A consolation prize in the channel of Westernization: are Westerners also Turks anyway?

On the occasion of D. Mehmed Doğan, whom we saw off to the abode of eternity last year, we continue to think again about Westernization. His book "Batılılaşma İhaneti" (The Betrayal of Westernization), published exactly 50 years ago, in 1975, was a courageous text that had a traumatic effect on a nation whose memory was being attempted to be erased by heavy blows, and that tried to remind it of what it had lived through during those blows. Describing this policy as "betrayal" in itself represented an important stance. Until then, analyses of the paths Turkey had entered in the name of so-called "keeping pace with the age," "catching up with the age" or "reform" had seen and narrated the process as a journey of spiritual progress that had to be walked "spontaneously" and "necessarily." Yet within this process there was also an element of surrender to the enemy against whom Turkey had fought for centuries. For that reason the book was a warning, a work of awakening, and as expected it had a significant echo and effect.

A Westernization sought in the wardrobe was one of the important fragments of this period. But it had other dimensions as well. For instance, there was an oddity, a contradiction visible even at the level of the simplest intelligence, in the fact that, right after a national struggle waged on the back of a nation, the nation was sidelined and an attempt was made to make it adopt the culture and identity (Westernness) of the enemy it had fought. When did we become Western? When did we come to attribute value to being Western, which to us appeared first and foremost as an identity identical with the Crusaders? Moreover, when themes such as nationalism, independence and Turkism, rising on the ground of the National Struggle, had awakened a very strong national feeling in us…

How, for instance, were we going to reconcile Westernization with nationalism? What kind of nationalism was this, which would alienate us totally from ourselves and put us into a condition wholly different from what we had been until now? There could be no way of making this reconciliation by the will of the people, relying on the people, or even somehow obtaining the people's approval. That is why whatever was done was done "in spite of the people." That some heads would roll ceased to be probable and was made real.

But still, for the ideological picture to be completed, a "reconciliation" had to be made.

It was done like this: in order to remove the oddity of a Turk, said to be worth the whole world, of noble blood, the most heroic and strongest people in history, being a blind imitator of the West, it was put forward that the West was originally Turkish as well. The Turkish Historical Congress, convened in 1932, aimed to bring out "the roles of the Turks in world history that had been consciously and unconsciously diminished."

In the end the famous Turkish History Thesis, which traces the origin of the world's civilizations to the Turks, was unveiled at this congress. According to this thesis, the Turks were the ancestors of the superior Aryan race of brachycephalic Alpine skull type, which migrated from Central Asia between 3000 BC and 1200 BC because of drought and founded the civilizations of the Mediterranean basin. The Hittites in Anatolia, the Etruscans in Italy, the Celts in Europe were Turks. This thesis would later be followed by the Sun Language Theory, according to which the origin of all languages was Turkish.

So to those who say we are Westernizing, we are being cut off from our essence, a great consolation of historical consciousness: the Westerners are already Turks. If they do not come to us, to their origin, we will go to our origin in them. It is a bit like rewriting history, like constructing the reality of the world through discourse alone, but was that not the founding principle anyway: writing history is as important as making history, even more important than it.

Many scientists, historians, anthropologists and politicians attended the congress. Mustafa Kemal followed everything that was said from the box. His adopted daughter Afet İnan was a history teacher only 24 years old, but the privilege of presenting the first paper would be hers. This privilege in fact came from its being known that the ideas she put forward belonged entirely to the Eternal Chief. After explaining in her speech that all the peoples of Central Asia were Turks, she made rather bold statements about the racial characteristics of the Turks. For example:

"Turkish children know and will make known that they are not from a tribe of 400 tents, but a nation of high ability descended from a race of tens of thousands of years, Aryan, civilized, exalted... The true heir of this sacred homeland, the indefatigable striver of the Republic of Türkiye, are the young and vigorous children of that great, exalted, noble Turkish people today, we are!" (Birinci Türk Tarih Kongresi: Konferanslar-Müzakere Zabıtları)

Here the expressions that trace the origin of Turkishness to the Aryan race are the expressions of a rather audacious venture that almost changes the whole known origin of Turkishness. That a 24-year-old history teacher spoke such big words with such audacity in an environment where, facing her, were mature and eminent experts on Turkish history such as Fuat Köprülü, Zeki Velidi Togan, Yusuf Akçura, İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı, Mükrimin Halil Yınanç, Vasıf Çınar and Yusuf Ziya Özer is a matter to be dwelt on separately. What matters in this communication is that İnan, in this state, was speaking as a more "decisive" authority relative to the others. What this authority, as the spokesperson of the official view, understood by Turkism would become fully clear in the skull examinations she conducted to determine the Turkish race within her anthropological studies at DTCF. As a result of these skull examinations it was concluded that the Turkish race was itself the Aryan race. That is, the Aryan race of Europe as you know it was sought to be registered as the ancestor of the Turk. And since this seemed to fit the physique of the blond-haired, blue-eyed Mustafa Kemal, it felt rather agreeable at first sight. With this motivation Afet İnan took the matter so seriously that she named her own daughter "Âri."

That so high a premium was placed at that time on the claim that tied the origin of all world civilizations to the Turks, and that the Turks were the source of the Aryan race, that is, the source of the race on which the fascist racists who claim a master race in Europe as we know it today based themselves… Let us say we entered Westernization a bit through the back door, but how was the price to be paid for this Westernization having made us kin to Hitler, who would later be cursed in the name of the supremacy of that very Aryan race?

NOTE: In my two studies titled "Batılılaşma: Modernleşme mi Yabancılaşma mı?" (Westernization: Modernization or Alienation?) and "Cumhuriyetin ilk Yılları: Demokrasi mi Diktatörlük mü?" (The Early Years of the Republic: Democracy or Dictatorship?) in Beyan Yayınları’ Tarihin Gerçek Yüzü (The True Face of History) series, more detailed fragments on this subject are included, with reference also to D. Mehmed Doğan.