Thanks for coming.

My paper examines the Turkish educational system, and specifically the National Security Knowledge course, and analyzes the extent to which it is in line with interwar-period nationalism, which is a militarist form of nationalism that was prevalent in Europe between the two world wars.

The Turkish state ideology is a product of the interwar period, and like its counterparts in the Nazi Germany or the Fascist Italy, it too is militarist in nature. But because Turkey is trying to adapt its political system to that of the EU, the discordance between the nationalist philosophy of education in the country and the supranational values in Europe constitutes a major albeit largely overlooked problem.

Especially between February 2002 and July 2004, the Turkish parliament has passed a series of laws that has introduced somewhat revolutionary changes ranging from improved civil liberties to enhanced civilian control of the military. This legal reform has constituted a major step in transforming the Turkish political system from a form of militaristic oligarchy of bureaucrats into a pluralist democracy. Yet none of the introduced measures have addressed the problems with the prevalent philosophy of education.

Today, the Turkish school is still a major playground of the Establishment’s militarism. Three major characteristics of interwar-period nationalism are especially salient in the Turkish school: (1) militarism, (2) the inculcation of the idea of a distinguished nation, and (3) cult of personality. Of these three, especially militarism and cult of personality are still easily noticeable in a wide variety of school activities ranging from the military-style marches in the physical education classes to the frequently-held school ceremonies. The pledge of allegiance ceremony, for example, inculcates a strong sense of self-sacrifice for the country as well as obedience to the post-mortem guidance of the national hero.

More interestingly, the students’ togetherness with the national hero continues throughout the school day. His statue in the schoolyard, his photographs in the first pages of all textbooks, his portrait in the classroom right above the board facing the students all day long, his words of guidance framed and hung up on the walls, textbook passages or anthems that glorify his life story over and over again, altogether, produce a somewhat enigmatic ambience around the spiritual impression of Atatürk.

As for the National Security Knowledge class, it’s almost as old as the Republic itself. It’s been a part of the high school curriculum since 1926. Yet its instruction has certain peculiarities.

First and foremost, the National Security Knowledge class is taught not by regular schoolteachers but by military-appointed officers – that is, retired or active-duty army personnel who have no training in pedagogy. Moreover, the National Security Knowledge class is the only class with a political content taught on the high school level in Turkey. A commission within the General Staff decides the contents of the course.

The officer-teachers teach this class in their uniforms, and sometimes even with their guns. Besides the psychological impact of the presence of a gun in the classroom, the instruction of the only course in the curriculum with a political content by a military man inculcates the idea that political problems concern primarily the military.

Another major problem with the instruction of the course is the way officer-teachers react to criticism. Past research reports that students who challenged the officer-teachers’ views faced dire consequences, such as disciplinary measures for articulating controversial views.

An officer-teacher, for example, has stated that he expelled some students from their high school on the grounds that they did not believe in Atatürk’s Principles.

Another issue of concern is race-based discrimination. Because, Kurdish students have complained from being constantly forced to express their opinions about the PKK, the separatist Kurdish guerilla group, as well as its leader Apo. Moreover, a Kurdish student has claimed that, in a mixed class of half Turkish and half Kurdish students, all Turks passed the course, and all Kurds failed despite their good exams.

In 2003, an edited volume thoroughly analyzed the contents of all textbooks in Turkey on the single variable of human rights. The chapter in that edited volume which analyzed the National Security Knowledge textbook indicated that 12 problems were common in the textbook as well as in many of the others.

My paper subsumes these 12 problems under three categories, which correspond to the aforementioned characteristics of interwar-period nationalism. The paper then analyzes the contents of both textbooks on these three variables in a comparative fashion – that is, a comparisons between the latest textbook and the previous one, which was in use before the legal reforms between 2002 and 2004.

Militarism in the National Security Knowledge course finds expression in the textbooks in such attitudes as:

- putting national defense before everything else,

- normalizing a wide variety of militarist values, such as the glorification of death for the fatherland

- understanding war, rather than peace, as the normal state of affairs

- putting the Turkish Armed Forces in the center of social and political life,

- emphasizing that the concern of the military includes not only external but also internal threats, and finally,

- presenting the Turkish military as an omnipresent domestic institution that helps the Turkish society by providing a wide variety of public services, ranging from mobile health services to teaching the illiterate how to read and write.

The idea of a distinguished nation is no longer as strong as it was in the 1930s, when the textbooks explicitly emphasized the superiority of the Turkish race or blood. This approach has largely declined since the 1950s. But the remains of these supremacist ideas now usually find expression in essentialist statements that attribute militaristic characteristics to the Turkish nation as a whole.

It is possible to also argue at this point that most teachers subscribe to and pride themselves with these characteristics. For example, when talking to an American anthropologist, one teacher has (seriously) claimed, “We are ‘the Turks who make the whole world tremble’; we’re the best in bed and at war.”

This approach also helps normalize xenophobia. The textbooks claim that the whole world constantly conspires against Turkey due to its geopolitical importance. One notable change in the latest textbook, however, is that it has softened the tone of its language on the country’s neighbors. The textbook no longer presents their enmity as categorically. One other positive development is the omittance of the explicitly exclusive attitude toward the non-muslim segment of the society.

The textbooks also urge the students to accept Atatürk as a leader and example in all aspects of their lives, and thus helps maintain the strong cult of personality around him. The Introduction section of both textbooks explicitly emphasize that one of the two objectives of the course was to make students “embrace the principles and revolutions of Atatürk not only on the level of thought but also as a life style.”

The textbooks also make it clear that Atatürkism is “the only possible path” for the peaceful progress and development of the Turkish nation. Yet even when explaining Atatürkist Principles, the textbooks apply the logic of Argument from Authority. What the textbooks typically do is to first present a normative claim as knowledge, and then support that claim with a quote from Atatürk. Therefore the logic goes: we know that the normative claims of the Atatürk principles are true, because Atatürk has said so.

On a side note… the textbooks frequently provide manipulated knowledge or simply make false statements and present them as being true. The latest textbook even goes as far as claiming that “scientific research has revealed with archival documents that the Armenian claims [of genocide] are not true, and that, on the contrary, there [was in fact] a genocide which the Turks were subjected to.”

In all, this paper, on the one hand, raises questions about the philosophy of education in Turkey in terms of how it is at odds with democratic values in general, and on the other, depicts the consequences of the influence of the Turkish Armed Forces on education.

Although the legal reforms in Turkey constitute a major milestone in the country’s journey toward full democratization, the educational process in the country continues to socialize students along authoritarian lines. In other words, the schools militarize the human capital of Turkey, whereas the politicians try to democratize its political system.

At this point, Vagtz’s (1937) differentiation between military and civilian militarisms is very relevant indeed: “Militarism has flourished more in peacetime than in war. Because, if the members of a whole nation are to be made soldiers, they must be filled with a military spirit in time of peace.”

The interwar-period nationalism is diametrically opposed to the values commonly-shared by the European society. Then the question is, how will it be possible for the younger generations in Turkey to be a part of the European society if they’re raised with such high levels of suspicion and enmity toward the world beyond the borders of the country?

Yet despite the salience of the issue, the progress reports of the European Commission has hitherto largely ignored it.

Thanks for listening.

Justin Sullivan: (laughs) It was a strange time. We started coming back to America for the first time in 2003, which is just the beginning of the Iraq War. And everywhere there was kind of flags. And I watched it dwindle, and dwindle, and dwindle, and dwindle down to where there is no flags now.

I first came to America in 1975 as a kid. I hitchhiked around America for three four months, just having weird adventures and sleeping out, just wandering around America. And it was a strange time. It was the time after the end of Nixon, after Vietnam, and the early Carter time. And there’s a lot of music from that time, which is very kind of burned out. Everything is burned out, bleached out. It’s like autumn. I love this time of the year when everything is kind of burned out. And I remember America just felt burned out. And now it feels like, again, only much more burned out.

S.K.: That’s all you want to say about it?

Justin Sullivan: Oh, oh, as to why we’re not killing each other… You don’t have to answer that question. (smiles)

But I wrote that song called Bloodsports. You know the chorus says, “I am not at war.” And it wasn’t written about Iraq really. It was written about Bradford. It was written the day after the 7/7 bombings is London. It was impossible not to look at the other people in the street, and go, “What do they think?” You know what I mean?

Some people vote for the British National Party (BNP). It’s a fascist party in Britain. It’s not very strong, but some people vote for it. So, if you’re a second generation Pakistani kid, you probably look at all the white people and ask, “Does he vote BNP?” And there is that moment, you know, when the communities kind of [diverge]. And there was a moment in “I am not at war” to kind of quarrel in myself as much as anything else. For two or three days after 7/7, we’re always kind of going [suspicious of one another].

S.K.: You?

Justin Sullivan: Yeah, even me. Even me.

S.K.: Even you.

Justin Sullivan: Even me, even me.

S.K.: You means, “even you,” yeah.

Justin Sullivan: Even me, going past some guy on the street with a long beard, and obviously he is a very religious Muslim. And I’m thinking, “Is he?” You know, “Does he sympathize with the bombings?”

S.K.: I wouldn’t expect that from Justin Sullivan.

Justin Sullivan: Yeah? I’m just the same as anyone else… Just like he might look at me and say, “Is he a racist bastard? Does he vote for the BNP?”

S.K.: If it’s a small party, probably not. But then again, probably so…

Justin Sullivan: Yeah, who knows… And there is that moment when communities are suspicious of each other. And most people just get on with life.

[VIEW THE VIDEO]

S.K.: Well… you already answered my next question. The question was, “I know you like to go to places that you haven’t been before. How did you like Turkey?” And…

Justin Sullivan: … I’m fascinated by Turkey. I like Turkey. It’s very beautiful.

S.K.: Beautiful?

Justin Sullivan: It’s a very beautiful country.

S.K.: Do you think that Turkey’s candidacy to EU membership is important in the sense that it is a predominantly Muslim country?

Justin Sullivan: I don’t know. You’ve got your own version of Islam. It’s very Turkish…

S.K.: Meaning?

Justin Sullivan: Islam can adapt – which is why it’s a moderately successful cult. Like the biggest Islamic country in the world is Indonesia. They’ve got their own version of Islam, which is kind of…

S.K.: … but isn’t it the same for every religion?

Justin Sullivan: Yeah. And you know, such and such in Turkey… How many Turks actually quite like drinking beer? Quite a lot. It’s quite deep in the culture. And there is parts of Turkish culture which is much older than Islam. Rather like in Iran. Zoroastrianism. I don’t know what the figures are [for Turkey].

S.K.: Like 30% I would say is religious.

Justin Sullivan: That’s less than in America. What parts of the population want to be a part of the E.U.? What are the figures?

S.K.: Since 1997, Turkey changed a lot, because in the past, Muslims were against the E.U. With Erdoğan – the prime minister that you so like – things have changed. After being subjected to different sorts of discriminations by the military-imposed ideology, Muslims switched their positions. Before 1997, they wanted freedoms only for themselves. But after then, the paradigm shift made them think and say that they should come up with a more embracing, a more encompassing idea of freedom – just so everyone [including themselves] can benefit from it.

Justin Sullivan: Could it be a more embracing vision of Turkey as well?

S.K.: Yeah. Because, Kurds have supported Erdoğan, since the freedoms meant more freedoms for Kurds. More non-Muslims have supported Erdoğan. Although they account only to 1% of the population, that’s still important. And intellectuals have supported Erdoğan. That’s also a group which is very few in number, but they are highly effective, since they publish books, op-ed articles, and so on… So that constitutes a realignment in Turkish politics.

The opponents of Erdoğan also support Westernization. But they want to Westernize only in terms of their lifestyles. They don’t want to Westernize politically. They don’t want political liberalism. Their idea of the West is more like the West in the Interwar Period. Yet between the two world wars, it was a fascist Europe.

Justin Sullivan: There is traditional Islam. And then there’s the new fundamentalist Islam, which is quite different. Then there’s the Western influence. Then there’s the army… Erdoğan has played very very cleverly. He is “very” clever. It is quite interesting to watch the army be outfoxed basically. Maybe that’s why he is so popular…

S.K.: Such an interesting conversation, thank you very much…

[From that point on, we're just talking as we pack...]

S.K.: By the way, on our way to here, I asked as to what would happen if Justin, in his next visit to Turkey, sang Arm Yourselves and Run in Kurdish!

Justin Sullivan: (laughs) Interesting to find out! But I don’t think I’ll try it…

S.K.: You don’t want to risk it?

Justin Sullivan: It’s not that. There are certain times to play “punk-rocker” – like to make things happen, just to put a stick in the wasp’s nest. There are good times to do that. And as I get older, I don’t really find as much fun in putting sticks in wasps’ nests. I put a lot of sticks in wasps’ nests in my life. And sometimes I still do it. But mostly I don’t.

