by Uzay Bulut
Insulting other nations
on TV might not be a method of boosting one's presidential election
campaign in most countries, but in Turkey, this method seems to work,
at least for Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
When he was asked of
his earlier discriminatory statements during a live interview, five days
before the August 10 presidential elections, Erdogan said:
"One of them came and
said I was a Georgian. Then another came up and, I beg your pardon,
called me uglier things, saying I was Armenian."
This was not the first time that Erdogan openly insulted another nation in a public statement.
On June 10, 2011, he
said in an interview on national TV: "There are many books, more than
30 written about us, calling us Jewish, Armenian, excuse my language,
Rum [a term used for Greek in Turkey]."
Those statements alone
should be enough to show the insincerity of the reforms that Erdogan or
his Justice and Development Party government has conducted concerning
the national conflicts in which Turkey is involved, mainly the Cyprus
issue, relations with Armenia and the recognition -- or denial -- of
the Armenian Genocide.
But Erdogan is hardly the only political figure in Turkey who, without reserve, has insulted other nations.
On November 10, 2013,
on the 75th anniversary of Ataturk's death, Muharrem Ince, deputy
chairman of the Republican People's Party, the main Turkish opposition
party, said: "If there had been no Ataturk, your names would not have
been Ahmet, Hasan, or Huseyin. Your names would have been Yorgo or
Dimitri."
In response, Yorgo
Demir, one of the very few Greeks who have remained in Istanbul and who
works at Galata Greek School Foundation, said: "Ironically, the
Dimitris and Yorgos, who had always existed in the lands Ince mentions,
were either assimilated after being forced to adopt names like Hasan and
Huseyin -- especially in the Pontus region -- when their lives fell in
danger during the foundation phase of the Turkish republic, or were
slain and wiped off these lands. That was no different from the
atrocities against the Armenians in Anatolia and the Jews in Thrace."
Both Ince and Demir
were right. The names of many people in Asia Minor would still be
Dimitri or Yorgo today if Ince's party, the Republican People's Party,
had not exposed the Greeks to genocide, forced conversions, or
assimilation.
According to a report
by Jeff Benvenuto and John Lim at the Center for the Study of Genocide
and Human Rights of Rutgers University: "Pontian and Anatolian Greeks
were victims of a broader Turkish genocidal project aimed at all
Christian minorities in the Ottoman Empire. A total of more than 3.5
million Greeks, Armenians, and Assyrians were killed under the
successive regimes of the Young Turks and of Mustafa Kemal [Ataturk]
from roughly 1914 to 1923. Of this, as many as 1.5 million Greeks may
have died. The end of the genocide marked a profound rupture in the
long Greek historical presence on the Asia Minor."
A total of 22 countries
and 42 U.S. states have adopted resolutions acknowledging the Armenian
Genocide as a bona fide historical event. In addition, the
International Association of Genocide Scholars has passed a resolution
affirming that the 1914-1923 campaign against Ottoman Greeks
constituted genocide, alongside the genocides of other groups -- namely
the Armenians and Assyrians.
But in Turkey, history
textbooks and the mainstream media do not utter a single word about the
destruction of historic Hellenic and Armenian communities in Asia
Minor, and the fact that genocide in the early 20th century claimed the
lives of hundreds of thousands of Ottoman Greeks remains untold.
Due to the
assimilationist policies of the Turkish state, several languages once
spoken by the inhabitants of Asia Minor have become extinct or
endangered, according to UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger.
Judezmo, for example, which was originally spoken in the former
territories of the Ottoman Empire, has become a severely endangered
language. Western Armenian and Pontic Greek have become definitely
endangered. And Cappadocian Greek has become an extinct language.
But that is fine. What
if many people in Turkey were still called Dimitri or Yorgo today? What
if the current prime minister of Turkey was a Jew, an "ugly Armenian"
or -- excuse my language -- a Greek? So let us not make a very big deal
out of those physical and cultural genocides.
