The Margins of Academia or Challenging the Official Ideology

Abstract

This chapter highlights two intellectuals, both “ethnic Turks,” who have challenged Turkey’s huge scientific machines. Their scholarship demolished the credibility of the official, extremely rigid, and radically nationalist “social sciences” as they are practiced, in the past and currently in Turkish universities and research centers. The impact of their work and their intellectual audacity gave birth to new intellectual traditions in Turkey and shook international Turcology and “Turkish studies,” which constitute an important branch of Middle Eastern Studies.

İsmail Besṃikçi earned a PhD in Sociology and seemed poised to obtain a position in the Turkish academic establishment. Through a series of sociological-ethnographic volumes published at the turn of the 1970s, however, he chose to show the centrality of the Kurdish issue in the very fabric of modern Turkey. In the second half of the 1970s, after he was fired from his university and spent several years in prison, he directly attacked the Kemalist academic establishment. Besṃikçi insisted that Kemalist power, far from being the initiator of modernity in Turkey, preserved, if not reinforced, pre- or profoundly anti-modern institutions, such as tribal leadership and religious brotherhoods, at least in the Kurdish region.

The second intellectual, Taner Akçam, one of the main figures of the radical left in Turkey of the 1970s, was obliged to flee the country. One of his largely unknown first books, published in 1992, was not on the Armenian issue, but on torture and cruelty in the national history. That same year, he also published a path-breaking book on the Armenian issue. Akçam had very few archival resources at his disposal, but he was able to see the deeper sense of what scholars shyly called the “Armenian question”: questioning “1915” meant questioning the very foundation of Turkey, as a state, but also as a country and a society, with all her components, including the Kurdish one, and all her political trends, including the liberal and left-wing ones. Scholars working on contemporary Tukey had to establish the facts, describe what happened in 1915 by taking their distance from official history-writing, and, more importantly, understand how such an act could take place and how such a massive taboo on the genocide could have been institutionalized.

This chapter aims to honor Taner Akçam’s pioneering inquiries into the Armenian genocide and its impact on Turkish society and politics, as well as the Turkish sociologist Ismail Beşikci’s contributions to the renewal of the historiography on contemporary Turkey, and discusses avenues that their oeuvre opens for the future research.

The Arab historian Ibn Khaldûn (1332–1406) was aware that important historical changes took place not only through the action of majorities but also thanks to the dynamism of the margins, that is, rustic groups located in the remote suburbs of power centers, who may have had very weak material and intellectual resources at their disposal. His hypothesis on the leading forces behind historical changes diverged radically from those of his successors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as Emile Durkheim, Max Weber and Norbert Elias, or Karl Marx and Vilfredo Pareto. In the interpretation of Ibn Khaldûn, the actors from the margins are initially unaware of the historical meaning of their ventures; still, thanks to their eruption on the historical scene, one can create new power relations, establish collective trust and thus restore stability and prosperity, and regenerate a declining civilization. Following this Khaldûnien vision, but interpreting it in a renewed approach, one can also say that intellectuals coming from the margins of academia, who often belong to dissident circles and are therefore deprived of economic and symbolic resources, can change the course of history-writing. They may remain marginal, and lack any means to prevent the dynamics of de-civilization unleashed in their country; still, they can radically transform intellectual life, renew social sciences, and redefine a given research field at the international level, despite not having a prestigious institutional position, at least at the beginning of their carrier.

In Turkey, two intellectuals, both “ethnic Turks,” if one can use this term, coming from two rather marginalized regions and modest origins, have challenged their country’s huge scientific machines. Their scholarship demolished the credibility of the official “social sciences” as they are practiced, in the past and currently, within the extremely rigid and repetitive frameworks of Turkish society. The impact of their work and their intellectual audacity gave birth to new intellectual traditions in Turkey and shook international Turcology and “Turkish studies,” which constitute an important branch of Middle Eastern Studies. The first one, İsmail Beşikçi, born in İskilip (Çorum province) in 1939, obtained a PhD degree in sociology and seemed poised to join the academic establishment. Through a series of sociological-ethnographic volumes published at the turn of the 1970s, however, he chose to show the centrality of the Kurdish issue in the very fabric of the modern Turkey. In the second half of the 1970s, after he was fired from his university and spent several years in prison, he directly attacked the Kemalist academic establishment, deconstructed the famous Turkish Thesis of History and the Sun-Language Theory.¹ Revisiting another pillar of “official ideology,” Beşikçi insisted on the fact that far from being the initiator of modernity in Turkey, Kemalist power preserved, if not reinforced, pre-, or profoundly anti-modern institutions, such as tribal leadership and religious brotherhoods, at least in the Kurdish region. He paid the price for his persistence in dissident research by additional long years in jail.²

The second intellectual, Taner Akçam (born in 1953 in Ardahan), one of the main figures of the radical left in Turkey of the 1970s, was obliged to flee the country. One of his largely unknown first books, published in 1992, was not on the Armenian issue, but on torture and cruelty in the national history. The change of perspective that would mark his later work was already clearly announced in this volume: Akçam did not read Ottoman history as a history of backwardness, feudalism or religious “reaction” (irtica), nor as that of economic and military battles between “imperialist” powers, as the left-wing theoreticians used to do, but as a history of brutality. Cruelty was not only a marker of the past, but also a founding element of “our political culture.”³