S.K.: After the age of 40? Same thing?

Justin Sullivan: Might be. I am 53 now, you know…

Justin Sullivan: Yeah…

S.K.: However, it’s also true that NMA songs influenced and intrigued a lot of people throughout the years, including myself. For example, I did not know the true story behind Waco before I wondered about what you were referring to in the song You Weren’t There. I then watched two documentaries on the issue, and the things I got to learn dramatically changed the way I looked at the incident. Don’t you think that this is also an important impact – because I’m sure there are a lot of other people who have been intrigued by similar songs, and are touched by what they found out in the afterwards?

Justin Sullivan: What can I say? (laughs) Maybe it’s true… I don’t sit down and write a song, going “Oh, this is really gonna change the way people feel about the world.” I don’t think that.

S.K.: That not the inclination. That’s not why you write the songs. But there’s such an effect…

Justin Sullivan: (dismissively) Okay, good…

S.K.: To you, that’s like a secondary effect then.

Justin Sullivan: (short pause) I guess…

S.K.: But that’s not what makes you write songs, because you just want to express as an artist, rather than trying to change the world.

Justin Sullivan: I hate making records, but I like writings songs, and I like playing songs live. I think music’s made of moments. When the guitarist does that, at the same time the drummer does that, and the singer sings those words, and your whole body goes, “Yes!” [But] Why? I mean, it’s weird, isn’t it? It’s abstract.
I had a weird thing the other night in San Francisco. We started [the gig], and I wasn’t really in the mood. I have to say I was tired, I was very unfocused, and the first song was a bit of a mess, to be honest. And when we go half way through the second song, one of those moments happened. I don’t know why, at a certain moment that we all played, just the chord changed, and there was that, and Michael did that, and it was one of those moments which was like perfect. Perfect! Perfect! Like the heaven opens, and some beam from God [descends] like that. And then I was there. And then suddenly I was in the gig. And the gig was a good gig after that. But I think music is made of moments.

When you’re growing up, [for example,] they tell you that the world is quite like this. But you find out quite quickly it’s not… So all through your life, you’re going like, “What is the truth?”, “What is the world made of?”, “What is life all about?”

I don’t spend everyday thinking about it, but [I do] every now and again. And then you hear a piece of music. And there is a moment in the music where you go, “That! That’s what it’s all about!” And it’s completely abstract. You can’t explain why. Wonderful! Magic!

[VIEW THE VIDEO]

S.K.: What you just said made me remember a passage I read in one of Ayn Rand’s books. It was saying that we don’t know anything about the psycho-epistemology of music – meaning that we don’t know what it is in sounds that makes us feel different things that we didn’t know were present inside of us.

Justin Sullivan: Sure.

S.K.: Secondly, you said, “I don’t write all the time.” But think about us. For example, this is the first time you’re talking to me, this is the first time you’re seeing me. But I watched lots of videos of you. From Impurity on, I have been listening to your songs, and we [as human beings] know phenomena with the parts of them that we come to contact with. So that’s the part of Justin Sullivan that I came to contact with, and that’s my idea of Justin Sullivan. So, it’s natural for us to think that you’re always like this.

Justin Sullivan: Yes, of course.

“[Obama is] an intellectual. That’s really weird for Americans…”

S.K.: In a U.S. gig a couple of years ago, before you started playing You Weren’t There, you told the audience about your experience of watching Fox News for the first time. Did you get to watch any more of Fox News while here in America this time around? If so, any progress on their part?

Justin Sullivan: (laughs) Fascinating! I think it’s amazing that America, given the presence of Fox News, short jokes, and all these things, voted in the last election voted for a f**king intellectual. The fact that he is black or half-African is not a big deal. It’s nothing. The point is that he’s an intellectual. That’s really weird for Americans… There is this huge anti-intellectualism in America.

S.K.: But it wasn’t always like that in the United States.

Justin Sullivan: I don’t know…

S.K.: You have James Madison on the other hand?

Justin Sullivan: Yeah. Long time ago, though… Since the Second World War, it’s pretty much not a huge tally of intellectuals out there… Not really… He’s a f**king university professor! This is a man who thinks a lot, and he is obviously very intelligent than all the rest of it.

S.K.: (laughs) That’s why I told you [before the interview] that I would drive this bus for free – to have this conversation going on for hours… It’s incredible!

Okay… [Next...] we occasionally hear of you doing things like handing out anti-war leaflets at Bradford city square or picketing with striking miners. Is that true?

Justin Sullivan: Yeah… I do that every now and again… I have to keep my hand in.

S.K.: To what extent do you feel a need to and actually do take your political views out on the street?

Justin Sullivan: I like to do it every now and again. [But] it’s not because I think that my presence is gonna make any f**king difference at all. It’s for the sake of my own soul.

S.K.: Like it would be a sin of omission?

Justin Sullivan: Yeah… [But] I don’t do it very often. I just do it sometimes – in a kind of random way. There is a million causes in the world. It’s a little bit like one of these beggars on the street. I don’t give to every beggar. I don’t give to no beggars. I occasionally give to a beggar – for no apparent reason. It’s random. Everything’s random. Nature’s completely random.

I used to be a busker… I used to play guitar on the street. When people come towards you, you never knew who would give you money. Some people did, and some people didn’t. Random.

I used to hitchhike. The car comes towards you. You look at the driver. Man-woman, black-white, old-young, rich-poor… You never know who will stop. Some people stop, and some people don’t. It’s really random.

Serdar Kaya: Prime minister?

Justin Sullivan: [Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan is an interesting guy.

S.K.: I can’t say I hate him.

Justin Sullivan: I can see why you wouldn’t. He’s a very interesting guy. At one night, I was up in the mountains in the northeast, near the border with Georgia and Armenia. We were sitting there watching television one night together with this guy, and I was talking about Erdoğan. We didn’t really speak English, and I didn’t speak Turkish, so I said [turns his thumb up and down], “Good man? Bad man? Good? Good?” And he went [turns his thumb up], “Very good! Very good!” Then the call to prayer went out across the village. It was the night time prayer, and I said, “Are you going?” And he went pffff….

S.K.: But he was still supporting Erdoğan…

Justin Sullivan: Exactly. He had no interest in religion, but he thought that Erdoğan was a good guy. Interesting… Erdoğan is kind of a street fighter, ain’t he?

S.K.: This is going really good, so I’m afraid we’re not going to be able to go through all of my questions. Because, I already have two [new] questions at this point: (1) What makes you interested in Erdoğan?, and (2) What makes you want to go to northeast Turkey? That’s very rare. You didn’t have any gigs there, right?

Justin Sullivan: I’ll tell you why. We had a gig in Istanbul, and then I had no special reason to go home. An the rest of the band went home. And you know the band Mor ve Ötesi? We’re friends with them. We were playing in an old place near Izmir, a seaside resort. So I went down there, and spent two days on the beach with them. It was lovely. But then I thought, “Well, I’m gonna see some Turkey!” But it was July. So all the sea is gonna be full of people on holiday, and the middle of Turkey, which is really interesting, is too f**king hot! And I had a guide book, and it said “northeast mountains!” Nobody goes there; cool in the summer; nobody speaks English… So that’s perfect for me!

S.K.: Did you go on your own?

Justin Sullivan: Yeah…

S.K.: Whoa!

Justin Sullivan: But it was interesting.

S.K.: I know you’re an interesting person. That’s why I wanted to interview you, but this is…

Justin Sullivan: Have you ever been to a place called Ani?

S.K.: Ani?

Justin Sullivan: Have you heard about Ani?

S.K.: No.

Justin Sullivan: The most amazing place I’ve ever been. Anywhere in the world, really, almost…

S.K.: In what city is it at?

Justin Sullivan: Ani is very near Kars.

S.K.: Oh my… I’ve never been to Kars.

Justin Sullivan: Okay, so… At the east of Kars, very near the Armenian border. And this was closed for a long time because of that thing between Armenia and Turkey. But there was an old city called Ani, which was the capital of Armenia [probably] in seventh, eighth, ninth century? And they built this amazing city. And then Genghis Khan smashed it on his way through. And then they had some more earthquakes. And then, most importantly, the trade routes changed. So this city became abandoned in 12th, 13th century. And there it is… Most of it is just rocks – rubble. But some of it, it’s kind of a big cathedral, and some are huge buildings from the eighth and ninth century. You can see Mount Ararat [from Ani] in a distance. It’s kind of on the grassy plains. And it sort of sits there, and nobody knows… I was there in July. I was there for seven hours, just looking… Just amazing… In seven hours, I saw ten Turkish family tourists. No Western tourists or nothing else… No one knows it’s there… [But] they will…

S.K.: Whoa! I’m amazed.

Justin Sullivan: You must really go there, it’s really interesting.

S.K.: I will. [...and I did, two weeks later!]

“Fascist Governments, in the End, Always Fail”

S.K.: In your songs, you talk a great deal about issues such as war, immigration, the environment, and justice or injustice. There are lots of references to natural and man-made phenomena as well – as in the city, the lights, or the hills. And we just talked about these… What makes you eventually come around and tell stories about these topics?

Justin Sullivan: It’s what I do…

S.K.: It’s just the way you are?

Justin Sullivan: It’s just what I do… The world’s interesting…

S.K.: And more specifically, do you think your strong sense of justice or injustice is influenced by your religious upbringing?

Justin Sullivan: No, I think it’s influenced by growing up in the sixties in a kind of liberal family. The sixties was an amazing time. I was a kid in the sixties. I wasn’t part of the hippie. I was too young. But my older brothers and sisters were kind of like that. But there is more the atmosphere of the time was very kind of “We’re gonna make the world better!” It’s the kind of natural phenomenon to have growth, and decadence, and then war; and then rebirth, decadence, war… We’re well into the decadence phase now. But the sixties was the rebirth after the Second World War. I picked up this atmosphere as a child. The world was gonna get better… But then it changed. In the seventies and eighties, and particularly in the eighties, that was over. It’s very over now – [that is] the sense of hope in the future… I think it must be terrible to be eighteen now.

S.K.: But, when you look at people, there are certain times when people are more inclined to do something or feel something about these issues, but then it fades away like in the cycle you talked about. But it didn’t fade away for you.

Justin Sullivan: Oh, I don’t know… I don’t know… I think I’m not the same. People think of me this way, because I wrote some songs about justice when I was young. I’m perhaps not the same. I’m not this great political warrior that sometimes people think I am.

S.K.: I heard you say things like, after the age of 40, you felt different.

Justin Sullivan: Yeah… I see everything in the world now according to nature’s laws. I have a religious upbringing. But now I’m basically a pagan.

S.K.: Like nature and God are the same thing…

Justin Sullivan: Nature and God are the same thing. Rule #1 of nature is constant change. Anything that is not changing is dead – which is why, in a strange way, capitalism is a kind of natural phenomenon. Because, it works according to laws of summer and winters. But, you know we had a big bubble, and it burst. That’s very natural. What’s not natural is the politicians and the financial people that were telling us three or four years ago that this will go on forever. After summer you can have more summer, and then you can have summer, and then you can have summer… And that now we’ve abolished winter, we’ve changed rules… There’s not gonna be a winter, there’s just gonna be summer. That was the unnatural part.

S.K.: The way you put it makes me think of John Maynard Keynes. Like you change the way business cycle works, and try to always make it summer.

Justin Sullivan: Yeah. It’s nonsense… It’s nonsense… The business cycle is like every other f**king cycle. It has summers and winters. The interesting thing about the current crash is that ordinary people are not out on the streets screaming, shouting. Ordinary people go, “Oh, we had a good summer, and now here comes winter…”

S.K.: But what do you expect? They’re not the ones who control the economy.

Justin Sullivan: That’s true. But nobody controls the economy…

S.K.: But maybe some people have more impact on the economy than the others.

Justin Sullivan: It’s debatable whether anybody controls the economy. Now there are some greedy f**kers who know how to play the economy. OK, that’s always true. Perhaps, the most interesting thing about the crash is that if you could’ve said to me a year ago that we’ll be in the situation we are in now. This is the most unlikely thing to me – that we would’ve given them all the money they wanted. The foxes killed all the chickens, and now you just give them more chickens…

S.K.: Because they’re too big to fail?

Justin Sullivan: But they’re not too big to fail… It just means that the next crash will be bigger.

S.K.: That’s another way to put it, and yes, it’s a legitimate perspective…

Justin Sullivan: You know I was a socialist when I was a kid. I was a communist, very left wing. The problem with socialism was not that it didn’t deliver economically. It didn’t, but that’s not the point. The problem with it is that it tried to freeze a moment. “This is the way the society is, and it will remain like this…” Nothing is more unnatural – which is why fascist governments, in the end, always fail; which is why democracy “sort of” works. Or there is a series of revolutions; that’s very natural too… As for the idea that you can create a perfect society and maintain it in the same rigid way; it’s very unnatural…

S.K.: It’s not gonna be as perfect as we thought it was after the passage of time is involved…

Justin Sullivan: Exactly. That’s right.

