THE NEXT TIME a Turk, a young student at Istanbul’s Bo?azi?i University, told me she believed America had bombed itself on September 11—I heard this with some regularity—I repeated my claim about believing in the integrity of American journalism. She replied, a bit sheepishly, “Well, right, we can’t trust our journalism. We can’t take that for granted.” The words “take that for granted” gave me pause. Having lived in Turkey for over a year, witnessing how their own nationalistic propaganda had inspired their views of the world and of themselves, their newspapers and their school curriculums, I wondered from where the belief in our objectivity and rigor in journalism came. Why would Americans be objective and everyone else subjective? From where did we get this special power? I thought that because Turkey had poorly functioning institutions—they didn’t have a reliable justice system, as compared to an American system I believed to be functional—it often felt as if there was no truth; for example, a man would be murdered and no one would ever be able to prove who did it. Turks were always skeptical of official histories, and blithely dismissive of the government’s line. But was it rather that the Turks, with their beautiful skepticism, were actually just less nationalist than me?
American exceptionalism had declared our 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’s nationalistic propaganda, I had internalized this belief as the basis of my reality. Wasn’t 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, 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. Likewise, if I had long ago succumbed to the pathology of American nationalism, I wouldn’t know it—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 na?ve.
I had come to notice that a community of activists and intellectuals in Turkey—the liberal ones—were indeed questioning what “Turkishness” meant in new ways. Many of them had been brainwashed in their schools about their own history, about Atatürk, 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, about the historic and eternal goodness of the Turkish Republic.
“It is different in the United States,” I once said, not entirely realizing what I was saying until the words came out. I had never been called upon to explain this. “We 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’t propaganda, that is truth. And to us, that isn’t nationalism, it’s patriotism. And the thing is, we will never question any of it because at the same time, all we are being told is how freethinking we are, that we are free. So we don’t 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.”
“Wow,” a friend once replied. “How strange. That is a very quiet kind of fascism, isn’t it?”
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 toward the peoples of the world. That night of conspiracy theories, Emre had alleged that I was a spy. “That information is being used for something,” Emre said. “You are a spy.” 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 who believed that one mere newspaper article could mean war, that one misplaced opinion could mean an intervention by the IMF, that my attitude, my prejudice, my lack of generosity could be entirely false, inaccurate, damaging, but that it would be taken for truth by the powerful newspapers and magazines I wrote for, thus shaping perceptions of Turkey forever. Years later, a journalist told me he loved working for a major newspaper because the White House read it, because he could “influence policy.” Emre had told me how likely it was I would screw this up; he was saying to me: First, spy, do no harm.
*
ONCE YOU REALIZE that the way you have looked at the world—the way you viewed your country, your history, your life—has been muddled, you begin a process of shedding layers of skin. It’s a slow process, you break down, you open up, but you also resist, much like how the body can begin to heal, only to fall back into its sicker state. I became so conscious of my assumptions that a new reflex began to emerge. Baldwin said the end of the empire necessitated the radical revision of identity. If the Turkish identity was so bound up in its relationship to the state, wasn’t ours? What was that state and what was that history?
I began to read the newspaper differently. I could see how alienating it was to foreigners, the way articles spoke always from a position of American power, treating foreign countries as if they were America’s 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. I read history differently, too. That year Drew Gilpin Faust published a book called This Republic of Suffering, whose central argument is that Americans during the Civil War were barbaric. I realized that American pundits often described the Middle East as some foreign, chaotic, unraveling, atavistic, violent, inhuman place but were oblivious to their own extraordinarily barbaric history: the Indian wars, the tree-strung lynchings, the My Lai massacre. And the American Civil War, which, as Faust writes, “produced carnage that has often been thought reserved for the combination of technological proficiency and inhumanity characteristic of a later time.”
When the financial crisis struck, I could see from Turkey all the countries that were being felled by this distant mother ship, this strange empire that wasn’t. I thought of all the Wharton School investment-banker kids I went to college with in the 1990s, we being the earliest beneficiaries of the delusions of globalization, we who lived and thrived in this fantasy world that preyed not only on our own American people but on the people we never thought about very far away. I found myself ranting in bars at night about my classmates. “Those people know nothing about the rest of the world!” I said. “They have no idea that what they do affects the global economy! What their stupid games could mean for a farmer in Ukraine!” Maybe I said Turkey, maybe Egypt, maybe Guam. Who knows. I was so angry, I had so much contempt for them, and for Americans, and for myself, who also had no idea how that global economy, how anything, worked.