military regalia.

It was these policies, the American policies, that drove more Greeks to join the dreaded Communist resistance.

The outlandishly brutal actions of America abroad in the 1950s required compensatory rationalizing language, a language equally violent in its distortion. It was a discourse that defined “objectivity”—indeed, “reality”—according to the requirements of American power, and that, as much as in Greece, was created in Latin America.

Guatemala, the Americans reasoned, threatened to go Communist as well. “Public opinion in the U.S. might force us to take some measures to prevent Guatemala from falling into the lap of international Communism,”

Greece was one of the Americans’ first occupied satellite states after World War II, Guatemala would count as one of its first military coups.