by Engin Ardic
STAR, February 27, 2004
(Translated by Ugur Akinci, Ph.D. The Turkish original at http://www.stargazete.com.tr/index.asp?haberID=44061)
The late [novelist] Kemal Tahir had once summarized the issue like this: “Turkey is not a tribal society from Ghana.”
Yes, this country is sitting on the ruins of an empire. If you say that “we have turned a fresh page in 1923; we don't know who the other guys are” you'll only fool yourselves (but not the voters).
You can deny the inheritance of the past all you want. But the creditors of your late grandfather and those who want his blood will continue to squeeze your throat. Because this score is six hundred years old and the reckoning is still not over.
Didn't the sad and heavy defeat of the Left during our youth, during the '60s and early '70s rest on the assumption that Turkey was an old colony, a colony like Vietnam, Algeria, a Bolivia, or Peru?
This is the country of the inheritors of a collapsed empire.
Not the country of those peripheral people who rebelled against the empire (like Greeks, Serbs, Bulgarians, etc.) and somehow “saved the day,” but that core nation who founded the empire and sank it.
Again, just like Kemal Tahir pointed out, the Ottoman rout, the heavy defeat we have suffered, still continues inside of us. Like the two inseparable faces of a coin, our grandeur complex and our equally-dominant inferiority complex stem from this fact.
That's why one day we fly off the handle with an obscene courage yet the very next day we cry, lamenting that “we'll never add up to anything.”
We have been crushed with such a disaster that we could not yet come to our senses for the last two hundred years. We still cannot maintain the order.
Because both the social order and the state order that “we used to know” have been delegated to the dustbin of history. They cannot come back anymore.
The Ottoman is the anti-thesis of the West. Ottoman is everything that the West is not, and is not anything that the West is.
The Turkish people are certainly and categorically not Western. They cannot be even if they wanted to.
The Westernization movement that was launched by the Tanzimat reforms [1839] and which took a radical turn 90 years later with the onset of the Republic, that is, the struggle to change civilizations and to transform into one's opposite at that, has not trickled down to the bottom of the society.
The process generated a monstrosity with “double realities”: the Ottoman people and the “European” administrators.
This is the dominant contradiction. This is why hell is breaking loose. Our rich who claim to be “bourgeois “ turn around and rob their own state when they cannot rob the outsiders. In a similar fashion, the Ottomans who cannot mess around with the outsiders are messing around with one another.
Because we are both very emotional and also very aggressive people, ready to explode.
A majority of our people do want to enter the European Union but not because they want to become Europeans. They want that for a very simple and concrete reason like finding employment. As a matter of fact, the ruling class also want [to become a member of] the Europe Union but under their own rules!
Why do you think our people brought AKP to power? It's not because of protest votes, economic crisis, etc.
Baloney! It is because the voters found a party for themselves which could not openly admit being “Ottomans” [at heart] – because there was punishment at the end ! -- but implied the fact and was forced to “play being the Republicans.”
When this party owned up to the Ottoman subconsciousness but rejected its superstructure – the sultanate, etc. -- then nobody could find any fault with it. Nobody could open his mouth and say anything.
Especially when this movement was also supported by the “religion factor” ...
However, this movement has two handicaps: 1) It cannot return to the past. It is not possible. 2) It cannot generate a new synthesis either. That's why it doesn't really know what to do exactly. It keeps saying “I have changed, I have developed” etc. and tries to survive the day by such verbal acrobatics. In essence, it is trying to gain some time of course!
But those “noble Anatolian peasants” that our poor a-la-franga [pro-European] intelligentsia have praised, have turned into lumpenproletariat -- the lowest, most vulgar and most dangerous of all classes -- because the industrialization did not proceed in a healthy and balanced manner.
Now the battle is waged between two poles: The pious segment of the lumpenproletariat supports the ruling party. That segment of the lumpenproletariat who drink diluted beer at the “Brother's Beerhouse” while eating their kokorec and fried clams support the main opposition party.
Please note that we've said main opposition, not CHP.
The rest, the communists, fascists, socialists, social democrats, liberals etc. are all full of hot air and will remain so.
But the “Neo-Ottoman” who defies the Europe but submits before the United States is comical as well ...
This is as comical as that guy who is trying to adopt the order of his traditional adversary and even old enemy, the Persian civilization, or that of the Najaf Desert – an old [Ottoman] province.