Post by hellboy87 on Nov 26, 2008 19:37:42 GMT -5
Whitewashed identities
Ever wonder about the national origins of Turks? Well don’t ask us, because we have no idea.
The strangest thing about us Turks is that we’re such hardcore nationalists while at the same time being absolutely clueless about our national roots. For example, most of us believe that we as a nation are descendents of Central Asian Turks whose historical roots go back to the Hsiung-Nu, and who, following the break-up of the Gokturk 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 outnumbered the Turkic newcomers by about 7 to 1. Even the state propagates this myth in school, as does the general media. I’m no ethnologist or anything, but if we as a nation were descendents of Central Asians then wouldn’t we look like them? Ok, maybe 10 percent of us are descendents of Central Asians, but that hardly constitutes enough to claim such ancestry for an entire nation, not to mention all that Ergenekon/Ashina/She-Wolf/Bortucene/Altay mythologizing that goes with it.
To confuse things even more, there are other Turks who say we’re mostly of Hittite-Anatolian ancestry; others who claim we are mostly Turkicized Hellenes, thus emphasizing a reaffirmation of our Greek roots; and yet others who claim Turks and Kurds are all just Turkicized and Kurdicized Semites. There’s even parallel racial mythologizing on the part of Kurds expounding Aryan descent because they speak an Indo-European language, further claiming that most Turks are actually Turkicized Kurds; and even Circassian racial mythologizing claiming that the Hittites and Urartians were in fact proto-Circassians. So what are our roots? Why are we so confused yet so passionate and adamant about establishing some sort of coherent and semi-logical sense of ancestry? We are a nation that is absolutely clueless about our national origins, precisely because we don’t really have any. In fact, if anything, our national origins only really go back to 1923 and the foundation of the Turkish Republic. Anything before that is just hodgepodge.
Every new country needs some sort of founding myth that can be propagated through institutionalized ideological apparatuses with which we can indoctrinate and brainwash ourselves – even against common sense – into believing some myth as long as it creates a sense of common ancestry (and thus common destiny), offering us some kind of buoy of identification to keep us afloat. Our state-guided mythologizing started off pretty realistically enough, with Ataturk having the good sense to base our new nation-state’s national origin myths in a synthesis of Anatolian civilization and Turkic Central Asian civilization, going so far as to carefully extract any racial component (since he was intelligent enough to see that there is no discernible Turkish race) by stating that the land you live on and the language you speak is enough on which to found a sense of national affinity and, thus, a common destiny. As a case in point, in the early years of the republic many institutions, streets, suburbs were named after the Hittites (Eti, Etiler, Etibank, etc.).
The whole project of creating a new nation replete with brand new ancestral origin myths got a little too ambitious in its scope, going so far as to claim the Sumerians also as proto-Turks (one of Turkey’s first banks was named Sumerbank), developing a Turkish Sun-Language theory (probably modeled on the Japanese Amaterasu myth), and even going so far as to claim that all humans are Turks based on the argument that the Turkish word for man (“adam”) also happens to be the name of the first man in Jewish-Christian-Islamic lore (overlooking the slight detail that “adam” is actually a Persian loanword, which would make all people… er… Iranian?). But nevermind, you’re creating a new country, so you can’t blame people for getting a little creative with all the enthusiasm going on, and besides you want to re-instill some pride and vigor in a war-weary nation. In any case, the point is that Ataturk wanted to distance Turks from Pan-Turkism and Turanism and other racist ideologies which had had such terrible consequences on the Ottoman Empire under the rule of the Young Turks during the First World War. In other words, 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 was precarious from the start, and sure enough it eventually shifted in favor of Turkishness within a few decades. Race (and religion) started becoming more of a defining factor, especially in the face of Greek nationalism on Cyprus, Armenian nationalist (ASALA) attacks, and the rise of Kurdish nationalism. As the Turkish state’s interests were threatened, a more 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 could also be shared by Greeks, Armenians (who also claim Hittite/Phrygian/Urartian descent) and Kurds – was out, and Turkish Central Asian ancestry was emphasized instead as a desperate grasp at a sense of exo-Anatolian purity. 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”. We are so confused yet so desperate to have some sort of coherent ancient racial ancestry scenario that any Turkish nationalist forum on the Internet immediately gets bogged down in pseudo-historical arguments over which view of racial origins we ascribe to, while any outward discussion of the topic is immediately stamped out under threats from both the Turkish state and Turkish far-right ultranationalists who are nervous and insecure enough in their belief in these racial myths themselves to know that letting it be debated or discussed would be disastrous for their cause. (1)
