Before an unparalleled history and an unparalleled regime, even hegemony remains far from officialdom

Anyone who takes a close look at how the Kemalist regime, established from the first years of the Republic, operated will immediately see its uniqueness in history. A unique Jacobinism, a unique narrative of salvation, a unique republican experience, a unique revolution and process of constructing identity, history, society and the individual, a unique project of modernization. Unfortunately, there is nothing positive to be found in any of them about this uniqueness.

In this debate that we started with Nuray Mert, and which I personally find very useful, the subject keeps opening up further. I do not know whether it will set her mind at ease on the worry about a "new official history" at this very point, but I wanted to begin with this observation. It is almost impossible for the channels, tools, apparatuses and processes by which Kemalism established an official history to be repeated in Turkey again. In my view they have not been repeated anywhere else in the world either, and repeating them would be very difficult. There have been places where it was attempted, but even in the most radical cases, for instance, a society's religious understanding, way of life, dress, self-definition, history, language, memory and even alphabet were not changed in such a radical manner. Let us look at the comparable cases: the Soviets? Italy? Germany? China? Cultural revolutions took place in all of them, but those cultural revolutions did not try to tear a country, against its people's will, out of one civilizational basin and plant it in another.

It was of course inevitable that this unparalleled form of revolution would take place in society under great pressure. Another inevitable thing is that all this pressure has a lifespan. What is suppressed will of course, after a certain point, burst out and erupt.

The official history that was narrated in this period, which left no possibility or space of utterance for any alternative, was irrational, mythological and just as detached from facts; and the attempt to implant it in people through education curricula, ceremonies and compulsory rote learning also has no parallel. That is to say, there is an asymmetry here as well. It is simply impossible for the criticisms directed today at this understanding of history, which may now be the subject of criticism and even of humor, however hegemonic they may become, to rise to the level of an official history or to a power equal to it. The graver side of the matter, even at the cost of repetition, is that today that official history is still being instilled in the minds of young people through ceremonies, school curricula and compulsory rote learning. We cannot even speak of the possibility of a "new official history" to that extent, and it should not exist either.

I think Nuray Mert is confusing two different levels here. The first is the state's education system, textbooks, the language of official ceremony, canonical heroes, the definition of the acceptable citizen, and the patterns of mentality these have produced over decades. The second is the everyday discursive superiorities that have formed around the current political power. These are not the same thing. Not every hegemonic discourse produces officialdom; nor does every political superiority automatically acquire the quality of historical foundation. The official historical narrative established in Turkey since the early Republic is not merely a discourse of power; it is a regime of mentality institutionalized through school, curriculum, law, the press regime, academia, symbolic violence and an exclusionary training in citizenship. This is what I am pointing to.

For this reason, it is not analytically correct to put the harshest remark of a politician, in whatever office he may hold, and an institutional regime of history nearly a century old in the same bracket. We do not have to find the statement "Drunkards used to rule this country" correct. Nor do I find it right for moral labeling to replace historical analysis. But the real issue here is this: will we not confront the fact that, in Turkey, even the simplest biographical data about Mustafa Kemal's way of life were for years preserved in a kind of armor of sanctity? Objecting to people constructing a crude language about the private life of a historical figure is one thing; ignoring the regime of untouchability woven around him is another.

I think Nuray Mert has become too fixated on conservative circles being "fixated" on Atatürk's drinking. Yet the problem here is not even the drinking itself; it is that even speaking about it was pushed for a long time into a kind of taboo area. In a society, a leader's way of life is historical material just as much as his military and political decisions. If which part of this material may be spoken of and which may not is determined politically, then history there has already ceased to be a free field of thought.

Moreover, if the matter has gone beyond being a question of Mustafa Kemal's private life or preferences and has come, to a considerable degree, to the point of getting society to adopt this way of life, one should not be at all surprised that it invites more discussion. Is the identification established in Turkey between drink and the republic such a small thing? On 28 February, was whether people drank or not not a testing ground for acceptable citizenship? Frankly, these tests neither started on 28 February nor ended when that process ended. How did we forget what kind of despotism was produced when this became an imposition of a lifestyle centered on drink?

