The domestic Turkish reaction to Michael Rubin’s most recent anti-AKP, anti-Tayyip Erdoğan diatribe has been interesting for its intensity (1). I don’t remember a point in the past ten years when Rubin’s slander pieces garnered this much notice. At the same time, I think this is easily accounted for: Most of the people reacting now simply had not given much attention to what international commentators, especially right-wing extremists like Rubin, were saying about Turkey. They thought either that someone else was dealing with it, or that it wasn’t worth their time.
However, over the past several years, most of those whom we thought “were dealing with it” have turned out to be not so different from Rubin. We have also come to understand that what the international English-language press and pundits say about Turkey has certain identifiable consequences. Hence there has been a reaction; some people have come to realize that something has to be done about all this, that new voices had to emerge, and that the English-language conversation about Turkey had to be addressed.
I’ve written on Rubin’s anti-Turkish screed before (2), so I’ll simply mention the fact that, since now Rubin has been writing in the same vein for a decade, it is totally unlikely that he would have a change of heart no matter what information was put in front of him. That means that fact-checking and rebuttals will have limited effect. Those paying attention to what Rubin says share the same weltanschauung, so they won’t be easily swayed either.
Instead, I want to point out the manner in which Rubin’s themes have been spreading amongst pundits interested in Turkish issues, and the highly unusual “bipartisan hatred” aimed at the current Turkish government.
As I described in my “Reminiscences of Bush’s Middle East Democracy Project” Serbestiyet article in July 2015, Rubin started coming up with fervent anti-AKP smear pieces well over a decade ago. Over 2003-2007, Rubin and other writers associated with neo-conservative political circles influential during the George W. Bush administration developed a variety of themes and techniques for attacking the Turkish government. At that time, however, Rubin’s narrative was somewhat out of synch with a presidency that needed positive themes to sell the (mendacious, murderously destructive, and ultimately leading to dire long-term consequences) invasion of Iraq to the American public. The “Greater Middle East Project,” for which Turkey was supposed to be a “model Middle Eastern democracy,” was one of them.
Ultimately, of course, those themes were simply propaganda intended for a specific political need at a certain political juncture. Eventually the Greater Middle East Project faded, but Rubin, firmly ensconced in his position at the ultra-conservative American Enterprise Institute, continued on with his malevolent essays. The Obama administration was voted into office, and for a short period President Obama pursued a policy of reconciliation with the Muslim world.
In the same period, Turkish domestic politics began to experience extreme turmoil. The Turkish military threatened a coup in 2007, and were rebuffed by the AKP with help and support from the Turkish electorate. This sparked serious concern amongst those sectors of Turkish society which had, for decades, fed off of the Turkish military’s control over state institutions. Reaction and fury began to mount. In the years after 2008, domestic Turkish opposition writers, step by step, discovered the potential in the great reservoir of anti-AKP animosity that Rubin and his comrades had compiled over the years. They began to utilize Turkish versions of the same themes; those who were operating internationally began to devise similar rhetoric for their compositions.
Finally, starting especially after the AKP’s overwhelming victory in the 2011 parliamentary elections, domestic and international academics began to produce intensely anti-AKP journal articles and media content. Many if not most of those academics attacking the AKP have been to the left of the political spectrum; despite this, the fundamental ideas that they began to express, and the vocabulary and clichés that they acquired, had been devised in the previous seven to eight years by right-wing pundits like Rubin. By 2013, even before the Gezi Park protests or riots or commune, this had turned into a full-force domestic and international verbal assault against the AKP. And in December 2013, all of Fethullah Gülen’s media outlets also switched sides and joined the hate-fest. Previously Zaman had been one of the few Turkish media voices that paid any attention to answering Rubin’s writing, but after December 2013 they turned around and completely adopted Rubin’s rhetoric. Just look at Sevgi Akarçeşme’s recent NYT op-ed. (3)
By early 2014, both the militant right- and left-wings of the domestic and international press, leading pundits and academics, had joined a bipartisan chorus of anti-AKP vitriol.
How did this happen?
In order for the U.S. right-wing to embrace Rubin’s perspective, they’ve had to forget important precepts of traditional post-WWII U.S. foreign policy. Turkey under the AKP is a staunch NATO ally, and the most important force for democracy in its region. The AKP is also devoted to developing Turkey’s market economy, and prefers international trade to be as free as possible. Remarkably, these items have been brushed aside by those taking up Rubin’s anti-AKP stance.
The left-wing is actually easier to understand since the AKP is a conservative political party that embraces aspects of Turkish culture, including its Islamic identity, in preference to blanket Westernization. The Jacobin, positivistic “for the people, despite the people” authoritarian modernization tradition that dominated the Turkish state until the early 21st century is an intellectual heritage that many leftists still embrace even though they might not be aware of it. The paradox is that Rubin-esque right-wing pundits have actually preferred that Jacobin Turkish state tradition to the more classically conservative AKP. Rubin is explicit about his preference (4), and continues, amazingly, to promote the idea that military coups are some sort of potentially desirable occurrence (5). And shamefully, various U.S. publications have been helping him promote an idea that runs against some very fundamental values of American politics (6).
For to repeat, that old Turkish state tradition was comprehensively elitist, devoted to forcible social engineering projects from the top down, and thus fundamentally anti-democratic. What progressives and leftists have to ask themselves is how they have come to agree not just on some marginal points, but on a whole spectrum of fundamental ideas about the AKP that were originally developed by Rubin and other right-wing pundits ten years ago. Why have these progressives and leftists allowed themselves to be captured by the same visions of top-down, even militaristic social control that Rubin and his like promote? Have they truly learned nothing from the Soviet or Chinese experiences? When will progressives and the leftists understand that the AKP is, at the moment, the only Turkish political party that is fundamentally committed to democracy?
Hopefully the progressives, at the very least, will soon come to their senses. Reforming Turkish state institutions in order to increase transparency and accountability, and to deepen and solidify Turkey’s democratic system, is a project of extreme importance for this region, and more generally for the whole Muslim world. Understanding this aspect of current events in this country is vital to seeing Turkish politics with clearer eyes, not dimmed or strained by militant stances like Rubin’s.
But ultimately, if writers such as Rubin are not able to begin objectively evaluating the real issues facing Turkish society, the content they produce will rapidly become completely obsolete. Rubin’s calls for military coups are irrelevant even in the current context, and the debates emerging now in Turkish politics and society, such as that about the Turkish Central Bank’s interest rates, the AKP’s economic policies, as well as much more nuanced debates about free speech and human rights, are now beginning to resemble the same discussions in the advanced industrial democracies. These are the types of conversations that Turkish society will more and more engage in, not the specter or the aftermath of military coups.
Mr. Rubin, Turkey has moved far beyond both your wishful thinking and your paranoid nightmares.
NOTES
(1) https://twitter.com/hilal_kaplan/status/711942560638509056
(3) http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/09/opinion/recep-tayyip-erdogans-despotic-zeal.html?_r=0
(4) https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/turkey-from-ally-to-enemy/
(6) http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/coups-advance-democracy-article-1.1391469; http://europe.newsweek.com/will-there-be-coup-against-erdogan-turkey-439181?rm=eu