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Also significant in this context was the systematic replacement of Armenian place names (on streets, buildings, neighbourhoods, towns, and villages) with Turkish names. The erasure of Armenians from collective memory was completed during the Turkish Republic; in their history textbooks, Turkish children hear nothing about Armenian culture or learn simply that they were enemies of the Turks.

the Turkish state and its governments have systematically removed all markers of the Armenians’ civilisation

Current scholarly discussion on the Armenian genocide, however, focuses almost exclusively on the human destruction, not taking into consideration the systematic annihilation of Armenian sites and monuments that has taken place since then

This is cultural death, and it is especially dangerous because it legitimates the denial of diversity by authoritarian states and their societies.

Historical records document previous erasures of peoples and their culture: the Native Americans and First Nations of north America; the Mayas and Aztecs of Mesoamerica; and the Roman destruction of Carthage (north Africa), which some scholars point to as the earliest recorded organised genocide.

the harrowing plight of Syrian journalist Ali Mahmoud Othman, co-founder of Le patrimoine archéologique syrien en danger. Othman was arrested by government forces in March 2012 and has not been heard of since his televised “confession” in May 2012

Recurring Internet images of ISIS fighters beheading western men obscure the equally outrageous and horrific acts of sexual violence against women, torture of children, and destruction of homes, markets, churches, Shi’a mosques, and ancient monuments. All of this constitutes the challenging environment in which cultural activists must do their work.

Lemkin’s teachings still have something to say to us today: without monuments and cultural objects, social groups are atomised into disaffected, soulless individuals

Ali Kemal fled into exile in 1909 in London and was in favor of a British protectorate over Ottoman lands, believing that a war for independence between the Turks and the imperial powers would further provoke the Great Powers and create a dark future for the Turks. Apparently he was badly misguided in this stance against Ataturk, who would ultimately lead Turkey to independence and expel foreign forces from Anatolia.

How Ali Kemal's life came to an end is horrific. While he was being transferred to Ankara to be tried by an Independence Tribunal, he was seized from a train and lynched by a mob organized by Gen. Nurettin Pasha, commander of the First Army. It is said that he was lynched because of his opposition to the independence war. It is also a well-known fact that during the attack, the mob called him Artin Kemal, Artin being a popular Armenian name.

It is said that prominent figures of the newly established Turkish Republic, among them Ismet Inonu and Ataturk, abhorred Nurettin Pasha for what he did. He was never, however, punished for that deed or the other atrocities in which he was allegedly involved as he escaped arrest. Nurettin Pasha also organized the lynching of Chrysostomos Kalafatis, the metropolit of Smyrana, today's Izmir.

on the one hand we need to give him credit for his being in favor of putting perpetrators of the Armenian genocide and war crimes on trial, but on the other hand we need to criticize him for his rigid opposition to the War of Independence and his unconditional support of the British back then

Talaat, one of the main organizers of the Armenian genocide, is still immortalized, remembered and admired in Turkey. Avenues, mosques, schools and hospitals are named after him, even in Armenian neighborhoods like Şişli.

a wholesale project of social engineering that continues in different forms, even though its original architects are long gone. The inability of the Turkish public to face the realities of its past has multiple uses for any regime, including the Erdoğan regime. As long as it continues to be a useful and essential building block of institutions, capital, political leadership and the public imagination, this engineered identity and history of lies and half-truths will feature prominently in Turkey

“For decades the official policy of Ankara has been to cement the denial of the Armenian genocide by way of constant indoctrination through schoolbooks, civil and military education, control of the media discourse and reproduction of the myth of Talaat. These efforts were also manifested in the giving of names to streets and squares. Symbolism is a solid part of denialism.”

“Talaat is by no means the only mass murderer that is being glorified in the current Turkish imagination. There are other [such] figures … ranging from the lesser-known Topal Osman, a well-documented figure responsible for conducting multiple atrocities in the Pontic genocide, a significant theater of the larger Greek genocide, to Nurettin Paşa, a prominent figure in the Greek genocide who crowned his career with the massacre of civilians and the burning of Smyrna/Izmir in 1922,

Without the sickly and frantic fervor of CUP ideologue Ziya Gökalp’s imaginings of the Turks as Übermensch, there would be no mythical “nation” to appeal to

After 1923, homogeneity, sameness, consistency, and obedience were qualities strictly enforced — a kind of ethnic chauvinism that repudiated the weak pluralism of the Ottoman state.

