Erbakan's Cause, Part II

Who rules the world?

This is the second in a series of blog posts on Davam [My Cause] the autobiography of Necmettin Erbakan, the standard bearer of Turkey’s Islamist movement in the 70s, 80s and 90s. Part I is here. Erbakan was the founder of the Milli Görüş (National View) movement and was a mentor to the AK Party’s founders.

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Covering this book has been more interesting than I thought it would be. I’ve already been getting very interesting engagement from readers, and learning more about the book.

The Islamism scholar Jan Vömel wrote that he believed that it was Mustafa Yılmaz from Milli Gazete who wrote this book based on notes and speeches, and that it was post-humously attirbuted to Erbakan. As I touched on in my first post, this sort of thing is common. What I’ve been hearing in right-wing circles, however, is that leaders these days also speak into recorders, and that books are often based on these recordings. The journalists who stitch it together into the final product are often people who spent decades with the leader in question and thus familiar not just with their ideas, but also their style and mannerisms. My impression from the text is that most of it was likely spoken into a recording device. Sentence structures in Turkish can be needlessly complex, but this text is very plain and lends itself to the breath. The intonation is also very Erbakan. I keep hearing his voice in my head as I’m reading it.

Some other readers, including

Zutano

, also commented on my comparison between Muslim and Christian creationism. I suggested that Islamists are more interested in wrapping their theories in scientific language. These readers pointed out that Christian creationism is also heavily invested in giving their movement a veneer of scientific legitimacy.

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This second post was going to cover a few chapters, but ended up being a deep dive on just one, detailing his world view.

There are versions of this book where the title is plural, as in “our cause” rather than “my cause”. The back cover on this version has Fatih Erbakan on it, so I assume it’s plural for his sake. It’s a political version of photo bombing.

The powers that rule the world

The first sentence in this chapter is absolutely priceless:

The National View Movement [Milli Görüş] is not a reaction to an existing thought or movement. It has emerged directly as a movement of science and contemplation.

It’s strikingly self-aware that Erbakan would feel the need to start this section with a defensive statement like that. I’ll summarize this chapter as accurately as I can and circle back to this statement afterwards.

Erbakan writes in the next paragraph that “the imperialists set up this world” after 1945, and made it so that the rich countries get richer and poor countries get poorer. The Muslims had it worse, as they were subject to violence and wars. “Step by step, the entire world was colonized and made to submit to global sovereignty.” The Bretton Woods institutions, EU, NATO were set up as guardians of Western hegemony.

I think so far the narrative isn’t too far from the critical literature to be found at most Western universities today.

What Erbakan then does though, is claim that Western global hegemony is institutionalized in what he calls the Secret World Government [Gizli Dünya Devleti], abbreviating it as GDD. This entity is like a global parasite that sucks a little bit of life out of everything. There’s a few examples he gives, including financial transactions:

Again, today, if someone wants to send money from one part of the world to another, it must first go through the American Express Bank, Chase Manhattan Bank or any similar bank in the USA. These banks are the banks of global powers. A commission of l to 5 percent of every money sent is charged. This commission goes back to their coffers in the same way. Thus, it is impossible to send money from one part of the world to another without paying such a share to the Secret World State that rules the world.

Like most good conspiracy theorists, Erbakan takes something that’s true (the SWIFT system perhaps) and uses it to build a vast fictional narrative. Note that Erbakan is usually referred to as “Erbakan hoca,” the title given to teachers and professors, because he has a PhD. He is not just a political leader, but a scientific authority. So when he says things like this, the average audience would assume that he has special technical insights into these matters. He continues:

These examples could be described in volumes of books.

As a result, many things from sports to theater, from art to industry, from law to commerce are under the control of the Secret World State. Therefore, in order to comprehend world events, first of all, knowing the anatomy of today's world comes before everything else. So how did the world become what it is today and with what changes over the centuries? For this, it is more important than anything else to take a fundamental look at the issue.

So the chapter first takes a snapshot of the post-War order and identifies the GDD as the parasitic force behind the modern world. Then it launches into the ancient origins of the GDD.

And of course they’re all Jews.

