What made that particular scene so disturbing was its familiarity. After all, these police officers are hardly alone in Turkey. They are ordinary Turkish citizens with ordinary feelings. Looking too deep for the deep state may cause us to miss what is so obvious on the surface. The police officers posing with the murderer did not come from the moon. Nor did the crazed masses in football stadiums chanting “We are all Ogün Samast.” The defenders of Article 301, or editorialists in search of empathy for the murderer are also not exceptions. These people are all products of our failed and increasingly failing education system. An education system that is unable to promote civic patriotism without fueling xenophobic nationalism. An education system that produces rote learning instead of critical thinking. And most disturbingly, an education system that blindly promotes a personality cult at the expense of the real merits of democracy. It is not a coincidence that the majority of ordinary Turkish citizens lack democratic virtues when our education is so pathetic. When ultranationalism is the norm, the evils associated with it look increasingly banal. This is why we need to avoid conspiracies about the deep state. There is no conspiracy. What we have is the banality of evil living amongst us. This concept of the banality of evil came into prominence thanks to Hannah Arendt’s 1963 book “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil,” which was based on the trial of the Adolph Eichmann, in Israel. Arendt’s thesis was that people who carry out unspeakable crimes, like Eichmann, a top administrator in the machinery of the Nazi death camps, may not be exceptional fanatics at all but rather ordinary individuals who simply accept the premises of their state and participate in any ongoing enterprise with the energy of good bureaucrats.
Doing terrible things in an organized and systematic way often rests on “normalization.” This is the process whereby ugly, degrading, murderous, and unspeakable acts become routine and are accepted as “the way things are.” Similar dynamics are at play in today’s Turkey. The political class, mass media and state bureaucracy are all responsible for fueling a schizophrenic and paranoiac form of nationalism. A culture of victimization where the Sevres treaty defines yesterday, today and tomorrow is deeply ingrained in our nationalist psyche. This is also why Turkey’s conspiracy-prone public debate is increasingly producing an anti-European, anti-American, anti-Kurd, anti-Armenian and anti-liberal nationalism.
We have an incorrigible sense of insecurity. Such fear and insecurity are evident in the opening word “Do not Fear !!” of our national anthem. Yet we still fear. And such fear produces lack of tolerance. We have transformed the founding ideology of our republic into a reflex against imagined enemies such Orhan Pamuk, Elif Safak, Hrant Dink, Atilla Yayla and many others. It is time to get serious and realize that our fear offers no solution to any of the problems we are facing. We have nothing to fear but the fear itself.
Our Kurdish dilemma, our problems with political Islam, our relentless anti-Americanism and growing anti-Europeanism cannot be solved with more nationalism. Turkey’s already difficult chances of becoming a member of the European Union ultimately depend on Ankara’s willingness to deal with the country’s ethnic and religious identities in a less authoritarian and more tolerant manner. As long as the country continues to justify its reluctance to establish a civic understanding of nationalism and a more tolerant style of secularism, the political and cultural distance between Turkey and Europe will widen. Ironically, Mustafa Kemal’s Westernization program was designed to achieve the contrary.