As Philliou meticulously demonstrates, “only by insisting officially on total rupture between the Ottoman and Republican Turkish states could the hesitations, about-faces, and imperfect pedigrees of the new nationalists be effaced. And only with total rupture could the myriad and possibly incriminating habits, associations, and values of Unionism be expunged from the record. Only with the insistence of total rupture could the resemblances in political culture, affiliation, and habits be submerged.”

As much he tried to deny it, what Kemal inherited was, in essence, the entirety of the CUP shorn of its Central Committee (soon to be cathartically liquidated by Armenian assassins as nemesis for the genocide). Even the guns and cash needed to shock the nationalist insurgency into action in mid-1919 had been arranged by Talât’s enforcers as part of a Gladio-like stay-behind plan. The great majority of the movement’s leading men were identical to those who had staffed the CUP’s government. Eighty percent of the state bureaucracy continued into the Republic; nine out of every 10 army officers still served; hundreds of party bosses, provincial governors, and police chiefs remained in their jobs.

Even after the Kemalists had been explicitly voted out in 1950, the siege mentality lingered because the Democrat Party was (again) not a break from the past but an outgrowth of the Republican People’s Party. Menderes’ victory “did not signal the entrance of an entirely new elite,” Philliou insists. “The new trappings of freedom and democracy were built on the quasi-fascist foundations of the republic and the RPP. … The institutional foundations of political authority had not been fundamentally altered.” It was not a leap for those who considered themselves guardians of the Kemalist legacy to intervene if they thought the nation to be at risk; it was a duty.

The 1971 and 1980 interventions were carried out to better smash the emerging Kurdish movement, labor militancy, and the spree of Armenian shootings of Turkish diplomats. And it is not by chance that the 1997 “Memorandum” — the so-called postmodern coup — came not long after the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) used suicide bombing for the first time in the summer of 1996.

Finally, Erdoğan and his party inherited the role that had once been the preserve of the men in bunkers and directorates. Clothed in the aura of honor, they gave up the delusion of democracy to guard against anything that might threaten the sacred state. Finally, they fulfilled the only authentic political tradition that has ever existed in Turkish history.

Throughout “A Past Against History,” Philliou evokes the concept of muhalafet to examine the liberal wing of Ottoman and Turkish politics from 1908 to 1965. It is clearly meant to evoke the plight of journalists and writers in Turkey today; Refik Halid can stand in for a Can Dündar or an Ahmet Altan, or any number of imprisoned nonconformists.Muhalafet is a slippery term, though, malleable and effervescent, meaning anything from “internal dissent” to “partisan opposition.” Philliou writes, “Today, the word carries a charged valence, of the principled heroism — often doomed to tragedy — of someone from a position of privilege, that is, within the Turkish elite, who speaks truth to power.” Yet if there is anything that can be gleaned from human struggles for liberation, it is that “speaking truth to power” has never worked. So long as it remains a principle and not a practice, so long as “speaking truth” remains in the realm of the imaginary, it will always be defeated. Power, in the form of a mass of organized people all heaving in one direction, must be wielded, not just spoken about.

Kemal understood this basic point, too. The nation would succumb to its partitioners unless its people — newly homogenized — could be hauled up from their postwar despair and pointed in the direction of a clearly defined enemy

a liberal or even a socialist opposition will be doomed if it rests on a purely aesthetic model of politics. Morals and theories alone won’t save you. “Cease quoting laws,” the Roman general Pompey once said, “to men with swords.”

In March, for example, two journalists were arrested on charges that they had been in contact with military officers who were plotting to overthrow the government. Soon afterward, several thousand people marched down Istanbul’s main street protesting the arrests. They held placards reading “Free Press, Free Society,” and “Turkey Rates 138 in Press Freedom”—a reference to a recent ranking by Reporters Without Borders.The next day, Erdogan delivered a speech in Istanbul. It was an ideal moment for him to reassure panicky citizens and foreigners worried about press freedom in Turkey. Instead he denounced defenders of the arrested journalists, accusing them of launching a “systematic defamation campaign against Turkey” shaped by “evil-minded intentions and prejudices.”This demagogic language disturbs many Turks, including some who admire what Erdogan has achieved. “I have never been as positive and enthusiastic as I am now,” one of the country’s visionary business leaders, the octogenarian Ishak Alaton, a lifelong human rights campaigner, told me in his office overlooking the Bosphorus. But he also lamented that Erdogan has begun to govern with “the sense that he’s invulnerable and omnipotent and all-powerful.”