The same year, Akçam published a second and path-breaking book on the Armenian issue. One should remember that at the turn of 1990s, scholars had hardly 20–25 scientifically solid titles on the Armenian genocide, and in Turkey, which painfully tried to leave behind her years of military rule and repression, it was simply impossible to speak about the Armenian issue with the slightest empathy or compassion. Akçam had very few archival resources at his disposal, but he was able to see the deeper sense of what scholars shyly called by then the “Armenian question”: questioning “1915” meant questioning the very foundation of Turkey, as a state, but also as a country and a society, with all her components, including the Kurdish one, and all her political trends, including the liberal and left-wing ones. Scholars working on contemporary Tukey had to establish the facts, describe what happened in 1915 by establishing a distance from official history-writing, and, more importantly, understand how such an act could take place and how such a massive taboo on the genocide could have been institutionalized.⁴

In his book, Akçam also insisted on the fact that this taboo did not mean that the “events” were really forgotten or ignored. On the contrary, while the official discourse categorically denied that the massacres were planned and executed by the central power, collective memory was by and large marked by them. Moreover, street-level discourse as well as academic historiography did not necessarily deny, but justified what happened. The official discourse even contained some relevant nuances and proposed brutal, but plural narratives. The first one of these narratives openly conveyed a discourse of hatred. According to some nationalist writers, the Turks rendered a great service to humanity by “punishing” this “harmful” group, which French and German antisemites qualified as “Jews of the Orient.”⁵ The second narrative was more exclusively based on the argument of self-defense: the Turks as an ethnic group were obliged to take some harsh measures against the Armenians, not in order to exterminate them, but as a “cruel necessity” of their “war for their own survival.” The third narrative, which insisted on the Social Darwinist necessity of war between nations and extermination of the weakest, presented itself as axiologically neutral. As the so-called left-wing Unionist Muhiddin Birgen put it, “history is founded on this right (to live), and this is true both for the living beings, as well as for unanimated objects [sic!]. And this right cannot be obtained without struggle […]. This struggle takes place sometimes through violence, and sometimes without violence […]. The conditions of the period had obliged the Unionists to undertake a violent offensive. Personally I am against violence, but the history is not. It is without emotion and does whatever it desires.”⁶

Thus, one could not conclude that Turkey suffered from amnesia due to the decades that passed since 1915 or to the state’s official discourse and education system: in reality, in some official publications, the facts were not even denied, rather the violence against Armenians was presented as a necessity either of national survival or of the elementary rule of a biologized history. Moreover, Akçam suggested in his book that Turkish identity has been constructed in relation to the genocide and that anti-Armenian hatred still structured the official discourse. The fusion between the state and the nation, as it took place in 1915 and during the following years, explained the key to the understanding both the genocide and its denial or, rather, non-denial.

Expelled from the academic world, Beşikçi was also abandoned by his colleagues and friends until the preparation of a Festschrift for his 70th birthday, and his name is still associated with the dangerous if not “sulfurous” issues, that a career-seeking scholar should leave aside. Akçam still remains a victim of massive campaigns of stigmatization. While young scholars working on the Kurds or on the Armenian genocide do not necessarily need to mention these two names anymore, it is obvious that thanks to their work it is no longer possible to write a history of Turkey similar to The Emergence of Modern Turkey by the late Bernard Lewis, the world-famous professor at Princeton.⁷

Beşikçi and Akçam do not belong to the same generation; they did not have a shared research experience, nor a common militant past. Still, their works, in the sense of an oeuvre, have at least two common points. First, Beşikçi, and the “Young Akçam” used largely open sources, memoirs, official discourses, newspapers, and so on and they asked themselves and their readers the same question: why these sources, which were celebrated by the press, highlighted by academia, and sacralized by civil and military decision-makers, had not been read, questioned, and used as the foundation for social science research on the Kurdish issue, or the Armenian Genocide. Why didn’t they allow for re-thinking the history of the late imperial and early republican periods? How does one explain that denial and ignorance could prevail at the level of the official discourse, while far from denying anything, the sources emanating from the state “confessed” almost everything?

