NEW BOOK ABOUT KEMALISM, TODAY’S TURKEY AND MINORITIES

Azg Daily
April 22 2010
Armenia

R. Galustanian from Berlin presents an extract from Perry Anderson’s
(Professor of History and Sociology at UCLA) "After Ataturk. Turqs,
their State and Europe" book, where, according to Galustanian, the
British Marxist reveals the mystery of Turkish super -chauvinism.

What is Kemalism for Anderson? A cultural revolution without a social,
therefore a vertical (Monohierarcic) matter. But above all, profoundly
dishonest structure: The Turkish secularism was true even in the
moments of feverish heat never secular. The state-controlled schools
and mosques. Religion became a state matter, and remained in spite
of suppression of constitutive part of the nation. The AKP is thus
an heir of Kemalism, and not their adversary. It is postkemalistic
not antikemalistic. The Turkish secularism was not really secular,
and – one might add – the Turkish Islamism is not really Islamic, at
least not like the arabic. Nationalist as far as it will go, however,
are both Kemalists and Islamists.

Non-Muslim minorities have in the history over and over again
experienced the Islamic Turkish super-nationalism. Not only the
Armenians during the First World War, but also in 1955 the Greek
inhabitants of Istanbul. The genocide issue is especially important
for Anderson in his settlement with the Kemalist ideology. For him
there is no doubt that these were in the mass killing of Armenians an
extermination, to the systematic, state-organized murder of a people.

He even sees many similarities with the Holocaust and is upset about
the fact that so many hold to the uniqueness of the Jewish genocide.

The good reason for his anger is that the latter is subject of a
monumental, reverent, quasi-religious culture of memory and the former
is only "a whisper in the corner, which brooks no diplomat of the EU".

The bad reasons for this imbalance is that the Western allies Israel
and Turkey demanded such an interpretation of history.