None of the dozens of people I met during a recent visit suggested that Turkey is in danger of slipping toward Islamist rule. Turkish society has defenses that most Arab societies lack: generations of experience with secularism and democracy, a growing middle class, a booming export economy, a still-lively press, and a strong civil society based in universities, labor unions, business associations, and civic, human rights, and environmental groups. The emerging conflict in Turkey is not over religion, but styles of power.

Partly because the EU has slammed its door in Turkey’s face, Erdogan’s government has been looking elsewhere for friends. This has helped draw Turkey away from half a century of subservience to Western foreign policy. Its first act of defiance came in 2003, when parliament voted against allowing American troops to invade Iraq from Turkish soil. Since then, Turkey has broken ranks with the West on two important issues. It favors negotiation with Iran and stronger pressure on Israel to change its policies in Gaza and the West Bank.

Banu Eligur, who has taught courses on political Islam at Brandeis University and is the author of The Mobilization of Political Islam in Turkey, believes that Erdogan’s government has “mobilized against the secular-democratic state” by naming pious Muslims to be “high-ranking civil servants in public administration” and by bullying the press, the judiciary, and universities. In fact, much of what Erdogan is doing seems popular. A recent opinion survey taken by an outside group found 62 percent of Turks in favor of Erdogan’s foreign policies. In another, when people were asked to rate their level of religious belief on a scale of one to ten, 71 percent rated themselves at seven or higher. In Turkey, Islam, Nationalism, and Modernity, the historian Carter Vaughn Findley observes that Erdogan’s government has surpassed the old secular establishment “both in recognizing the value of a religiously neutral government as a guarantee of pluralism and in espousing the reforms required to advance Turkey’s EU candidacy”

. The plot to destabilize the country, and the cases connected to it, are popularly known as “Ergenekon,” a reference to a mythic Turkic homeland and the name that plotters allegedly gave to their subversive plan. Mike King Many Turks greeted the opening of this case with both astonishment and jubilation. Investigating the military and its corrupt allies in the judiciary and bureaucracy was widely seen as a major step toward consolidating democracy. As the case has dragged on, however, it has taken on a different tinge. The authenticity of some incriminating documents has been challenged. Prosecutors have cast their net so widely that people have begun to wonder whether the true purpose of the case is to punish conspirators or to intimidate critics of the government. Since the government has been slowly replacing prosecutors with people it favors, there is suspicion that politics is once again intruding into the judiciary.

“I can no more believe these two guys were part of Ergenekon than I can believe Obama is part of the Ku Klux Klan,” said Hakan Altinay, a former director of the Open Society Foundation in Turkey, which is supported by George Soros. “It’s an important episode for left-liberal opinion, which has up to now been part of this government’s core support. It’s a tipping point.”If intimidation is a goal of this case, it may be working. “I wonder, is my phone tapped?” a young journalist told me at the end of an interview in Istanbul. “Should I censor myself?”

In Streets of Memory, a recent study of cultural attitudes in an Istanbul neighborhood that was a jumble of nationalities, Amy Mills writes:The price of belonging, in Turkey, comes at a cost—the forgetting of particular histories at the expense of the frequent retelling of others and the silencing of particular memories that cannot entirely be repressed. She finds troubling evidence of “polarization in thinking about national identities and minority histories.” People shy away from recalling, for example, the infamous pogrom in 1955 when rioters backed by police attacked homes and businesses owned by Greeks, Armenians, and Jews. But she also notes “an increasing curiosity and desire among Turkish citizens to learn more about places and pasts in Turkey.”

Attacking the government on sensitive issues like Kurdish rights, criticizing its handling of the Ergenekon case, and ridiculing Erdogan personally are not the only ways Turkish journalists can endanger themselves these days. There is another subject some fear to probe too deeply: the power of Fethullah Gulen, a shadowy but immensely influential Turkish religious leader. From a secluded estate in Pennsylvania, where he moved to escape possible prosecution for alleged antisecular remarks in the 1990s, Gulen directs a worldwide movement that is one of the most remarkable forces in modern Isla

This movement may be, as its sympathizers insist, a benign force that stabilizes Turkish life. But some Turks mistrust it, and their suspicion deepened when it turned out that one of the journalists arrested in March, Ahmet Sik, was about to publish a book about its rising influence called The Imam’s Army. Police confiscated advance copies. The text, which among other things alleges that Gulen sympathizers dominate the Turkish police, quickly appeared on the Internet, setting off what one blogger called “a frenzy of downloads.”