The second point that links the two scholars is much more important, and marks a real paradigm shift in the Turkey of the1960s–1970s. Beşikçi, who was never a militant, and Akçam, who was an important leader of a revolutionary organization, both came from a left-wing tradition, and still have democratic left-wing sensibilities. The Turkish left of the 1960s and 1970s was obsessed by two, and only two issues: the issue of class struggles or social justice, which was at the heart of any reformist and revolutionary left-wing concern, and the issue of anti-imperialism and independence. These two issues were to a large extent interrelated, or even merged in one single class-and-nation issue. Except Ibrahim Kaypakkaya, founder of an underground party and guerilla group (killed under torture in 1973)⁸, no left-wing leader at the turn of 1970s mentioned the Great War, the Unionist regime and its cruelties, nor the brutality of the Kemalist Kurdish policy, as founding episodes of the modern Turkey. The interpretation commonly given to World War I (WWI) was quite mechanical: it supposedly opposed “imperialist powers” fighting each other in order to share the world. According to this reading, France, Great Britain and Russia attacked the Ottoman Empire, governed by ill-advised leaders who happened to be collaborating in their turn with the “imperialist” Germany. The “War of Independence” of Mustafa Kemal, which followed the disaster of the Great War, constituted a sacred struggle for national emancipation and had an anti-imperialist feature. But while ensuring Turkey’s formal independence, this new war didn’t lead to a true emancipatory revolution; moreover, its legacy was betrayed by the new Muslim/Turkish “bourgeoisie” and the “feudal class,” both on the payroll of imperialism, either under Mustafa Kemal himself or immediately after his death. No one asked “how did Turkey become a Muslim country at 99.99%,” as powerholders then and now proudly proclaim, while it obviously had a massive Christian community before 1914, or how the “Turkish” bourgeoisie got their original wealth?

To be fair, the radical left expressed some sympathy for the non-Muslim communities that were considered just as oppressed as the Turks (and the Muslims) themselves by “imperialism.” It certainly did not share right-wing intellectuals’ conspiracy theories on the “missionary-schools,” or Freemasonry which, supposedly, aimed at the enslavement of Turks or Muslims during the late Empire; still, it put the emphasis, almost unanimously, on the fact that Christian minorities were manipulated by imperialist powers, which used them to fulfill their world-domination strategies. Thus, they were not and could not become agents of their own destiny with their own reading of history, their projection in the future, their dreams and their aspirations, and could remain but the “objects” of a history determined by the “imperialists.” The “imperialist,” in turn, was by definition the gavur, that is, the non-Muslim, whose diabolic projects, as in the past, consisting of exploiting the country and its resources. As a widely known revolutionary song put it in the second half of the 1960s:

Verse

Verse [E]ven if they come with their tanks and their canons … the country of the Turk will become independent. Workers and youth hand-in-hand; we have our youth (mobilized) in this field. Come oh! you, who are virile! We have our hatred vis-à-vis the gavur! Forwards, you! Bearer of the flag! Youth and military hand-in-hand, Independent Turkey! Independent Turkey!Footnote

Türk Solu, so. 43, 10 Eylül 1968, quoted by T. Feyizoğlu, Türkiye’de Devrimci Gençlik Hareketleri 1960–1968, İstanbul, Belge, v. 1, 1993, p. 573.

Mahir Çayan, a very sophisticated leader and theoretician of the radical Turkish left (killed in 1972) would even complain in 1971 that the society had been anesthetized to the extent of losing its reflexes against the “gavur.”¹⁰

Anti-imperialism as Anti-Christian Discourse

It is certainly not my purpose to judge these men and women, and even less Mahir Çayan, who were only in their early 20s, lacked intellectual resources and time for maturation, and paid the price for their convictions by death or by years of imprisonment: but mentioning them is also a way of understanding the importance of the “Beşikçi Moment” and the “Akçam Moment,” and questioning Turkey’s intellectual history, which is inseparable from her political history and her history of mass-violence. This questioning itself brings us to a very complex genealogy, where one observes that certain dynamics persist over a very long period, but the frontiers between left and right, emancipation and enslavement, revolution and order are constantly blurred. One could give many examples of this quasi-systemic set of confusions: Ziya Pasha (1829–1880), a well-known member of the Young Ottomans, aspired for liberty, constitution and accountability for the powerholders; still, his main source of inquietude was the emancipation of Christians and the perspective of their equality with the Muslims. Ziya did not hesitate to threaten these communities with a heavy but “just” revenge that the Turks might be tempted to exert over them.¹¹ Cevdet Pasha (1822–1895) a well-known statesman, state chronicler and law-maker, was not attracted by the idea of liberty, and even less by any constitutional project. He was perfectly aware of the French Revolution and its meaning, for France as well as for the world, and the importance that the idea of emancipation had become irreversible in the world of the nineteenth century. Still, he shared Ziya Pasha’s distaste for equality between Muslims and non-Muslims.¹² Abdülhamid II (r. 1867–1909) made a clear distinction between Muslims, to be empowered, and non-Muslims, to be disempowered; the large-scale massacres of Armenians between 1894 and 1896 and the Ilinden massacre in Macedonia in 1903 further attested to the legitimacy of exterminatory projects.

None of these three figures, who were each westernized in his own way, used the concept of imperialism or class. It was, however, clear to them that the Christians in the Ottoman Empire constituted an extension of Christianity in Europe, enlarged to Russia (even British and French participation in the Crimean War, between 1853–1856, in order to save the Ottoman Empire from fatal destruction did not change this imaginary), and none of them asked: who are the Christians of our Empire? What do they want? What kind of hopes, dreams, projections for the future do they have? The “Christian” was simply the “Non-Muslim,” whose otherness was associated either with economic wealth or with inferiority, and, in both cases, potentially, with enmity. Ziya, Cevdet and Abdulhamid II were forbearers of the Committee of Union and Progress which, after having created an empire-wide revolutionary enthusiasm, planned and executed the 1915 genocide.

