Tabii and the Quest for Cultural Hegemony

A new streaming platform is part of Ankara's attempt at shaping political norms

You might have missed it amidst the election frenzy, but in May, TRT, Turkey’s state broadcaster, unveiled a new streaming platform. It's called “Tabii,” as in the Arabic word for “natural,” also meaning “of course” in Turkish. For the time being, it's streaming its content on YouTube. Tabii billboards have been up across Turkey for months though, which makes me think that the government probably accelerated launch ahead of the elections.

Turkey is already a TV powerhouse. You might have heard of The Magnificent Century, Forbidden Love, or What is Fatmagül’s Fault? The country also has several streaming platforms, like Exxen, GAİN, and Blu TV. As far as I can see, Tabii carries the more state-sanctioned shows.

In terms of politics, this is about one of the government’s major strategic aims: to fight Western “cultural hegemony.” Turkey’s right-wing revolutionaries have succeeded in taking over the government and reforming it in their own image, but they often lament that the sphere of culture still lies beyond their reach. President Erdoğan himself said in a 2017 speech that “we have been in power uninterrupted for 14 years, yet we still have difficulties in terms of social and cultural power.” Fahrettin Altun, the chief of the Presidency’s Directorate of Communications, is known for his statements on this subject. Soon after the 2018 elections, for example, he tweeted “Your political incumbency [iktidar] has ended, your cultural incumbency [iktidar] will also end…”

The American right talks about pop culture in a very similar way. Conservative commentator Andrew Breitbart’s maxim was “politics is downstream from culture.” His eponymous media channel, as well as disciples like Ben Shapiro, took that to heart, waging battles against “woke” Hollywood studios and gender-neutral bathrooms.

TV: “The poor lion, despite not having done anything, the herd of zebra are starting to run away, causing great damage… and one of them is trying to kill the kind-hearted lion by kicking it.” man: “Wa.. what’s happening?” Lion: “I bought National [Geographic]…”

Turkey’s right-wing culture warriors have similar concerns about woke culture, and nowhere today is this more apparent than in streaming. U.S.-based private streaming services are widely watched in Turkey. The biggest of course, is Netflix, where content is fairly progressive, especially towards the LGBTQ+ community. Columnists have railed against Netflix for this reason, and the AK Party has argued that it is part of a larger plot to destabilize the wholesome culture underpinning its regime. RTÜK, Turkey’s media watchdog, has duly been fining Netflix.

This is a common problem for nationalists from Hungary to India - if politics is downstream from culture, the stream’s point of origin lies beyond their borders, in the most powerful country in the world. The only country that has enough juice to fight Hollywood seems to be China.

Still, I think the people behind Tabii recognized that Turkey has a privileged position in this landscape. It is the only major Muslim-majority country with the political stability, cultural capital, know-how and financial resources to create its own stream of (popular) culture. As a state-sponsored project, my understanding is that Tabii will funnel money into the sector and fine-tune the political message to suit its domestic and geopolitical agenda. It’s something that TRT has already been doing, but it’s still TV-based and its shows get streamed through various third party sites. By building a streaming platform, they could focus their cultural penetration.

This being Kültürkampf, though, I like to let me sources speak for themselves. Hilal Kaplan, one of Turkey’s foremost right-wing culture warriors, TRT board member and Erdoğan confidant, wrote a column on May 5 explaining the rationale behind the new streaming platform (translation mine):

The key to governing democratic societies lies in the manufacturing of consent and winning consent. The manufacture of consent is about more than holding democratic power that is won at the ballot box. In modern societies, it is those who hold cultural hegemony who have the most influence on the subjectivization processes that the individual goes through. The manufacture of consent is closely related to cultural hegemony.

One of the most widespread tools of cultural hegemony is undoubtedly the world of cinema-TV show [dizi], often placed under the “entertainment sector.” However, it is precisely with this perception of “entertainment” that new discourse reaching audiences through screens become the determinants of new norms.

Today, we live in a world where those who politicize sexual perversion have legalized the injection of hormones into children without even parental consent. As much as the deviants in this limited circle, we can neither talk about the oppressed in the world nor the current atrocities of the neo-colonialist West. This is cultural hegemony.

So governance is about generating consent, and international media is making that process difficult for the Erdoğan regime. The most important aspect of this is the entertainment industry. The injection of sexual content is especially distracting to the public and doesn’t allow for the discussion of serious subjects, like global oppression. Kaplan doesn’t feel the need to dwell on it here, but Islamists typically argue that this is part of a conscious plot in Western capitols to keep people in the dark. She continues:

America lost the Vietnam war, but the example of Rambo, which valorized it, is know to everyone. As in this example, cultural hegemony makes the good look bad, the defeated look victorious, the right look wrong, the just look cruel, it dominates minds, but makes the subject feel as if he is adopting this message voluntarily while internalizing it.

