Turkish nationalism/fake secularism: take only material civilization from the West

With the Gezi protests, many Western idiots have taken to believing in the fantasy of democracy in Turkey, because the Kemalist demographic doing most the protesting has decided to present it as a struggle of democracy to gain outside support. However in an Islamic society like the Turkish, democracy is not a goal held by any powerful segment of society. What Turks want is only the material civilization of the West, in the vain hope of gaining in some distant future enough national power to make new sieges against Vienna and Belgrade. They want to keep the spirituality and mentality Islam, no matter how secular they claim they are(by Turkish standards: which are low standards for secularism). Thus all that there can be in Turkish society is the powerful dictating and compelling the vulnerable.

Don't support the fake secular ideology of Turkey known as Kemalism and don't support Kemalists.

The theme that a patriotic Turk should try to achieve a balance between the benefits of the West and the East by opting for adopting the science and technology of the former and the spirituality of the latter is repeated quite often in the schooling system designed by the educational establishment in Turkey. This difficult endeavour is almost like a mission for every patriotic Turk. Hence, it is possible to argue that since the days of the early Westernization efforts. the Turkish psyche has been burdened with the difficult task of achieving a balance between the Western civilization and the Turkish culture. ... Patriotic Turks try to resolve this tension by achieving a balance between the materiality of the West and the spirituality of the East. However, the achievement of such a balance is quite enigmatic since a combination of Western civilization and Eastern culture, when transposed to the realm of nationalism renders itself as an insoluble problem.

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A preoccupation with this balance between modernity and tradition, Western materialism and Eastern spirituality as well as Civilization -- based on the premises of Enlightenment -- and Culture -- based on the premises of Romanticism -- is a recurring theme accompanying Turkish modernization. The desire to achieve such a balance is nowhere better expressed than in Ziya Gokalp's (1876-1924) works. Ziya Gokalp's ideas were wavering between the three trends of Islamism, Turkism, and Westernism, hence, reflecting the political climate of the context in which he was located. As Niyazi Berkes puts it: `He was fighting within himself the battle that intellectuals and politicians were raging on other levels'.(20)

Ziya Gokalp produced his basic writings between the years 1911 and 1918 when he was associated with the Party of Union and Progress against the emotional background of the period laden with nationalist movements among the non-Muslim and non-Turkish peoples of the decadent Ottoman Empire. While on the one hand, there were those intellectuals and politicians who opted for a social reconstruction by way of reversion to Seriat (Islamic law), there were those who staunchly supported the idea of Westernization, on the other. In addition to these two groups, there were others who longed for the romantic ideal of the pre-Islamic Turkic unity. Ziya Gokalp was influenced by all of these trends. Yet, he envisaged a middle road in the tradition of Namik Kemal: `that only the material civilization of Europe should be taken and not its non-material aspects'.(21) Yet, contrary to Namik Kemal's thought, Ziya Gokalp did not think that the individual and his reason could be a criteria for social reconstruction. Ziya Gokalp rather signified a shift from Tanzimat rationalism inspired by the eighteenth century thinkers of the European Enlightenment to the nineteenth century Romantic thought in the tradition of the German philosophers by accepting the transcendental reality of society identified with the nation instead of individual reason. Berkes sums up Ziya Gokalp's convictions in the following manner: `As the ultimate reality of contemporary society is the nation, and as national ideals are ultimate forces orienting the behavior of the individuals, so the most urgent task for the Turks consisted of awakening as a nation in order to adapt themselves to the conditions of contemporary civilization'.(22)

Source:

Ayse Kadioglu, "The Paradox of Turkish Nationalism and the Construction of Official Identity," Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 32, no. 2 (April 1996)