Videos On Turkish Politics This Week

Reflections on what I watched this week

It’s going to be a very brief post this week, O dearly beloved, as I am squeezing every bit of my mental energy into finalizing the first draft of my monograph on Turkish politics (more on that in coming weeks.)

I thought that this week, I’d share with you some of the Turkey-related things I’ve been listening to on my daily commute. So here it goes, quick & dirty:

The Darya Dugina assasination

As someone studying romantic nationalism, the assassination of Darya Dugina this week got my attention. I was interested to know what was being said in the government’s ecosystem, so of course I tuned into A haber:

This is a program hosted by the Barlas clan and brings to the surface some of the more Eurasian aspects of the government (as opposed to say, Islamist or Ülkücü ones). Mehmet Barlas is clearly upset about the attack on the Dugins, and goes around the table asking everyone else. Most agree with him and say what you’d expect them to say: that it’s part of the war between the globalists and Eurasian nationalists, that Dugin is a heroic thinker and intellectual, that he helped steer the Kremlin in a pro-Turkey direction in recent years, that the hit is the work of Ukrainians and/or Anglo-American spies, etc.

The sole dissenting voice is Emin Pazarcı, the Ankara bureau chief of a minor government newspaper. He says that Dugin is a Russian expansionist and not a friend of Turkey. “One doesn’t use America’s rope to go down a well, but one doesn’t use Russia’s rope to go down a well either” he says. Everyone sort of agrees with him that Russia shouldn’t be trusted either, but that Dugin said nice things about Turkey and President Erdoğan, and that they were considering the immediate future rather than “100 years from now.”

Barlas says he simply feels closer to Dugin, just as he feels closer to Germans and European nationalists, despite their insults at Turkey, because they’re all ultimately against the globalists. “It’s your enemy’s enemy is your friend sort of thing” he says. Everyone, including Pazarcı, sort of end up agreeing with each other on all of these points. It turns out they’re just emphasizing different aspects of the same idea.

This video (with Turkish subtitled) of Darya Dugina peaked this week. She’s on a TV program where someone apparently says that Ülkücü (pan-Turkic nationalist) groups are conducting sabotage operations in Crimea. She says that’s not true, the Ülkücü are nationalists and wouldn’t do that. She then says - and this is the important part - that Ukrainian soldiers have been found to be in possession of Fetullah Gülen’s book, and that they’re opposed to Erdoğan.

The claim doesn’t seem serious to me, but then again, it doesn’t have to be. The point is to draw clear battle lines, and she gets the job done.

It also made me think of a piece in last week’s The Economist, describing how Russia is mobilizing religious sentiment towards the war:

The loyal segment of Russia’s Muslim leadership has perhaps outdone the Orthodox church in the zeal of its pro-war pronouncements. Talgat Tadzhuddin, a senior figure in Russian Islam whose rhetoric has always been fiercely anti-American, last month backed the Kremlin’s surreal claim to be engaging in the “denazification” of Ukraine. He said that the government should keep pursuing its war aims “so as to leave no fascists or parasites anywhere near us, because in future there may not be enough pesticide”.

He and other state-backed Muslim leaders have presented the battle against Ukraine as a holy war, implying that soldiers who are slain on the battlefield will go to paradise. This matters because soldiers from Russia’s ethnic minorities, including many Muslims, are playing an outsize role in the campaign.

The Babala TV Q&As:

Next, a new series of Q&As on Babala TV, a YouTube channel that seems to be popular with the kids these days (yeah I get to say it). They call them “açık miktofon” which literally means “open mic,” but here it seems to refer to amateurs being able to ask questions, rather than the stage being open to amateur performers. I think it’s one of those instances where a word or concept changes meaning a little bit as it crosses a linguistic barrier.

Anyways, these events are very long. The first video is 2:15 hours, the second a whopping 3:39 hours, and that’s apparently the cut version (thank Google for x2 speed). The people in the audience seem to be friends and acquaintances of presenter (and Babala TV founder) Oğuzhan Uğur.

Uğur, as he mentions several times in the interviews, is the son of the soldier Hasan Atilla Uğur, best known for being the person to first interrogate PKK founder Abdullah Öcalan when he was captured in 1999. Uğur was formally tried of crimes relating to JİTEM and Balyoz/Ergenekon, and spent some time in jail, which also comes up (they also sometimes do father & son sessions).

