Peet, who says “secularists are snobs,” notes that the military has never taken a liking to the AK Party and stresses how the presidential elections were led to a deadlock through the midnight memorandum. Peet draws attention to the deep-seated threat Turkish democracy is faced with by saying: “The party may again try to install a mild Islamist as president. So the threat of a military intervention still hangs over Turkey, which has a long history of coups,” and he makes his most striking determinations about the old Turkish elite: “You might expect that the worldly elite of Istanbul would deplore such heavy-handed military threats and firmly back democracy. But that is not the opinion of most of the journalists, former diplomats and bankers... On the contrary, they are overtly sympathetic to the army, concerned to preserve secularism in Turkey, and suspicious that the AK Party has a hidden Islamist agenda to turn their country into a new Iran.”
Noting that these fears could be understandable at a time when the Islamic world is haunted by fundamentalism, Peet sums up the whole situation in Turkey: “Yet to a Westerner from Europe the notion that a military coup might be preferable to a woman’s sporting a headscarf in the presidential palace in Ankara seems bizarre. The truth is that, in Turkey, secularism has turned into another form of fundamentalism that trumps other values, including democracy and the country’s prospects of joining the European Union.”
The term “fundamentalism,” which is normally used to mean “a return to the roots, to the essence” in the religious sense, is now becoming a term more and more often used for the mechanism of secularism, which was reshaped and remodeled to counterbalance the effect of religion in Turkey. Moreover the phrase “fundamental secularism” was not used for the first time by Peet. The observations and definitions of liberal democrats in Turkey overlap with those of Peet.
That the French-style secular understanding had been turned into a religion by secular hardliners against Islam, and that secularism had become a dogma with all its practices in Turkey was already being talked about. However its high visibility today indicates to what extent fundamental secularism is perpetrated and how hard this secular religious ideology is trying to exceed its marginal area.
The recognition of the anti-democratic slogan, “Let’s go back to revolution laws!” -- which we hear in the statements of Doğu Perinçek, the leader of the Maoist Workers’ Party, which had, years ago, some sort of an emotional relationship with the separatist and terrorist Kurdistan Workers’ Party -- by nearly the entire old elite of the country, and the military backing this stance reveal the great danger, which the Turkish democracy is threatened by.
The greatest danger threatening Turkish democracy today is this fundamental secularism, which has all the diseases and psychoses the followers of all kinds of fundamentalism contract, such as intolerance toward those who are not like themselves, classifying, insulting, otherizing and infidelizing. This fundamentalism, developing parallel to the fascist and totalitarian mottos of neo-nationalism and perpetrated in the name of secularism, is forming the greatest atrocity that could be inflicted on the unique formula of living together.
Even looking at who the developers of these mottos are will be enough to shed light on what sort of nuisance the fascist-secular fundamentalism could be. The words spoken in London by the former commander of the Gendarmerie Forces and the current president of the Kemalist Thought Association retired Gen. Şener Eruygur, who got involved in the planning process of unstaged coups to depose the AK Party government in 2004, are divulging the mindset of this secular fundamentalism.
Eruygur, the organizer of the allegedly civil and “spontaneous” republic rallies, said in his speech that “nobody’s power will be enough to change the revolution laws” and claimed that the right-left fight in Turkey had lost its validity, and instead a merciless fight -- between those demanding that the republic be defended with its values as they were instilled in 1923 and those demanding that its content be amended -- had started.
One of the prominent representatives of this mindset, which sees everyone as an enemy, former secretary general of the National Security Council (MGK) retired Gen. Tuncer Kılınç, claimed in his speech at the same conference in London that Turkey could rid itself of the hegemony and exploitation of the west by quitting NATO. He also said that if Turkey were to quit NATO in the 21st century, thereby becoming a sought-after power in the view of the US and the EU, it would make Turkey an attractive force for Russia and other power centers.
This secular fundamentalism, developing side-by-side with the fascist-totalitarian neo-nationalism fed by a lot of paranoia, is forming an imminent danger not only for Turkey, but also the current international political system.