S.K.: If I may insert a question here [in regard to the song "Today is a Good Day"], how did it occur to you? Like were you watching the news, and saw the two big financial companies go down, … and bam! Today is a Good Day! Is that how it happened?

Justin Sullivan: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

S.K.: And you just wrote that song?

Justin Sullivan: Yeah.

S.K.: Whoa!… I thought you were gonna say something like, “Not exactly, but close…” Was it exactly like that?

Justin Sullivan: I write words all the time. The way we write is that we have a cupboard called “musical ideas.” And into that cupboard goes guitar riffs, drum beats, bits of bass line, bits of jamming, pool sequence, melodies… Chunk in the cupboard… Bits… They’re just bits, they’re not songs.

And in the other cupboard goes all the things I write all the time. And then, we have to stop, because I never write on the road… Because, we’re always tired… And writing songs requires even more focus than gigs. In order to write songs, you have to be really focused. So then we stop, we pull out all the musical ideas; and all the lyrical ideas, I just say, ‘That goes…, oh… there! That’s a good line, I’ll have that. And the chorus are there, that’s great. That works with that.” You just make it work… That’s the process of making an album. We wrote the whole of Today is a Good Day in three weeks – around last October. Except for Arm Yourselves and Run, which belongs in the time that it talks about, the early nineties in Yugoslavia, I wrote it then but never finished it. So I went back, and finished it for this album. Ocean Rising, obviously, is from my solo album; and the last song, North Star, which is written about our manager who died. You know the story… So everything else is written in October.

I interviewed Justin Sullivan of New Model Army right before the band’s Vancouver show at The Rickshaw on October 8th, 2009. The interview took place inside the band’s tour bus, since the vehicle seemed to be the only quiet place around. Within the 45-minute interview, Sullivan talked about a wide range of issues, including but not limited to (1) the way the band writes music, (2) the relations between the West and the Muslims in the post-9/11 world, (3) the Ani Ruins in Kars, (4) the Turkish political culture, and (5) Turkey in general. Furthermore, he once again amazed me with his humility – visible not only in his words but also in his manners in general.

Serdar Kaya: Let’s get started… You once said in an interview, June 18th, 2001…

Justin Sullivan: … oh, never quote me, I always forget, but go on, what did I say?

S.K.: Let me try… “If you’re prepared to follow a band who do not belong to any musical category, and are largely ignored by the media, then you already have an independent mind.” Do you deny that?

Justin Sullivan: No, I probably said something like that.

S.K.: OK. This is actually quite flattering for us fans, but how would you compare the American and the European audiences in that sense? Because, it is very common to direct negative comments to the American audience in that regard. I remember Scott Ian of Anthrax being really pissed off on that very same issue some years ago. He was talking about how Europeans would buy an album just because its cover looked cool, meaning they are more likely to want to explore.

Justin Sullivan: I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t think there’s a huge difference between people. There’s something in American culture which is a bit homogenized. People always ask what I think our audience is [like]. And I talk to other singers, and they always talk about “the audience” – singular. And I never really think of it like that. I think that it doesn’t really matter if there’s 50 people in a club or 100.000 people. To me, they are all individuals, and they have all got different reasons for wanting be there, and we’ve got different needs from the music, and they’ve all got different things they like about the music, and they’ve all got very different lives. I never generalize about audiences.

I know that, to some people, the words that I have written over the years are kind of like something they follow really closely. I also know there’s people in parts of the world, where people don’t speak English, they love the band, they don’t understand a word I’m singing. They love the band. They love the feeling and the music. And they don’t understand a word. That’s fine by me too…

S.K.: I would accept that for myself. Because, when I’m in a concert, I don’t usually react to the music the way people around me do. I just don’t like to jump and do stuff like that. I just pay attention to the music, and try to feel it inside of me.

Justin Sullivan: I judge what’s going on in a gig not by how much people clap, or how much noise they make, how much they dance, it’s just the look in the eye. You know, people have dead eyes or alive eyes. If we play a gig, and at the end, half the people still have dead eyes, then we failed. To me that’s a failure.

S.K.: I don’t think that happens a lot to New Model Army.

Justin Sullivan: Not often.

“There is a Process You Go Through When You Lose an Empire”

S.K.: I heard you more than once talking about how storytelling is one of the oldest human activities. But communication is a two-way process, and communicating through music makes it all the more complicated. Because, the story you are trying to tell or the feeling you’re trying to convey in a song can very well be perceived in different ways by the people who listen to it. For example, the song ‘Higher Wall’ is probably about immigration, but especially its concluding sentences always remind me of the nationalist/secularist official ideology of Turkey, and how it tries to constrain the behavior of the country’s citizens. Do you think that happens a lot? Do people receive your messages in their own subjective ways – even being aware of the fact that they are bending the original meaning?

Justin Sullivan: Yeah, it’s kind of why I said in the beginning that everybody’s view is subjective. I mean “everybody.” And when I write something, as soon as it’s released it’s public property, and people can take from it whatever they like. That’s the nature of all art. As soon as it’s out there, it’s public property. People can take from it, read into it, hear it, take the story whatever way they like…

S.K.: Did you experience a lot of people talking to you about NMA songs only to make you realize that they put totally different meanings to the songs than what you had in mind when writing them?

Justin Sullivan: Yeah, possibly. But that’s kind of all right for me, I don’t really…

S.K.: … care what people make of it?

Justin Sullivan: I don’t assume the right to control what people make of it. Do I care what they make of it? Well, I suppose so, but… It’s interesting what you said about Turkey though… I suppose that every country is always a result of its own history, and Turkey is still very conscious of 1918-1920. Because, it’s not very long ago. But gradually, that will fade, and the Turkish people will become more confident in the idea of Turkey. Think of what happened in 1918-1920… All these foreign powers are waiting to take bits of Turkey. So there is this part of Turkish national identity which is basically paranoid, and I think this will lessen as the years go by…

S.K.: It is…

Justin Sullivan: It is lessening?

S.K.: Yes.

Justin Sullivan: And the Turks are more confident in Turkey?

S.K.: I wouldn’t say “Turks.” I wouldn’t generalize. But a portion of the population is raising different kinds of questions.

Justin Sullivan: Yeah, I’ve seen a complete change in the 30 years we’ve been playing in Germany. The young people we were playing to in the 1980s would adopt British culture, or Irish folk culture, or South American folk culture; but anything except German folk culture. Because, they were terrified of German folk culture – since the German folk culture had been co-opted by Hitler, and the Nazi, the fascist thing. But now, we’re far enough away from the Second World War, for instance; far enough away from Hitler. We’re two three generations away from both. Young people in Germany are no longer scared about German culture – which is a good thing. If you have a kind of paranoia built into your history and stuff, this eventually subsides.

S.K.: I subscribe to that view actually, the historical process is a primary determinant.

Justin Sullivan: Yes, it is a historical process. Interestingly, Turkey lost an empire, and there is a process you go through when you lose an empire. Now Britain is kind of the same thing. It’s going through that process. And America, it’s just gonna start, shortly…

S.K.: I was just about to say that!

Justin Sullivan: It’s a natural process. You know everybody had an empire at one point. F**king Lithuania had an empire, you know. Armenia had an empire. Everybody has had empires; and they lose them; and then they go though a process of reevaluating.

S.K.: In Turkey, the nationalist idea is to gain it back, but let’s not go there, because it’s gonna take a lot of time…

“Turkey is Endlessly Fascinating to me…”

Justin Sullivan: Turkey is endlessly fascinating to me…

S.K.: Fascinating?

Justin Sullivan: Fascinating country!

S.K.: In what way?

Justin Sullivan: One, history; and two, geography… There you are sitting “there”… So Turks are forever going, “Are we in Europe? Are we in Middle East? Are we in Europe? Are we in Middle East? Are we in Europe? Are we…,” and they write endless books about it. Of course, the truth is, you’re both! And it’s a land of contradictions, [but] every land is a land of contradictions.

S.K.: I really like the way you approach the politics of the country, but people just don’t want to say what you say, as in we’re both. Maybe so, in a lot of ways…

Justin Sullivan: Yeah, both…

S.K.: But when the West says, “You’re not Western,” even those who do not really feel Western feel offended.

Justin Sullivan: Yeah, you’re too quick to take offense, don’t worry about it. When I was in Turkey last year, I spent a bit of time in Istanbul. I was with lots of rock ‘n roll, liberal, Westernized people. But I wanted to meet some other people. I have a friend in my home city Bradford. She is very religious. She is very Muslim. She had said, “Oh you must meet my friend, this guy in Istanbul.” I met him for dinner. We had a very interesting dinner. He said, “Of course, Istanbul is a European city, and of course, Europe has no problem with Istanbul being in Europe. But Europe does not want to border with Syria.” It’s an interesting way of looking at it.

Again… This is not a new phenomenon. It goes all the way back to 1920s, when the One-Party Rule brought about a Cultural Revolution, and socialized the public along the lines of the ideology of the revolution. Yet not the whole population was successfully socialized, and this created a dichotomy between the two groups of people.
Then, at this point, the question is: “What was it in the ideology of the revolution that created this dichotomy?” Well, the ruling cadre firmly believed that religion was antithetical to progress – and even to dignity – and it therefore approached the idea of Westernization as “a process through which Islamic codes and manners should be replaced by European ones.” With that idea, the cadre forced Westernization on the general public, and sartorial revolutions were a salient part of the process.
Since the new sociocultural elements were a reaction to the existing ones, the appearance of Western and Islamic sociocultural elements has always been central to Turkish politics. The quote here [on the slide] may give an idea. It is from a prominent laicist columnist in Turkey. It reads: “Our republic is different from any other republic on the face of the earth, because it is more a lifestyle than a form of government” (Bekir Coşkun, 29 October 2008), and hence my Research Question which is concerned with the reasons behind the long-lasting impacts… of the sociocultural elements on this group conflict.
Most of the answers scholars have so far given to similar questions can be clustered in two groups. The first is the center-periphery approach, first laid out by Lipset and Rokkan (1967), and then applied to Turkish Politics by Şerif Mardin (1973). This line of approach places the laicists in the center, and explains their relationship with the periphery for the most part with power concentration and sociopolitical elements, whereas the second perspective, the modernizationist one, focuses either on economic development or on how Islamic values are antithetical to Western ones.
This paper, however, employs a social constructivist ontology that allows to trace and analyze how these two groups under review have “changed while in interaction” – meaning how the way they interacted with one another determined the way they identified and categorized themselves and others. Since this process involves cognitive, and in particular out-group biases, this paper also draws from social identity and social categorization theories from social psychology literature. Especially social categorization theory helps here with how the experiences of group members during interaction have shaped the evolution of their identities.
Put differently, this paper analyzes how shared experiences keep forming and then reforming identities in an ongoing process. And naturally it is the “traumatic” experiences that have the utmost impact in this process – for they deeply influence people on each side – albeit in different ways and to different extents – and for they remain fresh in the collective memory.
Therefore, with that perspective, this paper analyzes five traumatic experiences in the recent history of the Turkish Republic that correspond to five major identity-constitutive steps. I of course will not elaborate each and every one of these steps. But I will give just one example to “change while in interaction” – in order to give a better idea about how I approach the concept.
During the February 28 Process, mentioned here [on the slide] in Step 4, the coalition led by the conservative-Muslim-party was ousted by a “military-inflicted” technical move, which came to be known as “the postmodern coup” that involved the close authoritative influence of the military on a wide number of issues ranging from controlling the media to ensuring the compliance of citizens with the legally-enforced dress codes. Various restrictions such as the reinitiation of the ban on the headscarf in the public sphere are all products of the same process.
This process has dramatically affected the lives of conservative Muslims as well as the course of Turkish politics… First and foremost, conservative Muslims did not respond harshly to the restrictive measures enforced by the new military-led government. Instead, in light of the ongoing unpleasant experiences, they started to review their positions on a number of issues, including (1) the relationship between politics and religion, and (2) coexistence with non-practicing Muslims and non-Muslims.
At the end of this “voluntary and spontaneous” process, many conservative Muslims came to identify themselves as (1) liberals (meaning pro-liberty, as the term is used idiosyncratically in Turkey), or (2) conservative democrats, or (3) Muslim democrats (influenced by the “Christian” Democrats in Germany).
Despite the variation in names, they all refer to the same political ideology, which involves (1) policies that are relatively much more inclusive than the Islamic or non-Islamic precedents in Turkey, (2) an inclination to support Turkey’s E.U. membership – partly out of an effort to restrict the influence of the military in politics, and (3) a free market economy coupled with extensive social programs to support the poor.
Sounds pretty progressive, don’t you think? But this is regarded as a right-wing political ideology in Turkey…
But what is even more interesting is the laicist response to the reconstruction of the conservative Muslim identity and ideology. Because after these developments laicists have further embraced ultranationalism, which involves (1) a strong opposition to Turkey’s membership to the E.U., (2) an implicit or explicit support of military influence in politics, and (3) the glorification of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk as an eternal political leader. And this is considered a left-wing political ideology…
In other words, the interaction between the two groups resulted in such a way that the groups switched sides in being pro- and anti-Western! And this leads to my conclusion, which, in light of this cognitive and historical analysis, holds that the interactions between laicists and conservative Muslims have resulted in a counterproductive process, along which, particular “contextual and constitutive forces” have shaped the way members of each group identify and categorize themselves and others.
However, the orientalist and the modernizationist approaches, which move from the assumption that Islamic values are antithetical to Western ones, disregard from the beginning the possibility of change through constitutive processes.
At this point, the argument about irreconcilable values becomes especially irrelevant. Because, in the Turkish case, first, the reformist and the traditionalist factions of the WP have demonstrated not only that there is not just one set of values to talk about but also that the existing sets of values within the same tradition may be at odds with each other; and secondly, the laicist state institutions, and in particular the military and the judiciary, still seek the obedience of elected governments, if not of the public as a whole.
In the final slide, I have a listed the conclusions of the paper. I have not supported each and every one of them in this presentation, but I still wanted to include them in order to give you a more inclusive idea about the scope of the paper.
First, Islamic Resurgence is more complex than is generally believed – since it also has “numerous connections to the non-religious dimensions of the society.”
I have talked quite a bit about the second one, which is about how the two identities have changed while in interaction.
The third conclusion is that authoritarian qualities are not peculiar to conservative ideologies. Because, as I just said, the secularist military and the judiciary in Turkey still seek the obedience of elected governments, if not the public as a whole.
And number four: Turkey has become more of a “torn country” in the process. This is conceptualized by Samuel Huntington. Although the paper rejects the idea of irreconcilable values, the “torn country” concept still applies. In fact, it is stated in the paper that Turkey is more torn right now than ever.
Number five: All that I talked about is a consequence of a harsh political socialization process.
Finally, in italics, is my answer to the research question. It basically says that, when we belong in groups, we employ out-group biases when perceiving the Other. This causes an exaggerated perception of reality. In the laicist case, this process translates into interpreting all demands of religious practice and expression as fundamentalism, if not concessions to a theocracy in the making.
This is it. Thanks for listening.

