Notebook #3

The hooding incident, Trump v Harris, Turkey in Africa, the Paralympics, a new movie, and how Syria broke Turkey

Hi folks,

Fall is upon us, and it’s going to be a busy one.

I didn’t get to take any time off this summer. We’re expecting a baby in the Kültürkampf household, so Müjge and I have been on a mad dash to get as much work done as possible before impact.

So yeah. That’s happening in a couple of months. Expect some posts about contemporary Turkish baby names. Or the education system. Or why Turkish baby YouTubers are so annoying.

In other news, I finished up the copy-edits for my forthcoming book and picked a cover visual. I’ll share more information in the comings months.

Nicholas Danforth

and I are also looking into having some guests on the podcast. It also looks like I might do a Turkish-language podcast sometime soon, and I’ll share that here as it materializes.

That’s it in terms of updates. Let’s get into the Notebook. As usual, the first item is free, the others are paywalled.

---

The hooding incident

Most of you will have heard that a group of young Turks assaulted a few American Marines. I don’t think this is very important, or at the least, I don’t think it says a lot about the central narrative in Turkish politics.

Let’s go over what happened: the Marines were part of the crew of the USS Wasp, a large American warship that docked in Izmir on its way to the eastern Mediterranean, where it’s supposed to provide support to Israel.

The people who assaulted the marines were part of the Turkey Youth Union (TGB), an Ulusalcı/Eurasianist, and therefore left-nationalist group. The video shows them holding one of the marines, putting a hood over his head, saying a few words of protest, then breaking into shouts of “Yankee go home!” There’s another video showing another marine being held down and shouting for help.

Unpleasant business.

There’s symbolism to the hooding that goes back to 2003, and the protest is clearly also motivated by the US support for Israel’s horrible conduct since October 7.

I’ve said that this actually isn’t new:

In response to my tweet,

Nick Ashdown

pointed out that TGB actually did this exact thing in Istanbul in 2021. They held down a civilian employee of the US Navy, hooded him and shouted “Yankee go home!” (UPDATE: apparently they also did this in 2014!)

Monica Marks asked me this in response:

I don’t think it’s Xenophobia. That’s too vague.

I don’t think it’s anger over Gaza either. That’s obviously within reach these days, but it’s not the animus behind the action. As mentioned, TGB has been doing this for a while.

I don’t even think it’s nationalistic anger over the 2003 hooding incident. The Turkish left has a long history of protesting the American military, especially the Navy, which is how the US projects power across the world. Throughout the Cold War, leftists protested American ships docking in Turkey, especially in Izmir.

Leftists in Istanbul protesting the 6th fleet in 1968. The sign reads “The Guardian of American Imperialism, 6th Fleet, get lost”. Source: SoL

Much of the energy of American diplomats during the Cold War was spent on worrying about this kind of thing, and the Turkish government and business elites worried with them. One of the ways they countered it was by supporting Turkist, and to a lesser extent Islamist nationalists. They knew that the one thing the right-wingers hated more than America was the godless left.

And it kinda worked. The left got steamrolled, especially after the 1980 coup, and the right became a bigger and bigger force, until it took over and refashioned the state in its own image in the 2000s and 2010s. (If you want to read more on this, Behlül Özkan’s work is a good start. He’s doing archival work.)

The Turkish left split into fragments in these years. There was a quasi-liberal, European Greens types, there were social democrats, and of course there were reactionaries. Think of them as being a bit similar to Germany’s Die Linke for example. They’re very romantic, very anti-liberal, and have a penchant for all things Russian, no matter how fashy it may smell. Like Die Linke, which can quickly flip into the AfD direction, (as we recently witnessed in Thuringia and Saxony) so the average TGB/Vatan Party type can easily find themselves in passive or active support of an assortment of far-right figures, from Erdoğan to Ümit Özdağ.

My point is that left-nationalism is a sideshow. It’s really the Islamist right that broke through, and has been thriving. Their “anti-Americanism” (I’d prefer “revisionism” at least) has grown into a huge, centralized, highly strategic operation. It has suffused the education system, state TV, and every major political speech. It has an increasingly skillful foreign policy that’s playing the long game. I would also argue that reaction to the “Westernness” inherent in modernity is the driver of AK Party politics, and the strategic force driving policy in this era.

TGB and Perinçek’s Vatan Party is a Cold War relic that sometimes sort of attaches to the underbelly of the whale that is Islamism, at other times it gently swims along in its shadow. I could easily see them existing and doing the same things under vastly different circumstances.

So I don’t like “Anti-Americanism” because it implies equivalence between these two strands of reaction against American influence in Turkey and the world. They’re not the same. Maybe they do bleed into each other a little bit, they come from different places in the country, their political energy is very different.

---

On Turkish coverage of Trump vs. Harris

I mentioned in our last podcast episode that I have been observing a strange silence in Turkey’s pro-government “pool” media about the US elections. There’s a bit more movement now.