The mayor, Yilmaz Buyukersen, a former university rector, told me that while some other Turkish cities are not as open to pastimes like late-night drinking, he has no doubt that Eskishehir represents Turkey’s future. Like many Turks who are not part of the ruling party or the Gulen movement, though, he worries about what is happening in Ankara.“Reading the newspapers depresses me,” he said. “Everything is about accusing, arguing, fighting.”There is pressure on the press, on labor unions, on professional organizations, on NGOs, on universities. The justice system responds to the ruling party. All of this creates fear in people’s minds. But I’m still optimistic. The new generation is aware of everything, open to the world, and totally in favor of freedom and democracy. Journalists and others are resisting the pressure they’re under. There is absolutely no going back.

Erdogan’s party won 326 seats in the 550-member parliament. This was far short of the 367 that would have allowed him to push through whatever constitution he wished, and also shy of the 330 that would have allowed him to call a referendum on a draft of his own. So his triumph at the polls was mixed and his authority is not absolute.

a sprawling and often amorphous network of clubs, charities, coffee houses, and neighborhood associations

Since the rise of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) in 2002, Ülkücü groups have rallied around Islamic nationalism, fusing religious scripture with an ethnic ideal of Turkishness

For years, the Ülkücü groups have been on the radar of the German national intelligence service and the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, flagged as a potential threat to the German constitution. Authorities decry how Ülkücü leaders and members promote pan-Turkish ideologies marinated in racial superiority theories, antisemitism, and hatred of multiple “enemies,” such as the Kurds, Alevis, and Armenians, and pose a threat to the principle of equality

The Ülkücü network is organized under two main civil society organizations in Germany. In a 2019 report on the protection of the constitution, the German Federal Ministry of Interior describes the Federation of Turkish Democratic Idealist Associations in Germany (ADÜTDF) as the largest Ülkücü umbrella organization. Established in Frankfurt in 1978, the organization is believed to be represented by 170 local associations and has 7,000 members. This is the figure frequently used by lawmakers to argue that the Gray Wolves constitute the largest far-right movement in Europe. The Union of Turkish Islamic Cultural Associations in Europe (ATIB), based in Cologne, is also accused of being linked to the movement.

Inside Turkey, the Ülkücü movement (the name “Gray Wolves” is rarely used in Turkish political discourse) is splintered into subgroups that are connected by a binding ethos of loyalty to the Turkish nation and state. Many identify as the dutiful “soldiers” of Atatürk commanded by duty to flag and country. A subset still draws upon the outdated “Turkish History Thesis,” a pseudoscientific doctrine designed during the early republican years of the 1930s to sever the new secular Turkey from its Ottoman and Islamic past. Instead, the ideology claimed that Turks were racially superior, Central Asia was the cradle of humanity, and that the origins of global civilization lay within Central Asiatic and Turkic prehistory. Others are more overtly concerned with Islamic referents and take a hybrid Turkish Muslim identity as their compass.

Puncturing their professed self-image as legitimate civil society groups, over the years, various Ülkücü groups have been implicated in violent acts in Germany that expose the dark, criminal underbelly of many of its members. For example, Turkish ultranationalists cropped up as a subculture of renegade biker gangs, most famously known as Osmanen Germania BC (Germania Ottomans). With around 300 members, the group was banned in Germany in 2018, amid raids in the states of Rhineland-Palatinate, Baden Württemberg, Bavaria, and Hesse. Members were prosecuted for carrying out violent crimes, including attempted murder, extortion, drug trafficking, deprivation of liberty, and forced prostitution.

Diaspora communities globally tend to cling to idealized stereotypes of their homeland that give them a larger-than-life sense of self. The Turks in Germany are no different, long preoccupied with reifying the soul of the nation that they left behind. Feelings of longing and remorse mingle with uncertainty as the ever-present question looms large for many — to return to Turkey or to stay?

the kind of nationalism embodied by the Ülkücü movement offers a positive identity at a time when many young people still feel like second-class citizens in Germany.

Regardless of the pull of identity politics, the majority of Turks shun antagonistic Ülkücü ideas. For many Turkish Germans, the Ülkücü movement is synonymous with a warped, dysfunctional, mafia-esque distortion of Turkish nationalism that has no place in Germany’s democracy. Many who have long called Germany home speak about a different kind of Turkish nationalism, one more akin to civic patriotism and cultural-linguistic pride, than the harsher, all-or-nothing Turkishness that far-right Turks champion. “It does generations of Turks toiling in this country as laborers, teachers, doctors, a disservice when the media caricaturizes us all as Gray Wolves,”

Turkish activists argue that media attention on the Gray Wolves seems to be missing the real danger as German prosecutors turn a blind eye to the neo-Nazi or far-right perpetrators of violence against Turkish and other immigrant groups.

