{"id":194,"date":"2021-08-21T18:45:16","date_gmt":"2021-08-21T22:45:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-2021\/?page_id=194"},"modified":"2021-08-21T18:47:06","modified_gmt":"2021-08-21T22:47:06","slug":"unlearning-the-myth","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-2021\/unlearning-the-myth\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cUnlearning the Myth of American Innocence\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

August 8 2017,\u00a0The Guardian<\/em><\/p>\n

When she was 30,\u00a0Suzy Hansen<\/a>\u00a0left the US for Istanbul \u2013 and began to realise that Americans will never understand their own country until they see it as the rest of the world does<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

My mother recently found piles of my notebooks from when I was a small child that were filled with plans for my future. I was very ambitious. I wrote out what I would do at every age: when I would get married and when I would have kids and when I would open a dance studio.<\/p>\n

When I left my small hometown for college, this sort of planning stopped. The experience of going to a radically new place, as college was to me, upended my sense of the world and its possibilities. The same thing happened when I moved to New York after college, and a few years later when I moved to Istanbul. All change is dramatic for provincial people. But the last move was the hardest. In\u00a0Turkey<\/a>, the upheaval was far more unsettling: after a while, I began to feel that the entire foundation of my consciousness was a lie.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

For all their patriotism, Americans rarely think about how their national identities relate to their personal ones. This indifference is particular to the psychology of white Americans and has a history unique to the US. In recent years, however, this national identity has become more difficult to ignore. Americans can no longer travel in foreign countries without noticing the strange weight we carry with us. In these years after the wars\u00a0in Iraq<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Afghanistan<\/a>, and the many wars that followed, it has become more difficult to gallivant across the world absorbing its wisdom and resources for one\u2019s own personal use. Americans abroad now do not have the same swagger, the easy, enormous smiles. You no longer want to speak so loud. There is always the vague risk of breaking something.<\/p>\n

Some years after I moved to Istanbul, I bought a notebook, and unlike that confident child, I wrote down not plans but a question: who do we become if we don\u2019t become Americans? If we discover that our identity as we understood it had been a myth? I asked it because my years as an American abroad in the 21st century were not a joyous romp of self-discovery and romance. Mine were more of a shattering and a shame, and even now, I still don\u2019t know myself.<\/p>\n

Igrew up in Wall, a town located by the Jersey Shore, two hours\u2019 drive from New York. Much of it was a landscape of concrete and parking lots, plastic signs and Dunkin\u2019 Donuts. There was no centre, no Main Street, as there was in most of the pleasant beach towns nearby, no tiny old movie theatre or architecture suggesting some sort of history or memory.<\/p>\n

Most of my friends\u2019 parents were teachers, nurses, cops or electricians, except for the rare father who worked in \u201cthe City\u201d, and a handful of Italian families who did less legal things. My parents were descendants of working-class Danish, Italian and Irish immigrants who had little memory of their European origins, and my extended family ran an inexpensive public golf course, where I worked as a hot-dog girl in the summers. The politics I heard about as a kid had to do with taxes and immigrants, and not much else.\u00a0Bill Clinton<\/a>\u00a0was not popular in my house. (In 2016,\u00a0most of Wall voted Trump<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

We were all patriotic, but I can\u2019t even conceive of what else we could have been, because our entire experience was domestic, interior, American. We went to church on Sundays, until church time was usurped by soccer games. I don\u2019t remember a strong sense of civic engagement. Instead I had the feeling that people could take things from you if you didn\u2019t stay vigilant. Our goals remained local: homecoming queen, state champs, a scholarship to Trenton State, barbecues in the backyard. The lone Asian kid in our class studied hard and went to Berkeley; the Indian went to Yale. Black people never came to Wall. The world was white, Christian; the world was us.<\/p>\n

We did not study world maps, because international geography, as a subject, had been phased out of many state curriculums long before. There was no sense of the US being one country on a planet of many countries. Even the\u00a0Soviet Union<\/a>\u00a0seemed something more like the Death Star \u2013 flying overhead, ready to laser us to smithereens \u2013 than a country with people in it.<\/p>\n

Boardwalk empire \u2026 a variety shop in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Photo: Michael S Williamson\/The Washington Post<\/p>\n