Class Struggles, and Struggles Among the Nations

Many scholars explained the radicalization of this Committee, which took power thanks to a pronunciamiento of some young officers in 1908, by the dramatic events of the years 1908–1914.¹³ These circumstances gave birth to a dark subjectivity, as well as a violent nostalgia for the lost Balkans among the Unionists. On the other hand, these young komitaci (“secret committee members”) had a specific ethos based on secretiveness, the spirit of sacrifice and duty of revenge; they were not only victims, but also authors of the tragedies they experienced and even felt flattered by them. Their inability to master their hubris pushed them to greater adventures that, by the end, they were unable to master. No doubt they imagined themselves as genius revolutionaries; still, they were also strongly linked to “Hamidianism,” this conservative, Islamist-Nationalist, anti-Christian, anti-(liberal) Western weltanschauung, that offered them the only raison d’état, which made sense to them and that they could radicalize to a genocidal extent. In 1908, the Unionist discourse proclaimed the unity of the anasir, a term used to describe the Ottoman ethnic and confessional communities, yet we also know from their internal correspondences as well as from the publication of Turk (1902)¹⁴, that the Committee was profoundly nationalist and considered that any other cause or goal had to be subordinated to its exclusive nationalism. Their acceptance of the ethnic and confessional plurality was real, but also conditional: Christians had to accept being at the service of Turkishness, without seeking full equality. In a speech delivered during a party-rally in Salonika (6 August 1910), Talaat clearly insisted on the fact that theoretical equality was not the same thing as equality in praxis:

If we follow the Constitution, all the Turkish subjects, Muslims as well as non-Muslims, are equal before the law. But you can understand by yourselves that this is impossible. Before everything else, the Sharia, all our past, and the feeling of hundreds of thousands of believers are opposed to that; then, and that is much more important, the Christians themselves are opposed to this because at any cost they want to be Ottomans.¹⁵

Thus, the Muslims (by this term the Unionists understood the “Turks” both in the Balkans and in Minor Asia¹⁶), were and had to remain the real masters of the Empire. They were seen as the Empire’s Herrvolk¹⁷ and had to be superior to the Christians. Power had to belong to the Turks, and to the Turks alone. This did not mean that the Unionists also considered the Turks as the socially and economically dominant element of the Empire. On the contrary, according to them, while being the political-military masters of the Empire, the Turks were socially, economically, and even culturally¹⁸ oppressed by the Christian minorities. For the pro-Unionist theoretician Tekin Alp, the “revolutionary fiat” couldn’t take place in the post-1908 Ottoman context, because the first and second “états,” that is, the Christians, while refused equality with the Muslims, continued to exploit and oppress them¹⁹. For the Unionists, the Turks constituted “a big, (but) disparate Race”²⁰ that was the oppressed strata of the Empire.

Turkish nationalism and the perception of the Turks as a dominated/persecuted group by their fellow-Ottomans, were unique to the so-called Young Turk Revolution and this distinguished it from the 1905 Russian and 1906 Persian revolutions. Except in some parts of the Russian Empire, such as in Baku where inter-ethnic Armenian-Azeri violence took place, the 1905 Russian revolution came from below, an uprising directly targeting the tsar, that had strong social and political content. Equally propelled from below, the Persian revolution mobilized both “progressive” and some conservative segments of society, and in spite of some complicity between the revolutionaries and Great Britain, had a strong “anti-imperialist” tonality. By contrast, the “Young Turk Revolution,” which was celebrated as “1789 on the Bosporus” in Paris and Lyon, emanated from within the state, mobilizing its young officers based in the Balkans, and aimed at the salvation of the state. Although, at the beginning, it advocated “progress” and the unity of Ottomans of all confessions, it rapidly switched into a profoundly conservative and anti-Christian movement.

With very rare exceptions, the Unionists did not use the concept of “imperialism,” and even less that of “comprador bourgeoisie.” Still, as readers (if not comrades) of Parvus Efendi, the Russian-German “socialist” economist,²¹ they analyzed interethnic relations in Asia Minor as relations between ethno-classes: the exploited Muslim/Turkish ethno-class, on the one hand, and the oppressive, bourgeois Armenian and Greek ethno-classes, on the other. The fight opposing them to each other was thus simultaneously perceived as a struggle between two classes and two ethnic groups. According to a Unionist paper, for instance, “the Greek” was the “enemy of our religion, our history, our honor, our homeland, to put it in one single word, our material and spiritual existence.”²² This idea also appears in the post-war memoirs of Unionist leaders: “The Turk and the Kurd were constrained to consider the Armenian as a snake introduced into their country by the Russian”²³. In his post-war memoirs, Talaat had the same reading:

[E]ven a rapid observation would be enough to show that the Armenians who are presented as victims and oppressed, live and enrich themselves through confiscation of the harvest of the Kurds, who are exhibited as oppressors and expropriators […]. Some Muslims, who possess villages (but) generally live in the cities, unite themselves with the Armenians to suck the blood of the Muslim element.²⁴

