Turkish Nationalist Quotes

…In the eyes of a desperate and desolate Germany, this was a nationalist dream come true, or rather something like hyper-nationalist pornography…

She was theorizing on the Deep State; that enduring Turkish paranoia that the nation really was a conspiracy run by a cabal of generals, judges, industrialists and gangsters. The Taksim Square massacre of three years before, the Kahramanmaraş slaughter of Alevis a few months after, the oil crisis and the enduring economic instability, even the ubiquity of the Grey Wolves nationalist youth movement handing out their patriotic leaflets and defiling Greek Churches: all were links in an accelerating chain of events running through the fingers of the Derin Devlet. To what end? the men asked. Coup, she said, leaning forward, her fingers pursed. It was then that Georgios Ferentinou adored her. The classic profile, the strength of her jaw and fine cheekbones. The way she shook her head when the men disagreed with her, how her bobbed, curling hair swayed. The way she would not argue but set her lips and stared, as if their stupidity was a stubborn offence against nature. Her animation in argument balanced against her marvellous stillness when listening, considering, drawing up a new answer. How she paused, feeling the regard of another, then turned to Georgios and smiled. In the late summer of 1980 Georgios Ferentinou fell in love with Ariana Sinanidis by Meryem Nasi’s swimming pool. Three days later, on September 12th, Chief of General Staff Kenan Evren overthrew the government and banned all political activity.

As far as Meryem was concerned, Greek baklava was Turkish baklava. And if the Syrians or Lebanese or Egyptians or Jordanians or any others lay claim to her beloved dessert, tough luck. It wasn’t theirs either. While the slightest change in her dietary vocabulary could rub her up the wrong way, it was the label Greek coffee that particularly boiled her blood. Which to her always was and always would be, Turkish coffee. By now, Ada had long discovered that her aunt was full of contradictions. Although she could be movingly respectful and empathetic towards other cultures and acutely aware of the dangers of cultural animosities, she automatically transformed into a kind of nationalist in the kitchen, a culinary patriot.

the Armenian genocide of the First World War years, which represented an escalation in intensity, rather than a departure from previous tolerance. Although the regime in power at the time of the actual massacres was the nationalist Young Turks, the actual violence had many resemblances to the Hamidian killings of twenty years earlier. As before, Turkish forces attacked a community believed to be sympathetic to external enemies, at a time when European powers were threatening not just the defeat of the Turkish state, but its partition among rival imperial powers.

the Young Turks with a complex nationalist ideology replete with ideas such as “in reality there cannot be a common home and fatherland for different peoples.… The new civilization will be created by the Turkish race.”27

The AKP government in Turkey, in power since 2002, while not officially abandoning its predecessors’ denialist approach to the issue, has taken a more permissive attitude, allowing alternative histories to be written and read in Turkey itself. This means that, first, the Turkish nationalist (or “denialist”) version of the Armenian Genocide that took root in the 1950s has crumbled in the face of the new scholarship: None of these Turkish nationalist historians has managed to write a full-length book that sets out a coherent “Turkish version” of what happened to the Armenians.