I have TV memories of world events. Even in my mind, they appear on a screen:\u00a0Oliver North<\/a>\u00a0testifying in the Iran-Contra hearings; the scarred, evil-seeming face of Panama\u2019s dictator\u00a0Manuel Noriega<\/a>; the movie-like footage, all flashes of light, of the bombing of Baghdad during the\u00a0first Gulf war<\/a>. Mostly what I remember of that war in Iraq was singing God Bless the USA on the school bus \u2013 I was 13 \u2013 wearing little yellow ribbons and becoming teary-eyed as I remembered the video of the song I had seen on MTV.<\/p>\n

And I\u2019m proud to be an American<\/p>\n

Where at least I know I\u2019m free<\/p>\n

That \u201cat least\u201d is funny. We were free \u2013 at the very least we were that. Everyone else was a chump, because they didn\u2019t even have that obvious thing. Whatever it meant, it was the thing that we had, and no one else did. It was our God-given gift, our superpower.<\/p>\n

By the time I got to high school, I knew that communism had gone away, but never learned what communism had actually been (\u201cbad\u201d was enough). Religion, politics, race \u2013 they washed over me like troubled things that obviously meant something to someone somewhere, but that had no relationship to me, to Wall, to America. I certainly had no idea that most people in the world felt those connections deeply. History \u2013 America\u2019s history, the world\u2019s history \u2013 would slip in and out of my consciousness with no resonance whatsoever.<\/p>\n

Racism, antisemitism and prejudice, however \u2013 those things, on some unconscious level, I must have known. They were expressed in the fear of\u00a0Asbury Park<\/a>, which was black; in the resentment of the towns of Marlboro and Deal, which were known as Jewish; in the way Hispanics seemed exotic. Much of the Jersey Shore was segregated as if it were still the 1950s, and so prejudice was expressed through fear of anything outside Wall, anything outside the tiny white world in which we lived. If there was something that saved us from being outwardly racist, it was that in small towns such as Wall, especially for girls, it was important to be\u00a0nice<\/em>, or\u00a0good \u2013\u00a0<\/em>this pressure tempered tendencies toward overt cruelty when we were young.<\/p>\n

I was lucky that I had a mother who nourished my early-onset book addiction, an older brother with mysteriously acquired progressive politics, and a father who spent his evenings studying obscure golf antiques, lost in the pleasures of the past. In these days of the 1%, I am nostalgic for Wall\u2019s middle-class modesty and its sea-salt Jersey Shore air. But as a teenager, I knew that the only thing that could rescue me from the Wall of fear was a good college.<\/p>\n

I\u00a0ended up at the University of Pennsylvania. The lack of interest in the wider world that I had known in Wall found another expression there, although at Penn the children were wealthy, highly educated and apolitical. During orientation, the business school students were told that they were \u201cthe smartest people in the country\u201d, or so I had heard. (Donald Trump Jr was there then, too.) In the late 1990s, everyone at Penn wanted to be an investment banker, and many would go on to help bring down the world economy a decade later. But they were more educated than I was; in American literature class, they had even heard of\u00a0William Faulkner<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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TV memories \u2026 Lt Col Oliver North is sworn in before Congress for the Iran-Contra hearings, July 1987. Photograph: Lana Harris\/AP<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

When my best friend from Wall revealed one night that she hadn\u2019t heard of\u00a0John McEnroe<\/a>\u00a0or\u00a0Jerry Garcia<\/a>, some boys on the dormitory hall called us ignorant, and white trash, and chastised us for not reading magazines. We were hurt, and surprised; white trash was something we said about other people at the Jersey Shore. My boyfriend from Wall accused me of going to Penn solely to find a boyfriend who drove a Ferrari, and the boys at Penn made fun of the Camaros we drove in high school. Class in America was not something we understood in any structural or intellectual way; class was a constellation of a million little materialistic cultural signifiers, and the insult, loss or acquisition of any of them could transform one\u2019s future entirely.<\/p>\n

In the end, I chose to pursue the new life Penn offered me. The kids I met had parents who were doctors or academics; many of them had already even been to Europe! Penn, for all its superficiality, felt one step closer to a larger world.<\/p>\n

Still, I cannot remember any of us being conscious of foreign events during my four years of college. There were wars in Eritrea, Nepal, Afghanistan, Kosovo, East Timor, Kashmir. US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam were bombed. Panama, Nicaragua (I couldn\u2019t keep Latin American countries straight),\u00a0Osama bin Laden<\/a>, Clinton bombing Iraq \u2013 nope.<\/p>\n

