Seeing Everything as a Conspiracy
by ETYEN MAHCUPYAN
Zaman, Turkey
Nov 4 2006
11.04.2006 Saturday – ISTANBUL 22:12
The most important pillar of the doctrine produced during the period
of the Turkish Republic’s foundation was certainly the backward-facing
historical discourse which never had much of a connection to the truth.
This approach, which aimed to cut itself from reality and idealize
what we had lived through, tied the Anatolian people to Central Asia,
and history was constructed on a migration map that had no basis.
Meanwhile, the historical continuity of the Ottomans was concealed
as much as possible. Consequently, history became a field where
we could only feel the past and internalize it by establishing an
emotional connection. Due to the vital function of nationalism in
the official ideology, the emotionalism at issue became molded into
national patriotism. The result was a society that neither knew what
history was nor its own history. Even today, what historians pass on
as "history" is mostly a form of a story. Anecdotes based on certain
people’s strength of character and moral stories, which are meant
to be taken as examples, still comprise the essence of perception in
this field.
While the past is turned into a story like this, history’s natural
complexity, contradictions and inconsistencies grow paler; the will
that is drawn by perfectly consistent molded characters appears
before us as a series of events. Thus, on the one hand, with the
inner richness and human weakness of the characters removed, history
is reduced to a struggle between good and evil. On the other hand,
social and political events are understood not as an extension of
a state with multiple determinants, but as the implementation of a
willful plan which had been made beforehand. This unreal world, because
it doesn’t permit real action, frequently makes things difficult for
us. For example, to write that Mustafa Kemal put on a woman’s dress and
left the house through the back door can be perceived as "insulting,"
because we can’t comprehend that the Mustafa Kemal of our imagination
could do such a thing. As a result, putting the real Mustafa Kemal
aside, the official ideology produces an imaginary Mustafa Kemal
based on already established patterns and we call this history.
Likewise, we have difficulty perceiving situations that appear
to be the result of coincidence, variables and multi-actors who
surround social and political events, as if we are uncomfortable
with the complexity accompanying the truth. Consequently, it’s in
our interest to see everything as a conspiracy, and we prefer the
assumption that conspiracy begets reality. We are not aware that this
approach consolidates an authoritative mentality to the degree that
it exaggerates the will of the powerful and distances us from the
consciousness of being a citizen and that we also degrade ourselves
when we perceive groups as impersonal gangs that pledge allegiance
to the state.
While diluting topics that are extremely important factors of Anatolian
history, like the Armenian issue to the treachery of "internal powers"
cooperating with "foreign powers," within a conspiracy mentality,
we think the artificial dialectic that has been produced is the
truth. Of course, great European powers of that period were determined
to protect the Ottoman minorities and, of course, a group of Armenians
got involved in partisan politics.
However, if we don’t ask why this happened, why these people behaved
this way, what the approach was of those who didn’t behave this way
and what the government was during while this was happening, we can’t
understand this issue within its real historical connection. Then we
will have to produce some dialectic to prove the government right,
we’ll make a whole community traitorous, we’ll say they all rebelled
and committed murder, and, by mixing events from different historical
times, we’ll attempt to produce an imaginary "balance."
Unfortunately, the only thing that emerges from such approach is a
tale or lullaby, not history.