Turkish Neo-Nationalists and Their Neocon Back Door To the US Administration
The details in this article might be a bit too heady for those not familiar with the issues and the personalities, and I am not vouching for accuracy, but the article makes intriguing allegations about links between Turkish neo-nationalists (”ulusalcis”) and US neo-conservatives (”neocons”), like Michael Rubin and Daniel Pipes, through them gaining access through the back door to the US administration and convincing it to favor ties to the Turkish military over the elected AKP government. Neo-nationalists are in favor of using any means necessary — including military intervention — to remove Islamic influence from Turkish politics and public life. Neo-nationalists are against the introduction of liberal values because these would lead to further undermining of “Turkish” values and, by giving minorities rights, would assist them in undermining the state. They also generally are against joining the EU and tend toward xenophobia and authoritarianism. (The article mentions the newspaper Cumhuriyet as a prime mouthpiece for the ulusalcis.) I particularly like the reference to the aestheticization of violence, which is something I have written about on this blog — the role of violence, masculinity and honor in imprinting national(ist) feeling.
Here is an interesting excerpt:
Why would Gündüz Aktan, a former ambassador and a declared nationalist, refer to both Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) and Schmitt’s staunch critic, Leo Strauss (1899-1973), in the same article as sources of inspiration to define the current domestic political struggle in Turkey?Aktan did this in his farewell article to the readers of the Radikal daily on June 9, 2007 and claimed that Turkey’s situation coincided with Schmitt’s view that politics is a struggle of different lifestyles that can be fatal. Schmitt is known to be the ideologue of National Socialism, and Leo Strauss was a Nazi survivor who immigrated to the US to become the theoretician of the neo-conservative ideology. What brought these two unlikely bedfellows together and made them a source of inspiration to Aktan was their uncompromising antagonism against liberalism. Schmitt believed that through its endeavor to reconcile opposites, liberalism was an effort to change the intrinsic characteristics of politics and Strauss believed in “the continuation of the existing hegemony” by any means necessary. Schmitt believed that war is a way to keep the current hegemony so it has to exist to prevent the spread of liberalism. Strauss believed that “noble lies,” robust internationalism, declarations of emergency, immunity from accepted rules and laws and, finally, the aestheticization of violence were all legitimate methods to preserve the standing hegemony. …
Here is the link to Gunduz Aktan’s farewell article (it’s in Turkish of course).