Turkish Ultra-Nationalist Education Produces Soldier-Students

The Turkish anthropologist, Ayşe Gül Altınay, is a good source on the militarist, virulent, Turkish education system. If anyone has interacted with the typical Turk in real life or online, one will wonder where their renowned fanaticism comes from. Well she partly answers it in her works. 

Bianet: Turk-Soldier-Muslim: The Ideal Student

"The ideal student, according to the education system in Turkey, is the student who looks at the world with a nationalist mentality, who defines him or herself as 'a Turk' based on ethnicity, and who is a soldier-student, ready to fight."

Presenting a paper titled "Who is a good Turk?: The 'Ideal' student according to Textbooks" at the "International Human Rights Education and TextBook Research Symposium" held last weekend, Assistant Professor Ayse Gul Altinay from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Sabanci University, tackled this issue.

                ...

Another important characteristic of the "ideal" Turkish student in textbooks is being a "soldier-student." By extension, this ideal student, or the first-class citizen is basically a man.

Here, military service is defined as a cultural given and students are told that they will not be of any good to themselves, their families or their nation if they do not serve in the military. Under this definition, military service is no longer a citizenship obligation for male citizens. It is taken out of the political/legal framework, and is used in a social and cultural framework, which defines a person's life, and his relations with his family and environment.

The discourse about Turks being a "military-nation" underlies this argument and it naturalizes dying, killing and thus, violence.

Almost all excerpts reflect a homogenous nation that represents a "single race" and a single culture. Saying there are different "races" within one nation is defined as "separatism."

The general view in these textbooks is that, the Turkish nation is a homogenous nation with a single ethnicity. Thus the books ignore the diversity in Turkey and see every kind of diversity as an element of "threat."

Ayşe Gül Altınay went on to produce a related book that deals with this subject further:

In Turkey, the mandatory military course taught in high schools by military officers remains one of the most significant sites where the interdependencies between education and defense are established and naturalized. Taught under different names in different periods (Military Service, Preparation for Military Service, National Defense Knowledge, and National Security Knowledge), the military course has been in the curriculum of high schools since 1926. Currently, it is called National Security Knowledge and is mandatory for all students (male and female) in the second year of high school, regardless of the kind of school. ...

The most important continuity is that the course has been taught by military officers (or retired officers) who get paid by the Ministry of National Education or the school that employs them. However, neither the Ministry nor the schools have any say in the choice of these officer-teachers. The officer-teachers are appointed by the highest commander of the nearest garrison on an annual basis. ... Their qualification for teaching this course is defined solely in military terms: the most preferred category is that of staff officers (Staff Colonels, Majors, and Captains), followed by other officers ranked militarily.[5] ...

Source:
Altinay, Ayse Gul. Myth Of The Military Nation. (Palgrave, 2004; 1st Edition) p. 124.

Here is a Youtube video, Neden Hedef Türkiye(48:51), that was shown to Turkish students in those classes that teaches them to suspect neighboring countries and minorities. If anyone knows Turkish and is willing to translate please translate any section you wish in the comments.

Kemalism: Legal And Media Engineering To Develop An Ultra-Nationalist Population

Turks with very few exceptions are proud ultra-nationalist lunatics. Their state is structured by their war criminal military regime who act as overseers of the state ideology of Kemalism, the Turkish equivalent to the ridiculous North Korean Juche Idea. This is changing slightly in the present as the success of the Islamic oriented AKP Party has allowed them to  route out the traditional Kemalist deep state, media and other organs and replace it with their plants. However, they just want those who are more oriented into Sunni Islamic bigotry to control the state ideology, not abandon it or reform. Turks are fanatic nationalists because Kemalist ideology structures them to be so. This relatively old source from 1995 still holds largely true in most aspects:

Official ideology: Turkey is the only European State to have, written into its Constitution, an official ideology. This is based on: "the concept of nationalism and the principles and reforms brought about by Ataturk, founder of the Turkish Republic, immortal guide and incomparable hero".

According to the Preamble to the Constitution "no opinion or thought can expect to receive any protection as against Turkish National interests, the principle of the indivisibility of the Turkish national entity, its State and its territory, the historical and spiritual values, inherent in the Turkish people or the nationalism, principles reforms and modernism of Ataturk".[1]

THE MEDIA:
On the Official State Ideology's Service

Foreigners passing through Turkey or observers critical of certain political aspects of the country, are often shocked by the ultra-nationalist and militarist content of the principle Turkish media and the virulence of the press campaigns they orchestrate. At the same time they notice that certain media don't hesitate to criticise on or other of the Ministers or even the Prime Minister. To understand the Turkish system one must bear in mind that, apart from some publications of the Left or islamic opposition, the principle Turkish media are at the disposal of the State and its official nationalist ideology (Ataturkism).