I knew\u00a0\u201cSaddam Hussein\u201d<\/a>, which had the same evil resonance as \u201ccommunism\u201d. I remember the movie\u00a0Wag the Dog<\/a>, a satire in which American politicians start a fake war with foreign \u201cterrorists\u201d to distract the electorate during a domestic scandal \u2013 which at the time was what many accused Clinton of doing when he ordered a missile strike on Afghanistan during the\u00a0Monica Lewinsky affair<\/a>. I never thought about Afghanistan. What country was in Wag the Dog? Albania. There was a typical American callousness in our reaction to the country they chose for the movie, an indifference that said,\u00a0Some bumblefuck country, it doesn\u2019t matter which one they choose.<\/em><\/p>\n

I was a child of the 90s, the decade when, according to America\u2019s foremost intellectuals,\u00a0\u201chistory\u201d had ended<\/a>, the US was triumphant, the cold war won by a landslide. The historian David Schmitz has written that, by that time, the idea that America won because of \u201cits values and steadfast adherence to the promotion of liberalism and democracy\u201d was dominating \u201cop-ed pages, popular magazines and the bestseller lists\u201d. These ideas were the ambient noise, the elevator music of my most formative years.<\/p>\n

But for me there was also an intervention \u2013 a chance experience in the basement of Penn\u2019s library. I came across a line in a book in which a historian argued that, long ago, during the slavery era, black people and white people had defined their identities in opposition to each other. The revelation to me was not that black people had conceived of their identities in response to ours, but that our white identities had been composed in conscious objection to\u00a0theirs<\/em>. I\u2019d had no idea that we had ever had to define our identities at all, because to me, white Americans were born fully formed, completely detached from any sort of complicated past. Even now, I can remember that shiver of recognition that only comes when you learn something that expands, just a tiny bit, your sense of reality. What made me angry was that this revelation was something about who I\u00a0was<\/em>. How much more did I not know about myself?<\/p>\n

It was because of this text that I picked up the books of\u00a0James Baldwin<\/a>, who gave me the sense of meeting someone who knew me better, and with a far more sophisticated critical arsenal than I had myself. There was this line:<\/p>\n

But I have always been struck, in America, by an emotional poverty so bottomless, and a terror of human life, of human touch, so deep, that virtually no American appears able to achieve any viable, organic connection between his public stance and his private life.<\/p>\n

And this one:<\/p>\n

All of the western nations have been caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism; this means that their history has no moral justification, and that the west has no moral authority.<\/p>\n

And this one:<\/p>\n

White Americans are probably the sickest and certainly the most dangerous people, of any colour, to be found in the world today.<\/p>\n

I know why this came as a shock to me then, at the age of 22, and it wasn\u2019t necessarily because he said I was sick, though that was part of it. It was because he kept calling me that thing: \u201cwhite American\u201d. In my reaction I justified his accusation. I knew I was white, and I knew I was American, but it was not what I understood to be my identity. For me, self-definition was about gender, personality, religion, education, dreams. I only thought about finding myself, becoming myself, discovering myself \u2013 and this, I hadn\u2019t known, was the most white American thing of all.<\/p>\n

I still did not think about my place in the larger world, or that perhaps an entire history \u2013 the history of white Americans \u2013 had something to do with who I was. My lack of consciousness allowed me to believe I was innocent, or that white American was not an identity like Muslim or Turk.<\/p>\n

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\u2018White Americans are probably the most dangerous people in the world today\u2019 \u2026 author James Baldwin in New York, 1963. Photograph: Dave Pickoff\/AP<\/p>\n

Of this indifference, Baldwin wrote: \u201cWhite children, in the main, and whether they are rich or poor, grow up with a grasp of reality so feeble that they can very accurately be described as deluded.\u201d<\/p>\n

Young white Americans of course go through pain, insecurity and heartache. But it is very, very rare that young white Americans come across someone who tells them in harsh, unforgiving terms that they might be merely the easy winners of an ugly game, and indeed that because of their ignorance and misused power, they might be the losers within a greater moral universe.<\/p>\n

In 2007, after I had worked for six years as a journalist in New York, I won a writing fellowship that would send me to Turkey for two years. I had applied for it on a whim. No part of me expected to win the thing. Even as my friends wished me congratulations, I detected a look of concern on their faces, as if I was crazy to leave all this, as if 29 was a little too late to be finding myself. I had never even been to Turkey before.<\/p>\n