There’s different versions of Judaism in Islamic collective imagination. The one that’s very common, which is present here, is that the Jewish belief system is a corruption of true revelation. The Old Testament was at some point based on real prophetic content, but was continuously re-written over time and “has lost its divine content.” The pharisees have created a twisted, racist ideology that’s supremacist and hyper-conservative. Jews believe that they are supernatural beings and make everyone else believe that they’ve evolved from apes. The word “Israel” means “those who struggle with God and win,” thus having heresy built into its very existence.

The Jews believe that greater Israel will be theirs, from Cappadocia in Turkey to the Suez Canal in Egypt.

Type in “Büyük İsrail” into Google and you’ll get a wide selection of images like this.

To realize this goal, the Jews then build up the Masonic lodges, which acts as the backbone of a global power network. They employ Kabbalah, which is a practice of Jewish mysticism.

It occurs to me that some of you may not have read a full-blown antisemitic conspiracy theory in some time, so I’ll quote this bit:

Two thousand years ago, those who, in bondage to their ego and in obedience to Satan, first changed the Torah, the true book sent by Allah Almighty to Moses, and then the Bible, the true book sent by Allah Almighty to Jesus, to suit their desires, have since then, from father to son and generation to generation, made great progress in these two thousand years in order to realize their idea of a superior race and its main goal, “World Domination.” Especially in the last four hundred years, they began to exploit the riches of America, Asia and Africa. Through the spread of interest and the development of the capitalist system, they made “huge sums of money.” In time, these became big banks. And they began to control the entire world economy.

These people, who became astronomically rich, began to control not only the economic life but also the political governments of all the countries of the world. They began to control the media, the biggest world news agencies and strategic research institutes in the same way. Finally, little by little, they established the “Secret World State” (GDD), which rules the whole world. Through this GDD, they have reached a point where today they rule the whole world.

There it is. Erbakan wasn’t very subtle about it, and his followers loved him for it.

The next section is on the secret symbols this global conspiracy leaves around. These are well-trodden paths for conspiracy theorists, bur Erbakan loved talking about it.

Erbakan discussing the pyramid on the dollar bill. On his desk is another book of his entitled “The Secret World State” which is full of this kind of stuff. Milli Gazete often gave these books out in exchange for newspaper coupons. The one dollar conspiracy re-surfaced with the Gülenists in the mid-2010s.

There’s a lot of other “decoding” about how everything in Judaism, Zionism, and its institutional form, the GDD, boils down to service to Satan. Secret handshakes and hidden symbols allow the ruling elites in Europe, America and Japan to communicate with each other. There’s 2-3 pages on the Bilderberg Meeting, where the global cabal gets together to discuss its secret business.

Other Western institutions are kind of downstream from Bilderberg. The EU is born of it. In the U.S., the State Department is for show, and the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) is the “real foreign ministry, which is under the control of the Secret World State.” (Does this mean that Steven Cook, their resident Turkey expert, is responsible for running my country? If so, we need to have words about parking in Esat. Everything else is fine.)

The Zionist lobby in the U.S. forms the guard rails of elections, and uses the American state as the GDD’s base of operations. The GDD’s military is NATO and its financial enforcers are the IMF and World Bank. Every country in the world pays into this system, and all together, Erbakan thinks that the GDD collects a trillion dollars a year. One assumes that those are 2011 numbers, since that’s the year he died, and in any case, one doesn’t want to impose on such passionate a narrative.

Erbakan then goes into Islam’s struggle against the Zionist project of world domination. Islam, you see, is inherently egalitarian and universalist, and is therefore the natural enemy of the racist and Jewish-supremacist GDD. The Zionists got the upper hand in late Ottoman empire by supporting the Young Turks against Abdulhamit II. Zionism then tried to invade Turkey, but Anatolia’s brave sons and daughters defeated their forces and founded the Republic of Turkey.

There is a full page on the origins of modern Turkey, but in typical Islamist fashion, it makes no mention of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Erbakan was a straight-shooter, but even he recognized his limits. Islamists nurture a bitter hate for Atatürk for his Westernizing policy, but they rarely confront the matter head-on in the court of public opinion. Not even Erdoğan has done so, opting instead to re-frame Atatürk as a war hero, rater than Republic-builder.