The political police (MIT) and the General Staff, who have a whole network of influential "honourable correspondents" constantly keep watch over what they consider "the superior interests of the State" and launch orchestrated press campaigns against "the internal and external enemies of the country". Amongst the more famous victims of their campaigns: Nelson Mandela, "guilty" of having refused an Ataturk Peace Prize, which seemed to him rather out of place in a country that was martyrising its Kurdish population; Mrs Mitterrand, Senator Kennedy, the German Social-Democratic Party leader R. Scharping etc... Their network covering the media is sufficiently subtle to allow each paper to have some liberal editorial writers who criticise official policy from the standpoint of another idea of "patriotism". Those who cross the thin red line(criticism of Ataturk or of nationalism, defense of the Kurds) are promptly sacked, like Koray Düzgören from Hurriyet, Ahmet Altan from Milliyet or Ismet Imset of the Turkish Daily News — often following a simple phone call from an official of the Joint Forces General Staff.

Concentration of ownership also helps ensure a more efficient control of the media. Two groups share the bulk of the market. The Dogan Group, with the two mass circulation dailies Hurriyet and Milliyet, each of which has its own television network, and the Ding Group whose main standard bearers are the two dailies Sabah and Yeni Yuzyil as well as the ATV television network. The industrialists who control these two groups also have large interests in sectors which depend heavily on State and Army contracts. The General Staff, also regularly calls the Managing Directors of the newspapers and television stations for "briefings" in which they are told how to treat matters affecting national interests and defense. It is, for example, "inadvisable" to publish anything on "events in the South-East" (Kurdistan) apart from official Army communiques.

Finally, by a very generous policy of subsidies and loans on advantageous terms, the Government has been able to ensure the support of these media and their huge audience. The police and the courts can be left to stifle the few dissident voices, like the pro-Kurdish Ozgur Grundem, which was banned after the assassination of ten of its journalists and the blowing up of its premises by the police.

Despite the diversity of papers, publications, radios and televisions, those that really form public opinion are, with a few rare exceptions at the disposal of the State, its security organs and its official ideology. The "organs" only have to whistle and this powerful brain-washing machine gets under way to denigrate or vilify any opponent judged too iconoclastic, or to present as an enemy of the Turkish nation any foreign personality who dares to criticise excess of the Turkish Army or Courts or express a wish for an improvement in the fate of the Kurds in Turkey.[2]

Sources:
[1.]The International Committee for the Liberation of the Kurdish Parliamentarians Imprisoned in Turkey(CILOEKT). Which Turkey for Which Europe(PDF). (December 1995) p.  8.
[2.] Ibid., p. 10.

The main difference is that in the present those who are against the AKP regime are complained against over the phone, fined, jailed, taken to court and otherwise silenced by the AKP regime, and not the militarists of the Turkish General Staff as in the past.

The Lunatic Followers of the Kemalist State Religion in Photos

At a recent 2013 graduation at Ege University in Izmir, Turkey[1], 720 Atatürkist, fascist graduates, sending a message to the Islamist oriented AKP after their pathetic Gezi revolt, all put up portraits of Ataturk that covered their faces. The symbolism was obvious, they are an ultra-nationalist mob worshiping their state religion and not individuals. A photo:

Turkish columnist Mustafa Akyol observed that in Turkey the most racist, intolerant group in his country are the university grads who receive the most indoctrination into the Turkish state ideology-religion known as Kemalism:

Hurriyet: Beware of 'educated' Turks

9/3/2010

...

This week, Turkey’s Education Personnel Labor Union, or Eğitim Bir-Sen, revealed a survey that mapped out the political attitudes in Turkish society. ...

...

The more interesting part of the survey was the political categories that people identified with. The most popular tags were “democrat” and “nationalist,” which were equally shared by 22 percent of the population. After that, 17 percent defined themselves as “Atatürkist” and 10 percent preferred to be called “Islamist.”

Interestingly, the “Atatürkists” turned out to be the least supportive of the reforms to broaden Kurdish rights. They, for example, gave the lowest support to the 24-hour official Kurdish-language television channel TRT 6 that the government opened two years ago.

Similarly, the “Atatürkists” outperformed every other political category, including the self-declared “Turkish nationalists,” in their opposition to “teaching of mother tongues in schools.” Only 38 percent of the “Atatürkists” supported this right, in contrast to 75 percent of the “leftists,” 70 percent of the “democrats” and 63 percent of the “Islamists.”

