"It is a fake, a fake"

For some time now Yeni Şafak has been publishing documents that will shed new light on Turkey's history and that perhaps will require rewriting many sections of this history. That history is something rewritten at every moment is a truth that can be accepted somewhat more easily today. This reality stems largely from the fact that we look at history every day from different places and under the influence of different events:

Different perspectives have different histories written. Different concerns derive different stories from historical events. But historiography also has an aspect determined by the data at hand and redetermined by a new piece of data.

There are always the "voluptuous eunuchs of history," of the kind Nietzsche spoke of, and in every historical debate they step in and speak of history as not changing, in its most objective form, and of historical facts as being the same for everyone. Yet when data emerges that would satisfy their own voluptuousness, a naive attitude of "surrendering to the truth" is only very rarely seen.

Generally, people continue to remain bound with incredible loyalty to the theories and perspectives they clung to before the data. No historical datum, document or discovery opens their eyes, or can open them. History exercises its rule not as scientific knowledge but as opinion.

It is very hard to draw an apparent distinction between conviction and a blindly adopted dogma. For example, there is no one who does not know that Şükrü Kaya was at odds with İsmet İnönü. But when it comes to light that they met or corresponded in the manner of close friends in secret, the first reaction could be "the document is fake, since these two were adversaries," or it could be "so, there turns out to be much we did not know?" Which historian would not be excited to see a document about a collaboration that drove them to play the enemy outwardly and that convinced even all the historians in a certain direction for years?

In the end, which of these reactions you adopt has no effect on the historical event; it only shows with what kind of belief you approach historical knowledge. Whatever the case, it happened there and is over, and you will never have the possibility of knowing it with absolute or certain knowledge.

You can also use, to produce whatever historical information you want, the "is not a member of the Masonic lodge" certificate that the Masonic lodge itself once gave Süleyman Demirel in the sixties, when the need arose. In this matter the document itself does not hold your hand or stand in your way.

Among the documents published by Yeni Şafak, the reactions displayed at first to those concerning Fethullah Gülen in particular, and above all to those concerning his Masonic relations, were evidently reactions given without taking into account the documents that would come later. When the documents followed, each document that came afterward strengthened the first published one. It became, and is becoming, clear that we are facing data at the level of tawatur. When I first saw these documents, frankly, as I have written before, my reaction was not to be surprised but to find some of the things I knew or had inferred confirmed.

The attitude displayed toward the documents, instead of refuting them technically, took the form of a general uproar and mocking laughter. The commotion raised on social media, or the notorious newspaper's declaring the documents fake and fabricated within the very first minute, is an approach far from any seriousness. You immediately understand that there can be no document that would open the eyes of this approach. Because whatever the strength of the document or data you come with, the reaction is ready in advance and is, even if temporarily, quite soothing: "It's fake, fake!"

It may be soothing temporarily, but it is inevitable that all these documents will in time open those eyes a little. Perhaps not everyone's, but for those whose hearts are not sealed there is, of course, light enough to enlighten.

First of all, none of the things described in the contents of the documents are relations or cases that someone who knows the structure, someone inside the structure, would never see unless they shut their eyes.

What does insisting that the documents are fake achieve? That the structure today is far from the emotional climate of Muslims, that it never had any concern called the ummah, how distant it is from the cause of Palestine and Jerusalem, how close it is with anti-Islamic circles and lobbies in the US and abroad, are the relations woven with the lobbies into which himmet money is channeled any more innocent, any more defensible than what is set out in these documents?

Moreover, what document is needed today to see, to show, the evils the structure has done to our country and to Muslims all over the world? Is a document needed to know its relations with Kasım Gülek and the Associations for Combating Communism? Are the parts of these that are already plain as day any less than what is set out in these documents?

Are you not disturbed by these relations and these political attitudes, of which you have witnessed far more, but disturbed by their being set out in the form of documents?

Even the whistles you blow as you pass a graveyard, shouting "It's fake, fake!", document your position. Beware!