This piece from the New Duranty Times about the murder of Hrant Dink should be used in journalism classes as an example of how to deliberately (and even, in parts, undeliberately) mislead the audience and oneself -- and yet to include, almost unwittingly, other material that does not fit the agreed-upon narrative. In this case, that the guilty party is a "nationalist" motivated by "nationalism" and that "nationalism" has no substratum of Islam, when Turkish nationalism is in fact a deliberately cultivated calque and variant upon Islam, with the non-Muslims in Turkey still discriminated against (or, as they were during World War II, made subject to special, Jizyah-like taxes) as they were under pre-Kemalist Islam.
The Christian Armenians were not killed in 1894-96, nor in 1909, nor in the final and largest massacres of 1915-1920, by Muslim Turks only, but also in places by Muslim Kurds. And even later, as the survivors, mostly women and children, made it to fellow Christians in Haleb (Aleppo) and Beirut, they were also set upon by Muslim Arabs. They were killed because they were Christians who dared to behave, and were feared for behaving, not as dhimmis but as free men. On this many of the Turks agreed. It was also the "reformers" or Young Turks, like Talaat Pasha, who were as murderous, and then some, as any Turks during the 1894-96 Hamidian (under Abdul Hamid II) massacres.
Kemalism, or Turkish nationalism, does not make a clean break with Islam. It is based on a mimicking of Islam. There is the total system. There is the Maximum Leader, the one must worship in thought, word, and deed. Only that Maximum Leader presented for adoration and worship is not Muhammad, but Kemal Pasha. The new belief-system was an attempt to replace one primitive and Total System by another that was less primitive and more open to the modern world. The new one would therefore, Ataturk believed, be more likely to be able to handle the modern world and survive in it. Thus the Cult of the Turk was started under Ataturk, and then expanded under Inonu and other successors.
The cult of the Turk does a number of things. It backdates the arrival of both the Seljuk and the Osmanli Turks, so that "the Turk" is seen as having always been the inhabitant of Anatolia, right back through the time of Byzantium, all the way to the Hittites. How history in its "Turkish" version is taught is something that should be presented by intelligent Turks abroad, who at least -- unlike those brought up strictly on Islam -- are able, or at least some of them are, to regard the whole business with the skeptical eye of a true Westerner. There are not many of these, but there are certainly more of them than there are of similarly clear-sighted Arabs. Of those there are practically none who can admit to themselves, much less to the world, what societies suffused with Islam must necessarily produce.
The "nationalism" that this Turkish reporter keeps attempting to fix our attention on is not only nationalism but nationalism-cum-religion. The killing of the priest, the hints of "nationalism plus religion" -- it's there, but only for those who already know enough to know where to look. And very few of the readers of The Times will know enough to know what is wrong with that report, and what -- malgre the journalist's best efforts -- is nonetheless smuggled in.
It's still there. It didn't go away. Just when you think it might have succumbed, it keeps coming back.
It is the secular class in Turkey that is going to have to admit this to itself. It is going to have to rediscover, and then to go much beyond, far beyond, Kemalism and the Cult or Myth of the Turk. Those Westernized istambullis, perhaps dining out with one or more of the Freeleys tonight, or who have a signed copy of one of Orhan Pamuk's books in their library, had better get cracking if they don't want the Turkey they allow themselves to believe exists and dominates (but it doesn't, they've got it wrong) to disappear altogether.
The Kemalist "revolution" was not that much of a "revolution." The real ideological revolution in Turkey, in which neither Islam dominates, nor a substitute cult with a substitute Great and Perfect Man, has yet to come.
Most of the ancestry of the Anatolian Turks is derived from enslaved or converted and Turkified Orthodox Christians - mainly Greek and Armenian and including a variety of ethnicities imported from the Balkans. However, since the Greeks and Armenians were the "enemy", Ataturk and his disciples found it necessary to reach thousands of years back and concoct his "Hittite" theory.
True reform will only come to Turkey when they acknowledge their recent Byzantine heritage and mourn the crimes committed by one group of their ancestors on another.
How did the New York Times get a reputation as "The Newspaper of Record?"
You've prob been asked this before, but this site keeps mwntioning rhe "New Duranty Times" Is that the New York Times? :)
OOOOKKKAy.I clicked on the link, it's the NYT. Sorry I asked, silly of me.
Chalking the Anatolian horrors up to nationalism rather than religion is the last gasp of 20th century theological modernism--a radical revision of Protestant Christianity. Theological Modernism wanted to "prove" that religion is a vague, benign influence, and directed most of its ire towards the hard-edges of Christian orthodoxy [small o]. One of its baneful legacies is that few are willing to consider, vis-a-vis the furor Islamicae, that the rleigion you follow can and does make a difference.
Walter Duranty was the Times correspondent in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. He also won a Pulitzer Press for his coverage of the Soviet Union. This was strange, because what he reported was nonstop apologetic nonsense, and perhaps worst of all was his supposedly splendid reporting in the Soviet-induced famine in Ukraine.
The Times did a terrible job in its coverage of the Soviet Union. But that was not all. It also did a terrible job in its reporting on Adolf Hitler, the Nazis, and the persecution of Jews throughout the 1930s, and then of course, the mass round-ups ("Aktion") and murders during the war. Many things were not mentioned at all. Others were relegaged to tiny paragraphs deep inside the paper. You can read all about it in excvellent book by Laurie Leff (of Northeastern University).