So why do we cling to this myth of Central Asianism? Here’s why: 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 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 vanquished, the defeated, the conquered (psychosexually “Female”) Anatolians (and later, under the Ottomans, Middle Easterners/South-Eastern Europeans/Caucasians) who were Turkicized and assimilated from the 11th century onwards. The evidence is literally written on our faces. 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 (the battle of Malazgirt/Manzikert) when we irrupt on the scene sweeping away all those in our path.(2) We ignore anything that happened before, as if trying to erase any trace of our shameful pre-Turkish or non-Turkish conquered roots. (3)
But it doesn’t end there. It’s not that we just ignore that we are obviously not ethnically descended from Central Asian Turks, but many of us (mostly the elitist upper-class Turks) actually make a point of identifying themselves as “white” even while still upholding a belief in the Central Asian ancestry myth. Sure, many of us are descendents of those we call “beyond the river” (nehir otesinden), i.e. those from either beyond the Meric/Maritsa river in Thrace (Balkan descent) or the Aras/Araxes river in the east (North Caucasian descent). But doesn’t that then preclude the Central Asian ancestry myth? What is it then, European or Central Asian? It’s a complete mess!
Why do generally cultured and well-educated people ignore this obvious contradiction? On the one hand it’s because those elitist Turks who form the highest socio-economic class in Turkey – and who are generally well-traveled, having lived or still living in Europe or America (the only options for elitist Turks) – are ashamed of the Turkish stereotype that predominates in these countries, and so they seek to exculpate themselves from the stigma of Turkishness by propagating the belief of white ancestry for Turks – or at least for their class of Turks. But since that would mean that they are descendents of conquered, vanquished, Turkicized people (since the Turks who conquered Anatolia were obviously not “white”), they also have to claim at the same time that they are descendents of the victorious Central Asian Turks who conquered Anatolia. And so here’s what we end up believing: a bunch of Caucasoid Altaic-speaking Turks miraculously emerged from Central Asia amidst a sea of Mongoloid peoples and came trotting into Anatolia as the victors and conquerors while the indigenous population that vastly outnumbered them just vanished into thin air. Nice. Why don’t we give our ancestors wings as well so they can fly? (4)
What are the tangible results of our self-deception? The obvious one is that we get bogged down in intractable problems that we can never solve because we can never talk about the real causes of those problems, because talking about it would unravel all the lies and myths we’ve believed in until now and which we’ve founded an entire state and national identity upon. That means we will always be blind to the causes of all the tragedies our country continues to endure. We will continue to send our citizens to their deaths, either as conscripted troops or as guerrillas, and think the problem lies somewhere out there far away from us in northern Iraq, unable to face the real issue at hand: i.e. that through our racist nationalism we have actively denied the basic human rights of an entire segment of our population for the past 80 years, forbidding them to speak, learn or even sing in their own language, forbidding them any political representation, closing down their political parties on flimsy excuses, leaving their part of the country impoverished, subjecting them to forced Turkization and martial rule, and virtually giving many of them an excuse to take their rifles and head to the mountains. Then we hypocritically mourn every poor 20-year-old conscript whose life is wasted in the name of this repression, as we curse the very bloodshed that our myopic nationalistic repression has helped create. We saw no hypocrisy when we decried the Bulgarian regime’s repression of Turks under Todor Zhivkov in 1989, going so far as to call it genocide because ethnic Turks could not use Turkish names, learn Turkish in schools, or speak Turkish in public, while at the same time we carried out the exact same policy in Turkey vis-à-vis our own Kurdish population. In other words, our nationalist lies have made us all blind to what’s really going on because we’re all too afraid that if we take one card out to see the number written on the back, the whole fragile house of cards will come tumbling down around us. (5)
So what are we left with when deep-seated complexes about our national identity are kept suppressed by an actively repressive state - and ourselves - for long enough? We get an entire nation that thinks the world hates them, that thinks everybody is their enemy, that everybody has complicated plans and plots and schemes and conspiracies to destroy our country, that a "Turk's only friend is a Turk", when really we are our own enemies but we try not to face this fact and instead project all our neuroses away from us, dumping it all on international Greek and Armenian lobbies, on Europeans and Americans who want to carve us all up, on northern Iraq, basically wanting desperately to believe that the problem is everywhere except among us. And so what do we get? We get what we have now: a paranoid pathologically nationalistic flag-fetishist xenophobic hypocritical society that’s afraid of looking in the mirror lest the image we see is neither white, nor Central Asian, nor European, nor Turkish, nor any other of our desired images, but instead something we’ve always dreaded being: ourselves.