It is difficult to untangle the proposed terror listing of the Gray Wolves from the rapidly deteriorating relations between Turkey and the EU over the past few years. Talk of a ban in places like Germany sends a message to Turkey that its aggressive foreign policies against EU member states will not go unchecked. Meanwhile, Erdoğan recently railed against the spreading “virus of Islamophobia” across Europe, likening it to the threat of COVID-19.Stuck in the crosshairs are members of the Turkish diaspora, seemingly reduced to pawns in the political fallout between Turkey and the EU. But ban or no ban, the long-standing debate around radicalization among disaffected Turks in Germany and the limitations of inclusive politics is far from over and requires a resolution within Germany’s deliberative public sphere.

Under Kaftancioglu’s guidance, Imamoglu and other mayors took a new tack, dubbed the “Radical Love” strategy, which is the antithesis of Erdogan’s ferocious style of polarization and antagonism. This involved making overtures to marginalized groups, using positive, inclusive language (extremely rare in the vicious world of Turkish politics), and trying to heal the cultural fault lines that Erdogan has taken a jackhammer to. Imamoglu’s positive slogan was “Everything’s going to be OK,” and he recited a prayer at a mosque—a rare move for a CHP politician—as a form of outreach to pious Muslims.

“This is the first time I’ve seen the CHP this organized,” said Nevsin Mengu, a columnist from a CHP background. “Kaftancioglu has played an important role in this.”

She has expressed opinions that are extremely controversial within the party and indeed the country, acknowledging the Armenian genocide, calling the state a “serial killer,” and criticizing a popular Kemalist slogan for its militant language, tweeting “I refuse to say we are the soldiers of Mustafa Kemal, but we are his comrades.”

Within 48 hours of Kaftancioglu being elected the party head for Istanbul in 2018, a prosecutor opened a terrorism investigation into her (she’s now appealing a 10-year jail sentence) and Erdogan himself devoted 10 minutes to slamming her during an AKP meeting the next day, reading each of her tweets that he took issue with.

the government’s wider antagonistic strategy of treating any and all opposition as an existential threat

More recently, a criminal complaint and investigation were opened against Kaftancioglu after the CHP Istanbul municipality lodged a complaint against Erdogan’s powerful Communications Director Fahrettin Altun for allegedly building illegal constructions in Istanbul.

“I’ve been subjected to hundreds of sexist, nationalist, ultrareligious groups’ threats, and it still goes on. I knew that as a woman I was going to face this, but I never thought of taking a step back,”

“If [the government] can’t identify an enemy outsider, they create abstract enemies and pretend to be in a fight with them. Sometimes they call it foreign powers, sometimes terrorism, sometimes secular people.”

“What really makes her a juicy target is her flagrant absence of the ‘yerli ve milli’ [local and national, a favorite phrase of the government], the national spirit. She and the people around her … don’t just exist outside of the national spirit type of thing, they deny that kind of nationalism,” Koru said. “Erdogan can get up and say, ‘Look, this is being disrespectful on purpose. She hates you, she hates what you are, and she wants to change you in the way that Kemalists wanted to change you, in the worst possible way.’”

just as Kaftancioglu’s approach turns many people off, it also caters to others who previously may have felt excluded, such as younger people, leftists, liberals, and religious and ethnic minorities. “A certain segment of the party … didn’t like her iconoclastic approach to politics,” he said. “But it may also be that some other people who previously [felt] alienated from the party are now more interested for the same reason.”

the CHP’s increasingly national ambitions. The party hasn’t won an election since 1977, but its most popular figure, Imamoglu, polls almost as high as Erdogan. It’s far too early for the party to announce a presidential candidate, but two of the main contenders would likely be Imamoglu or Mansur Yavas, the popular mayor of the capital, Ankara. Kaftancioglu will likely continue her behind-the-scenes role.

Some governance experts no longer consider the country a democracy, but rather a competitive authoritarian system, especially after Erdogan was left with few limits on his power when the government was transformed into an “executive presidential” system following a referendum in 2017, which Kaftancioglu describes as “one-party rule transformed into one-man rule.”

“For the first time in a long time people are talking about the CHP like it can realistically win national elections.”