The “Atatürkists,” in other words, were the least tolerant group in Turkey when it comes to cultural diversity.

But this was a surprising result (at least for the uninitiated foreigner) because the “Atatürkists” were also the more educated part of society. The survey underlined this paradoxical relation between “the level of education” and “the support for the democratic opening” for Kurdish rights: “As the level of education falls, the number of those who see the democratic opening as a positive step increases. Conversely, as the level of education rises, the number of those who see the democratic opening as positive declines.”

As I said, this might be surprising to foreigners, particularly Westerners, who tend to presume that “education” and “liberal values” go hand in hand. ...

So, one wonders, why Turkey is so exceptional?

The answer might be in the education system. In the West, education is designed mainly to raise critical and democratic-minded individuals. But Turkish education, from primary school to universities (yes, even the universities), is designed to raise generations “loyal to the principles and revolutions of Atatürk.”

Unfortunately, those “principles and revolutions” don’t include concepts such as individual freedom, cultural diversity, and, alas, even democracy. (In case you haven’t noticed, Atatürk has a zillion sayings about nationalism, secularism or “republicanism,” but hardly anything on democracy.)

That’s why a mind shaped by the Turkish education system, unless tainted by some other factor, will be a staunch nationalist, secularist, and “republicanist” — but hardly a liberal or democrat.

...

The education system is really the key. From age 7 to 18, a Turkish student hears the word “Kurdish” only once: When he learns about the “The Society for Kurdish Advancement,” as one of the “treacherous organizations” that arose in the final years of the Ottoman Empire. (The take-away message is that “Kurd” is something treacherous.)

...

Furthermore, the same “educated” Turks also believe that their co-nationals who question such national myths are either paid agents of the “imperialists” who want to destroy Turkey or wild-eyed Islamists who yearn for “the darkness of the middle ages.”

...

Again in Izmir in 2013, one of the strongholds of Kemalist fascists, a lunatic mob of Kemalists Turks wasted their time recreating a potrait of Ataturk[2] like the North Koreans of the Mideast they are:

Due to all the Kemalist brainwashing in Turkey, Kemalist Turks see the long-dead dictator and militarist, Ataturk, as an immortal father figure. Here are some photos of the North Koreans of the Mideast kissing the statue of the immortal father and seeing if his statue will whisper them advice[3]:

Finally from the 2007 Republic protests of the Kemalist fascists against the Islamic oriented AKP party, here are some North Koreans again showing they are not self regulating individuals but part of the homogeneous ultra-nationalist, Kemalist mob[4]:



[1.] Most of the photos in this blog post where gathered from the The World's Armed Forces Forum, Greece & Turkey subforum posted by North Koreanesque Turks themselves to actually gloat about their blind, slavish obedience to the symbol of a long-dead man. The forum is like a Wild West environment, but the Turks there are very open and proud of their national fascism, barbarism and atrocities so it is a good source on the North Korea of the Mideast. Instead of hiding or denying their crimes or dirty laundry they most often gloat over it!
This particular graduation is from this thread:
Greece & Turkey Forum: Ege University graduation July 16 2013

[2.] Greece & Turkey Forum Thread: This is why I love Izmir April 1 2013

[3.] Greece & Turkey Forum Thread: And they say Kemalists are like North Koreans, I've never seen a North Korean do this June 13 2013

[4.] The Pasha and the Gypsy Blog: The Second Anniversary of Disgust January 18, 2009

Kemalism: the fascist Turkish state religion modeled after Islam

What the backward Turkish nation considers secularism is not the separation of Church and State of the Western model, rather a Turkish secularist is a type of rabidly fervent fascist that elevates the state and nation to the level of a religion, referenced after Islam. Ziya Gökalp, one of the most prominent Turkish nationalist theorists(who himself was likely a Kurd, but pretended to have pure Turkic origins), outlined the contours of what is now termed Kemalism, the omnipotent Turkish statism, imputed falsely to Ataturk today(as Turks are quite proud of their historic ignorance):

Gokalp gave "the nation" an important mystical component. In his work, "he transferred to the nation the divine qualities he had found in society, replacing the belief in God with the belief in the nation: and so nationalism became a religion."[43] The national is deified, thus expanding Durkheim's idea that "society can do as it pleases." So, if a nation perceives itself in danger, it feels no moral responsibility in its response to that danger. The Unionist "scientific approach" gained a "sacred" character through Gokalp's theories.

Source:

Heyd, Uriel. Foundations of Turkish Nationalism: The Life and Teachings of Ziya Gökalp. p. 57.

cited in: Akcam, Taner. A shameful act : the Armenian genocide and the question of Turkish responsibility. (Metropolitan Books; 2006) pp. 88-9.

