THE TROUBLE WITH LIBERAL INTELLECTUALS
Gunduz Aktan, Radikal

Turkish Daily News , Turkey
April 25 2007

What Others Say

"Participants of April 14 meeting are fascists and racists. They
invent fears; they dare to protect the Republic but it is neither
in danger nor under threat. When fears reach the level of paranoia,
some slaughter Christians in Malatya to save the country," etc.

According to such analyses of the individuals who name themselves
as "liberal intellectuals," to defend the Republic and its founding
principles is fascism. In fact, they would call the Chief of General
Staff and the President fascists, but they have cold feet. They
indirectly accuse others who share the same view for fascism.

At the same time, these liberals express proudly that they are not
nationalists, for old-fashioned nationalism creates enemies both
inside and out as it causes society to turn inward. Therefore,
basic characteristics of nationalism such as national identity,
national interest and national honor mean nothing to them. Namely,
entities at stake are worthless for them and that lies under their
being daredevils.

They have no fears if secularism and singularity principles of the
Republic would be damaged. These principles, they think, prevent
integration of religious groups with the system and solution of the
"Kurdish issue" in democracy. These people are in favor of political
organizations of religious and ethnic communities and some sort of
a Kurdish-Turkish federation, in line with multi-cultural liberal
democracy.

Their dream of a Second Republic:

Isn’t this the reason behind their stance for "The Second Republic"?

They think that if Turkey wouldn’t have its foreign dynamics based on
EU, it would fail to stand alone with the presence of internal dynamics
only, let alone its development. For this reason, they even do not
understand why it is feared to accept "all" EU demands. They think
EU does not have racist prejudices, double standards and excessive
demands towards Turkey.

These liberals are not frightened by the formation of a Kurdish
state in north of Iraq. For them, Turkey should not intervene in
northern Iraq in accordance with the U.S. demands. Instead, Turkey
should establish high-level dialogue with Kurdish administrators and
recognize the reality of Kurdistan, issue an amnesty for the Kurdish
Workers’ Party (PKK) terrorists and introduce some regional rights
to southeastern part of the country similar to that of northern Iraq.

For them, Cyprus has no strategic value at all. "We" are the guilty
part for the deadlock on the Island anyways. They are not scared
that unilateral approval of the Annan Plan would cause us to lose
the ground. Their encouragement stems from that they do not know
loses as gains in foreign politics occur as a result of incremental
developments in a long period.

They also defend that we should not be afraid to accept unjust Armenian
allegations and that to face up with our history will promote our
democracy.

By not taking into consideration how Far East countries such as Korea
and China rule globalization for their interests, these people side
with opening our economy to all external influences with "no fears"
for the sake of integration with the world economy. The outcome does
not affect their lives anyway.

Their alliance with the AKP:

Unfortunately, everything that they are not scared of is the source
of rightful and legitimate fears in the rest of the society. However,
the real reason affecting the society negatively is not that what
liberals are not frightened, but are frightened.

These liberals are so much in the trajectory of Justice and Development
Party (AKP) that they are even afraid of real democracy where deputies
are elected by the people not the leader and the deputies who are
not under immunities and whom their finances are audited.

However, what they really fear is a Turkey rising on its own, leaning
on the power of the nation only, showing the will to solve problems
on its own and going after an ideal of contemporary independence. In
short, at the center of their fears lies the probability of Turkey
and Turks having a strong national identity.

They quickly accept the differences of others. They are even against
Turkishness being a supra-identity beyond ethnicity. They are trying
to spoof constitutional citizenship as identity.

Those who do not own any national identity think the others are
"fascists". Then, there is possibility that the others might think
of them as "traitors".