In the weeks before my departure, I spent hours explaining Turkey\u2019s international relevance to my bored loved ones, no doubt deploying the cliche that Istanbul was the bridge between east and west. I told everyone that I chose Turkey because I wanted to learn about the Islamic world. The secret reason I wanted to go was that Baldwin had lived in Istanbul in the 1960s, on and off, for almost a decade. I had seen a documentary about Baldwin that said he felt more comfortable as a black, gay man in Istanbul than in Paris or New York.<\/p>\n

When I heard that, it made so little sense to me, sitting in my Brooklyn apartment, that a space opened in the universe. I couldn\u2019t believe that New York could be more illiberal than a place such as Turkey, because I couldn\u2019t conceive of how prejudiced New York and Paris had been in that era; and because I thought that as you went east, life degraded into the past, the opposite of progress. The idea of Baldwin in Turkey somehow placed America\u2019s race problem, and America itself, in a mysterious and tantalising international context. I took a chance that Istanbul might be the place where the secret workings of history would be revealed.<\/p>\n

In Turkey and elsewhere, in fact, I would feel an almost physical sensation of intellectual and emotional discomfort, while trying to grasp a reality of which I had no historical or cultural understanding. I would go, as a journalist, to write a story about Turkey or Greece or Egypt or Afghanistan, and inevitably someone would tell me some part of our shared history \u2013 theirs with America \u2013 of which I knew nothing. If I didn\u2019t know this history, then what kind of story did I plan to tell?<\/p>\n

City watch \u2026 US army troops stand guard at a checkpoint in Baghdad, Iraq, in August 2007. Photograph: Spencer Platt\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

My learning process abroad was threefold: I was learning about foreign countries; I was learning about America\u2019s role in the world; and I was also slowly understanding my own psychology, temperament and prejudices. No matter how well I knew the\u00a0predatory aspects of capitalism<\/a>, I still perceived Turkey\u2019s and Greece\u2019s economic advances as progress, a kind of maturation. No matter how deeply I understood the US\u2019s manipulation of Egypt for its own foreign-policy aims, I had never considered \u2013 and could not grasp \u2013 how American policies really affected the lives of individual Egyptians, beyond engendering resentment and anti-Americanism. No matter how much I believed that no American was well-equipped for nation-building, I thought I could see good intentions on the part of the Americans in Afghanistan. I would never have admitted it, or thought to say it, but looking back, I know that deep in my consciousness I thought that America was at the end of some evolutionary spectrum of civilisation, and everyone else was trying to catch up.<\/p>\n

American exceptionalism did not only define the US as a special nation among lesser nations; it also demanded that all Americans believe they, too, were somehow superior to others. How could I, as an American, understand a foreign people, when unconsciously I did not extend the most basic faith to other people that I extended to myself? This was a limitation that was beyond racism, beyond prejudice and beyond ignorance. This was a kind of nationalism so insidious that I had not known to call it nationalism; this was a self-delusion so complete that I could not see where it began and ended, could not root it out, could not destroy it.<\/p>\n

In my first few months in Istanbul, I lived a formless kind of existence, days dissolving into the nights. I had no office to go to, no job to keep, and I was 30 years old, an age at which people either choose to grow up or remain stuck in the exploratory, idle phase of late-late youth. Starting all over again in a foreign country \u2013 making friends, learning a new language, trying to find your way through a city \u2013 meant almost certainly choosing the latter. I spent many nights out until the wee hours \u2013 such as the evening I drank beer with a young Turkish man named Emre, who had attended college with a friend of mine from the US.<\/p>\n

A friend had told me that Emre was one of the most brilliant people he had ever met. As the evening passed, I was gaining a lot from his analysis of Turkish politics, especially when I asked him whether he voted for\u00a0Erdo\u011fan\u2019s Justice and Development party (AKP)<\/a>, and he spat back, outraged, \u201cDid you vote for\u00a0George W Bush<\/a>?\u201d Until that point I had not realised the two might be equivalent.<\/p>\n

Then, three beers in, Emre mentioned that the US had planned the\u00a0September 11 attacks<\/a>. I had heard this before. Conspiracy theories were common in Turkey; for example, when the military claimed that\u00a0the PKK, the Kurdish militant group<\/a>, had attacked a police station, some Turks believed the military itself had done it; they believed it even in cases where Turkish civilians had died. In other words, the idea was that rightwing forces, such as the military, bombed neutral targets, or even rightwing targets, so they could then blame it on the leftwing groups, such as the PKK. To Turks, bombing one\u2019s own country seemed like a real possibility.<\/p>\n