“Only the Turk would thus not have a right to live in this world?” a scandalized Talaat asked himself after the war,²⁵ as did Cemal Pasha, a member of the Unionist troika, in exactly similar terms.²⁶ In their eyes, however, this “right to live” was the right to exclusiveness. During the genocide, Talaat expressed his ambition to create a “purely Muslim” economy,²⁷ as did Enver, the last member of the troika, who explained to the German military attaché Otto von Lossow, on 9 May 1916, that Armenians, Greeks, and Jews had to be excluded from production and commerce in the Empire.²⁸ One can find hundreds of similar comments and passages in the Unionist and pro-Unionists papers, theoretical texts (Yusuf Akçura), or poetry (Ziya Gökalp).

Kemalism, Revolution, Nationalism, and Conservatism

As I have said, contrary to an over-interpretation that some historians propose,²⁹ very few Unionists used the concept of imperialism. To be sure, they were familiar with the term “revolution,” but after 1909 they adopted an exclusively nationalist, and what they called “Germanized” version of this concept; for instance, they firmly condemned the “doctrine of human rights” that was spreading like “microbes” in the Empire, and commanded “discipline and order” (rabt-i-zabt) instead of political plurality and freedom. After 1917, and at least until mid- or late 1921, the terms “revolution” and “imperialism” together constituted the backbone of Unionist, and consequently Kemalist discourses.

In 1917, the Unionists wanted to send a delegation to the Stockholm Conference of anti-militarist socialists (also called the Third Zimmerwald Conference, 5–12 September), without convincing the dissident socialist representatives of the Second International that they were socialists and/or pacifists.³⁰ But they persisted. After the 1918 debacle, they understood that they had to play the game of being genuine “socialists.” They had to face the reality provoked by their defeat, but on the other hand, they clearly understood that the Russian Revolution had changed Europe’s political map, as well as its political syntax. In Russia, many liberal, or even “reactionary” forces were henceforth defining themselves as socialists. In Central Asia, Bolshevism was seen both as the near and unavoidable horizon of Russia (and Asia) and as compatible with Islam, but also as a doctrine of preservation of local and religious authorities, institutions, structures and values, and not as a social upheaval.

To be sure, the Unionists had no feeling of guilt: far from assuming any responsibility concerning the imperial disaster created by their own will, they were even proud of their legacy. But they also seemed to understand that their time might have been over. As Talaat told his companions:

Our political life has come to an end; the nation’s hate and wrath are suspended on us. We have to find the shortest way in order to join Europe, or withdraw us to some locality, and follow what happens without undertaking an action. Of course, if an opportunity presents itself, we can profit from it. But what we have to do (now) is to leave aside our personal concerns and retire us somewhere. We have tried to save our nation, therefore, we are not condemned by our conscience. But the fortune didn’t smile to us. We have to pass over our duty to the others.³¹

In reality, however, even after their final defeat they remained profoundly chiliastic, worshiping, in Karl Mannheim’s terms,³² Kairos with the hope that this god of opportunity would allow them to undo what Cronos has established. And the new Russian context offered them precious margins of action. They could easily organize themselves as an informal “International,” or an international that Hans-Lukas Kieser defines as “the anti-liberal International of Revolutionists.”³³ Enver even founded a new organization called Islam Ihtilâl Cemiyetleri Ittihadi or, according to its official French translation L’Union pour la liberation de l’islam.³⁴ Unionism made a significant comeback in Baku, where its representatives participated in the First Congress of the Peoples of the East (1–8 September 1920), and paraded thereafter in Moscow, where it introduced itself to Bolshevism and encountered Karl Radek, as well as other strong men of the new regime.

Unlike the Bolsheviks and the newly formed communist parties, whose main figures had been against the “imperialist war” of 1914–1918, the Unionists had participated in the war and their primary objective was to continue the war. Still, Talaat, Enver, Cemal, as well as the Kemalist resistance which, in its main body, constituted the organic continuity of the Committee of Union and Progress, re-appropriated the Bolshevik vocabulary in an extremely hastened process. In the words of Emel Akal, during the first stage of the War of Independence (1919–1921), “everyone (was) a sympathizer of Bolsheviks” in Ankara.³⁵

The move toward Bolshevism was partly opportunistic, not to say cynical, but only partly. Many Unionists were in fact passing through a real revolutionary “drunkenness,” which marked the Zeitgeist at the turn of 1920s. Cemal Pasha, for instance, was transformed into a “vagabond of the revolution, feeding himself only by the idea of an Indian revolution.”³⁶ But what kind of revolution did they have in mind? Concerning the exiled Unionist leadership, the answer to this question should not be sought in Marx or Lenin, but in nationalism, which itself was inseparable from Pan-Islamism: they wanted their revolution, with their own nationalist imaginary and agenda, that would allow them to take their generational revenge and the revenge of Turkishness and Islam over their enemies. Their “India,” for instance, was Afghanistan and Muslim India, and certainly not India in her immense ethnic and religious plurality.