As the Turkish people move further away from the status quo, the pro-Kemalist minority sinks deeper into the state of fear that they and their forefathers have lived in since 1922. Therefore, whenever an elected non-Kemalist party decides to act like the legitimate power it is and intends to introduce some of the measures that the Turkish people have voted for, Kemalists tend to react once again in desperation, and call the Turkish Armed Forces ‘to duty,’ which is to safeguard the Kemalist principles – needless to say, at the expense of democracy.
Despite the militarist authoritarianism they involve, Kemalist concerns are not unfounded. Because, it is true that, on a wide variety of policy issues, large segments of the Turkish society position themselves in a manner which is irreconcilable with the state ideology. However, these people have for so long been questioning why their opinions are not as valid as the next man’s. At that point, Kemalists argue that the educational level of the Turkish people is very low, and that the ‘public’ would endanger the fundamental values of the Republic if given the right to choose for themselves. “For the time being,” Kemalists argue, “Turkey’s unique conditions make it impossible for the regime to allow a free market of ideas.” The only cure to the disease that Kemalists keep talking about is therefore to keep waiting until the majority of the Turkish people are educated enough to understand how Kemalism is best for them.
The Kemalist argument is invalid for two reasons.
First, many of the opponents of the Turkish official ideology are, in fact, respected journalists, intellectuals and academicians, whom certain ultranationalist Kemalist groups frequently label as traitors. It is not uncommon for such intellectuals to also be subject to threats of violence, or to face charges and convictions. Very recently, Atilla Yayla, a political science professor at Gazi University at Ankara, and one of the most prominent proponents of freedom of thought and expression in Turkey, was temporarily dismissed from his academic post right after certain newspapers proclaimed him a traitor to the country on the grounds that he referred to Turkey’s ‘Great Leader Kemal Ataturk’ as ‘this man.’ Acting upon the controversy, the Public Prosecutor pressed charges on Yayla, and he was eventually convicted for pointing out in his speech that the one-party era (1925-1945) of the Turkish Republic was less progressive than the period that followed. Yayla now teaches at a university in the United Kingdom – sharing a similar fate to that of the Nobel-laureate novelist Orhan Pamuk, who also opted for a self-imposed exile, and left Turkey to teach comparative literature at Columbia University.
Secondly, the Turkish official ideology is not composed of complex social, cultural, political or economic doctrines at all. In other words, a high level of education is not necessary to understand its implications. Kemalism finds expression in six principles formulated by the Party-State during the late 1920s and the early 1930s. These principles correspond to either the imposition of certain Western cultural standards, such as the Western dress code, or to typical examples of collectivism and social solidarity that were very popular in the (then) corporatist Europe.
In all, the real question Turkey faces today is not whether the Turkish people will one day be educated enough to understand and conform to the principles of Kemalism. The real question is, instead, what the Kemalists will do about those who refuse to accept Kemalism as a guide for their social, cultural and political lives. To put it in another way; when faced with an even more conscious majority of opponents in the future, will hard-line Kemalists be ready to accept the fact that their ideology is disputable like any other, and that not every one has to agree with it – or will they opt for another coup to overthrow their political opponents and to intimidate the Turkish people?
This is a question of democracy and militarist authoritarianism. In more simple terms, this is a question of what they will do to us when the time comes. Because, it will be up to the Kemalists to decide which one it is going to be – since they are the ones in possession of brute power. And given their track record, there is not much room even for wishful thinking.

After the coup of 1980, Turkey was governed by a military administration for three years, during which the junta restructured the country’s political system. The most important outcome of this process was probably the Constitution of 1982, the most militaristic fundamental document of law in the history of the Turkish Republic. The new constitution was enacted by a popular plebiscite, which the junta conducted with quasi-transparent envelopes.

The next and final phase of the process was the restoration of ‘democracy,’ which, according to the junta, was a synonym of ‘elections.’

General Elections of 1983

The military administration led by general Kenan Evren designed a two-party political system, where two military-friendly parties would superficially represent the country’s left- and right-wing ideologies. The party on the right, Nationalist Democracy Party (MDP), was in the leadership of the retired general Turgut Sunalp, and the party on the left, the Populist Party (HP), was led by Necdet Calp, a bureaucrat.

Stealing the elections was not going to be a big deal, since the pre-coup era political parties were to remain banned throughout the pseudo-democratic process (as well as in the years to come), and new applications were to be rejected. The military, however, made one exception for Turgut Özal, the US-educated former deputy prime minister who also served in the military administration as a civilian state minister responsible of the economy.

Özal was fully aware of the intentions of the junta, as well as the reason why they allowed him to form a party. He later on said he knew all along that the soldiers believed he wouldn’t be able to get even a paltry 10% of the vote. His Motherland Party (ANAP) was simply the junta’s proof of democracy, or a ‘garnish on the menu,’ as Özal put it.

As the months passed by, and the election date drew closer, however, the military leaders realized that they made a big mistake. Because, the general public increasingly sided with the ‘civilian’ Özal, and not with the arrogant Sunalp, who continuously and unintentionally ridiculed himself as he talked to the press. In a last effort to impact the outcome, coup leader Evren addressed the public two days before the election, and strongly implied that they should vote for Sunalp, and not for Özal. But in the end, to everyone’s surprise, Özal scored a major victory by winning 45% of all votes. Sunalp came as the third with only 23%.

The people had refused to do as the coup leader told them.

How the Turkish History Repeated Itself in 2007

Shortly after coming to power in 2002, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) introduced somewhat revolutionary reforms “ranging from improved civil liberties and human rights to enhanced civilian control of the military,” as the European Commission stated in its 2004 Regular Report on Turkey. The reforms altogether constituted a major deviation from the country’s Kemalist political tradition. The ban on the Kurdish language was lifted; certain restrictions on the right of non-violent expression of opinion were abolished; military representatives in the Board of High Education (which oversees the universities) and the Superior Board of Radio and Television (which oversees the mass audiovisual media) were removed; the principle of the primacy of international human rights conventions over domestic law was adopted; the authority of military courts were restricted so as not to try civilians for offences related to criticizing the military; and the National Security Council was brought under stronger civilian control.

The legal reforms were brought about in an effort to adapt the Turkish political system to that of the EU. Reducing the military influence and control, and thus protecting civil liberties was therefore the paramount issue all along.

Once deprived of some of the political powers it long enjoyed, the military obviously had every reason to try and reverse the process. Unwilling to remain in the barracks, the military “continue[d] to exercise influence through a series of informal channels” despite the newly-enacted legal restrictions, the European Commission’s 2004 Regular Report on Turkey also acknowledged. Moreover, the retired army members established a number of non-governmental organizations, started registering thousands of people, and, in some cases, organized ceremonies where they pledged to kill traitors. This neo-nationalist (ulusalcı) network also engaged in grassroots efforts in order to influence the public opinion against the EU and the AKP.

The implicit efforts of the military and the explicit efforts of the neo-nationalists reflected on the political arena throughout the first half of 2007.

March 2007: An internal memorandum of the military that indexed Turkish journalists as either pro- or anti-military leaked to the press. Three weeks later, a 2000-page alleged memoir of the retired naval forces commander that revealed detailed coup plans of some generals also leaked to the press.

April 2007: Hundreds of thousands of people gathered in Ankara in a public demonstration organized by the pro-military neo-nationalist networks to protest the AKP and the prospective presidential candidacy of an AKP member (April 14th). Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced the presidential candidacy of Abdullah Gül, the country’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and former Prime Minister (April 24th). The Turkish Armed Forces issued an ultimatum on its official web site, harshly criticizing the AKP, also implying the threat of an actual coup (April 27th). The neo-nationalist network organized the second leg of its anti-AKP demonstration in İstanbul (April 29th).
May 2007: Introducing an unprecedented requirement, the Constitutional Court declared the first round of presidential elections unconstitutional, creating a strong impression that it made an arbitrary decision (May 1st). The Prime Minister announced early general elections (May 2nd). The neo-nationalist network organized a third demonstration, this time in the city of İzmir (May 13th).

June 2007: Evidence linked some of the neo-nationalist groups to recent high-profile murders and attempted bombings.

As of July 2007, it was highly visible that Turkey once again entered a pre-election calm where the state/military indicated the general public to vote against a certain political party. The demonstrations, which, according to the anti-AKP groups, attracted two to three million people in each of the three major cities strengthened the view that there would be a visible increase in the votes for the Republican People’s Party (CHP), which represented the state’s official ideology.

It did not happen.

46% of the popular vote went to the AKP, indicating a sharp increase from 34% in 2002.

The people, once again, disagreed with the generals.

The Ungrateful Nation

The dichotomy between the state and the people has always been a major phenomenon in the republican-era Turkish politics. It is not a rare case for the members of the so-called republican elite to accuse the general public with illiteracy, bigotry or shortsightedness. İsmet İnönü, the second president of Turkey, is reported to have reacted to the humiliating loss he suffered in the general elections by saying, ‘Ungrateful Nation!’ – (nankör millet). This was in 1950, the year which the Turkish people finally had the chance to bring about the electoral downfall of the state-party. The die-hard republican elite still call it ‘the counter-revolution.’
After 57 years, the ‘elite reaction’ to the will of the people remains pretty much the same. After the general elections of 2007, Onur Öymen, the deputy head of the Republican People’s Party, claimed that the election results were ‘irrational.’ Erdal Atabek, a columnist in the Kemalist Cumhuriyet Daily asked, ‘What percent of the voters are really able to use their minds?’ Finally, Özgür Çakmak, who unsuccessfully ran for MP within the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) ranks said, ‘I have travelled the whole world, but never came across such a characterless people.’

Despite all the arrogance, sensible voices are getting increasingly more common in Turkey. Professor Murat Belge, who has published a large volume of articles about the influence of the state-inflicted militarism on the Turkish people, wrote in the left-wing Radikal Daily: ‘Whenever it had the chance to make a ‘choice,’ this society always made the right one: In 1950, in 1973, in 1983, and now.’ But, more importantly, he also quoted Abraham Lincoln: ‘You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.’

The Turkish Parliament adopted eight legislative packages between February 2002 and July 2004, introducing somewhat revolutionary changes to the country’s political system. As the European Commission’s 2004 progress report on Turkey stated, these changes ranged from “improved civil liberties and human rights to enhanced civilian control of the military.” The changes were so wide in scope that the European Commission, in response, recommended the EU to start accession negotiations with Turkey.

