Who succeeds in Turkey, who boasts?

The developments in industry, science and technology in Turkey over the last twenty years are bearing very obvious fruit. Its obviousness comes from its being directly reflected in the numbers, beyond being a mere discourse of unfounded, groundless, empty pride and boasting.

For God's sake, there is a side of empty boasting that is quite familiar to us and wearisome. For years we were kept consoled by the bombast of strata that did not drive a single nail for the country, did not lay one stone upon another, could not, and had no horizon or capacity in this regard anyway. At the same time, the guardian elites of a country whose only achievement for eighty years was to establish an authoritarian and totalitarian rule against its own people, and which was among the most backward countries in the world in terms of democracy, human rights, quality of governance, science, industry and technology, still did not refrain from instilling in us as bombastic a nationalism, ulusalcılık, as possible. A sick state of mind holding that everything we lost in the real field could be won with bombastic discourse. In the stands, you curse the opposing side as much as you can with the most fantastic expressions. In the end the match is won on the field.

A mentality that regarded its own people, the beliefs and values of its own nation, as an enemy: on behalf of which nation was it essentially going to practice nationalism? Building a nationalist narrative on top of the open rupture between nation and state was also, objectively, quite absurd. The result was a cowed personality among the nations of the world. A country with no human rights and freedoms, where democracy was under direct intervention once a decade and under constant ideological and military tutelage at other times, with no brand of its own, whose law was under the interpretive tutelage of an ideological scholasticism, which under the claim of secularism understood secularism as a religion and imposed it, with a low rate of university expansion and restricted press freedom: a country with neither a word nor a claim to say to the world. A bombast in which, though it had no claim, there was also no lack of an outlook that saw itself as superior to all the nations of the world. Again, trying to cover with talk and bombast what was lost on the field.

Yet within the short span of 20 years, with the universities opened in Turkey (208 universities) and the revolution in the field of education, the rate of university expansion, with 8.5 million students (10 percent of the population), has risen to the highest level in the world. With the amount allocated to R&D expenditures being increased regularly in the public and private sectors, Turkey has made great leaps in areas that could not even have been imagined before. It has risen to become the 12th country in the world in the field of the defense industry, and since its rate of rise is higher than the others', it is expected to rise in the rankings as well. The products displayed by our firms that took part in the 16th International Defense Industry Fair (IDEF), held in recent days, presented a very clear picture of how far Turkey has come in a short time. Vice President Cevdet Yılmaz noted that in the first six months of the year Turkey's defense exports reached 2.5 billion dollars, that by the end of the year this would reach 6 billion dollars, and that in the following year it is moving rapidly toward 10 billion dollars. This picture needs to be viewed together with the Teknofest culture that has been blowing in the country for years under the leadership of the Bayraktars. It is a picture that practically revives, by updating, the generation of Asım, by putting a concrete, emulable, followable goal before the youth that is typified as the "Z generation." This is a series of works that truly deserves, as a nation, to be proud of, perhaps deserves it for the first time with concrete grounds.

The matter is of course not only the successes in the defense industry. The successes recorded in many other fields too, in health, education, transportation, the social state, scientific research, democracy and freedom of expression. In any case all of these feed one another and affect one another.

As Turkey breaks the chains of internal and external tutelage, it comes to itself. A Turkey that comes to itself also finds its historical and cultural codes; indeed it comes to itself because it has found them. The result of this discovery, of this coming to itself, is Turkey's return to the stage of history. Perhaps Turkey truly has a real reason to be proud as a nation. It has real successes, and it has development, progress and a place in the community of world nations that cannot be ignored.

It has a real reason for pride, but of course without missing the real reasons and the style of this pride.

The odd side of the matter is that, rather than those who earned Turkey this real reason for pride, it is people who have no share in these successes, who on the contrary kept this country backward for eighty years, who express their own bombastic feelings in an even more spoiled way over the successes of today's Turkey, that is, the Turkey distinguished by its twenty years of success.

Comparing Turkey with other Arab or Muslim countries, they venture to heap ignorant praise, on the basis of the difference from them, upon secularism, Westernization, that is, their own old dark models. They ignore, and try to make others ignore, that Turkey in its old state was no different from the countries over which they now put on airs of superiority.

Yet Turkey would advance precisely because it emerged from the vise they had put it in. They have no share in Turkey's successes today, in its rise, in its attainment of its privileged place in the league of world nations. On the contrary, they constantly tried to obstruct Turkey's development, its success, its openings. Had it been up to them, Turkey would not have been able to be anything more than a country slightly better off than the Baath regimes of the Middle East. Of course, their bombastic-racist discourse of that time would have remained entirely baseless and far from credible. Today, however, they take the advantage that living in this country, in whose success they have no share, gives them as a spoil, and venture to trample upon it and to feed their racist feelings on it.

Yet this country was able to rise to this level because it overcame and surpassed their narrow horizons, their racist feelings, their Baathist fancies. But shamelessly, though they have no achievements, merits or virtues, they brazenly pour out their fascistic claims of superiority over the position that Turkey's present level provides to every Turkish citizen.

That is, another appearance of the trickery of coming from the mountain and driving out the one in the vineyard.