How Turks deal with wokeness, Mo, Obama's political machine, and Ayn Rand

Notebook #16

This is a regular feature in which I discuss things I’ve been reading, watching or listening to. The first item is for free, the rest is for paid subscribers only.

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First things first: early copies of my book have arrived!

You have one more day to pre-order it here, or wherever you get your books!

I’m very happy with the cover art. It depicts the monument commemorating the people who rose up against the coup attempt July 15, 2016.

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The Ottoman treatment for wokeness

It’s increasingly clear that the Western world is going through deep political and cultural shift. It’s very hard to make out what’s going on, and a lot of it is what people call “vibes.” I think a better word is values. There’s a shift to a different value system, and countries like Turkey have transitioned relatively early.

For example, Elon Musk tweeted this last week:

And the full tweet Musk is referencing is:

There’s a bunch of things going on here.

1. The historical assessment has problems: as far as I know, the Ottoman slave trade was at no point quite as brutal as the transatlantic slave trade, which was based on chattel slavery. There were many different kinds of slave trading in the empire (not just the devşirme system), some of them kind of close to what the Europeans did. I don’t think any of them left as deep a scar on the successors of the slaves as in the European and Anglo-American cases. I do think the Ottomans did it for longer though, simply because there was a long time when they were much, much more powerful than Europe, and had control over more souls across more land. If you’re an engineer (the way these two gentlemen are) you might be inclined to get your measuring stick out and argue about total units of suffering caused across time, in which case the Ottomans might “win.” You’ll be ignoring that the Ottoman suffering imposed on people is buried deeper in history, and that it probably wasn’t as acute and inter-generationally damaging as the Western cases (perhaps because eunuchs were involved? Okay I’ll stop.)

2. They’re right in arguing that Turkish leaders stomp out any hint of progressive criticism: this was already the case when the Kemalists ran Turkey, but it’s especially the so now that the Islamists are in power. What’s a little grating is that the Islamists connect to the narratives of Western progressives (see: Palestine), but disassociate with them when it comes to their own responsibility (see: Anatolian Armenians). Erdoğan’s son-in law was excited about Chomsky’s criticism of US empire when he was at MIT. He’s now one of the world’s leading exporters of killer drones, reining death on insurgency movements everywhere.

3. So what Musk wants his followers to think isn’t necessarily that their country is relatively innocent, but that they should treat questions of morality and historical responsibility as the political battlegrounds they have become. He’s saying nobody is above the global Kulturkampf.

What I like about this is that right-wing Turks are going to read this and agree with the spirit of the assertion, while disagreeing with the substance. They’ll argue that Ottoman slavery wasn’t as bad as that of the West (because: not racist). For the most part though, that won’t be a problem. Nationalism (like religion) is largely impervious to contravening facts.

This kind of politics is supposed to be a big show (WWF style), and you perform your role as faithfully as possible. My argument has long been that the shows that people like Musk, Trump, Erdoğan, and Netanyahu put on are probably going to have them run into conflict with each other. Let’s hope that I’m wrong, and that it’s all just a very elaborate form of entertainment.

Right?