\u201cCome on, you don\u2019t believe that,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy not?\u201d he snapped. \u201cI do.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBut it\u2019s a conspiracy theory.\u201d<\/p>\n

He laughed. \u201cAmericans always dismiss these things as conspiracy theories. It\u2019s the rest of the world who have had to deal with your conspiracies.\u201d<\/p>\n

I ignored him. \u201cI guess I have faith in American journalism,\u201d I said. \u201cSomeone else would have figured this out if it were true.\u201d<\/p>\n

He smiled. \u201cI\u2019m sorry, there\u2019s no way they didn\u2019t have something to do with it. And now this war?\u201d he said, referring to the war in Iraq. \u201cIt\u2019s impossible that the United States couldn\u2019t stop such a thing, and impossible that the Muslims could pull it off.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some weeks later,\u00a0a bomb went off<\/a>\u00a0in the Istanbul neighborhood of G\u00fcng\u00f6ren. A second bomb exploded out of a garbage bin nearby after 10pm, killing 17 people and injuring 150. No one knew who did it. All that week, Turks debated: was it\u00a0al-Qaida<\/a>? The PKK? The DHKP\/C, a radical leftist group? Or maybe: the deep state?<\/p>\n

The CIA has a long history of helping to kill leaders around the world<\/strong><\/p>\n

The deep state \u2013 a system of mafia-like paramilitary organisations operating outside of the law, sometimes at the behest of the official military \u2013 was a whole other story. Turks explained that the deep state had been formed during the cold war as a way of countering communism, and then mutated into a force for destroying all threats to the Turkish state. The power that some Turks attributed to this entity sometimes strained credulity. But the point was that Turks had been living for years with the idea that some secret force controlled the fate of their nation.<\/p>\n

In fact, elements of the deep state were rumoured to have had ties to the\u00a0CIA<\/a>during the cold war, and though that too smacked of a conspiracy theory, this was the reality that Turkish people lived in. The\u00a0sheer number of international interventions<\/a>\u00a0the US launched in those decades is astonishing, especially those during years when American power was considered comparatively innocent. There were the successful assassinations:\u00a0Patrice Lumumba<\/a>, prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, in 1961;\u00a0General Rafael Trujillo<\/a>of the Dominican Republic, also in 1961;\u00a0Ngo Dinh Diem<\/a>, president of South Vietnam, in 1963. There were the unsuccessful assassinations: Castro, Castro, and\u00a0Castro<\/a>. There were the much hoped-for assassinations: Nasser, Nasser,\u00a0Nasser<\/a>. And, of course, US-sponsored, -supported or -staged regime changes: Iran, Guatemala, Iraq, Congo, Syria, Dominican Republic, South Vietnam, Indonesia, Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, Uruguay and Argentina. The Americans trained or supported secret police forces everywhere from Cambodia to Colombia, the Philippines to Peru, Iran to Vietnam. Many Turks believed that the US at least encouraged the 1971 and 1980 military coups in Turkey, though I could find little about these events in any conventional histories anywhere.<\/p>\n

But what I could see was that the effects of such meddling were comparable to those of September 11 \u2013 just as huge, life-changing and disruptive to the country and to people\u2019s lives. Perhaps Emre did not believe that September 11 was a straightforward affair of evidence and proof because his experience \u2013 his reality \u2013 taught him that very rarely were any of these surreally monumental events easily explainable. I did not think Emre\u2019s theory about the attacks was plausible. But I began to wonder whether there was much difference between a foreigner\u2019s paranoia that the Americans planned September 11 and the Americans\u2019 paranoia that the whole world should pay for September 11 with an endless global war on terror.<\/p>\n

The next time a Turk\u00a0<\/strong>told me she believed the US had bombed itself on September 11 (I heard this with some regularity; this time it was from a young student at Istanbul\u2019s Bo\u011fazi\u00e7i University), I repeated my claim about believing in the integrity of American journalism. She replied, a bit sheepishly, \u201cWell, right, we can\u2019t trust our journalism. We can\u2019t take that for granted.\u201d<\/p>\n

The words \u201ctake that for granted\u201d gave me pause. Having lived in Turkey for more than a year, witnessing how nationalistic propaganda had inspired people\u2019s views of the world and of themselves, I wondered from where the belief in our objectivity and rigour in journalism came. Why would Americans be objective and everyone else subjective?<\/p>\n

