Post by hellboy87 on Oct 30, 2009 4:28:01 GMT -5
Confused identities
Writer: Attila Pelit
Ever wonder about the origins of Turks? Well don’t ask us because we have no idea.
If you’ve ever asked us Turks about our national roots you’ll have invariably been told that we as a nation are descendents of Central Asians whose historical roots go back to the Hsiung-Nu, and who, following the break-up of the Göktürk Empire, began migrating westward from around present-day Mongolia in the 6th century AD, first conquering and colonizing the area that has since become Turkestan, and then from there springing forth into Anatolia in the form of Turkmen raiders and Seljuk conquerors while gradually displacing an entire population of millions of Anatolians who far outnumbered the Turkic newcomers – all of which is taught to us through a rigidly state-controlled education system, and later regurgitated through the media. But it leaves many asking the obvious question: if Turks are descendents of Central Asians, then why don’t we look like them?
The answer of course is obvious: we don’t look like Central Asians because we are not descendents of Central Asians. Genetic research proves that only about 10 percent of the population of Turkey share common genetic traits with Central Asian Turks. That means that the overwhelming majority of our population are descended from people whom we thought our ancestors had conquered, whereas we are in fact descendents of the conquered themselves. Turks are for the most part direct descendents of Anatolian peoples (Hittites, Lydians, Urartians, Phrygians, Ionians, etc.) whose ancestry can be traced back thousands of years, and certainly back to before the irruption of the Turks. Besides the Turkicization of Anatolia under the Seljuks in the 11th to 14th centuries, there was a further mixing of peoples in the time of the Ottomans, which led to an admixture of Slavic, North Caucasian, Balkan, Middle Eastern and African genetic input. So then why do we teach ourselves to believe in an obvious fallacy – namely, that we are all from Central Asia?
This wasn’t always the case, because in the early years of the Turkish Republic emphasis was actually given equally to both Turkic and Anatolian ancestry combined. After all, every new country needs some sort of founding myth that can be propagated through institutionalized ideological apparatuses with which citizen-subjects can be indoctrinated into believing some sort of myth as long as it creates a sense of common ancestry – and thus, common destiny – offering us a buoy of proud collective identification to keep us afloat on a sort of mass existential life-raft on the one hand, while on the other hand ensuring that we are predisposed to offering our freedom and our lives (in the form of taxes, military service, salaried labour, obedience) to a state which we are trained to accept as the custodian of our shared fate.
Our particular state-guided mythologizing started off realistically enough following the creation of the Turkish Republic in 1923, with Ataturk having the good sense to base our new nation-state’s national origin myths in a synthesis of Anatolian and Turkic civilizations, going so far as to carefully extract any racial component by stating that the land you live on and the language you speak is enough on which to found a sense of national affinity. After all, he was intelligent enough to not only recognize that there is no genetically discernible Turkish “race”, but also that any racial identification was bound to bring us into conflict with the USSR who ruled over most other Turkic peoples at the time. As a case in point, in the early years of the republic there were companies, state institutions, streets, and suburbs named after the Hittites (Eti, Etiler, Etibank, etc.), and the Sumerians (Sümerbank), and there was even a Turkish Sun-Language theory (modelled on the Japanese Amaterasu myth). You can’t blame people for getting a little creative when founding a new country, and besides, you want to re-instil some pride and vigour in a war-weary nation that’s just lost an empire. In any case, by co-founding the historic origins of the Turks in Anatolia, Ataturk wanted to distance Turkey from Pan-Turkism/Pan-Turanianism and other racist ideologies that had had such terrible consequences on the Ottoman Empire under the rule of the Young Turks during the First World War. So the new Turkish nation-state would renounce irredentist dreams of pan-Turkic expansionism and focus on creating a new sense of identity rooted in not just Turkishness but in Anatolianism as well.
Unfortunately, this novel delineation of national identity eventually shifted in favour of pure Turkishness within a few decades. Race (and religion) started becoming more of a defining factor in Turkey, especially in response to the rise of EOKA-led Greek nationalism on Cyprus, ASALA-led Armenian attacks on Turkish diplomats, and the emergence of Kurdish nationalism. As the Turkish state’s geopolitical interests were threatened, a xenophobic, racist, exclusivist nationalism took hold in Turkey, both on an institutional state level and in the population at large. Emphasis on Anatolian ancestry – which is also shared by Greeks, Armenians and Kurds – was out, and ‘pure’ Turkish Central Asian ancestry was emphasized instead as a desperate grasp at a sense of exo-Anatolian purity, with a clean diachronic break meaning pre-1071 (Seljuk victory over Byzantines at Manzikert) Anatolia was ‘Them’ (Greek, Armenian, Byzantine, Christian), and post-Manzikert Anatolia is ‘Us’ (Turkish, Muslim). The result is that now we have a whole generation of Turks who think their ancestors came from Mongolia and don’t even question it, while pre-Turkic Anatolian history is a mere footnote in our school textbooks, something we pass off as having happened ‘before us’, and therefore ‘not us’.