The book is limited in time and space to addressing population policies in the Young Turk era (1913–50) in Eastern Turkey. It begins with the Young Turk seizure of power in the 1913 coup d’état and ends with the end of Young Turk rule in 1950.1 It will describe how Eastern Turkey as an ethnically heterogeneous imperial shatter zone was subjected to various forms of nationalist population policies aimed at transforming the region into an ethnically homogeneous space to be included into the Turkish nation state. How was Eastern Turkey moulded by Young Turk population policies? Why was the Turkish process of nation formation so violent in this region? Why do political elites launch policies to increase homogeneity in their societies? These will be the guiding questions in this book. The focus will be on an account of the implementation of these nationalist population policies in the eastern provinces, in order to discuss the policies in detail. This book argues that the Young Turk nationalist elite launched this process of societal transformation in order to establish and sustain a Turkish nation state. In this process, ethnically heterogeneous borderland regions were subjected to more encompassing and more violent forms of population policies than the core regions. The eastern provinces were one of these special regions. This book highlights the role played by the Young Turks in the identification of the population of the eastern provinces as an object of knowledge, management, and radical change. It details the emergence of a wide range of new technologies of population policies, including physical destruction, deportation, forced assimilation, and memory politics, which converged in an attempt to increase population homogeneity within the nation state. The common denominator to which these phenomena can be reduced is the main theme of population policies. The dominant paradigms in the historiography of the great dynastic land empires can be characterized as a nationalist paradigm and a statist paradigm. According to the first paradigm, the phenomenon of nationalism led to the dissolution of the empires. Centrifugal nationalism nibbled at the imperial system for several decades until the empire crumbled into nation states. Due to their relatively early acquaintance with nationalism, the main force behind this nationalist disintegration was often located among minority groups such as Czechs, Serbs, Greeks, and Armenians. In this interpretation, the Young Turks too, were a nationalist movement that reacted to minority nationalisms by pushing for the establishment of a Turkish state in the Ottoman Anatolian heartland. In 1923, they succeeded when a unitary Turkish nation state rose from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire.

The Izmir trials had liquidated all criminal conspirators and silenced the Progressive opposition to Kemal -for the generals and their friends would henceforward be effectively excluded from political life. The Ankara trials, which followed a fortnight later, were intended to dispose, once and for all, of his remaining enemies, the members of the former Union and Progress Party. Some fifty were accused, of whom the most prominent were Javid and Dr. Nazim. Here the indictment concerned not a criminal attempt on Kemal’s life, but a political attempt to overthrow his régime. It was the final culmination of that feud between Unionists and Nationalists, between the followers of Enver and those of Kemal, which had divided the Turkish revolutionary movement. Kemal judged the remnants of the Union and Progress group partly in personal terms, through his own obsessive memories of past rivalries, slights and intrigues, but partly also in political terms, as the survivors of a régime bounded by individual interests with no radical national programme. What remained of the party, armed as it still was with funds and animated by leaders well versed in underground political intrigue, must thus inevitably be the enemy of his own. Until the Unionists were finally eliminated Kemal could enjoy no sense of security.

The Izmir trials had liquidated all criminal conspirators and silenced the Progressive opposition to Kemal -for the generals and their friends would henceforward be effectively excluded from political life. The Ankara trials, which followed a fortnight later, were intended to dispose, once and for all, of his remaining enemies, the members of the former Union and Progress Party. Some fifty were accused, of whom the most prominent were Javid and Dr. Nazim. Here the indictment concerned not a criminal attempt on Kemal’s life, but a political attempt to overthrow his régime. It was the final culmination of that feud between Unionists and Nationalists, between the followers of Enver and those of Kemal, which had divided the Turkish revolutionary movement. Kemal judged the remnants of the Union and Progress group partly in personal terms, through his own obsessive memories of past rivalries, slights and intrigues, but partly also in political terms, as the survivors of a régime bounded by individual interests with no radical national programme. What remained of the party, armed as it still was with funds and animated by leaders well versed in underground political intrigue, must thus inevitably be the enemy of his own. Until the Unionists were finally eliminated Kemal could enjoy no sense of security.

Nevlinsky had a more realistic, or more opportunistic, approach. He suggested that Herzl, as an eminent journalist connected with one of Europe’s most influential newspapers, could be of great service to the Ottoman Empire’s public relations regarding its persecuted Armenian minority. Accordingly, Herzl provided his newspaper a flattering interview with the Grand Vizier, Halil Rifat Pasha, and a pro-Turkish account of recent mass killings in Armenia as well as the empire’s conflict with Greece over Crete. Herzl was not unsympathetic to the Armenian cause, but he believed that Armenian “revolutionaries” were bringing misfortune upon themselves and, in a meeting in London with the Armenian nationalist leader Avetis Nazarbekian, urged him to order his followers to lay down their arms. Herzl may well have viewed the Armenians with compassion, but he also knew that so long as the “Armenian Question” exercised the sultan, he would not brook any consideration of concessions to another non-Muslim minority.