Preceded by a number of other positive developments, this long-awaited decision of the European Commission was warmly welcomed in Turkey. The majority of the Turkish people came to believe that things were finally getting on track in the country. The subsequent events, however, proved otherwise.

Despite bringing about Turkey’s most comprehensive democratization reform in its history, the conservative (yet progressive) Justice and Development Party (JDP) was subjected to heavy criticism by the state institutions due to the presidential candidacy of Abdullah Gül, the country’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, and former Prime Minister. Although an accomplished diplomat known for his moderate views, Gül became a persona non grata since his wife wore the Muslim headscarf, which, according to the Kemalist elite, is a symbol of political Islam and thus incompatible with the country’s secularist character.

The first reaction to Gül’s candidacy came from the Turkish military in the form of a harsh warning, which implied a threat of intervention. After a short while, Kemalist circles organized new legs of huge demonstrations to protest a prospective JDP-elected president. These demonstrations were, from one viewpoint, a reflection of widespread concerns about secularism, which is the foremost defining characteristic of the Turkish regime. But from another, they were examples of mass mobilization to produce a political cul-de-sac in the country’s path of democratization.

Democracy-Coated Militarism?

In their academic article “Democratization and the Danger of War,” Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder argue that developments such as “social change, institutional weakness, and threatened interests tend to produce a political impasse along the route toward democracy.” Under the above ‘threatened interests’ context, Mansfield and Snyder demonstrate how, in the periods of democratization, “threatened elite groups have an overwhelming incentive to mobilize allies among the mass of people … using whatever special resources they still retain.” The following (edited) excerpts from the article clearly explain the recent phenomena in Turkish politics:

• Elites mobilize mass support to neutralize mass threats.
• By mass mobilization, elites aim to maintain their ability to use the control of traditional political institutions to shape the political agenda and to structure the terms of political bargains.
• The elite mobilization of mass groups takes place in a highly competitive setting.
• When autocratic states start to democratize, many of the interests threatened by democratization are military in nature.
• A nearly universal element in these ideological appeals is nationalism, which has the advantage of positing a community of interest that unites elites and masses.

It is a well-established fact that, in the last couple of years, retired members of the Turkish Armed Forces tend to associate themselves with the concept of kuvva-i milliye, the legendary militia forces that fought the Turkish War of Independence in the early 1920s. Pro-kuvva ex-soldiers have founded a network of NGOs, employed grassroots efforts nationwide, and registered a large number of members. Some of the new-member-ceremonies that leaked to the media included pledges to kill traitors, since the new kuvva movement intended to not only influence public opinion but also fight the enemy within. The main agenda of this new neo-nationalist (ulusalcı) network includes: opposition to Turkey’s EU membership for sovereignty reasons, opposition to privatization and foreign investments, and glorification of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk as a national hero.

This new-born neo-nationalist movement was highly influential in the recent mass mobilization efforts in Turkey – strongly implying that the supposedly democratic reactions against the elected JDP government can very well have a hidden agenda. At this point, it should not be overlooked that the reforms introduced by the JDP in order to bring the Turkish political system into line with the Copenhagen Criteria not only entailed an “enhanced civilian control of the military” but also constituted the biggest deviation from the Kemalist political tradition in the country’s history. Since the Turkish Armed Forces considers protecting the Kemalist political tradition one of its major raisons d’être, it is highly questionable as to whether it will acquiesce to the consequences of democratization in Turkey. A careful reading of the secularist demonstrations can help with the answer to this question.

On the face of things, the huge demonstrations seemed to be merely secularist in character, yet a strongly nationalist, pro-military and anti-EU discourse was also equally existent. Furthermore, it is very hard not to notice that the main organizer of the rallies, the Association of Atatürkist Thinking, is headed by a retired general who allegedly planned a coup when in office in 2004. In all, the recent developments in Turkey deserve to be examined also under the ‘democratization’ context with a special focus on the ‘mass mobilization’ phenomenon that Mansfield and Snyder point out. As the European Commission acknowledged in its 2004 progress report, “the Armed Forces in Turkey [still] continue to exercise influence through a series of informal channels,” and the analyses that ignore this fact and base their results on inadequate information are doomed to be misleading.

The current U.S. foreign policy focuses on the states that sponsor terrorism, and aims to replace dictatorial regimes with democratic ones – on the assumption that the latter will bring new societal and political values which will not only moderate strong anti-American sentiments but also make America safer. In that sense, the region that poses imminent security risks and requires immediate attention in the world is the Middle East. Therefore, democratization of the Middle East surfaces as one of the biggest concerns of the current U.S. administration.

The question of whether the dictatorial regimes in the Middle East really plan to attack the United States or have ties to anti-American terrorist groups has yet to be answered. But even if new evidence unveils such ties, the democracy-based arguments of the current U.S. administration will still lack a sound rationale. Because, as far as international security problems are concerned, democracy can hardly ever be a cure to the sickness.

Democracy cannot be a Tool of Conflict Resolution

Issues related to international security stem from a conflict of interests – rather than the nature of the regime that prevails. States, almost always, aim to follow policies that serve their best interests, and unlike domestic politics, democracy has not yet been an effectual instrument in breaking deadlocks on an international level. Northern Ireland, for example, is a chronic problem between two democracies, but democracy alone has not been sufficient to resolve the conflict.

Under a domestic politics context, there is no reason why democracy should necessarily produce results that are in line with the interests of another nation. Because, adoption of democracy does not silence popular views or policy choices – including those which the majority of the voters deem necessary for their subjective ends. Moreover, globalization works against the modernist idea that the role of religion will fade away in societies as well as in individual lives; and as different nations re-embrace their cultural and religious identities, countries in the Middle East will naturally be more sensitive in their problems with Israel. Democratization is not capable of reversing such trends and developments in a society.

Besides, it is highly questionable as to whether it is possible to export democracy, since democracy does not prevail by democratic institutions but by a democratic mindset that is absorbed by the society in generations.

Nonproliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction

The current U.S. foreign policy understands democratization also as a tool of nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction – and this is yet another issue where the role of democracy is exaggerated.

Although it is true that democracy rejects the militarist worldview that favors proliferation by all means possible, it is nevertheless not sufficient solely by itself to ensure peace. This is mainly because democracy is (unfortunately) still an instrument of domestic politics. In other words, democracy, for the most part, determines only domestic issues related to rights and public participation, however, proves ineffective in international relations. Iraq War, for example, was started in the name of freedoms by a coalition of countries whose populations vastly opposed it.

If democracy is restricted to domestic affairs and does not really apply to international security issues, then the nature of the domestic regime is irrelevant when judging who should have the right to possess weapons of mass destruction, and who should not. All countries have certain interests, and all wars start for pragmatist reasons. It is apparently not in the best interests of the United States (or any other state) to have enemies with WMD. However, nonproliferation through preemptive strikes, in that matter, is merely another form of pursuing interests by force, and has nothing to do with democratization whatsoever.

Alternative Policy Implications

Samuel Huntington argues that the world is moving away from political ideology-based bipolarization after the collapse of the USSR, and that, in the 21st century, culture and civilizations will determine the nature of alliances. During the Cold War Era, NATO served as a treaty organization against the expansionist threat of communism, which is now a thing of the past. If weapons of mass destruction are the biggest present threat against humanity, then NATO should be replaced by a similar treaty organization which would accept countries that possess nuclear technology (not nuclear weapons) as members. Abiding by the organizational codes of inspection, the countries which form this alliance must register all of their nuclear research facilities and storage. The treaty organization can, in the end, easily identify any country that does not wish to become a member and to comply with organizational codes.

The ideas of the scholars and political analysts who offer (or reject) a multilateral, international solution have, of course, not been tested – simply because this is a fairly new issue, and it is not possible to scientifically explain phenomena that have yet to occur. The implications of the Cold War Era, however, may be an exception. Because, we know it for a fact that the Cold War Era did not heat up, and this is at least partially due to the existence of the NATO. If a coalition of the willing decided to preemptively attack the Soviet Republic on the basis that it had nuclear weapons (instead of forming an international alliance), that would not prevent nuclear war. It would evangelize it.

The French Idea of Republicanism

According to the French version of republicanism, only the ‘atomistic individualities’ of citizens, and not communities, form the nation. In that sense, French republic is ‘the gathering of the citizens, not the gathering of the communities.’¹
This approach directly affects the way individual rights are defined in France. Due to its strong opposition to the idea of a nation that is formed by a gathering of communities, the French state chooses to assumes that communities do not exist on a sociopolitical level. The state takes this aspect of its republicanist ideology so seriously that it even goes as far as considering all sorts of characteristics and expressions that have to do with a communal identity a problem.
With full loyalty to this model, the French expect every one within the borders of the country to conform to the French culture – which, they believe, is what ‘being French’ is about. However, due to its misconceptions, France fails to differentiate conformity from egality, and unfortunately, this is exactly how it creates an army of outsiders.

Discrimination in France

In cases which a group of people are expected to conform to certain cultural standards, the first issue that needs to be looked at is what happens to those who cannot (or do not) do so. For minorities in France, what happens is outright discrimination.
The naturalization process in France pretty much portrays the extent of conformity France expects from its citizens.
Candidates for French nationality are reported to have been asked questions, such as ‘how many times a week the candidate eats couscous,’ ‘what language the candidate speaks with her family,’ and even ‘which newspapers the candidate reads.’²
The candidates are also ‘encouraged to adopt French-sounding names,’³ however, this is actually a very good advice:
SOS Racisme, an anti-racist organization in French, sent two identical resumes of fictitious job applicants to a range of companies. The resumes listed exactly the same qualifications and experience. The only difference was the names of the applicants – one being French, and the other not. The outcome demonstrated a huge ‘lack of interest in the foreign candidate.’³
Discrimination in employment leads to segregated housing of minorities in the suburbs, where the unemployment rate can be as high as 40%.⁴ These people live a life that is totally different from that of the rest of the population.
Discriminatory approach significantly affects the nature of legislative issues and law enforcement. French parliament passed a law on February 2004 to ban religious symbols (including Islamic headscarves) in public schools. This particular law not only exhibits the French version of secularism but also reveals the French idea of public schools.
French scholars proudly declare in their academic articles that ‘[s]chool is on the front line of acculturation to French values and, in some measure, to social accomplishment,’⁵ and just so exhibit their approval of public school indoctrination, which, in this case, strongly resembles Mao’s educational notion of ‘mold’ that aims to create like-minded citizens.
Derived from the same old supposedly anti-communitarian approach, the French idea of secularism considers all sorts of religious public displays ‘a symbol of one’s identity,’ and thus unacceptable. One important thing to remember here is that enforcement of secularist laws is highly discriminatory in France. Because, the French state supports thousands of Catholic schools when forcing Muslims to obey the rules of secular state schools.
Discriminatory affairs of law enforcement officers are also in line with legislative double standards. Police authorities now acknowledge that the officers commonly address ‘non-white youths with the condescending ‘tu‘ rather than the more respectful ‘vous.’⁶ More importantly, immigrants in France face ‘notorious levels of harassment and brutality,’ and even ‘deaths in police custody.’⁷
After the riots, Alan Badiou, professor of philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superieure, published a deeply moving letter in Le Monde, where he recounted the life of his adopted son, arrested six times, insulted, beaten up – simply because he was black. ‘France has the riots it deserves,’ he concluded.⁸

Conclusion

Despite all these highly questionable policies, the French declare proudly that their modele d’integration is the anti-thesis of the Britain’s multicultural society,⁹ and caricature their opponent ‘as a multitude of ethnic and religious ghettos.’¹⁰ In order to demonstrate how poorly France evaluates the state of its internal affairs, it may be appropriate at this point to state that, a few months before the riots, French newspapers ‘asserted that the strength of the French integration model explained why, unlike in London, no terrorist attacks had occurred in France.’¹¹
Piously self-reighteous, France refuses to look critically at its past and present policies – including its colonial past, which is very much alive in the minds and hearts of its minorities. Instead, it keeps on insisting that the problem is not with its ‘republican values,’ but Islam, which is supposedly not compatible with them.¹² However, in actuality, it is not really possible to hold Islam responsible for the events since ‘[m]any young blacks, half of whom are Christians in France, were also part of the riots.’¹³
France may continue its arrogant attitude all it wants, but it will not help in any way to solve the country’s problems. The truth is that the immigrants segregated in the peripheral provinces of Paris today consider themselves outsiders, and not full members of the community. Unfortunately, France lacks the much needed empathy to sincerely try and understand how they feel. Because, France simply does not have the will to abandon its obsessions. What it has instead is ministers like Nicolas Sarkozy, who, a few months before the riots, had brutally announced that he would cleanse the suburbs with a high pressure hose.¹⁴
Looking at how narcissistically France admires itself, it is not that hard to conclude that its problems will unfortunately only get worse in the future.
¹ Maillard, Dominique. 2005. “The Muslims in France and the French Model of Integration.” Mediterranean Quarterly 16(1):74
² Murray, Graham. 2006. “France: the riots and the Republic.” Race and Class 47(4):36
³ Murray 28.
⁴ Murray 29.
⁵ Maillard 73.
⁶ Murray 32.
⁷ Murray 31.
⁸ Fassin, Didier. 2006. “Riots in France and silent anthropologists.” Anthropology Today 22(1):2
⁹ Wihtol de Wenden, Catherine. 2006. “Urban Riots in France.” SAIS Review 26(2):47
¹⁰ Murray 37.
¹¹ Wihtol de Wenden 50.
¹² Murray 40.
¹¹ Wihtol de Wenden 51.
¹⁴ Didier 1.