I thought that because Turkey had poorly functioning institutions \u2013 they didn\u2019t have a reliable justice system, as compared to an American system I believed to be functional \u2013 it often felt as if there was no truth. Turks were always sceptical of official histories, and blithely dismissive of the government\u2019s line. But was it rather that the Turks, with their beautiful scepticism, were actually just less nationalistic than me?<\/p>\n

American exceptionalism had declared my country unique in the world, the one truly free and modern country, and instead of ever considering that that exceptionalism was no different from any other country\u2019s nationalistic propaganda, I had internalised this belief. Wasn\u2019t that indeed what successful propaganda was supposed to do? I had not questioned the institution of American journalism outside of the standards it set for itself \u2013 which, after all, was the only way I would discern its flaws and prejudices; instead, I accepted those standards as the best standards any country could possibly have.<\/p>\n

Red state \u2026 Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdo\u011fan attends a rally following a failed coup attempt last year. Photograph: Osman Orsal\/Reuters<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

By the end of my first year abroad, I read US newspapers differently. I could see how alienating they were to foreigners, the way articles spoke always from a position of American power, treating foreign countries as if they were America\u2019s misbehaving children. I listened to my compatriots with critical ears: the way our discussion of foreign policy had become infused since September 11 with these officious, official words, bureaucratic corporate military language: collateral damage, imminent threat, freedom, freedom, freedom.<\/p>\n

Even so, I was conscious that if I had long ago succumbed to the pathology of American nationalism, I wouldn\u2019t know it \u2013 even if I understood the history of injustice in America, even if I was furious about the invasion of Iraq. I was a white American. I still had this fundamental faith in my country in a way that suddenly, in comparison to the Turks, made me feel immature and naive.<\/p>\n

I came to notice that a community of activists and intellectuals in Turkey \u2013 the liberal ones \u2013 were indeed questioning what \u201cTurkishness\u201d meant in new ways. Many of them had been brainwashed in their schools about their own history; about\u00a0Atat\u00fcrk, Turkey\u2019s first president<\/a>; about the supposed evil of the Armenians and the Kurds and the Arabs; about the fragility of their borders and the rapaciousness of all outsiders; and about the historic and eternal goodness of the Turkish republic.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is different in the United States,\u201d I once said, not entirely realising what I was saying until the words came out. I had never been called upon to explain this. \u201cWe are told it is the greatest country on earth. The thing is, we will never reconsider that narrative the way you are doing just now, because to us, that isn\u2019t propaganda, that is truth. And to us, that isn\u2019t nationalism, it\u2019s patriotism. And the thing is, we will never question any of it because at the same time, all we are being told is how free-thinking we are, that we are free. So we don\u2019t know there is anything wrong in believing our country is the greatest on earth. The whole thing sort of convinces you that a collective consciousness in the world came to that very conclusion.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWow,\u201d a friend once replied. \u201cHow strange. That is a very quiet kind of fascism, isn\u2019t it?\u201d<\/p>\n

It was a quiet kind of fascism that would mean I would always see Turkey as beneath the country I came from, and also that would mean I believed my uniquely benevolent country to have uniquely benevolent intentions towards the peoples of the world.<\/p>\n

During that night of conspiracy theories, Emre had alleged, as foreigners often did, that I was a spy. The information that I was collecting as a journalist, Emre said, was really being used for something else. As an American emissary in the wider world, writing about foreigners, governments, economies partaking in some larger system and scheme of things, I was an agent somehow. Emre lived in the American world as a foreigner, as someone less powerful, as someone for whom one newspaper article could mean war, or one misplaced opinion could mean an intervention by the International Monetary Fund. My attitude, my prejudice, my lack of generosity could be entirely false, inaccurate or damaging, but would be taken for truth by the newspapers and magazines I wrote for, thus shaping perceptions of Turkey for ever.<\/p>\n

Years later, an American journalist told me he loved working for a major newspaper because the White House read it, because he could \u201cinfluence policy\u201d. Emre had told me how likely it was I would screw this up. He was saying to me: first, spy, do no harm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

August 8 2017,\u00a0The Guardian When she was 30,\u00a0Suzy Hansen\u00a0left the US for Istanbul \u2013 and began to realise that Americans will never understand their own country until they see it as the rest of the world does My mother recently found piles of my notebooks from when I was a small child that were filled … Continue reading “\u201cUnlearning the Myth of American Innocence\u201d”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":114,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-194","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/114"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=194"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/194\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":196,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/194\/revisions\/196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/world-politics-2021\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}