I grew up with little sense of this history, and didn’t incorporate it into my assessment of American foreign policy, or myself. The born-again experience that characterized the very founding of America would later be reenacted by millions of immigrants like me, whose freedom also meant severing from their past. In Turkey, when I would bring up the Armenian genocide, the foundational slaughter of a Christian minority that allowed for the creation of the Turkish state, Turks would often remind me of the elimination of the Native Americans. This was a defensive rhetorical trick on their part, but my reflex, even if only in my mind, was to reply that “that was many hundreds of years ago,” which was how I actually felt. Technically, it was true: my family didn’t own slaves either. About the appropriation of land, the plundering of resources, the taming of rivers, the enslavement of people, and the destruction of plains and mountains—all of which contributed to making my country the wealthiest and most powerful on earth, and myself a beneficiary of it—I could say, “I had nothing to do with that and it is not a part of me.”
The suppression of the Native Americans, the insistence on slavery in a constitution that otherwise proclaimed the liberation of a people, and the economic necessity of territorial expansion would forever connect America’s racial history to its foreign policy, its African American communities to Cubans and Filipinos, James Baldwin to Turkey. As early as 1959, Williams went as far as to say that America needed a kind of truth and reconciliation commission about the history of twentieth-century American foreign policy and the relationship between that foreign policy and the domestic economy, a reckoning with the fact that America’s much vaunted prosperity and peace at home would simply not have been possible without its violence at home—and abroad. If Americans didn’t face such realities, Williams warned, they would continue to believe that “world power was thrust upon” them, and that “a unique combination of economic power, intellectual and practical genius, and moral rigor” enables America “to build a better world—without erecting an empire in the process.” The Americans were in active denial of their empire even as they laid its foundations. They saw themselves as helpless and ingenuous first responders to fate, a feeling that would deepen with the siren call of World War II.
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IN THE YEARS after September 11 and the financial crisis, and after the moral and military failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, I noticed that writers and pundits had become increasingly nostalgic for World War II—what they called America’s “good war.” To them, World War II wasn’t a war of military and economic dominance, a bid for power, but a seamlessly executed rescue operation for which the Americans won the world’s fealty and gratitude. We still saw ourselves as friendly GIs handing out Hershey bars, someone giving stuff out to a crowd of delighted supplicants. In recent years, there was a sense that America had somehow gotten “worse” at the business of warfare, which suggested that the Americans had ever been good at it in the first place. I, too, caught myself sometimes thinking that in contrast to the gloomy present day, the Americans once held the admiration of the world, especially in the 1940s. This kind of language, aquired no doubt from countless history lessons in school, or on the nightly news, or from my parents, had hardened into truth. Our victory in World War II is more crucial to Americans’ ideas of themselves than they may even realize, but I wanted to understand what this self-image left out. Among many omissions were two glaring realities: that the vanquished populations of the Axis powers did not much enjoy the humiliation of American occupation, and that during World War II, the supposed “good war,” the Americans dropped the nuclear bomb.
That the American liberators behaved badly after World War II has been well established: from Paris to Cairo, American soldiers were allowed to run riot 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.
When the American military arrived in Italy in 1943, the writer and aristocrat Curzio Malaparte was living in Naples. The city, wrecked from Allied bombs and artillery, was in ruins, its people sucking pieces of leather for nutrients, women selling themselves for a sip of wine. In The Skin, the American soldiers know nothing about Italy, nothing about the politics of the war; they laughed a lot, “like children, like schoolboys on holiday.” Malaparte, at first, seems to find the Americans amusing. One soldier he befriends “would blush crimson” when he saw misery because Americans were embarrassed by it, like innocents. That concept, Baldwin’s word, “innocent,” I was finding, was all too common in foreign writings about the Americans.
But over time, Malaparte begins to discern something dangerous in the American soldiers’ simplicity in the face of horror, their faith that “men can recover from misery, hunger and pain, that there is a remedy for all evil,” much as Baldwin’s Italian character in Giovanni’s Room once accused an American expat of not believing in death, of believing “as though with enough time and all that fearful energy and virtue you people have, everything will be settled, solved, put in its place.” The Skin is often grotesque satire, but in many ways, it is difficult to distinguish the American soldiers Malaparte is describing in the 1940s from those in Vietnam, or in the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan sixty years later. The Americans succumb to the typical depredations of occupiers everywhere: they abuse local women publicly, go to obscene lengths for a good meal. For Malaparte, the Americans do not have good intentions at all; they come from a society, which he recognizes as a distinctly capitalist one, that was “founded on the conviction that in the absence of beings who suffer, a man cannot enjoy to the full his possessions.” In other words, the Americans believe people must be subjugated so that they themselves can be free. They cannot recognize the irony inherent to the concept of an “army of liberation” because “they believe that a conquered nation is a nation of criminals, that defeat is a moral stigma, an expression of divine justice.” As Christians, the Americans believe that the loser in the war deserved its lowly state, that the winners had been sanctified by heaven. Christianity, Malaparte writes, as Baldwin would, too, was often the Americans’ “alibi” for their war making.