To understand Turkey
by
ORHAN KEMAL CENGİZ

Turkey is like a wounded person who suffers from a complicated neurosis. You can hear him brag about himself in seizures that are brought on by profound inferiority complexes. He continuously oscillates between two ends of a pendulum. If you cannot understand this neurotic individual, you cannot understand Turkey, either.

Suppose your father had committed a crime before your eyes when you were a kid, and you dedicated your life to denying this incident ever happened. Suppose that you have a number of sisters and brothers. None of you could remember that moment of murder, but occasionally, you talk about it with fuzzy memories. There was a half brother, wasn’t there? But, he had provoked our father too much! But, we can’t remember it all. What happens to these neighbors? All of them are lousy. They try to bring those images before our eyes. They just want to separate our family. They want to strip us of everything we have. We have no friend in this world, and we are all alone.

To understand a neurotic society

Through Dostoevsky you can understand Turkey. Freud may be an eye-opener in this quest of yours. If you translate Karen Horney’s neurotic individual to a neurotic society, all the capillary veins in your brain will open up, and your mind will suddenly be illuminated. Only those who forget about all they know can make sense of Turkey. And those who push all theories aside and try to look at it with a pure conscience ... and those who lend an ear to their consciences and those who are not afraid of facing the truth even if it hurts. Only they can understand Turkey.

We have forgotten about that moment of murder in order not to suffer from it. But its price is so heavy. We have severed our ties with all of our past. We have forgotten about who we are. We have created a false identity for ourselves. We have automated our behaviors. We do not know why we are doing most of the things we typically do. We secretly try to suffocate the Greek Patriarchate under the pretext of “national interests.” We just want to get rid of this Patriarchate, but we still don’t know why we are doing so. When we banish the Patriarchate from İstanbul, the Kremlin will secure the spiritual leadership of the Orthodox world. What sort of national interests can we have from this? In the past, the Greek patriarch had a certain political influence in Turkey -- of course, at the time, more than 1 million Greeks were living in the country -- but how can the Patriarchate be a threat in Turkey where only 3,000 Greeks live today? Why should it be a threat? What are we afraid of? We are fabricating a series of lies for ourselves, continuously and tirelessly. Our mighty generals command the world’s eighth biggest army but can incessantly talk about the “threat” posed by a handful of Christian missionaries against Turkey. This issue of Christian missionaries had served as an agenda item for many meetings of the National Security Council (MGK). Can we offer a rational explanation for this? Where does this paranoia come from? Where do the unchanging red lines of this country come from?

A murder had been committed in the past. We virtually forgot about it. We have buried this knowledge in the deepest part of our subconscious. But we occasionally suffer from slips of the tongue. Sometimes we have nightmares. We have many phobias. We cannot manage to be honest. We do not have a true sense of self-confidence. We just brag. Onlookers never understand it. They can easily see we actually do not have the slightest self-confidence beneath our incessant bragging. But given our appearance or potential, they are surprised, and they ask themselves why these guys do not have self-confidence.

Who are we?

While we were trying to forgot about one incident, we forgot about our entire past. Really, who are we? Did our past start with the republic? Why are we so intolerant towards diversity? Why do we have so many enemies inside and outside? Does the republic really represent real progress beyond the Ottoman experience? Why are we so afraid of Christians? Don’t we claim that we are secularists? It is understandable that we have crushed Muslims saying they are “bigots,” but how can we explain our attitude towards Christians? Why are only a handful of people regarded as esteemed citizens in this country?

Why don’t we have a true “bourgeoisie”? Why are the rich always in favor of the establishment even if this is occasionally against their interests. Do they assist in crime? Why do we fear foreigners taking our lands? Is it because we have confidential information about their intent? Is it because some of our property is “cursed”? Is it because we have not earned them with our labor? Have we taken an oath for maintaining our complicity in crime forever, fearing that this property may be taken from us one day?

We are paying a very heavy price. We are actually doing ourselves the greatest injustice so that we do not acknowledge the injustice we did to other people. In order not to face our past and those old sorrows, we spend our days in this dark dungeon. We are both the keepers and the inmates of this dungeon. While we are in the grip of this complicated neurosis, we realize only part of our potential. We are indeed very sick. We tend to label those who have managed to save themselves from this maddening machinery in some way or another as mad. We treat our best minds as “marginal.” Our most foolish ones dare tell our smartest ones to “be smart” in a threatening shout. Our killers are treated as heroes.