Footnotes
1. After all, you just have to look at the faces of those present at a meeting of our head of state with those from the Turkic republics from Central Asia to figure who the odd one out is: one of them has a big nose and round eyes, the other four have flat noses and epicanthic eyes.
2. A common image we propagate of Alparslan is that he had chiseled Caucasian features and that he rode a big muscular Arab stallion. In actual fact, the Seljuks who invaded Anatolia had overwhelmingly Mongoloid features with epicanthic eyes and rode small Central Asian ponies ideally suited to the Turco-Mongol style of warfare which necessitated stability, maneuverability and endurance with which to traverse large distances and also be able to use their most effective weapon – the bow and arrow – with precision not only when attacking but also when retreating. Furthermore, we know from Byzantine sources that both the Seljuks and the Byzantines would often seek to hide their casualty rates (for propaganda purposes) by not only castrating their dead on the battlefield (Muslim Seljuks were circumcised, Byzantines uncircumcised) but also decapitating them, because the facial features of the Byzantines and Seljuks were so distinct from one another.
3. We have gone so far with this that any immigrants to Turkey with non-Turkish backgrounds are given especially Turkish surnames when they take citizenship, as if stamping Turkishness upon them: thus if you’re of, say, Bosnian, Albanian, Kurdish or Circassian origin there’s a good chance your family name will have the word “Turk” in it (Turker, Turkkan, Erturk, Ozturk, or just Turk). For example, the leading Kurdish politician in the Turkish parliament is named Ahmet Turk.
4. I’m not even going to go into the number of Turks who would have you believe that American Indians are of Turkish descent, with their whole “Iowa = Ay + Ova (moon + plains in Turkish)” bullshit, or the ones who think every Eurasian people in history were all invariably Turks, including Scythians, Mongols, Finns and Hungarians.
5. Excuse the trite metaphor.
Ever wonder about the national origins of Turks? Well don’t ask us, because we have no idea.
The strangest thing about us Turks is that we’re such hardcore nationalists while at the same time being absolutely clueless about our national roots. For example, most of us believe that we as a nation are descendents of Central Asian Turks whose historical roots go back to the Hsiung-Nu, and who, following the break-up of the Gokturk 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 outnumbered the Turkic newcomers by about 7 to 1. Even the state propagates this myth in school, as does the general media. I’m no ethnologist or anything, but if we as a nation were descendents of Central Asians then wouldn’t we look like them? Ok, maybe 10 percent of us are descendents of Central Asians, but that hardly constitutes enough to claim such ancestry for an entire nation, not to mention all that Ergenekon/Ashina/She-Wolf/Bortucene/Altay mythologizing that goes with it.
To confuse things even more, there are other Turks who say we’re mostly of Hittite-Anatolian ancestry; others who claim we are mostly Turkicized Hellenes, thus emphasizing a reaffirmation of our Greek roots; and yet others who claim Turks and Kurds are all just Turkicized and Kurdicized Semites. There’s even parallel racial mythologizing on the part of Kurds expounding Aryan descent because they speak an Indo-European language, further claiming that most Turks are actually Turkicized Kurds; and even Circassian racial mythologizing claiming that the Hittites and Urartians were in fact proto-Circassians. So what are our roots? Why are we so confused yet so passionate and adamant about establishing some sort of coherent and semi-logical sense of ancestry? We are a nation that is absolutely clueless about our national origins, precisely because we don’t really have any. In fact, if anything, our national origins only really go back to 1923 and the foundation of the Turkish Republic. Anything before that is just hodgepodge.
Every new country needs some sort of founding myth that can be propagated through institutionalized ideological apparatuses with which we can indoctrinate and brainwash ourselves – even against common sense – into believing some myth as long as it creates a sense of common ancestry (and thus common destiny), offering us some kind of buoy of identification to keep us afloat. Our state-guided mythologizing started off pretty realistically enough, with Ataturk having the good sense to base our new nation-state’s national origin myths in a synthesis of Anatolian civilization and Turkic Central Asian civilization, going so far as to carefully extract any racial component (since he was intelligent enough to see that there is no discernible Turkish race) by stating that the land you live on and the language you speak is enough on which to found a sense of national affinity and, thus, a common destiny. As a case in point, in the early years of the republic many institutions, streets, suburbs were named after the Hittites (Eti, Etiler, Etibank, etc.).