Pluralism, as a theory of power, relies on the dynamics of the concept of free market of ideas, and affirms that free competition of diverse interests will serve the best interests of a democratic society. Policy decisions, according to the pluralist approach, are therefore results of the struggles among competing groups that have different causes.

Contrary to the pluralist approach, however, elitists argue that policy decisions are made under the heavy influence of certain small (but equally powerful) groups that are controlled by a very small group of wealthy individuals. Due to the incomparable power of the elite, the influence of other interest groups is, at best, minimal.

Both the pluralist and the elitist approach offer useful insights, and in an effort to reconcile their disagreements, it can be argued that, for the free market of ideas to work, it is necessary (although probably not sufficient) that all groups possess the much needed means to have their voices heard. Because otherwise, certain factions, or in James Madison’s words, ‘a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest’, can influence the policy outcome in a way that will serve the interests of only a small minority – while violating ‘the rights of other citizens, or … the permanent and aggregate interests of the community’.

Two-Dimensional Thinking in American Politics

American politics is cursed with the prevalent belief that problems can be solved either one way or the other – which, almost always, translates into a choice between Democratic and Republican cures to the issues. Two-dimensional thinking makes many American people subscribe to one of the two pre-arranged policy baskets, and support everything in the basket as a whole, rather than considering each issue individually.

Forming opinions based on partisanship rather than individual thought eliminates the concern of looking for alternatives when facing policy conflicts, and produces individuals who conform to one of the two common forms of argument on each policy choice. It is not a rare case for such individuals to ignore other viewpoints by simply protecting what they believe to be true, and filtering out information they do not want to receive.

Debates on the U.S. Tort laws is one of the many examples to the two-dimensional thinking and its relation to interest group politics. Insurance companies, big corporations, pro-business interest groups, and conservative think tanks in the United States lobby for a Tort reform in an effort to limit tort litigation and damages, while consumer, lawyers, and labor groups lobby for the existing state of Tort legislation.

Those who lobby for a Tort reform focus mostly on frivolous law suits, and argue that the current Tort laws do not serve justice but irresponsibility. They talk about how the current Tort laws increase the costs of products and services – eventually financially hurting the society also.

Those who lobby against a Tort reform, on the other hand, view the issue from a consumer-rights viewpoint, and focus mostly on the responsibility of corporations to produce safe products, and argue that a Tort reform would only help large corporations in escaping from paying just compensation to their customers for damages that occurred due to their malpractices or defective products.

Both sides focus on certain arguments that would prove their point right, and ignore the counter-arguments – although, in actuality, both arguments have truth in them. Although unethical, this form of struggle is quite natural from the interest group politics aspect of the issue, since interest groups, by nature, focus on not ethics but accomplishment of policy goals. For example, in their book ‘Distorting the Law: Politics, Media, and the Litigation Crisis’, William Halton, a professor at the University of Puget Sound, and Michael McCann, a professor at the University of Washington, Seattle, provide a scholarly analysis of how tort reformers use various techniques to get into and misuse mass information channels in an effort to manipulate public opinion. Such practices pose significant threats to the right to accurate and complete information, and as all lobbyists involved in the process try to prove their opposing points, the society is fooled as a whole. In that sense, the pluralist approach miserably fails.

As far as the relationship between interest group lobbying and public opinion is concerned, it is safe to say that interest group lobbying tends to bipolarize (or multipolarize) the public opinion under the cover of ‘pluralism’. In other words, free market of ideas, shifts the public opinion towards certain views that carry the most weight in terms of representation and power. Even when more than one (or more than several) views prevail in the market, the public opinion therefore tends to conform to the interest-group-driven policy choices.

Existence of multiple views in the marketplace does not necessarily assure the prevalence of accurate and complete information so long as the opinions presented rest on not knowledge but manipulation. If a boxer is badly hit on the right side, a second hit on the left will not cancel the effect of the first one out. It will just make things worse.

This is why scholarly works that rest on scientific analysis of information are particularly important, since, unlike lobbying efforts, such studies are not conducted to influence legislation. Instead, they merely aim to produce knowledge, which is the only cure to two-dimensional thinking.

When enacting laws that mandate restrictions on what people think (Level 1), what they say (Level 2), and what they do (Level 3), members of the legislative and executive branches of the free countries claim to draw the line after Level 2, and before Level 3 – in an effort to convince the citizens that they respect people’s freedom of thought and speech. However, in actuality, it is hardly ever the case. Looking at the history of the United States, for example, it is possible to see that it was not merely violent speech that was restricted. Since, to the best of our knowledge, it is not yet technically possible to physically restrict what people think (Level 1), restrictions on the freedom of speech (Level 2) brings free and unfree countries closer to each other. Because, countries that allow some speech, while disallowing others, are not considered free.

The History of Freedom of Speech in the United States

On June 15, 1917, shortly after the United States entered World War I, the Congress passed the Espionage Act of 1917. In an effort to suppress dissent in the time of war, the law made it a crime to convey information that interferes with the operation and success of the U.S. Armed Forces. Newspapers, magazines, or even letters that contained information which violated the Act were subject to be declared ‘unmailable’. Many publications lost their mailing privileges in the process.
Shortly after the law was enacted, the New York postmaster, who, under the Act, had the right to declare certain publications unmailable, refused to allow an antiwar journal, and the case was brought before the Supreme Court of the United States. The Court declared the action of the postmaster unconstitutional under the First Amendment. When deciding the case, Masses Publishing Co. v. Patten, Justice Hand also introduced the ‘incitement test’, under which citizens would be protected by the First Amendment – given that they stop “short of urging upon others that it is their duty or their interest to resist the law.” In other words, the First Amendment would protect the right of the citizens to personally admire the antiwar resistance, but that right did not include ‘counsel[ing] or advi[sing]‘ (or convincing) others to, for example, resist the draft.
The Espionage Act of 1917 was later amended by the Sedition Act of 1918, which made “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” a crime. Eugene V. Debs, a political activist, and the Socialist Party presidential candidate in 1904, 1908, 1912, and 1920, was arrested and sentenced to 10 years in violation of the Sedition Act – on the grounds that he ‘obstructed recruiting’ on a speech he made on June 16, 1918. Hundreds of anti-war protestors were also arrested for speaking out against the draft, which was also a violation of the Act.
Another Supreme Court case, Schenck v. United States, was about whether the circulation of a flyer that mentioned the Involuntary Servitude Clause of the Thirteenth Amendment. The flyer also advised people to ‘assert opposition to the draft’. On March 3, 1919, writing the opinion of the Court, Justice Holmes stated that, ‘[w]hen a nation is at war, many things that might be said in time of peace are such hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight, and that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right’. Justice Holmes also introduced the ‘clear and present danger test,’ which, when deciding cases, focused on ‘whether the words used are … of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantial evils,’ which in this case was resisting the draft. (The ‘clear and present danger test‘ was used in deciding free speech cases for 50 years – until it was overturned in 1969.)
Nine years after the World War I was over, on May 16, 1927, the Supreme Court decided another case, Whitney v. California, where the defendant was accused of helping to establish the Communist Labor Party, which was known to the U.S. government as a group devoted to teaching the violent overthrow of the government. Justice Holmes, writing for the majority of the Court, stated that the defendant’s conviction for membership in the Communist Labor Party did not violate her First Amendment rights, because “utterances inimical to the public welfare, tending to incite a crime, disturb the public peace, or endanger the foundations of organized government and threaten its overthrow” are punishable by law, since they are abuses of the free speech rights. This became known as the ‘bad tendency test,’ which was more conservative than the ‘clear and present danger test.’
In 1940, the Congress enacted an even tougher federal law, the Smith Act (a.k.a. the Alien Registration Act), which made it a criminal offense to “knowingly or willfully advocate, abet, advise or teach the duty, necessity, desirability or propriety of overthrowing the Government of the United States or of any State by force or violence, or for anyone to organize any association which teaches, advises or encourages such an overthrow, or for anyone to become a member of or to affiliate with any such association.”
Starting from the late 1940s, McCarthyism (a.k.a. the Second Red Scare) also became a part of the everyday U.S. politics. Government officials set forth blacklists of people, who were allegedly members of certain associations, and thus were considered suspicious. (The Second Red Scare was over only after the late 1950s.)
On June 9, 1969, the Supreme Court decided Brandenburg v. Ohio, where a Ku Klux Klan leader was convicted of making a speech, which included a reference that a ‘revengeance’ was possible against niggers, Jews, and those who supported them. The Court, introducing the ‘imminent lawless action test,’ declared his conviction unconstitutional. The per curiam majority opinion stated that the Court’s “decisions have fashioned the principle that the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.”
The ‘imminent lawless action test,’ which overturned the ‘clear and present danger’ and ‘bad tendency’ tests, is the latest major test of the Supreme Court. However, few cases have been decided by the Supreme Court using this test. In other words, the ‘imminent lawless action test’ has not been applied to so many different issues, and therefore, it does not constitute a strong precedent.

Violent Speech and the Right to Abolish the Government

Although laws that restrict freedom of speech seem to focus mainly on violence, the outcome of the cases suggest otherwise. In practice, those who face conviction under such laws are not necessarily violent.
For example, laws mentioned above passed by the U.S. Congress usually focus on ‘overthrowing the U.S. government by force,’ however, the laws also connect lots of other actions to the act of ‘overthrowing the government,’ and, consequentially, many non-violent people suffer from the wrath of the law. The legal history of the United States has numerous examples of convictions, which rest on quite indirect ways of violent speech. The mere membership to a group which allegedly tries to overthrow the government has been enough to get many people convicted during the (first and second) Red Scares. It is also possible to observe conviction on more indirect grounds, such as: conviction upon membership to a group which allegedly has ties to another group that allegedly tries to overthrow the government.
Although many of such laws that restricted freedom of speech in the past have now long been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States, it is highly probable that similar ones will be enacted in the future when similar circumstances occur. On one hand, it is true that the State has a compelling interest to protect the nation – especially when it has reason to believe that the country faces a threat. On the other hand, however, the constitutional interpretation should not be dependent on the existing state of affairs, and most important of all, security issues should not be used as excuses to suppress opposition.
In order to compromise these two facts, laws must fulfill two requirements:
First, what the government can and cannot do in cases of emergency (including but not limited to the times of war) should be very clearly defined – in order to prevent the government from using security issues as an excuse to justify its actions that involve the restriction of freedoms.
Secondly, citizens should know what instruments they are allowed to use against the government if it tries to deprive them of their unalienable rights – as set forth in the Declaration of Independence.¹
The two issues stated above are particularly important, because restrictions on freedom of speech is not limited to violent speech. Unlike the popular idea, violent speech is not only about verbal calls to destructive behavior or killing human beings. It also has a political context, and when defined by the government, restrictions on allegedly violent speech can also serve as a means to suppress political dissent.
¹ The Declaration of Independence gives the American people the right to abolish the government if it deprives people of their rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” (emphasis mine)