Further the Preamble part of the Turkish Constitution contains this fascist screed:

Affirming the eternal existence of the Turkish Motherland and  Nation  and  the  indivisible  unity  of  the  Sublime  Turkish  State,  this   Constitution,  in  line  with  the  concept  of  nationalism  introduced  by   the founder of the Republic of Turkey, Atatürk, the immortal leader  and the unrivalled hero, and his reforms and principles;

...

That no protection shall be accorded to an activity contrary to Turkish national interests, Turkish existence and the principle of its indivisibility with its State and territory, historical and moral values of Turkishness; the nationalism, principles, reforms and civilizationism of Atatürk and that sacred religious feelings shall absolutely not be involved in state affairs and politics as required by the principle of secularism;

      

Brainwashed Turks kissing the marble at Anıtkabir, the memorial tomb of the immortal dictator of the Turkish nation, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk,:

This more current article demonstrates how powerful in practice the official worship of the state with Ataturk, as it embodied, immortal, ever present Father figure is amongst the fascist Turkish nation:

New York Times: In Complex Times, Turkey Seeks a Reassuring Face

By SABRINA TAVERNISE, January 16, 2008

...

Almost 85 years after Ataturk formed the modern state of Turkey from the remains of the Ottoman Empire, millions of Turks still flock to the mausoleum that contains his grave here in the country’s capital. So many that 2007 was a record year for visitors, according to the Web site of the mausoleum, called Anitkabir.

Last year, a total of 12.7 million people visited the monument, a figure lifted by a large demonstration in the spring, but still a 50 percent rise over the previous year and more than in any other year in the 54-year history of the monument, according to the Anka news agency. 

Why the surge in visits to the grave of a man who died in 1938? For one, Ataturk is no ordinary man. He is referred to as the “immortal leader and unrivaled hero,” in the preamble to the Turkish Constitution. Insulting his memory is a crime in the penal code. The entire nation stops to mourn on the minute, each November, when he died.

... 

Newspaper headlines last week told of a group of high school students who painted a Turkish flag using their own blood and sent it to the commander of the military. Last year, the authorities were forced to discontinue a lottery scratch card because its design was an outline of Turkey, and scratching off the eastern part was seen as an act of sedition. ...

Note: 2007 was the year of the so called "Republic Protests" in Turkey, where millions of the more fascist fake secular Kemalist Turks backed by their politically meddling military protested when they realized the more Islamic oriented Abdullah Gul of the AKP party would likely win the Presidental elections(which he did).

The only friend of a Turk: other Turkish Mahometans

A famous saying of the chauvinist Turkish nation is: "The only friend of a Turk is another Turk."[1] However since the fake Turkish nationalism/secularism is just a re-adaption and even greater narrowing of Islamic allegiance from a wider Islamic ummah to an even smaller Turkish national ummah, one finds that is just a nationalist re-adaptation of the following Surah:

Chapter 3 Surah 118

PICKTHAL: O ye who believe! Take not for intimates others than your own folk, who would spare no pains to ruin you; they love to hamper you. Hatred is revealed by (the utterance of) their mouths, but that which their breasts hide is greater. We have made plain for you the revelations if ye will understand.[2]

Turkist theorist Ziya Gökalp elevated the elevated the national to a religious level, which explains their ultra-nationalist penchant as a nation:

Gokalp gave "the nation" an important mystical component. In his work, "he transferred to the nation the divine qualities he had found in society, replacing the belief in God with the belief in the nation: and so nationalism became a religion."[43] The national is deified, thus expanding Durkheim's idea that "society can do as it pleases." So, if a nation perceives itself in danger, it feels no moral responsibility in its response to that danger. The Unionist "scientific approach" gained a "sacred" character through Gokalp's theories.[3]

As Ali Osman Egilmez, observed in a previous posting on this blog, the Turks are modernist, seeking a modus-vivendi between Islam and the West, and not modern. Thus the Turkish saying admonishing Turks to take only as friends other Turks, is just a re-adaption and further narrowing of a Surah.

[1.] Wikileaks Cable: 06ANKARA6118, 26 Oct 2006
[2.] The University of Leeds: Qurany Tool: Al-Emran Verse No:118
[3.] Heyd, Uriel. Foundations of Turkish Nationalism: The Life and Teachings of Ziya Gökalp. p. 57.
cited in: Akcam, Taner. A shameful act : the Armenian genocide and the question of Turkish responsibility. (Metropolitan Books; 2006) pp. 88-9.