As Chris Crutcher puts
it, "Racist thought and action says far more about the person they come
from than the person they are directed at."
So the more tragic
question is why Erdogan and Ince feel superior to Armenians, Greeks or
Jews, the indigenous peoples of Asia Minor and Thrace, and proudly
express their hateful thoughts even 90 years after the establishment of
the Turkish republic.
This discriminatory
mentality did not just begin to prevail under Justice and Development
Party rule, of course. It is the result of unending propaganda designed
by the Turkish state and imposed on its people for 90 years.
Through the official
education system and mainstream media, the people in Turkey have been
indoctrinated to believe in a Turkish version of history, which is
deliberately distorted in accordance with the official ideology of the
state. From when Turkish people commence school, they are exposed to
the Turkish state propaganda -- an imaginative and untrue version of
history.
When people in Turkey
are asked about fundamental issues in the history of the Ottoman Empire
and Turkish republic, the following answers are likely:
-
What happened in the 1915 Armenian genocide?
"It was a period of war and a necessary deportation of Armenians that had to be conducted to stop the reciprocal conflicts between Turks and Armenians."
-
What happened to the Greeks in Asia Minor, Pontos, and Eastern Thrace in the 1912-1923 genocide?
"Was there ever such a genocide? It was a period of war. People die in war times. The world attacked our country during this period. So we fought back. And how many Greeks lived here back then, by the way? No so many, I suppose."
-
What happened in the 1934 anti-Jewish pogroms in Eastern Thrace?
"Did Jews ever live in Thrace? I thought the region has always been predominantly Turkish and Muslim."
-
What happened in the 1974 Turkish occupation of Cyprus?
"It was not an occupation. It was a peace operation that Turkey carried out to protect Turkish Cypriots from killings at the hands of Greek Cypriots. Moreover, the northern part of the island has always been historically Turkish soil."
-
Why does the whole world call it an illegal invasion and occupation?
"Because they hate us. They always have a hidden agenda against our country."
As a result of this
unimaginable propaganda that Turkish people are regularly fed,
discrimination, hate speech and racism have become routine practices
publicly carried out even by the head of the government and other
parliamentarians. This is one of the most extensive, long-standing and
systematic propaganda campaigns ever conducted in world history, and it
has produced tragic results.
According to a survey
conducted in January 2014 by the Istanbul-based Konda Reserch Company,
67 percent of respondents believe that "the Turkish nation is superior
to other nations in all respects."
According to another
report based on the results of a survey titled "Nationalism in Turkey
and in the world," conducted by Professor Ersin Kalaycioglu of Sabanci
University and Professor Ali Carkoglu of Koc University, a large
majority of Turkish people think there is nothing in their history that
they should be ashamed of.
The view that theirs is
a model nation and an example to the world is much more common in
Turkey than it is in other countries, the report added.
"It seems that Turkey
has a xenophobic, autarchic and nationalistic culture which could be
summed up with the common Turkish saying: 'There is no friend of Turks
but Turks themselves,'" according to the survey, based on interviews
conducted with Turkish citizens above the age of 18 in 64 cities.
About 63 percent of
respondents agreed that one should support one's country even if it
does wrong, and 71 percent thought Turkey was a better country than
most, according to the report.
"Next year will be the
anniversary of 1915 [the Armenian Genocide]. Turkish people do not tend
to do historical research on this issue. In a country that does not get
ashamed and has a very high level of self-confidence, people tend to
say that they are a better country than others. It seems that people do
not critically evaluate history," Professor Ali Carkoglu said.
It is certain that
genocides, massacres and atrocities have been committed throughout
history in every corner of the world, but what makes Turkey unique is
its "talent" for denying them.
This mentality is what made a
prime minister call another a nation "ugly" on national TV and helped
guarantee his success in the presidential election.
Uzay Bulut
Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=9639
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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