Thomas Jefferson is reported to have written the following for the opening of the United States Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Today, it would be very difficult to find a U.S. citizen who disagrees with that statement, however, that does not necessarily mean that all American people interpret it the way Jefferson did.
Jefferson grew up in a society, in which some people could be bought and sold at auctions as properties. What made it legally possible for other people to own them was the color of their skins. Thomas Jefferson himself owned over 200 human properties, and did not come close to freeing any of them all his life. “All men are created equal,” he would say, and he wouldn’t think that enslaving other men (and women, and children) constituted an inconsistency with that statement. Perhaps, what Jefferson had in mind when making that statement was, “All white men are created equal.” But, too bad, he did not phrase it this way. Maybe he thought that it was so obvious that no one would interpret the word ‘men’ in a broader sense. Maybe… We do not know.
Still, his omission of the word did not do any harm to the prevalent idea of slavery. Negroes were bought, sold, raped, tortured, and in a lot of occasions, they were separated from their families when a transfer of ownership did not include their loved ones.
Such were the prevalent values of the society the Founders of the United States grew up and lived in. It was the same values that made the judges of 1856² tell to Dred Scott’s face that he was actually a property, and that his master could not be deprived of his property without the due process of law under the Fifth Amendment. In 1896, the justices of the same Court declared³ that racial segregation was separate, but equal.
It took centuries before the majority of white men to understand that slavery was wrong. All this, in fact, is a repetition of what Arthur Schopenhauer is reported to have said: “All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”
The truth is, the Framers did not write a color-blind Constitution. Nor did they live (or care to live) in a color-blind society. It was self-evident to them that the Negroes were not to be given any rights. They did not feel a need to state the obvious. Nobody does that. As far as constıtutıonal rights were concerned, Negroes were totally out of the equation. Not that the Framers excluded them when writing the Constitution. It is just that they were not considered citizens (or, in a sense, humans), and thus their rights were irrelevant pretty much like animal rights. As of today, there is still not a sentence in the Bill of Rights like ‘Black people should not be enslaved”, and there is not a need for it. However, bringing back slavery is never an issue. That is simply because people do not perceive things the same way any more, and that makes all the difference: the mindset (the perceiver), intentionally or unintentionally, defines what the text (the perceived) means.
In his book, Liberty: Interpreting our Democratic Constitution, Justice Stephen Breyer says, “As history made clear, the original Constitution was insufficient. It did not include a majority of the nation within its “democratic community.” It took a civil war and eighty years of racial segregation before the slaves and their descendants could begin to think of the Constitution as theirs.’⁴ Fair enough. But the fact is, the Constitution was not meant to include the Negroes in the first place. To emphasis the very same point, twentieth century American rapper Tupac Shakur, for example, cried out in a song, ‘America’s freedom was not meant for me.’ I find his statement more clearly put than Breyer’s.
The way people perceive things change only gradually. However, when we look at the whole picture today, we see that the overall change is dramatic. History of thought has always witnessed a constant change, for good and bad. There is no reason to assume that neither 1787 nor 2006 is the point for it all to stop. So far as it is ‘We the People,’ change will prevail. Justice Breyer says that “the judge should recognize that the Constitution will apply to “new subject matter… with which the framers were not familiar.”"⁵ There is no reason why freedom should not be included in the “new subject matter” that Justice Breyer says the framers “were not familiar” with. That’s because the idea of freedom the framers were familiar with did exclude people who were not like them, because race, gender, and ethnicity played a major role in their thinking. Today, such an idea of freedom would be discriminatory, undemocratic, inhuman, and, ironically, un-American!
Things change, people resist.
Justice Scalia has a point when he says the following: ‘The originalist, if he does not have all the answers, has many of them… For the evolutionist, on the other hand, every question is an open question, every day a new day.’⁶
Very true indeed.
For progressives, every day is a new day – and rightly so.
¹ Breyer, Stephen, (2005). Active Liberty: Interpreting our Democratic Constitution (7th ed.). New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 25.
² Dred v. Scott, 60 U.S. 393 (1856)
³ Plessy v. Ferguson, 60 U.S. 393 (1856)
⁴ Breyer 32.
⁵ Breyer 18.
⁶Scalia, Antonin, (1997). A Matter of Interpretation: Federal Courts and the Law (1tsted.). Princeton University Press. 46.

Kersch’s book provide the reader with a rich background information as to how the Constitution of the United States has been interpreted since its inception. In other words, Kersch analyzes the relationship between ‘development processes’ and ‘constitutional interpretation’ in an effort to depict how the way people perceive (and apply) the concept of civil rights and liberties has changed throughout the years. This change, Kersch argues, is what made the modern (or post-New Deal) Supreme Court possible. He specifically focuses on the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which include the Civil War, abolishment of slavery, segregation, The Great Depression, and finally, the New Deal era (1933-1937) under President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
In the first section, Kersch demonstrates how the idea of increased state power ‘narrowed’ privacy and criminal process rights. He mentions the term ‘publicity’ as pointed out by Justice Brandeis, who claimed that shedding broad light upon the actions of men would purify them as the sun disinfects. He further reasoned that electric light was the most efficient policeman.
In an effort to realize this idea of publicity, ‘Federal Trade Commission’ was created in 1914 with a broad range of powers over businesses – such as “expos[ing] to outsiders a company’s private business methods, trade secrets, and intimate correspondence” – which violate the ‘unreasonable searches and seizures’ clause of the Fourth Amendment (p.60). At this point, Kersch mentions two cases, Boyd v. United States (1886) and Weeks v. United States (1914), as examples from the ‘Old’ Court protecting the right to privacy against the see-it-all state.
In Boyd v. United States (1886), Boyd, a business owner, was asked by the U.S. government to produce and supply the invoices of a certain trade deal. He refused to supply the documents, and claimed that compulsory production of his records violated his rights under the Fourth Amendment, which forbids a person being forced to incriminate himself. Despite the prevalent views of the times which imagined economic actors as criminals, the Court upheld the Fourth Amendment rights of Boyd.
In Weeks v. United States (1914), a police officer did not hesitate to use a key he found to the defendant’s home although he did not have a warrant. While the defendant was at work, he searched his house, and found what he was looking for in a drawer. The Court, however, refused the evidence since it was obtained in an illegal search.
As for criminal process rights, Kersch reports Chief Justice Warren to have drawn attention to “a series of cases decided by [the Supreme] Court [since the 1930s, in which] the police resorted to physical brutality – beating, hanging, whipping – and to sustained and protracted questioning incommunicado in order to extort confessions” (p.124).
Kersch mentions a few cases about police brutality – most of them involving Southern lawmen. One of them is Screws v. United States (1945), in which a county sheriff, who had problems with a thirty year old black man named Hall, a deputy and a policeman gathered in a local bar, ‘had their fill’, headed to Hall’s home, and arrested him with an alleged crime of stealing a tire. Taking him to the police headquarters, they began beating him “with a two-pound, eight-inch-long blackjack and with their fists” for almost half an hour until he passed out. Hall died shortly after the beating. The Supreme Court held that the policemen in question could be prosecuted for acting ‘under color of state law’ enacted during the Re-construction era, despite the fact that their actions were already illegal under the Georgia state law.
In Sweeney v. Woodhall (1952), a black man doing time in an Alabama prison was repeatedly beaten to unconsciousness, “scarred by lashes from a nine-pound strap studded with sharp metal prongs,” forced to sexual slavery, forced to work under the sun all day long without rest, finally escaped, and fled to Ohio. The Court ruled for his extradition to Alabama on the grounds that he did not vindicate his claims in Alabama courts.
As for how the Court applied criminal process rights, Kersch states that it first tried to expand the rights defined at the Fourth and Fifth Amendments while the centralized, powerful New American State was being created. However, the Court began ‘negotiating away’ these rights, Kersch argues, after the reformist state-building effort became ‘all but inevitable’.
Labor rights, on the other hand, raise the issue of individualism vs. collectivism in the sense that the freedoms are perceived not on an individual but on a class basis. In order to give the reader an idea of Frankfurter’s collectivism, Kersch, in the second section of the book, quotes the words he said in 1920: “The era of romantic individualism is no more.”
Kersch also mentions the political philosopher John Dewey’s Marxist contribution to the modern American constitutional ideology. Dewey’s thinking involved class exploitation, and Darwinian ‘fight for labor power’. He coined the term ‘industrial democracy’, which he believed was necessary for a truly democratic society.
Senn v. Tile Union (1937) is a good example of what kind of an environment of labor rights culture the United States had during the New Deal era. Paul Senn owned a small Milwaukee tile-laying sole proprietor company, working on his own, laying tiles with his own hands. However, he occasionally hired two to four people to help him. He had a wife and four children, and the money he made was insufficient for him to support his family. He was sympathetic to the union, and therefore, when local tile layer’s union, in Milwaukee approached him about converting his company into a union shop, he did not reject the idea. When the discussion began, however, problems occurred – due to the union rule that required those who engage in Senn’s type of work to have three years of apprenticeship, which he lacked. One other problem was that the union required a sharp distinction between the labor and management in a business – which meant that Senn would no longer be able to work in his small business if he joined the union. Senn, still being willing to join though, stated that he would be happy to hire only union employees, and follow the union’s wage rules, and even accepted not to work in his own business at times when he had sufficient work to get by, but he could not stop working right now, because if he did, he would go bankrupt. He said that he needed exemption from this particular rule, however, Tile Layers Protective Union did not consider its rules negotiable, and started a campaign in order to destroy Senn’s business. Members of the union “followed Senn from home to work, and picketed his jobs.” Seeking a way to save himself from harassment and resume his usual work, Senn took the issue to the court, however, Wisconsin was “a pioneer of the new constitutional order concerning labor,” which took away the state courts’ power over picketing – after the Norris-LaGuardia Act. The case went all the way up to the Supreme Court, and Senn and his lawyer argued that the due process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourth Amendment protected “the right to work and earn a living.” The Court, however, rejected this argument in an opinion written by Justice Brandeis.
Kersch argues that Senn should be protected under the traditional right of an individual to work. However, it was an era of not individualism but collectivism, therefore, an individual’s right to work did not really matter when compared to collective right to work – as defined by the unions.
The way unions defined labor power prior to the mid-60s also meant black exclusion. White workers resented black competition for their jobs from black workers to such an extent that many black workers started to sympathize with capitalism – due to the fact that it was color-blind (p.189). One other consequence of black exclusion from unions was picketing cases and campaigns of ‘Do Not Shop Where You Can’t Work’ (p.211). In that sense, it is possible to say that labor rights, as the Unions perceived it, were being expanded at the expense of black civil rights. Kersch argues that the Supreme Court, during this period, was driven neither by partisan politics nor legal doctrine, but rather by a ‘highly ideological process’ taking place both within and outside the Court (p.233).
In the third and final section of the book, Kersch focuses on education rights, which involve more nation- and less state-building – due to the issues of ‘who’ will be educated, and ‘how.’
When the federal government intended in 1866 to fund the education of the now-free blacks, it faced intense opposition from the South. In the 20th century, however, whether the black population should be educated was out of question, and the education issue was debated more on nationalist and collectivist grounds.
In 1920, the Army’s Charles Holley argued that more federal money should be spent on education in order to “prevent the propagation of foreign culture at the expense of American ideals.” An advocate of a federal education department was reported to have said that the presence of an electorate speaking a foreign tongue only and more or less ignorant of American institutions was a menace to all.² The educational concerns centered around not only language but also indoctrination. This is probably the part which the black people of the United States of the time must have found interesting the most. Because, actors in the nation-building process set forth the concern of ‘an appreciation of an ‘American’ understanding of liberty.’ Charles Holles is again quoted: “[C]entrally subsidized system of schools would be ever ready to meet the emergency by spreading desirable national propaganda. … The central national authority could convert the teachers, and the teachers would then reach the people.”³ Interestingly enough, statist progressives, nativist anti-Catholics, and Ku Klux Klan became political allies in that matter. Such a policy of education which involves indoctrination – in terms teaching children not how to think but what to think – in order to ‘produce’ national beings also brought the question of whether the child belonged to the parents or to the society.
Concluding the book, Kersch tries to find a solution to the problems with ‘The New American State,’ and sort of goes out of his way to hypothesize a ‘world constitution,’ which would bind the U.S. Constitution, in a way pretty much similar to what Justice Ginsburg offered in a speech she gave the other week in South Africa. Kersch questions how a world constitution looks like, and gives examples of other nations who gave up their own rights and privileges for the sake of common good – as in Kyoto Protocol and International Crime Court. Referring to the book One World by the philosopher Peter Singer, he further questions the possibility of the creation of a world government and a world ethical system, which would not slip into tyranny, and argues that the answer possibly lies with the Europeans – since they have pioneered the principle of ’subsidiary’ (p.345).
The controversial solutions Kersch offers, in fact, belong to a different issue, and thus constitute a topic for a different book, but his overall depiction of the nation- and state-building processes in the 19th and 20th century American constitutional development in three highly interrelated sections is very successful indeed.
¹ Cambridge University Press, 2004. ISBN: 0521811783
² A.J. McKelway, National Child Labor Committee, ‘The Next Federal Campaign’, Child Labor Bulletin 6, p.214 (Fall 1918)
³ Charles Holley, National System, p.320

U.S. : 11127
Germany: 381
France: 255
Canada: 165
U.K.: 68
Australia: 65
Japan: 39