This first one is with Ümit Özdağ, the leader of the far-right nationalist Victory Party, best known for their harsh anti-immigration stance. He’s a Nigel Farage type of figure in that he isn’t very electable, he know he isn’t electable, but he’s trying to pull the political spectrum in his particular direction, which happens to be an extremely nativist type of nationalism in the mould of continental European far-right parties.

There isn’t a whole lot to say about Özdağ’s performance that’s new. He picks fights with a few people asking questions, which I’m sure got lots of views, but he doesn’t really say anything you won’t have heard in coverage on him. Overall, the Babalı crowd seems to be relatively close to Özdağ’s ideas, if not quite as far to the right as he is.

There is a bit in the end where a young woman, who is apparently a long-time friend of Uğur, goes up on stage and talks about how her parents who were vocally opposed to the construction of a series of mines in the Finike, Alacadağ area in Antalya. Her parents apparently won a court case that stopped the construction of 15 mines in the area on environmental grounds. They were then brutally murdered, and the case was never really investigated properly. Another alternative media channel recently made a documentary about it. (I haven’t watched it yet, but it’s here, and seems to be subtitled in English)

The second interview in the series is with Ömer Faruk Gergerlioğlu, a doctor-cum-human rights defender and current HDP MP. Gergerlioğlu has been pretty fierce in defending the rights of some members of some of the most reviled groups in the country, including Gülenists. He went to jail under accusations of terror propaganda, but was released upon appeal to the constitutional court.

Uğur, the presenter, actually talks to the audience before Gergerlioğlu walks in because he’s worried that they’re going to attack Gergerlioğlu too much and that the attempt at dialogue will fail.

And he’s right. They do come from a very jingoistic Turkish angle and rip into Gergerlioğlu one after the other. As is often the case with these things, they see the PKK as inexplicably evil and the HDP as its extension, and they aren’t too eager to empathize with Gergerlioğlu’s self-proclaimed humanism. He tries to charm them with anecdotes but it doesn’t really work. Some of the questions are too insulting and Uğur has to intervene.

A lot of the anger against the HDP sort of bleeds into the opposition to refugees and Islamism. This generation of young nationalists seem to think that “other countries”, primarily in the West, get to have ethnically and linguistically homogenous, (mildly) secular nation-states, and are furious because they can see how Turkey is shifting into something else at breathtaking pace. The concept of the country is very quickly. They want the change to stop, and for the basic functions of the state to resume, which amounts to a restoration of homogeneity.

Gergerlioğlu is patient and tells them that he’s committed to dialogue. I’m not sure I share his conviction. The format is built to stop the fragmentation of public discourse in the run up to the next era of Turkish politics, but I don’t think that’s what’s happening here. The video got 5 million views in 5 days (Turkey has a population of roughly 85 million plus 5-10 million in the diaspora). I have a feeling that most of those people wanted to see a member of the HDP shouted at. A distant American cousin of this are “Ben Shapiro destroys” videos on YouTube. You (the young conservative) walk around all day thinking about all these things you’d say to the enemy if you had the chance, then you go on YouTube and watch someone do it just the way you thought you would.

Uğur, it has to be said, is strangely accommodating for a right-wing host. He tries to find areas of common ground with Gergerlioğlu. He has a tight-knit group of people there who broadly share his nationalistic attitude, but not exclusively. In the Ümit Özdağ Q&A, Salih Gergerlioğlu, the son of the HDP MP, is also in the audience and asks a question. Özdağ wants to know if he’s related to the HDP MP, and learning that he is, sort of disparages him. Uğur intervenes and asks him to respond, saying that dialogue is important, even if people disagree strongly (he should read Raymond Geuss on the subject).

I’m curious to see what IYI and CHP politicians are going to be like in this format. I’m guessing that they’ll be pulled to the right.

That’s it. A bit longer than planned, as usual.

I’ll hopefully be coming out of this extremely busy period around late September, when I’ll probably rethink the entire format here on Kültürkampf, so please feel free to comment and/or email me with thoughts, questions and requests.

Now back to the monograph…