The Americans recognized that they had to tread carefully in Turkey. “The Turk is a proud man. We must proceed with a reasonable caution to avoid surfeiting him with American omnipresence,” one State Department briefing read. The first free elections in Turkey, which were held in 1950, had come as a pleasant surprise to the Americans: a largely peasant society had decided to vote for a party, the Democrat Party, that had been overtly praiseful of American capitalism. Soon the State Department, the Joint American Military Mission for Aid to Turkey (JAMMAT), and the CIA set up in Turkey and got to work on their modernization projects, around the same time that Engin Cezzar was studying theater in America, where he observed how little Americans knew about Turkey at all.
In reality, the Americans were busy in Turkey tackling all sorts of military, educational, and cultural deficiencies. In fact, the Americans almost completely remade the Turkish military, an institution I had imagined impervious to foreign interference: they founded an engineering school in Ankara, a commando training camp in Izmir, and schools that taught how to build artillery and ordnance. Turkish soldiers even took the same classes that American soldiers took. “American advisors wanted to replace Oriental obedience,” writes the historian Nicholas Danforth, “with a more modern, liberal American ethos.” Cultural programs cropped up in Turkey to promote a certain America-centric worldview. One radio show called Haz?rcevap invited contestants to call in and try to win a trivia game, which revolved around questions like these: “Where are the longest bridges and tunnels in America?” “Among the weapons invented until now, are there any that are useful to human beings or nations?” “Where in America are the Redskins located?” “Do they make Turkish movies in Hollywood?” The Americans, it turned out, had also built the roads I loved so much in Turkey. The Turks had wanted to build roads that linked four major cities so they could easily transport their armies throughout the country in case of a Soviet attack, but the Americans overruled them and instead began building a different network of roads designed for economic efficiency. “It was more than a decade,” Danforth writes, “before an unbroken paved road linked even such major cities as Istanbul and Ankara.”
What, ultimately, were the Americans even trying to do? “U.S. officials believed that wanting to be modern was the first step toward being modern, and that being modern meant appreciating modernity,” Danforth writes. “That is, showing off how modern America was would encourage Turks to be more modern themselves, and as they became more modern, they would develop an even greater appreciation for America, the most modern country of all.” The Americans were creating a world in which no other future would be considered but the American one, which was both the source of change and the unattainable ideal.
When Rana had said much of her life had been defined by America, I had not understood what she meant. I had scoffed at the ways Turkish secularists used the word “modern,” thinking they were snobs using some bastardized conception of the word, having no clue from where it came. I also unwittingly used that language of modernization when I moved to Turkey, and when I thought about Turkey, and sometimes when I wrote about Turkey. But I had not known, and did not suspect, the degree to which this way of thinking had been premeditated, developed, deployed, and enshrined in so many facets of American life by a handful of men. I had not even known it was a “way of thinking” that could be challenged, that could be flawed. I thought, indeed, that it was simply reality.
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.
It may be an exaggeration to say that the magazines of Henry Luce still influence magazines of today, or that the recent currents of American literature still draw upon the University of Iowa’s Cold War curriculums. By now, Daniel Lerner has been refuted by both foreign and American academics who recognized his book as a blueprint for imposing the American way of life on “traditional” people. And yet so much of what I read about Cold War programs has a deeply familiar ring of truth: so-called modernity trumped up as the antithesis of Islamic societies; globalization and neoliberalism accepted as natural, inevitable phenomena, just like modernization. I had a Cold War mind. The reason that I was not thinking about Erdo?an’s economic policies—the reason I was not, as Rana said, thinking about money—was that deep down I had found Erdo?an’s pro-business, American-sounding rhetoric deeply comforting, the obvious path forward for Turkey. 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-determination while robbing it from others. No romantic image was without its darker underbelly, as Caner had shown me was true of Turkey’s myths, too—even during that romantic time of the nation’s birth, whole civilizations were destroyed. Even during the “good war,” the Americans had been a source of terror. There was no state of noble innocence. But that hadn’t stopped American intellectuals during the Cold War from inventing one, thereby keeping the country’s own citizens constantly in search of something they would never find.
4.
BENEVOLENT INTERVENTIONS: GREECE AND TURKEY
To defend your own reality and then impose it forcefully on the outside world is paranoia.
—THOMAS MERTON