Wasn't the road back to fascism closed?

Our world suffered greatly from fascism. It led to genocide, oppression, concentration camps, discrimination, massacres and wars. For a time it was almost the norm of Europe. Those who waged a struggle for freedom against it seemed to be standing, within the warped ideological atmosphere imposed by the warped reality that was lived, against a mentality and a political practice that were normal. Struggling against fascism was like rowing against the current. Because it also had the possibility of making the masses accept its own distortion as the norm. Even in Turkey, fascism was embellished and embroidered by the CHP's publications and presented as the only mentality that could save us.

It is well known that the banner headline on the front page of the 22 May 1932 issue of the newspaper Cumhuriyet read: "Greetings from Kemalist Turkey to Fascist Italy!" In the photograph published beneath the same headline, the emblem of the Fascist Party led by Benito Mussolini was placed inside the Turkish flag. This shows how valid, legitimate and attractive in that period was a concept that no one claims today, that has no legitimacy left, that is even used as an expression of insult and abuse. And this, of course, is the dangerous side of fascism: its being embraced by the masses, its values and assumptions becoming the norm, being normalized.

The heavy traumas experienced after the Second World War, into which this mentality dragged humanity, were this time sought to be overcome by loading all the crimes of humanity onto fascism. In Europe fascism was damned together with everything that might evoke it and buried in history. It was buried, but could so dense a dark period have been closed in one stroke, its fears completely vanished, its traumas completely overcome?

Moreover, could the possibility of certain attitudes and stances disavowed in the name of fascism recurring within any political movement have been entirely eliminated? In an atmosphere in which a complete complacency had formed that we had been rid of fascism, Theodor Adorno, one of the famous thinkers of the Frankfurt School, in an interview issued a considerable warning, saying that the danger of fascism might perhaps have been averted but that the paths of its return had not been closed. What was worse, he said, was that the way for fascism to return as such an attitude might pass precisely through the movements that most opposed fascism.

Turkey was in fact able to come to terms with the problem of fascism much later than Europe. Until the early two-thousands, the understandings and practices that fell to this country's share of fascism were still continuing.

That in a place like Turkey a ban was imposed on a garment that is the emblem of the Muslim woman is perhaps something even those who imposed the ban and enforced it mercilessly today do not want to remember. Because this irrationality was being lived as the normal of a period we have put behind us.

Today it has been only ten years since this ban was lifted, but even the CHP cannot own a word said on this subject; it leaves it hanging. Because today's normal is very different. Today everyone sees very clearly that beneath speaking against the headscarf there is a direct hatred of Islam. Unfortunately, a treatment that would be directly described as enmity toward Islam when done by some Europeans was applied by the CHP, which once governed this country, with its ideological clamor and its legal justifications.

The idea that "a headscarved judge cannot behave fairly" is an approach that sees being headscarved as abnormal and being bareheaded as normal. At first glance the discrimination it contains is glaring, eye-gouging. To put it most mildly, it assumes that any state of the body can be free of every kind of ideology, identity or stance, and no such human body exists. The human body is by its very nature clothed anyway. It is clothed when it uncovers the head, and clothed when it covers it. And what it is clothed in is of course not a mere garment. Within every kind of clothedness there are ideology, identity, gender and personality.

Today's normal of course does not say that "a headscarved judge cannot behave fairly"; indeed, it shows very clearly that beneath this idea lies the existence of a relentless idea of discrimination against the headscarved. And that the attitude toward the headscarf is at the same time an enmity toward Islam and toward this country's values.

That this enmity could at one time have been a normal imposed on this country, on a country whose people are entirely Muslim, is actually something shameful to remember. That is why Kılıçdaroğlu can even say that the headscarf ban was lifted thanks to him. Because it is no longer something anyone with the slightest level of reasonableness can defend. But the truth is that Kılıçdaroğlu had no contribution whatsoever to the lifting of the headscarf ban. He merely surrendered because he no longer had any weapon, any means, any instrument with which he could resist the lifting of the ban.

If we recall, there was not even a law or regulation upholding the headscarf ban. The only thing upholding it was a decision the Constitutional Court gave although it had no authority to do so. The CHP continued to keep this ban standing with the political-official-ideological power it had in the period when the Constitutional Court was its backyard.

Perhaps, on the occasion of this debate, we can probe the possibility that this irrational Islamophobia, which we have left behind in an Islamic country, even at the center of the Islamic world, might turn into a norm again. The atmosphere of complacency formed by the normal we have been breathing for about ten years may make the possibility of a return to the same fascist understanding seem impossible. But the voicing of these thoughts in this way makes, precisely as Adorno once said, the warning that fascism's way of return is not closed.