The whole project of creating a new nation replete with brand new ancestral origin myths got a little too ambitious in its scope, going so far as to claim the Sumerians also as proto-Turks (one of Turkey’s first banks was named Sumerbank), developing a Turkish Sun-Language theory (probably modeled on the Japanese Amaterasu myth), and even going so far as to claim that all humans are Turks based on the argument that the Turkish word for man (“adam”) also happens to be the name of the first man in Jewish-Christian-Islamic lore (overlooking the slight detail that “adam” is actually a Persian loanword, which would make all people… er… Iranian?). But nevermind, you’re creating a new country, so you can’t blame people for getting a little creative with all the enthusiasm going on, and besides you want to re-instill some pride and vigor in a war-weary nation. In any case, the point is that Ataturk wanted to distance Turks from Pan-Turkism and Turanism and other racist ideologies which had had such terrible consequences on the Ottoman Empire under the rule of the Young Turks during the First World War. In other words, 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 was precarious from the start, and sure enough it eventually shifted in favor of Turkishness within a few decades. Race (and religion) started becoming more of a defining factor, especially in the face of Greek nationalism on Cyprus, Armenian nationalist (ASALA) attacks, and the rise of Kurdish nationalism. As the Turkish state’s interests were threatened, a more 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 could also be shared by Greeks, Armenians (who also claim Hittite/Phrygian/Urartian descent) and Kurds – was out, and Turkish Central Asian ancestry was emphasized instead as a desperate grasp at a sense of exo-Anatolian purity. 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”. We are so confused yet so desperate to have some sort of coherent ancient racial ancestry scenario that any Turkish nationalist forum on the Internet immediately gets bogged down in pseudo-historical arguments over which view of racial origins we ascribe to, while any outward discussion of the topic is immediately stamped out under threats from both the Turkish state and Turkish far-right ultranationalists who are nervous and insecure enough in their belief in these racial myths themselves to know that letting it be debated or discussed would be disastrous for their cause. (1)
So why do we cling to this myth of Central Asianism? Here’s why: 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 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 vanquished, the defeated, the conquered (psychosexually “Female”) Anatolians (and later, under the Ottomans, Middle Easterners/South-Eastern Europeans/Caucasians) who were Turkicized and assimilated from the 11th century onwards. The evidence is literally written on our faces. 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 (the battle of Malazgirt/Manzikert) when we irrupt on the scene sweeping away all those in our path.(2) We ignore anything that happened before, as if trying to erase any trace of our shameful pre-Turkish or non-Turkish conquered roots. (3)
But it doesn’t end there. It’s not that we just ignore that we are obviously not ethnically descended from Central Asian Turks, but many of us (mostly the elitist upper-class Turks) actually make a point of identifying themselves as “white” even while still upholding a belief in the Central Asian ancestry myth. Sure, many of us are descendents of those we call “beyond the river” (nehir otesinden), i.e. those from either beyond the Meric/Maritsa river in Thrace (Balkan descent) or the Aras/Araxes river in the east (North Caucasian descent). But doesn’t that then preclude the Central Asian ancestry myth? What is it then, European or Central Asian? It’s a complete mess!
