The Fourth Reich that we barely avoided

That idea of a militarist dictatorship that would last for a millennium reminded me, at times, of the Nazi’s Third Reich, which was, again, supposed to last for a thousand years. To be sure, the Turkish reich would have been much softer than the German one. Its ethnocentric nationalism would never go as insane as the Nazi’s biological racism. Its extrajudicial murders and killing fields would be nothing when compared to the latter’s gas chambers. And the limited war it could possibly have launched against Iraqi Kurdistan would be utterly minuscule when compared to World War II.Â

Totalitarian re-education
Yet still there was a notable similarity in the regime that the Turkish militarists envisioned and the one the German Nazis realized: totalitarianism. Students of political science know that totalitarianism is a unique phenomenon, and it is different from the more common alternative to democracy, i.e., authoritarianism. Authoritarian regimes simply suppress the society by using crude power. But the totalitarian ones go beyond this; they not just suppress, but also transform and "re-educate." An authoritarian regime would do just fine with draconian laws and powerful guns. But a totalitarian regime also needs means of mass propaganda and social engineering in order to create the New Man.

I personally experienced a glimpse of this "re-education" during my days in the Turkish army. In the summer of 2000, I spent four weeks in a land forces barracks in Samsun, as a part of the compulsory military service. I was just expecting to dodge a few bullets, and wash countless numbers of dishes, which I both did. But there was also an unexpected and quite revealing experience. At the end of the second week, the general who overlooked the whole military base in the city, Osman Doğu Silahçıoğlu, gave a "conference" to us, the soldiers in uniform. To a packed hall of at least a thousand privates, he made a four-hour-long Power Point presentation.

The content of the speech was simply amazing: Gen. Silahçıoğlu started by telling how such a big conspiracy was the Ottoman Empire against "Turkishness." The Ottoman Sultans, according to him, were ethnically impure cosmopolitans who looked down upon the authentic Turks of Central Anatolia. Then he moved on to argue that the real root of the problem was Islam. After presenting some apparent contradictions in the Koran, he argued that it was "a product of Muhammad, an Arab" who allegedly wanted to "Arabize" other nations in order to deprive them from their "national soul." After other negative comments about "Muhammad’s religion," there came the positive stuff: The motivated general started to praise Shamanism, the ancient faith of the pre-Islamic Turks, as a very open-minded, "modern" and rational creed. At the very end, he even made us take an oath, which included clearly Shamanistic themes and compelled us to sacrifice ourselves to "Turkishness."

I must admit that it was one the most eye-opening experiences I ever had in this country. Anyway, the Islam-bashing and Shamanism-praising Gen. Silahçıoğlu soon retired and started to write for daily Cumhuriyet, the bastion of secular nationalism. In a column dated Feb. 3, 2008, he had an interesting suggestion:

"The supporters of the Atatürk Republic should take all the necessary measures in order to stay in power until a new generation is raised." Raising a new generation? With the extravagant ideas that Gen. Silahçıoğlu generously shared with people under his command? Now, this made even more sense to me, when I read a particular sentence by one of the several coup-craving generals in the second Ergenekon indictment. "We need to come and stay [in power] for 10 to 15 years," that general apparently said, "and put things in order."

Of course, this dream did not turn into reality. Due to various factors, such as democrat generals who resisted this plan, the lack of support from outside world, and the level of development the society has achieved, the coup plans failed. That’s why some (and probably not all) of the coup-plotters are facing justice now in the Ergenekon trial.

Against wrong ideas
Yet if things had worked fine for them, the "10 to 15 year long" regime that they would establish to "put things in order" and perhaps to "raise a new generation" would be nothing shorter than totalitarian. Its aspiration for "a thousand years," like that of the Nazis, would be limited to rhetoric, but the way it would try to shape the mind of the society would be similarly ambitious. Political opposition would be wiped, civil society would be crushed, and those who mislead the public with the "wrong ideas" would be silenced. I, personally speaking, probably would not be around to write what I have been writing.

This is really what we seem to have survived from. Thank God.