"America cannot occupy the world. It has to learn to live in it."

This book was difficult for me, as someone born in 1992 and who really came of age in post-9/11 America. My eternal refrain bewailing the state of the U.S.'s public education must be repeated again: many of the political events related in this book were incredibly difficult to understand because I knew nothing or next-to-nothing about them. The Cold War era through, pretty much, George W. Bush's presidency just . . . isn't really taught in most public schools? At least, it wasn't taught in mine.

Still, I think it's a critical text for American citizens, not the least because it contextualizes our place on the world stage and provides a more comprehensive understanding of the political events leading up to the present. Mamdani stresses in the latter part of his book that the U.S. controls public perception of its actions (its atrocities) abroad through carefully controlled media and the framing of our actions in a righteous "good" vs. "evil" fashion. It's also sadly true that they control public perception through the lack of education and the rewriting or plain erasing of historical fact. When you know nothing of the horrors your country committed ten, twenty, or even two years ago in some far-away country you can't even point out on a map, it isn't that hard to be led in any direction a skilled propagandist wants you to be led.

One of the best takeaways from this text was the earlier discussion regarding the perceived morality/justness of colonization - and the amount of violence allowed - based on the so-called "civility" of the place being occupied ("savage" cultures vs. pseudo-Westernized ones). I of course loved that Mamdani did the work of holding the United States responsible for the terror it has cultivated abroad for its own political purposes, terror which has now grown out of our control and which we very desperately refuse to admit culpability for creating (esp. the role of the CIA in working with drug lords and training troops to wage our proxy wars). I also really appreciated the sheer amount of effort that went into drawing connections between key political events spanning half a century and multiple continents. It got muddled at times, both because of my own ignorance and because I think the scope of this work was enormous, but ultimately it provided me, the reader, with a very necessary historical and political context, which I will take into other readings.

My main complaint is that the citations in this edition, at least, were terrible. We had a huge amount of chapter notes tucked away in the back, but no citations on the page indicating that anything was being referenced. I don't care if it's a valid citation style; I think it hurts the credibility of the author's arguments. It was as if he was trying to hide his endnotes for some reason, which is probably not true but is nevertheless the vibe I ended up with.

I also noticed a breakdown in the lucidity of his arguments where the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was concerned, particularly in the last chapter when he begins to discuss the U.S.'s relationship with Israel. I'm not pro-Israel (I actually don't know enough about it to be pro-either of them at this point), but even I could see that his arguments became thin, emotional, and less supported by fact in those sections.

A lot of great information in here, much of which surprised and dismayed me, and some interesting arguments made by Mamdani.