There’s a clever bit here about Zionism’s long-term plans for Turkey. It goes like this: the GDD will first accept Turkey into the EU, then Israel. Then they’ll say that the EU has grown a bit too large, and they want to designate the Middle Eastern portions as a separate entity. And boom! Israel and Turkey are now part of the same state, the implication being that Israel now controls Turkey. It’s all very clever of the Zionists, but Erbakan sees them coming miles away.

There’s a section on how the collective West works together:

Zionism is like a crocodile. Its upper teeth are America, its lower teeth are the EU. Its brain is Zionism and its body is collaborationists."

In case it isn’t clear, the “Collaborationists” [işbirlikçiler] is Islamist code for Westernizers in non-Western countries, chief of which are the Kemalists.

It’s a bit convoluted, but what Erbakan wants to say here is that Western civilization is an organism of its own, and Islamic civilization is separate, and that that division should be maintained for Turkey to become powerful again. Collaborationists in Turkey want to deny Turkey’s core Islamic identity and drag the country into Western subservience.

We can assume that he’s recording or writing these things in the late 2000s, so all the news is about Turkey trying to join the EU, and he’ll have none of it. The EU is a Christian club, he insists, and was founded by the pope after WWII. Turkey shouldn’t allow the EU to judge it (through the aquis) and submit to its rule. It should separate from it culturally and economically in order to compete with it.

Erbakan’s big idea was therefore a united Islamic state, and he wanted to get there the way the Europeans did, by starting an economic union and strengthening it until it could match the EU and U.S. in economic and military power. That’s why, in 1996, when Erbakan was part of a coalition government, he founded the D-8 Organization for Economic Cooperation, which is today a multilateral organization made up of eight Islamic countries. He believed that Turkey was the most advanced Islamic country, and would thus assume a leadership role in such a formation.

Erbakan proposed the “Islamic Dinar” as a currency for intro-Muslim trade. It was to be an alternative to the U.S. Dollar, and was made of 22 carat gold. The year on the back of the coin is according to the Hijri calendar, and the motto is inscribed in Arabic and English, reading “Allah has permitted trade and forbidden usury” which is from scripture (Al-Baqarah 275)

The next section is on Islamic unity, so there’ll be more of this then.

That’s it.

I’d now like to briefly reflect on this chapter.

We live in strange times, and I’m aware of the diversity of my readership, so I’ll be very explicit in my beliefs. I make fun of Erbakan’s views a little bit because I don’t consider them worth serious engagement. This to me is the very definition of a reactionary tract. That’s why it’s telling that the chapter begins with a refutation of its reactionary nature. Erbakan was aware of the accusation and must have felt that it merited a response, even if it was only a blanket denial.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t think that criticizing Zionism or Israel’s influence on the U.S. is a bad thing. It’s valid and necessary of course, to think seriously about Israel’s influence in the United States. I remember reading the 2007 book The Israel Lobby by Walt and Mearsheimer during my time in the West Bank, and I thought that was a strong argument overall. I also think that accounts of Israel as a settler-colonial state, such as Rashid Khalidi’s excellent history, are solid, and will increasingly become the norm.

The Gaza war has blown up discussion around these issues in a major way. Reasonable people can disagree on whether Israel is committing genocide, and that’s just it. We are at a point where post-war orthodoxies are coming down. One aspect of that is the taboo against antisemitism. I can see in real time how people in the Islamist space are airing their antisemitism much more freely. It’s ubiquitous in Turkish social media and chat channels.

It wasn’t always that way. Erbakan’s antisemitic theories were deeply ingrained in Turkey’s Islamist movement, but its younger members in the 1990s realized that they had to hide it from view in order to have a shot at ruling the country. The AK Party’s founders also found Erbakan’s world view correct in overall approach, but a bit too cartoonish for a political movement. The West was dominated by Jewish/Masonic elites, but it was a bit too simplistic to look for their cyphers in dollars bills. Calling it all “the Secret World State” and make wild claims about the financial system was also too crass and would prevent them from being taken seriously. All that had to be put stowed away in a closet somewhere. The people who ruled the world were secretive about their true beliefs. Why be open about yours if you were to oppose them?

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I’ll probably interrupt this series next week to comment on the elections, then write Part III next week.