For them, the Turkish nation was a proletarian nation, and even the “sole proletarian nation” of the world,³⁷ that had to deliver a struggle as an oppressed nation and integrate the world of tomorrow as a free and dominant nation, politically, economically and culturally. Obviously many eastern delegates at the Third International had the pretention of representing a nation proletarian in its essence and expressed their ambition to participate to the world-wide socialist revolution as oppressed nations, and not as oppressed classes; encouraged or at least tolerated by Lenin who took note that the German, and therefore the European revolution would not take place in the foreseeable future, and felt the urgency of protecting the new regime through a series of contests in Asia, these “easterners” would provoke the anger of some European delegates such as Giaconto Menotti Serrati.³⁸ But in contrast to what was expressed in the discourses of Manabendra Nath Roy, a representative from India in the Komintern, the Unionists had no social program at all, and their exclusive nationalism and lately elaborated pan-Islamism were obviously at the antipode of what Lenin or Roy meant by socialism.

In Asia Minor, the Unionist heartland of the Empire, the situation was radically different from that in Baku, Moscow or Kabul. In Ankara, too, “bolshevism” fascinated many people, but for the leaders of the Kemalist resistance, to start with Kemal himself, the rapprochement with Soviet Russia had before everything else a pragmatic dimension, and could not lead to an adventurist policy as Talaat, Enver, and Cemal developed in Afghanistan or in Russian Central Asia. It is true that Mustafa Kemal suggested the creation of a Communist Party to some of his closest friends, but not with the purpose of “communizing” Turkey; on the contrary, thanks to this subordinated “over-radicalism,” he wanted to show that communism was unworkable in this peculiar country.

A short-lived “Green Army” pretending to be “socialist” was also set up, but this time independent from Kemal’s recommendation. According to the historian Mete Tunçay, the “reactionary aspect” of this later organization was much more prominent than its “communizing-ideas.”³⁹ This perspective defines the evolution of all Unionist-Kemalist circles based in Turkey during this period. They were, above all, conservative and understood “anti-imperialism” as the fight of Turks and Muslims against France, Great-Britain and Greece, and, even more urgently, against the Armenians. The epistolary exchanges between Talaat and Kemal, Kemal and Lenin, and broadly speaking the Unionist-Kemalist representatives with the Bolsheviks were exclusively based on animosity against the Armenians.⁴⁰ In his letters and speeches, Kemal frequently deployed the concept of “imperialism,” but his first strategic goal was to crush the independent Armenia, this “insolent and ingrate race” (17.9.1919).⁴¹

What Unionism-Kemalism understood by “imperialism” in Asia Minor was in no way limited to opposition against the winners of WWI. To give one example, in one of his letters, Kemal advised Lenin that his Red Army should destroy “Georgian imperialism,” and allow at the same time Kazım Karabekir’s Third Army, the main remaining military structure of the Empire, to destroy “Armenian imperialism.”⁴² Almost all the meetings between Bekir Sami (Kunduk), Ankara’s minister of Foreign Affairs, and Chicherin and Lenin, in August 1920, similarly focused on the necessity of destroying Armenia.⁴³

Harmony for the Nation, De-civilization for the Enemies

The self-imaginary of the Turkish nation as a constantly exploited and threatened proletarian nation has become a part of Turkish political culture. Accepted to some extent by both the right and the left, this imaginary could be used as a source of symbolic violence throughout the twentieth century. During the 1920s and 1930s, for instance, both the newspapers Akşam and Cumhuriyet, and the highly intellectual periodical Kadro, published namely by the renegades of the Turkish Communist Party, defined the Turks as an ethnic class oppressed by the feudal Kurdish ethno-class, with the latter aiming at the destruction of the former through primitive brutality and assimilationist methods.⁴⁴ Notwithstanding the active cooperation of Great Britain with Turkey, and to some extent France, against the Kurdish movement/s, the theme of the Kurds manipulated by “imperialist powers” persists, a century later, as a constant element of Turkish official discourse and history writing.

This discourse and praxis, which remain vital in Turkey and elsewhere, bring forward some important elements in understanding the formation of national-socialism not as a specifically post-WWI German movement, but as a world-wide phenomenon. It is obvious that the Unionists and their organic continuators, the Kemalists, were “westernized” and “westernizers,” but the West that interested them was a profoundly anti-liberal, anti-democratic and social-Darwinist one. Their “West” bore in itself some germs of national-socialism too. As is well known, throughout the long decades of the nineteenth century, the idea of the nation was mainly linked to left-wing movements that insisted on citizenship, the end of traditional hierarchies, “collective will,” national sovereignty, political participation and representation. By the end of the century, however, the social integration, military service, emergence of Social-Darwinism, and more importantly the challenge of the left and its revolutionary imaginary and praxis pushed right-wing movements to reject, on the one hand, the ideal of the nation as a democratic and internally divided entity, and to develop, on the other hand, a nationalist doctrine considering the nation as an organic body, threatened by other organic bodies and internal degeneration, a body that had to be constantly “empowered” externally and purified internally. As Friedrich Engels, who himself developed some sympathy for his country of origin over the decades, tragically understood after the 1870–1871 French-Prussian War, war between states could prevail over war between classes.⁴⁵ The new form of war, however, was not a war between two sovereign princes or simply two governments, but that of the nations: the injection of the terms of the class struggle into the field of struggle between nations has indeed changed the political and ideological landscape, opening the way to mass-violence.