Why do generally cultured and well-educated people ignore this obvious contradiction? On the one hand it’s because those elitist Turks who form the highest socio-economic class in Turkey – and who are generally well-traveled, having lived or still living in Europe or America (the only options for elitist Turks) – are ashamed of the Turkish stereotype that predominates in these countries, and so they seek to exculpate themselves from the stigma of Turkishness by propagating the belief of white ancestry for Turks – or at least for their class of Turks. But since that would mean that they are descendents of conquered, vanquished, Turkicized people (since the Turks who conquered Anatolia were obviously not “white”), they also have to claim at the same time that they are descendents of the victorious Central Asian Turks who conquered Anatolia. And so here’s what we end up believing: a bunch of Caucasoid Altaic-speaking Turks miraculously emerged from Central Asia amidst a sea of Mongoloid peoples and came trotting into Anatolia as the victors and conquerors while the indigenous population that vastly outnumbered them just vanished into thin air. Nice. Why don’t we give our ancestors wings as well so they can fly? (4)
What are the tangible results of our self-deception? The obvious one is that we get bogged down in intractable problems that we can never solve because we can never talk about the real causes of those problems, because talking about it would unravel all the lies and myths we’ve believed in until now and which we’ve founded an entire state and national identity upon. That means we will always be blind to the causes of all the tragedies our country continues to endure. We will continue to send our citizens to their deaths, either as conscripted troops or as guerrillas, and think the problem lies somewhere out there far away from us in northern Iraq, unable to face the real issue at hand: i.e. that through our racist nationalism we have actively denied the basic human rights of an entire segment of our population for the past 80 years, forbidding them to speak, learn or even sing in their own language, forbidding them any political representation, closing down their political parties on flimsy excuses, leaving their part of the country impoverished, subjecting them to forced Turkization and martial rule, and virtually giving many of them an excuse to take their rifles and head to the mountains. Then we hypocritically mourn every poor 20-year-old conscript whose life is wasted in the name of this repression, as we curse the very bloodshed that our myopic nationalistic repression has helped create. We saw no hypocrisy when we decried the Bulgarian regime’s repression of Turks under Todor Zhivkov in 1989, going so far as to call it genocide because ethnic Turks could not use Turkish names, learn Turkish in schools, or speak Turkish in public, while at the same time we carried out the exact same policy in Turkey vis-à-vis our own Kurdish population. In other words, our nationalist lies have made us all blind to what’s really going on because we’re all too afraid that if we take one card out to see the number written on the back, the whole fragile house of cards will come tumbling down around us. (5)
So what are we left with when deep-seated complexes about our national identity are kept suppressed by an actively repressive state - and ourselves - for long enough? We get an entire nation that thinks the world hates them, that thinks everybody is their enemy, that everybody has complicated plans and plots and schemes and conspiracies to destroy our country, that a "Turk's only friend is a Turk", when really we are our own enemies but we try not to face this fact and instead project all our neuroses away from us, dumping it all on international Greek and Armenian lobbies, on Europeans and Americans who want to carve us all up, on northern Iraq, basically wanting desperately to believe that the problem is everywhere except among us. And so what do we get? We get what we have now: a paranoid pathologically nationalistic flag-fetishist xenophobic hypocritical society that’s afraid of looking in the mirror lest the image we see is neither white, nor Central Asian, nor European, nor Turkish, nor any other of our desired images, but instead something we’ve always dreaded being: ourselves.
Footnotes
1. After all, you just have to look at the faces of those present at a meeting of our head of state with those from the Turkic republics from Central Asia to figure who the odd one out is: one of them has a big nose and round eyes, the other four have flat noses and epicanthic eyes.
2. A common image we propagate of Alparslan is that he had chiseled Caucasian features and that he rode a big muscular Arab stallion. In actual fact, the Seljuks who invaded Anatolia had overwhelmingly Mongoloid features with epicanthic eyes and rode small Central Asian ponies ideally suited to the Turco-Mongol style of warfare which necessitated stability, maneuverability and endurance with which to traverse large distances and also be able to use their most effective weapon – the bow and arrow – with precision not only when attacking but also when retreating. Furthermore, we know from Byzantine sources that both the Seljuks and the Byzantines would often seek to hide their casualty rates (for propaganda purposes) by not only castrating their dead on the battlefield (Muslim Seljuks were circumcised, Byzantines uncircumcised) but also decapitating them, because the facial features of the Byzantines and Seljuks were so distinct from one another.
3. We have gone so far with this that any immigrants to Turkey with non-Turkish backgrounds are given especially Turkish surnames when they take citizenship, as if stamping Turkishness upon them: thus if you’re of, say, Bosnian, Albanian, Kurdish or Circassian origin there’s a good chance your family name will have the word “Turk” in it (Turker, Turkkan, Erturk, Ozturk, or just Turk). For example, the leading Kurdish politician in the Turkish parliament is named Ahmet Turk.
4. I’m not even going to go into the number of Turks who would have you believe that American Indians are of Turkish descent, with their whole “Iowa = Ay + Ova (moon + plains in Turkish)” bullshit, or the ones who think every Eurasian people in history were all invariably Turks, including Scythians, Mongols, Finns and Hungarians.
5. Excuse the trite metaphor.