I’d like to take a second here to note that all of these terms come from the left. “Cultural hegemony” is a Marxist term. “Manufacturing consent” comes from a 1988 book by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky. Her Rambo example also makes me think of James Baldwin’s famous 1966 Cambridge debate against William F. Buckley, where he said “it comes as a great shock to discover… that Gary Cooper killing off the Indians, and you were rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians were you!”

So none of this is exactly new, and in Turkey’s case, much of it goes back to the progressive posturing of Islamist right in the 1990s and 2000s. Still, I think it’s a bit strange that Kaplan is writing about Rambo here. Alev Alatlı, a higher order mystic of the Erdoğan elite, also wrote about Rambo in her book about the evils of Holywood, but she’s 78 years old. Kaplan is 40. You’d think she’d know that the American consent-manufacturing industry has graduated to Jason Bourne, Iron Man and Captain Marvel. The modern Hollywood hero is self-critical, purging his institutions of immoral conduct, presumably restoring the virtue lost in places like Vietnam. I’m not saying that makes things all that much better, I’m just saying they could at least update their examples. Maybe these guys are so busy winning at politics that they aren’t keeping up with the literature. (There’s a lot of work done on the U.S. government’s involvement in Hollywood productions. This book by two researchers at the University of Bath looks like a good place to start.)

Anyways, let’s get back to Kaplan:

TRT's international digital platform TABİİ will go down in history as one of the international challenges that our country has issued [to cultural hegemons] in this field. While its counterparts [like Netflix, Disney+] enter our country without even putting forward proper Turkish-language content, TRT TABİİ will start broadcasting on 7 May with 30 new and original series.

The digital platform, which will be free of charge to our citizens in the beginning, and will continue to meet audiences with productions in accordance with our national values at a much lower fee than its competitors.

However, just as Turkish TV series have become the biggest competitor against the American cultural hegemony on a global scale, TRT, the biggest patron of those series, will become a center of resistance against the cultural hegemony established by digital platforms with TABİİ.

Good luck to our country and the resisting world.

Basically, cultural production is a tool of power that has been used against Turkey, and Turkey is now forging its own tool. Except, as this argument usually goes, Turkey is a uniquely just power, so having replicated the American consent-manufacturing machine to its own specifications, it will only use it to moral ends.

Well, I’ve been watching bits and pieces of the consent-manufacturing entertainment my tax liras have been buying. Ibn Sina, is a family-friendly show about the childhood of the 10th century Muslim polymath known as Avicenna in the West. Akif is a show about the life of Mehmet Akif Ersoy, the romantic poet best known for writing Turkey’s national anthem. Dayton is about War-torn Bosnia and the Srebrenica massacre. Şebeke is yet another story of a hero-cop fighting a Gülenist-like clandestine cult within the state. Metamorfoz, is a show about an evil philanthropist-cum-putshist who looks an awful lot like Osman Kavala, one of Erdoğan’s more prominent political prisoners. The show amounts to a very expensive attempt at character assassination.

Tabii has Arabic, Urdu, Spanish and English channels, all of which offer pretty good subtitles and dubbing. It makes sense in terms of Turkey’s geopolitical reach. I can see how a middle class family in Lahore would shell out for the family-friendly content.

It’s still early days though. How will this new tool of consent manufacture actually work? If so, what will its audience be consenting to? It’s not very interesting to jump to conclusions. I’ll keep watching some of this and report back to you. I will say though, that culture quickly withers when put to the service of the state, and despite everything my generation has been through, it’s still a bit shocking to see how oblivious our right-wing overlords are to that very basic truth.

I leave you with one of my favorite parts of that Baldwin v. Buckley debate:

One of the great things that the white world does not know, but I think I do know, is that black people are just like everybody else. When is used the myth of the negro and the myth of color, to pretend and to assume that you are dealing essentially with something exotic, bizzarre, and practically according to human laws unknown. Alas it is not true. We are also mercenaries, dictators, murderers, liars. We are human too. What is crucial here is that unless we can manage to establish some kind of dialogue between those people whom I pretend have paid for the American dream, and those other people who have not achieved it, we’ll be in terrible trouble.

---

Hi Folks,

If you enjoy Kültürkampf and if you’d like to hear more from me, please consider becoming a paid member.

You’d be supporting my work and getting exclusive reviews of books, movies and music, as well as political analysis:

If you are already a paid member, please let me know what else you’d like to see on here. Would you like a members-only chat channel? Should I do mail bag sessions, where I collect questions and respond to them all every once in a while?

Just reply to this email to let me know.