The quest for internal equality at the cost of inequality in the world system almost constituted a pattern that would survive in time and diffuse itself in space. Nazism, for instance, that would emerge only after the WWI, was a profoundly unequal system; still it aimed at the creation of a society where equalized Germans would be governed by a new aristocracy formed by the Wehrmacht, Waffen-SS and Nazi Party leaders.⁴⁶ The price to pay for this dark romantic utopia was however the destruction of civilization elsewhere.

Marxism and its postulate that class struggle was the engine of world history, racism and social Darwinism were born in Europe, but in a world that was already “Europeanized.” In the Japanese inter-war discourse, for instance, Japan had to fight Western “imperialism” in order to secure the ascension of Asia, but also to submit this continent by force to its own hegemony as Asia’s aristocratic nation par excellence. The Koreans and the Chinese were historically and culturally close to the Japanese, still, they were situated at a much lower level of humanity, and thus could not enjoy certain privileges and rights; as such, brutality against them was not a crime.

That was also the case for post-1909/1910 Unionism, which considered the turcification of Asia Minor that it defined as belonging to the Turks, and the constitution of a Turanian Empire as the natural-right of the Turkish nation and as the culmination of its historical mission. Unionism was a system dominated by a paramilitary cartel, which aimed at the same time at the creation of an internally equalized society. It is true that the Unionist officers saw themselves as a Turkish Junkertum, the well-known landed- military aristocracy that played a decisive role in post-unification Germany⁴⁷ and the Committee’s thinkers insisted on creating a “national bourgeoisie,” while at the same time, preserving the Turkish nation as a militarist body. According to Tunçay, Unionism also advocated the internal equality of the Turks and projected itself in the New Life (Yeni Hayat) promised by its main theoretician, Ziya Gökalp (1876–1924), under which everything had to be Turkish, and solely Turkish. However, the cost of this new life was high for the non-Turks: the heartland of the Empire would be purified to become Turkish in all its dimensions, and elsewhere would be put under the rule of de-civilization. As Ziya Gökalp put it boldly: “Turkey will grow up, and become Turan; (and) the country of the enemy will become a field of ruins.”⁴⁸

In his letter to the Ottoman Emir of Mecca (5 December 1916), Talaat clearly established a link between the extermination of the Armenians and the prosperity of the Muslims. To his tremendous satisfaction, his trip in Anatolia (Konya, Ankara, Sivas, Harput), convinced him once again of the judiciousness of the deportation of Armenians, not less because the muhacirs, those migrants coming from the Balkans and the Caucasus were installed in the Armenian houses and were henceforth running commercial activities previously belonging to the Armenians.⁴⁹ In contrast to the fate he wished for his own “subjects,” in his letter to the governor of Aleppo (13 January 1916), he ordered devastation for the non-Turks: no rescue should be given to surviving Armenian children, whom he defined as a source of threat for the future; instead, available resources should be used for Turkish widows and orphans.⁵⁰

2010s–2020s: The Old-New Anti-imperialism

The perception of Turks as an oppressed class and an oppressed nation, struggling for their double emancipation, didn’t come to an end with the “national liberation” of 1922–1923. In the 1960s, some intellectual and political currents that presented themselves as Kemalist encountered the hegemonic leftwing ideas then prevailing around the world. In a very short period, they would elaborate a synthesis between national and class issues in Turkey, and present the Turkish nation as an oppressed nation, at least in its main body. According to Yön (“Orientation”) and Devrim (“Revolution”) circles, which regrouped many young intellectuals as well as some officers, the Kemalist revolution was interrupted, or, worse, betrayed; thus, a second revolution, with a more clearly announced and assumed anti-imperialist and social justice program was necessary. The entirety of Turkish history, from the decline of Empire to prospective Turkish integration with Europe was read according to this framework that saw domination of the Turks by imperialist powers.

Such a reading of the world in the 1960s and 1970s was not restricted to Turkey; many intellectuals and militants throughout the “Tree-Continental” universe (Africa, Asia, Latin America) promoted the same ideas and took up arms to obtain independence for their countries from real or imagined imperialist domination. These intellectuals and militants, however, did not have a genocide such as the Armenian Genocide in their national history, and none of them had to justify the past crimes of their former powerholders, such as the extermination of American Indian communities, or slavery. The “Kemalist-left,” in contrast, had to defend Turkey in her historical formation and give a name and an explanation to the Armenian issue (as well as other issues, such as the Kurdish, Ottoman Greek and later on Cypriot ones).