But there’s another reason why we cling to this belief in Turkish Central Asian ancestry: Because the Turks who conquered Anatolia in the 11th century and led to the Turkification of the Anatolian populace (of which most of us are descended) were the conquerors, the victors, the penetrating “Men” in our male-centric psychosexual subconscious, and so we would rather identify ourselves with them even at the price of the obvious contradiction entailed, than admit that we are actually mostly descendents of the conquered (psychosexually “Female”) Anatolians who were Turkicized and assimilated from the 11th century onwards. So instead of accepting the unpalatable fact that we’re mostly descendents of converted non-Turks, we all lop ourselves in on the side of Alparslan’s victorious Seljuks so that our mythic history effectively begins in 1071 at Manzikert when ‘we’ burst on the scene sweeping away all those in our path. We ignore anything that happened before, as if trying to erase any trace of our pre-Turkish or non-Turkish roots.
So what are we then? We are ‘Anatolian Turks’ in the full sense of the word – i.e. Anatolian and Turkish. We should be equally proud of the Hittites and the Ottomans, the Lydians and the Seljuks, the Ionians and the Huns, our Islamic heritage and our pre-Islamic one. We should be proud of our unique diversity. After all, we are a distinct nation, one essentially born in 1923 but one that has been evolving through successive stages of history, one that is a unique synthesis of many ethnicities and cultures, all of which have gone into making us and our country a remarkable entity that we need to affirm as a whole, rather than selfishly and short-sightedly trying to carve out what part of the tapestry we identify with the most and forcing it on others, even at the price of a lie – a lie propagated for the sake of justifying and nurturing an aggressive and jingoistic brand of right-wing militarism that has taken deep root in our society and that is nourished through the education system and the media and protected by repressive laws like Articles 301 and 314 of the Turkish penal code.
But unless we can start reaffirming our Anatolian roots, we will always be too scared to look in the mirror lest the image we see is not the image we would like to see, or the image we imagine we see, but the image we’ve been afraid of seeing all along: ourselves.
www.timeoutistanbul.com/english/4904/confused_identities
How nice! Written by a Turk! A smart Turk! ;D ;D ;D
Writer: Attila Pelit
Ever wonder about the origins of Turks? Well don’t ask us because we have no idea.
If you’ve ever asked us Turks about our national roots you’ll have invariably been told that we as a nation are descendents of Central Asians whose historical roots go back to the Hsiung-Nu, and who, following the break-up of the Göktürk Empire, began migrating westward from around present-day Mongolia in the 6th century AD, first conquering and colonizing the area that has since become Turkestan, and then from there springing forth into Anatolia in the form of Turkmen raiders and Seljuk conquerors while gradually displacing an entire population of millions of Anatolians who far outnumbered the Turkic newcomers – all of which is taught to us through a rigidly state-controlled education system, and later regurgitated through the media. But it leaves many asking the obvious question: if Turks are descendents of Central Asians, then why don’t we look like them?
The answer of course is obvious: we don’t look like Central Asians because we are not descendents of Central Asians. Genetic research proves that only about 10 percent of the population of Turkey share common genetic traits with Central Asian Turks. That means that the overwhelming majority of our population are descended from people whom we thought our ancestors had conquered, whereas we are in fact descendents of the conquered themselves. Turks are for the most part direct descendents of Anatolian peoples (Hittites, Lydians, Urartians, Phrygians, Ionians, etc.) whose ancestry can be traced back thousands of years, and certainly back to before the irruption of the Turks. Besides the Turkicization of Anatolia under the Seljuks in the 11th to 14th centuries, there was a further mixing of peoples in the time of the Ottomans, which led to an admixture of Slavic, North Caucasian, Balkan, Middle Eastern and African genetic input. So then why do we teach ourselves to believe in an obvious fallacy – namely, that we are all from Central Asia?
This wasn’t always the case, because in the early years of the Turkish Republic emphasis was actually given equally to both Turkic and Anatolian ancestry combined. After all, every new country needs some sort of founding myth that can be propagated through institutionalized ideological apparatuses with which citizen-subjects can be indoctrinated into believing some sort of myth as long as it creates a sense of common ancestry – and thus, common destiny – offering us a buoy of proud collective identification to keep us afloat on a sort of mass existential life-raft on the one hand, while on the other hand ensuring that we are predisposed to offering our freedom and our lives (in the form of taxes, military service, salaried labour, obedience) to a state which we are trained to accept as the custodian of our shared fate.