In this case, I hardly need remind you that even those who raise the drinking issue in this way cannot avoid, at the end of the day, going to Anıtkabir to pay ceremonial homage to Atatürk, presenting their periodic reports to his private notebook, and thereby repeating that rote learning of official history. Only a few days ago, the Atatürk prize was presented to the UN Secretary-General by the political summit of this very "new official history."

When I say "official history was not questioned," I am not saying that nobody wrote anything in this country. Of course things were written. Karabekir's memoirs and all his books were published later, alternative memoirs were published, and a literature called post-Kemalist emerged. But that these things were done is not the same as the main backbone of social memory having changed and a new official history having formed. A text being printed is one thing; that text entering social circulation as official, let alone legitimate, historical knowledge is another. Karabekir's memoirs may have been printed; but in school, in official ceremony, in public memory and in the regime of intellectual prestige, they have never been placed on the same plane as the founding privilege that the Nutuk (The Speech) enjoys. What I call "asymmetry" is exactly this.

My stance on the Nutuk is also clear. The Nutuk should of course be read; but turning an address delivered at a party congress, containing grave accusations against political rivals and serving the purposes of defense and legitimation, into an almost untouchable primary source of history was in itself problematic. The problem is not the reading of the Nutuk; it is the halo of unquestionability created around it. And the fact that alternative narratives have, most of the time, been discredited right from the start as "the words of traitors, the heedless, those in error, reactionaries." The great majority of those discredited in this way are Atatürk's own comrades-in-arms, and all of them are figures with leadership qualities.

Incidentally, Nuray Mert did not find my answers about my expression "wars are first lost in the minds" satisfactory and has continued to object. I am not using this expression to determine, with psychological certainty, the intentions of individuals. My concern is both to point to something more structural and to approach it from a side that has never been dwelt on. If the geographical, civilizational and political horizon of an empire was narrowed in the mind long before the war began; if certain cadres began to see the solution not in consolidating the idea of the great empire but in withdrawing to Anatolia, then this, however you look at it, is a sign of mental disintegration.

No one can explain this by the conditions of the period and by its having been already adopted by everyone at the time, because this disintegration was not present in everyone's mind; indeed very few people were putting forward such a definite idea of "withdrawal." To say that this withdrawal or defeat was inevitable is also incompatible with any critical approach. In that case no responsibility for any mistake made at that time is attributed to anyone. What the most optimistic Kemalist historiography describing this period tries to convince us of amounts to nothing but this irresponsibility: we had to withdraw from the Arab lands, because history had made its decision, the circumstances made it necessary, the Ottoman state was finished anyway, and more importantly, the treachery of the Arabs had compelled us to leave.

Was it really so? I am saying that all these excuses have no meaning other than to prepare a cover for this "defeat accepted in the minds."

The fact that Mustafa Kemal had been in Tripolitania, in Damascus, in Çanakkale, which Nuray Mert offers as a counter-argument, of course does not refute this finding. For an officer fighting at the front does not prevent him from carrying other political visions in his mind about the empire's future. In those years he was himself an officer under orders, unable to decide on his own. Presumably he does not believe he was on those fronts with the initiative of a "savior."

Moreover, while people carry out their duties within the existing order, they can at the same time hold different opinions about that order's future. What Ali Fuat Cebesoy and Falih Rıfkı Atay recount, the line Şükrü Hanioğlu points to, and the ideas of "withdrawal from the Arab provinces," coded as "not ours," that existed in some officer circles of the period, show that we must discuss this seriously. On this subject, let alone a "new official history," the matter has not yet been fully taken up by anyone. This is also, in fact, the place where Nuray Mert criticizes Hanioğlu for not sufficiently taking the mental level into account, whereas I, from the exact opposite direction, criticize Hanioğlu as a place we cannot understand by remaining at the mental level. To explain why that is so, I think at least one more article is needed.

At a time when our world has turned into a scene of fire, when the US and Israel are attacking our homelands, and moreover on a festival day, I hope that discussing these things will not be perceived by anyone as discussing theology while the homeland is under enemy threat. In truth, the attacks we are exposed to are a war with theological dimensions; and on the other hand, Kemalism and its view of history is a subject with theological dimensions.

***

The festival is a mercy and blessing that points the way to human beings, who are always prone to losing their way, and that pours forth into existence. May God not withhold this mercy and blessing from us; may your festival be blessed.