For the countries other than the United States, the figures portray somewhat of a deviation too, but when the data from the United States comes into the picture, the interval enlarges dramatically. Amazed by the figures, Michael Moore tries to reason why, and raises a couple of hypotheses.
First, he wonders whether more people own firearms in the United States. However, since hunting is very popular in Canada, Canadians own millions of guns and rifles – yet there are only 165 records of annual deaths by firearms in the country. Moore also compares the history, religious affairs, and the demographics of the two countries, but nothing suggests a hint. In the end, without a solid theory, he keeps asking “What is it?,” but no one seems to have a clue.
In such a popular yet controversial issue, every one will have a thing or two to say, so here is my two cents:
Michael Moore is right when he states that many countries have very bloody histories, like the Nazi Germany. However the case of the United States is different in the sense that it is a nation of immigrants who perceive life more like an individualist battlefield.
The term ‘American’ does not exactly refer to a certain group of people who share the same culture or values. It refers to the people who come from a variety of backgrounds but live on the same land. Except for the native Americans, all of the American people travelled overseas throughout the centuries to get a piece of the ‘American Dream.’ But in fact, there never was a commonly shared ‘American Dream.’ People were in the pursuit of a personal, material dream, and most of them were ready to do whatever it takes to achieve it.
Spaniards took the lands of the native Americans, and killed millions of them. Spaniards won; native Americans lost, and more importantly, their loss was Spaniards’ gain. Very shortly after the white man set foot on the so-called New World, he brought black people from Africa in cages, and enslaved and used as a factor of production. The white man was armed, and more powerful, and he won. The black man lost; and his loss was white man’s gain.
Later in the 19th century, white men were not able to resolve their disputes, and fought one another this time. Those in the North won, and slavery was no more. But since the centuries-old perceptions were still in place, a new era of segregation started, and lasted at least until the fifties, if not today.
In the book An American Dilemma, Gunnar Myrdal and Sissela Bok state the following, which may shed a light on why carrying a gun is traditionally important in the American culture:

Repeating the patterns of slavery times, the white Southern policeman, “a crucial and strategic factor in race relations” acted as an agent of white planters and employers to enforce black obedience. As part of a system of social subordination, the Southern policeman not only arrested but also summarily sentenced and punished blacks, commonly without the trouble of a trial.
The lawless lawman was a brutal menace, a poorly trained and ill-educated white man of low social status, taught from an early age to despise Negroes. The chief way this man rose in the world was by carrying a gun and wielding the power that came with it. He was, in short, a “weak man with … strong weapons”. (p.538-544) (emphasis mine)

Since 1492, the social, political and economic environment in the United States has been a battlefield, where every one is inclined to find a way to stay alive and well – physically or financially. In other words, the struggle for wealth, which drove the first Westerners overseas, still continues. Because, in the United States, life is more about winning or losing. This land is where the word ‘loser’ is more commonly used as a degrading term. Some cultures do not even have such a use for their equivalent of the same word.

To give an example: A man wakes up in front of the back wall of a dark cell. The space between him and the open door of the cell is densely covered with a web of barbed wire. Right beside him is a voice recorder. Turning it on, he hears a recorded voice, calling him by his name and telling him that he recently committed suicide, and that it was now the time to know whether he really wanted to die that day or was just trying to attract some attention. The voice also tells him that if he really wants to die, all he needs to do is to stay there and wait, but if he wants to live, he has to go through the web of barbed wires. Moreover, he has to do that within two hours, because the door of the dungeon is on a timer.
John claims that he never murdered anyone, and that his ‘tests’ always had the chance to survive. His main point is that those who do not value the precious gift of life and do not do what is necessary to live it, do not deserve it. This is why he chooses heedless, unfocused, lost, adrift, and unappreciative souls. He designs the game, leaves the instructions in a voice recorder; and when his voice in the recorder finally says, “Let the game begin!”, the ‘test’ is on her own.
This game which John Kramer truly enjoys playing is almost identical to the one that God created: life. Most people would say no to that, but the similarity is obvious.
We are born to a universe, about which we know next to nothing. We do not know why it exists. We do not know how it exists. Our limited intelligence and sensory perception are inadequate to explain all this. However, just like John’s voice recorder, the messengers and scriptures of God tell the tests about the rules of the game, and what they should do in order to win. Those who are successful in playing John’s games are rewarded with life. Correspondingly, those who are successful in playing God’s game are rewarded with an eternal happy one. Both games involve the use of the mind, both have to do with rational decision making, and both have timers.
There is one big difference though. All of those who wake up in a game of John’s, take it seriously – regardless of whether they succeed or not. On the other hand, many of those who wake up to this world prefer just to have as much fun as possible before their times are up, and do not really wonder what the hell they are looking for here. There are also many others who try to do their best in playing this game the way God advises, however, they seem to somehow have turned off their faculty to question and inquire. But then again, one does not have to question or inquire anything in order to win John’s game. So that attitude may probably work for God’s game as well.

Government officials who consider themselves to be doing highly important jobs may very well be unaware of the workings of the more complex system that they are a part of. The movie Lord of War portrays a good example of that. At the end of the movie, Jack Valentine (Ethan Hawk), the Interpol agent, who arrests Yuri Orlov (Nicolas Cage) is surprised to hear him say that he would be released shortly. Therefore he tells him that he is not fully aware of the seriousness of his situation, and that he is living in a dream world! In a short while, things turn out exactly the way Yuri Orlov predicted, and Agent Valentine realizes who, in fact, has been living in a dream world the whole time. At this point, one has to remember an earlier scene, in which Agent Valentine asks Orlov, “Do you know why I do what I do?” and makee a cocky explanation.

Act II

Once upon a time, I was driving on I-15 at San Bernardino county, California. They have a cool radio station there at 96.7. It was shortly after 9/11, and the U.S. was about to attack Afghanistan. The two hosts of the morning show were talking about how these guys in Afghanistan were just intrinsically wrong since they were forcing men who naturally lacked a beard to put on fake ones. One of the hosts stated that a lot of things might be attributed to cultural differences, but the other immediately added that we should also ask ‘who’ created the culture. This last comment of his seemed to be a very rational one, and I have, since then, used that as a parameter (among others) when I tried to understand a particular culture. I came to agree that it was the Afghans who created such a culture which was nowhere else to be seen in the Islamic world. After when I watched the movie ‘Lord of War,’ I applied the same process to the current state of the world. The world as it is today is a battle zone for many people around the world, and the countries mentioned at the beginning of the movie ‘Lord of War’ very much intend to keep it that way – since warlords cannot exist without wars.
I wonder which is worse. A culture which forces men who lack a natural beard to put on fake one; or one that applies official and unofficial policies which will lead to more money – and brutal deaths of innocent people around the world?

Act III

Some people start sentences with phrases like ‘When we built this country,…’, when, in fact, they did not build anything. Then what does that ‘we’ imply? Most probably, they mean their ancestors, not themselves – if the ancestors in question are really theirs and not their neighbors’, of course.
It was obviously all there long before they were born, but that doesn’t stop them from imagining their heads in the clouds. Just like Agent Valentine, they are very much fond of associating themselves with ‘the good’, which is everything every single country/religion/faction in the world claims to stand for. But everybody needs to feel important – even in a dream world.
I wonder what they would have built if they were born in, for example, Liberia.

Act IV

We just pretend. We shed a tear when we see innocent people being killed, as was the case when a woman and her child were beaten to death in the movie ‘Lord of War’. Since very few people would consider themselves evil, we just pretend to be good. Thanks to that very important teardrop or two, as well as the $20 bills that we may happen to donate from time to time, we can sleep peacefully at night considering ourselves noble.
Human nature is doomed with ignorance of the pains of others we hardly have any relationship with.

Status quo is a term used to refer to the ‘existing state of affairs’. Since most people do not question the way things get going, repetitive imposition of mainstream values shape the borders of a status quo mindset. By nature, the majority of human beings have a strong tendency to keep things the way they are. They resist change. This makes it easier for all political systems to push citizens inside a mainstream. Since this has to be a specific mainstream that serves the best advantage of the controllers of the political system, citizens are subjected to mental programming with the use of mind control techniques.

It is important for rulers of masses to maintain the status quo, because they derive their power from it. Because, a society composed of individuals who are exactly like one another will act and react accordingly and predictably. This can be made possible by government-controlled education. Therefore, rulers of the masses regard education as an essential political tool. Since human beings are born with an unwashed brain, and have not yet been subject to lies based on distorted historical, traditional, institutional or religious facts, education serves the purpose of mental programming in order to impose the nationalist indoctrination.

Nationalist Indoctrination

“Education of the young is used to condition them to what comes later, thereby eliminating the difference between propaganda and education. Propaganda cannot work effectively without education. The mind is conditioned with vast amounts of information posing as ‘facts’ and ‘knowledge’ dispensed for ulterior motives… With propaganda, distraction focuses attention on information that is false. Repetition of the false information imbeds it in your subconscious mind so that your acceptance of its truth and accuracy becomes a conditioned response, circumventing analysis. Therefore, you accept this information as true without thinking about it. This is especially true in school where there is pressure to accept what is presented as true because that is what is expected from you.”¹
Nationalist indoctrination uses various kinds of mind control techniques. As in any other kind of manipulation, distraction is the starting point. This is where the concept of state comes in. Rulers cannot directly manipulate the masses. The concept of state is used as the intermediary of distraction between the rulers and people. lMoreover, “people are led to believe something that is not true when that information is presented by an accepted authority.”². Rulers make use of emotional symbols (most of which trigger subconscious perception) in order to control actions and sentiments. Epic songs and poems, monuments, national anthems, official uniforms and national anniversaries are just a couple of rituals of statism.
History is also a lucrative source to pump national enthusiasm. Especially in distressing periods, glorifications of distorted and exaggerated past achievements (or just plain myths and legends) are used to manipulate the individuals through the previously embedded national sentiments.

In many cases, the state’s sacred entity is impersonated in characters called leaders. With the help of a heroification process, these leaders who have the main role in national myths, are presented as super humans.

Organized Religion and Cults

Using mind control techniques in order to better control the masses is not merely limited to those who govern. There are also many religious, secular and business groups which use various mind control techniques. Organized religion, however, possesses the only comparable power to that of those who govern.

Religion, at its core, intends to serve the good. It brings a call to people to join the righteous path. It has the intention to shape the human being in a way that will make a better person. To achieve this, it sets forth various rules and methods. But by nature, people think and act in different ways from each other. Moreover, they perceive the same things in so many different ways. Therefore, as a religion ages, it always splits into more factions and sects.

When the passage of time is involved; culture, politics and other corruptive influences distort the essence of religion – whether on purpose or not. When these are combined with imperfect decision making by human beings, wisdom of ages may end up a bunch of nonfunctional rules and restrictions that do not make much reasonable sense. This is when religion really becomes organized religion.

New generations who are born to this distorted belief system either blindly follow it or refuse to accept most parts of it – even though they have faith in the concept of a supreme being. This may foster social polarization between believers and non-believers – as well as polarization among sects. Because, when a religion is equated (or reduced) to rules and restrictions, it loses its edge, and the door to bigotry opens. These rules, restrictions and rituals become the religion itself; and the blind followers of this watered-down faith takes things to a new level. Because, this is when a cult mentality that embraces conformity is born.

Rulers of the cult (and also those who wish to manipulate the cult) embrace this conformity. Because, conformity makes it a lot easier to control (and in some cases manipulate) the members – since members composed of individuals who are exactly like one another will act and react accordingly and predictably. On the contrary, it is very hard to control a fully independent and liberated individual.

Another typical characteristic of religious (or non-religious) cults is to discourage individualism and autonomy. Cult members are provided with the few and same source(s) of information, while alternate readings or other inputs are discouraged. Members believe in almost exactly the same things, which is, most of the time, what they are told or taught to believe. In the end, members of such cults or sects come to think, look, act and dress more or less the same as one another, and reach a point where they tend to protect what they believe is true, and unconsciously filter out information they don’t want to receive.

Such a strong emphasis on conformity naturally involves the rejection of diversity, and thus it becomes pretty usual to treat deviant members with suspicion. Due to similar concerns, it is difficult for cults to recruit scientists, philosophers and artists, since they hardly fit in a certain mainstream. They tend to question the authority that prevails, as well as the underlying principles that are intended to not be discussed widely and openly.

After Indoctrination

Once programmed, both educated and uneducated masses become slaves to their own status quo mindsets.They ‘choose’ to believe in the dominant and populist ideas which are socially and officially approved, and they view all the changes to the status quo skeptically.

Slaves to the status quo mindset tend to label and categorize those who do not fit in the mainstream. That’s because they perceive and judge others with the paradigms and norms injected in their brains. A great deal of prejudice and stereotyping is involved in their understanding.

This is the typical transformation of individuals, who are now called citizens, from human beings to collective (or national) beings. The saddest part of all is that the dominant and populist idea exists in different forms. The indoctrination produces rightists, leftists, greens, yellows and so on. Citizens who choose one of these labels as their political identities start to believe that they are different from others in the political arena.