Because of the miserable coverage of the Nazi war against the Jews, many of the readers of The Times, and readers of other less well-endowed newspapers that did not have foreign bureaus, but took their lead from The Times -- never published the truth. And many readers of The Times had relatives in Europe, and could have done things to save them, had they been properly informed, properly alarmed. And perhaps, too, those in Washington who treated the groups of Orthodox rabbis who went to Washington to implore that something be done, might have done more, might have done something, anything, instead of letting a cabal of antisemites (from Breckenridge Long, in the State Department -- see "The Truth About the State Department" by
William Bendiner, a pamphlet written during the war, who was determined to keep Jewish refugees out, to John J. McCloy, that swinish "pillar of the establishment" who as Asst. Secretary of the Air Force prevented the bombing of the rail lines to Auschwitz, even though American bombers were succcessfully destroying targets just a few miles away -- one of the pilots on the first daylight bombing raids over Berlin, incidentally, and a recipient of the Medal of Honor, was one of my relatives, and he and those who flew with him, would have gladly bombed any rail-lines leading to death camps, had they only been given the information, and the target).
Anyway, that's why The Times - that failed to properly cover the Soviet system, and failed to cover, and hence to warn many who might have, had they known more, worked to get their relatives out, out, out in the 1930s -- out even from Germany itself -- is called The New Duranty Times.
It has failed again, in its miserable coverage of Islam -- of what Islam inculcates, of what is in Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira (does the Times even mention the Hadith and Sira? Have you learned a single thing about any teachings about Infidels in Islam from reading The Times over the past decade? Since 9/11/2001? Since last year? No, you have not).
What a paper. What an example of so much that is wrong with America, and the Western world. The ignorance. The arrogance. The lack of sense and lack of responsibility. I wish it ill. Don't you?
You said it, Mr.Fitzgerald! Yet, NYT is "the most respected paper in the west". Go figure!
Ahh! That's a keeper. Thank you - signor Hugh.
Tha
Hugh:
I spent time in Trabzon and did quite a bit of research for my masters on the modern history of the area back in the 1980's.
There are a couple of major points on the nationalism there that are not included in the NYT story and many other backgrounders arising on Dink's killer(s).
In Trabzon the people were quite separate from the Turks for the entire Ottoman period. A specific Pontian Greek identity was maintained there, and of course the Pontic Greek language. In 1920 the population of Pontians Greeks in that area was about 700,000 to one million speakers. But between 30% to 40% of them had converted to Islam in forced conversions and other pressures over 400 years. A very large chunk of the poplaton was killed, snd all the Orthodox Christian remnanets expelled to Greece. But the Greek speaking Moslem Pontians could not be expelled.
The Turkish state found itself with a group of people who spoke Greek, had a Greek identiy and had been living there for 3000 years (at least) which they could not expell in the exchages as they were Moslem and exempt.
The policy adopted to counter this was to import populations of extreme nationalist ethnic Turks in to that area and radicalize, empower and arm them in order to cow the Pontians. There have been extra judicial state killings sprees there and the "gray wolves" terrorist/paramilitary operate there as a matter of state policy to that end. They are above the law and directly connected to the military.
The imported Turkish nationalists were even given unique access to weapons and local organized gendarmes or militias in order to keep the pressure on the Pontians.
In the case of Dink's killer he is not only coming from that background of nationalists, but is probably part of a still functioning and encouraged group in Trabzon.
In addition to the history my personal experience meeting with many people there indicated they fell into two distinct groups. One was people who knew they were not ethnic Turks. The other group was nationalist (in an extreme I saw nowhere else in Turkey, not even in the southeast!) which served as the imported and state empowered persecutors of the indigenous population.
Also I must say there is no such thing as "secularism" per se in Turkey. It is "secular nationalism," or "nationalist secularism". Non-Turkish Moslems minorites in modern Turkey have been ruthlessly massacred and oppressed once the Christians were forced out or subject to genocide.
Ultimately the political movements one needs to know to understand Ataturk are the Ba'ath and Nazi movements. I always found it shocking that people on our side on the war on terror held up Ataturk as an example to be followed. In fact if Atatürk were alive today, the contemporary political system and leader he would have most identified with would have be Saddam and his Ba'athist Iraq.
Lastly, yes the Moslem Kurds did kill many Armenians (and other Christians including Assyrians and Greeks). But the key here is that the authorities, including the later secular revolutionaries KNEW this would happen and marched them through there to that end (indeed most died on the death marches themselves from starvation and exposure as opposed to predation by Kurds). So you had direct shootings by Turkish military the same as the Einsatzgruppen, burning of villages, impressment into "labor battalions" that served as moving death camps and the death marches through Kurdistan, as killing methods. That for the latter portion of killings non-Turkish moslems were used is notable, but this was still a policy set in motion with intent by the "secularists."
How does a paper wrong about so many big important things continue to be "the paper of record"?
Because people want it the things in publishes to be true.
The NYT is a microcosm of the weakness of Western civilization. For the strengths, one has to look elsewhere.
Just a note -- I had always thought that the Armenian genocide was related to starvation, forced marches (you know, like what Stalin did in the Ukraine -- just prevented any food from reaching the populace -- nothing "intentional," you know). but then I read "Islamic Imperialism" by Efraim Karsh. Karsh has a section of what the Turks did to the Armenians -- he mentioned that there were concentration camps (I didn't know about that), also Karsh explained why the massacres as a deliberate, intentional genocide. (Much of this, though, has been hushed up).
Hugh:
Has a rival paper, or writers, written a detailed chronicle/critique of the the NYT blindness in the Communist/Nazi era, and the current Muslim/Terrorist tide?
Perhaps you should write a book or an essay on this, and get it published?