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

by Suzy Hansen

THIS IS A BOOK about an American living abroad in the era of American decline.

Fokus

As an American abroad now, you do not have the same crazy, smiling confidence. You do not want to speak so loud.

it is the impotence born of a constant humiliation, of a failure to make oneself understood, to have one’s voice heard.”

The philosopher Jonathan Lear has written that certain books can provoke an ethical transformation in their readers,

the year of the Rwandan genocide, and the Bosnian war,

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.

Americans would become so terrified of the rise of communism that they would soon encourage the Turkish government to use an unlikely force against it: Islam.

Egyptian jails. “The one thing that everybody in the prison had in common—the ISIS guys, the Muslim Brotherhood guys, the liberals, the guards, the officers,” he said, “is that they all hated America.”

Baghdad University in the 1980s had more female professors than Princeton did in 2009,”

It was because we did not see Iraqis as humans that we did not know that “democracy,” a word by then sucked of most of its meaning by the American century, might have mattered less to most parents than the ability to feed, house, educate, and protect their children.

ISIS was born from the Iraqi occupation; it came from the Americans. It may have grown from the darkness, because the Americans couldn’t make the electricity work. It may have grown from the world we created in Iraq: the night raids by scary hulks draped in weaponry, kicking open doors and humiliating men and dishonoring women, the bombs from the air, the tanks in the street.

It is one of the ironies of Turkish history that it was the Kemalist-secularist military’s coup that would usher in Turkey’s era of political Islam.

Nothing seemed to make Erdoğan happier than the smell of freshly laid asphalt.

when an economic system humiliated its workers, when the system was, essentially, violent, it meant the humiliation and abuse of women, children, an entire society.

the empire did decline, it would, as Baldwin had predicted long ago, first decline from within.

After my time in Mississippi, I left America knowing for sure that the promise of the country had not failed with the financial crisis or September 11; it failed long ago. It failed itself, its own people, and its own ideals,

We cannot go abroad as Americans in the twenty-first century and not realize that the main thing that has been terrorizing us for the last sixteen years is our own ignorance—our blindness and subsequent discovery of all the people on whom the empire-that-was-not-an-empire had been constructed without our attention or concern.

I did not blame those voters for Trump’s election, and I didn’t even blame them, in all cases, for their racism. I blamed the country for Trump’s election because it was a country built on the rhetoric and actions of white supremacy, by which I mean it was a country built on the rhetoric and actions of American supremacy.