Our particular state-guided mythologizing started off realistically enough following the creation of the Turkish Republic in 1923, with Ataturk having the good sense to base our new nation-state’s national origin myths in a synthesis of Anatolian and Turkic civilizations, going so far as to carefully extract any racial component by stating that the land you live on and the language you speak is enough on which to found a sense of national affinity. After all, he was intelligent enough to not only recognize that there is no genetically discernible Turkish “race”, but also that any racial identification was bound to bring us into conflict with the USSR who ruled over most other Turkic peoples at the time. As a case in point, in the early years of the republic there were companies, state institutions, streets, and suburbs named after the Hittites (Eti, Etiler, Etibank, etc.), and the Sumerians (Sümerbank), and there was even a Turkish Sun-Language theory (modelled on the Japanese Amaterasu myth). You can’t blame people for getting a little creative when founding a new country, and besides, you want to re-instil some pride and vigour in a war-weary nation that’s just lost an empire. In any case, by co-founding the historic origins of the Turks in Anatolia, Ataturk wanted to distance Turkey from Pan-Turkism/Pan-Turanianism and other racist ideologies that had had such terrible consequences on the Ottoman Empire under the rule of the Young Turks during the First World War. So the new Turkish nation-state would renounce irredentist dreams of pan-Turkic expansionism and focus on creating a new sense of identity rooted in not just Turkishness but in Anatolianism as well.
Unfortunately, this novel delineation of national identity eventually shifted in favour of pure Turkishness within a few decades. Race (and religion) started becoming more of a defining factor in Turkey, especially in response to the rise of EOKA-led Greek nationalism on Cyprus, ASALA-led Armenian attacks on Turkish diplomats, and the emergence of Kurdish nationalism. As the Turkish state’s geopolitical interests were threatened, a xenophobic, racist, exclusivist nationalism took hold in Turkey, both on an institutional state level and in the population at large. Emphasis on Anatolian ancestry – which is also shared by Greeks, Armenians and Kurds – was out, and ‘pure’ Turkish Central Asian ancestry was emphasized instead as a desperate grasp at a sense of exo-Anatolian purity, with a clean diachronic break meaning pre-1071 (Seljuk victory over Byzantines at Manzikert) Anatolia was ‘Them’ (Greek, Armenian, Byzantine, Christian), and post-Manzikert Anatolia is ‘Us’ (Turkish, Muslim). The result is that now we have a whole generation of Turks who think their ancestors came from Mongolia and don’t even question it, while pre-Turkic Anatolian history is a mere footnote in our school textbooks, something we pass off as having happened ‘before us’, and therefore ‘not us’.
But there’s another reason why we cling to this belief in Turkish Central Asian ancestry: Because the Turks who conquered Anatolia in the 11th century and led to the Turkification of the Anatolian populace (of which most of us are descended) were the conquerors, the victors, the penetrating “Men” in our male-centric psychosexual subconscious, and so we would rather identify ourselves with them even at the price of the obvious contradiction entailed, than admit that we are actually mostly descendents of the conquered (psychosexually “Female”) Anatolians who were Turkicized and assimilated from the 11th century onwards. So instead of accepting the unpalatable fact that we’re mostly descendents of converted non-Turks, we all lop ourselves in on the side of Alparslan’s victorious Seljuks so that our mythic history effectively begins in 1071 at Manzikert when ‘we’ burst on the scene sweeping away all those in our path. We ignore anything that happened before, as if trying to erase any trace of our pre-Turkish or non-Turkish roots.
So what are we then? We are ‘Anatolian Turks’ in the full sense of the word – i.e. Anatolian and Turkish. We should be equally proud of the Hittites and the Ottomans, the Lydians and the Seljuks, the Ionians and the Huns, our Islamic heritage and our pre-Islamic one. We should be proud of our unique diversity. After all, we are a distinct nation, one essentially born in 1923 but one that has been evolving through successive stages of history, one that is a unique synthesis of many ethnicities and cultures, all of which have gone into making us and our country a remarkable entity that we need to affirm as a whole, rather than selfishly and short-sightedly trying to carve out what part of the tapestry we identify with the most and forcing it on others, even at the price of a lie – a lie propagated for the sake of justifying and nurturing an aggressive and jingoistic brand of right-wing militarism that has taken deep root in our society and that is nourished through the education system and the media and protected by repressive laws like Articles 301 and 314 of the Turkish penal code.
But unless we can start reaffirming our Anatolian roots, we will always be too scared to look in the mirror lest the image we see is not the image we would like to see, or the image we imagine we see, but the image we’ve been afraid of seeing all along: ourselves.
www.timeoutistanbul.com/english/4904/confused_identities
How nice! Written by a Turk! A smart Turk! ;D ;D ;D