And indeed, it did. For Doğan Avcıoğlu (1926–1983),⁵¹ Yön-Devrim circles’ main source of inspiration, the Armenian issue was a purely imperialist creation, and had no other purpose than to protect the commercial interests of Great Britain and other “imperialist” powers.⁵² The impact of such an explanation was not limited to Turkish left-wing Kemalist figures. A world-famous historian such as Feroz Ahmad (born in 1938 in Delhi), for instance, continues to ignore the totality of scholarly work done over the past three decades, as well as the tremendous documentation published (including Ottoman, German and Austrian sources) during this period, just for the sake of maintaining his reading of the late Ottoman period elaborated at the turn of the 1970s. According to him, the relationship between Christian communities and the Ottoman state is defined by class relations, imposed by the gradual integration of the Empire into world capitalism, and the non-Muslim communities constituted the main body of the Ottoman comprador bourgeoisie.⁵³

In such an interpretative framework, the extermination of the Armenians could not be perceived as mass-violence, but rather as an unintended, cruel, nevertheless ultimately logical consequence of class struggles, themselves intrinsic to imperialist domination and power relations. “Biz soykırım yapmadık, vatan savunmasi yaptık”: “we didn’t commit a genocide, we defended our homeland,” is repeated ad nauseam by Doğu Perinçek,⁵⁴ a former “Marxist-Leninist-Maoist,” who is also a member of the Talaat Pasha Committee. This Committee, which counted among its preeminent figures of radical Turkish nationalism the late Rauf Denktaş (1924–2014), long-time president of Turkish Republic of North Cyprus (recognized exclusively by Ankara), is clearly a nationalist-socialist organization. The argument linking the Armenian issue to imperialism in order either to relativize the gravity of genocide and explain it by attenuating circumstances, or simply to justify it, is the standard argument bringing together “social democrats,” liberals, Kemalists, nationalists, and Islamists, in their internal plurality, fragmentation, but also sociological continuum. It is impressive to see the frequency by which Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Turkish president, references “imperialism” to justify both the past and his own policies of cruelty against the Kurds in Turkey and Syria or against the Armenians in the Caucasus, for almost a decade.

This should not sound astonishing: each of these currents is a de facto heir of 1915, and will remain as such unless it is explicitly renounced. Assuming the heritage of 1915 and justifying it by the argument of anti-imperialism also requires ipso facto the reproduction of a rather brutally selective memory concerning the history itself: the one who justifies or relativizes “1915” must also ignore that the Ottoman Empire entered the Great War without the slightest provocation from France and Great Britain, or by Russia, these three powers warranting, on the contrary, the preservation of its integrity in exchange for its neutrality; one must also omit the fact that the second and most important phase of the genocide took place not in Asia Minor, but in the Syrian deserts, where the extenuated survivors, mostly elderly men, women and children had certainly no link with “imperialism” and represented no threat to the Ottoman military apparatus. Finally, one must decide to blind oneself to the vast expropriation of Armenian proprieties confiscated in the immediate wake of the deportations, and to ignore that this confiscation was juridically consolidated under Kemalist rule.

For the Unionists, the genocide was a part of the “war of ummah,”⁵⁵ headed by the Turks. Erdoğan himself mentions that Turks have a double historical mission consisting of protecting the “oppressed” Muslim world, and dominating the world in order to bring harmony, justice and “stateness” to it. His often-repeated motto, “the world is bigger than Five (permanent members of the Security Council)” is not a call to democratize international relations, but a claim to be recognized as the sixth world-power representing the Muslim world.⁵⁶ Here too, some comparisons with inter-war Japan can be meaningful. The imperial Japanese military and civil bureaucracy aimed at the creation of a “sphere of co-prosperity” in Asia, with Japan as the “museum” par excellence of Asian civilization.⁵⁷ Japan, in fact, sought to establish a “new world which will ensure the permanent stability of East Asia, a quasi-continental “harmonious, moral supranational order” through use of force and “stationing of Japanese troops in key areas, control of communications in areas where Japanese troops were stationed, and special economic concessions.”⁵⁸ Japanese brutality, namely in China and Korea, as well as the Japanese wars were justified by Asia’s struggle against Western “imperialism.”

While underlying the constructive role played by the margins in the regeneration of civilization, Ibn Khaldûn was also aware that war, brutality, and disintegration could transform a soil into a totally sterile one, thus making any kind of renewal impossible. Such a soil would enter into a phase of de-civilization, a concept that the sociologist Norbert Elias would also use in the 1960s and 1970s,⁵⁹ for a long period of time. Neither Beşikçi’s pioneering work of 1970s nor Akçam’s work from the 1990s to the present day could prevent the state of brutality and cruelty incarnated today by MHP (Party of Nationalist Action, radical_right), the presumably modernist national-socialist circles and Erdoganism. It has consistently demonstrated, however, that a crime against humanity is and remains a crime against humanity, and not “anti-imperialism,” “war for survival,” “war of independence,” or defense of a “proletarian nation.”

Future generations in Turkey can play a historically emancipatory role only if they renounce their “national heritage” built up by a brutal syntax of enmity, myths, and taboos justifying the crime, and instead make their own critical intellectual and ethical legacy that Taner Akçam so generously hands over to them.