Turkey in the Cold War

Ideology and Culture

C. Örnek Konu, Ç. Üngör Sunar, C. Örnek Konu, Ç. Üngör Sunar, Kenneth A. Loparo, Kenneth A. Loparo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137326690
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

This volume examines the cultural and ideological dimensions of the Cold War in Turkey. Departing from the conventional focus on diplomacy and military, the collection focuses on Cold War's impact on Turkish society and intellectuals. It includes chapters on media and propaganda, literature, sports, as well as foreign aid and assistance.

Part I
Propoganda and Discourse

1
Cold War in the Pulpit:
The Presidency of Religious Affairs and Sermons during the Time of Anarchy and Communist Threat

Ceren Kenar and Doğan Gürpınar

This study investigates the use of religion during the Cold War by the Turkish state via the Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı), the state agency that is responsible for regulating and monitoring the conduct of religious services (in mosques and elsewhere), as well as for the imposition of ‘proper Islam’. This essay examines sermons delivered during Friday prayers (khutba in Arabic, hutbe in Turkish) which were sanctioned by the Presidency of Religious Affairs (PRA) and recited from pulpits throughout the country in addition to articles published in various PRA periodicals that the PRA distributed primarily to train and inform imams (clerics, prayer leaders) and circulated in cities, towns, and thousands of villages across the country. The essay specifically examines sermons¹ in the late 1970s on the eve of the 1980 coup when Islamic anti-communism was at its zenith. Before 1980, imams were de jure free to prepare their own sermons due to certain legal loopholes. However, the PRA provided imams with sermons, which were supposed to be used as models, even if these model sermons were not expected to be read verbatim. These model sermons were distributed via the PRA’s periodicals, first and foremost Diyanet Gazetesi (PRA Journal) in the late 1970s during the cultural Second Cold War in Turkey.

This essay also discusses the repercussions of the invasion of Afghanistan as demonstrated in the journal of the PRA since this incursion propelled Cold Warriorism merged with Islamic vigilance. Rather than investigating Islamic and Islamist anti-communism, this essay examines the campaign launched by the PRA and its employment of Islamic motifs to garner obedience to the (secular) state. It also examines the intersection of the agendas of the Kemalist national security establishment with an Islamic consciousness against the common foe as consummately embodied in the discourses of the PRA.

Introduction: The Changing Face of Cold War Culture and Anti-Communism in Turkey

In the first two decades of the Cold War, Kemalism, which had strictly excluded any public expression of Islam from legitimate politics, assumed the anti-communist Cold War line in Turkey (in contradistinction to the conservative and religious overtones of the culture of Cold war in the United States).² It was the ‘civil religion’ of Turkey.³ Remarkably, the attributes of religion in the United States were assumed by Kemalism. Kemalism (as a secular and civic religion for many) was seen as constituting the pivot of the social and moral universe of the nation, particularly for the middle classes and bureaucratic-military establishment in Turkey. The war on communism was waged in Turkey under the aegis of Kemalism. The values espoused by Kemalism were juxtaposed against subversive communism.

This culture of the Cold War prevailed in Turkey until the mid-1960s. This conformist political culture perceived any political diversion (and tilt either to the right or the left) as inherently treacherous and hazardous to the moral order of the mainstream. This centrism perceived both right-wing Islamic politics and socialism as abhorrent and offensive to the values embodied by the Kemalist republic and its values. Although religion emerged as a bulwark against communism in the minds of arch-secularist Kemalists as early as the late 1940s – simultaneously with the rise of McCarthyism, which was concerned that republican radicalism may bring about unintended Communist infiltration – public references to religion were viewed with suspicion. Nevertheless, these attitudes changed in the late 1960s and early 1970s. By the mid-1960s, a new (and antagonistic) political culture surged both at the right and left wing of the political spectrum. It was also the time when the Cold War consensus shattered, not unlike the transformation of the political culture of the United States in the ‘long sixties’ and the surge of the counter-culture.⁴ The simultaneous emergence and surge of the left and the right, which were dissociated from their center-left and center-right bases, transformed the political climate.

Certainly, this was a new political climate, ushered in by the relatively progressive 1961 Constitution, in which the center could no longer hold (both on the right and on the left). In this polarized political climate, the left and the right emerged claiming to be antithetical and in juxtaposition to each other rather than replicating and adapting the supposedly universal ideologies of Western Europe. In the second half of the 1960s, the staunchly Kemalist youth gradually tilted to the left and to a newly imagined ‘progressive Kemalism’, which gradually transformed into socialism. During this period, socialism became the dominant political allegiance among youth, especially on university campuses. It was so much so that voting for the center-right Justice Party (JP) and adhering to a rightist worldview was regarded as a disgrace tantamount to treason.⁵ This nascent socialism was molded within the ideology of Kemalism, upholding its enlightened premises and its rancor toward religion.⁶

This shift created its nemesis on the right. In fact, arguably the Turkish right-wing dispositions (as they began to disassociate from the Turkish center-right) were created as a mirror image of the Turkish left. Although previously the Islamic-inspired nationalists could be marginalized by the center-right governments, as in the case of the closure of the controversial Turkish Nationalists Association in 1953,⁷ this was no longer tenable. Concomitant with the rupture of the youth from the RPP and Kemalism tilting toward socialism and mocking the political centrism of their parents, the sons of the voters of the JP in the countryside also broke from the JP. As a member of this generation recalls, ‘We perceived the [Justice] Party as Masonic, an imitator of the West and cosmopolitan.’⁸ The center-right JP, which had successfully overwhelmed the center of the political spectrum with the enormous turnouts it enjoyed in the elections (53 percent in 1965, 47 percent in 1969), began to lose its grip and its monopoly on the right of the political spectrum.⁹ The minor right-wing Republican Peasants and Nation Party (RPNP) was renamed the Nationalist Movement Party (NMP) after the election of Alpaslan Türkeş as the chairman in 1965, and was transformed from a conservative agrarian-populist party to a radical nationalist party. Simultaneously, a new party with an Islamist orientation, the National Order Party (NOP), was founded in 1970 by those who no longer wanted to be affiliated with the centrist and pragmatic JP but sought an exclusively Islamic political orientation.¹⁰ Furthermore, those who were perturbed by the internationalist commitments of Süleyman Demirel, the powerful chairman of the JP, quit the party to found a new Democrat Party (DP), slightly tilted to the right of the party. They invoked a populist discourse imbued with the conservative values of the constituency of the JP. Disturbed with the surge of right-wing tendencies within the party, the JP ousted well-known right-wing ideologues who used to be affiliated with the party. Well-known right-wing deputies of the JP, such as Osman Yüksel Serdengeçti, the author of many books and pamphlets inciting the sentiments of the conservatives, and Osman Turan, the eminent conservative historian, intellectual, and ideologue, were expelled from the party. The right wing of the party under the leadership of Sadettin Bilgiç, who lost the party congress to Demirel, was also driven out from the commanding heights of the party. Nevertheless, in the 1970s, the centrist DP was forced to endorse a right-wing political stance and establish a ‘National Front’ with the political parties to its right against the perceived leftist threat. The center-right consensus established against the left crumbled and its center of gravity shifted to the right.

The right as a political outlook unfettered by the centrist JP was clearly on the ascendancy. The mushrooming Organization for Combating Communism (Komünizmle Mücadele Derneği), with overt Islamic overtones,¹¹ was heavily active in anti-Communist vigilance in the 1960s, most likely encouraged by the Turkish para-state.¹² The National Turkish Union of Students (MTTB, Milli Türk Talebe Birliği) was taken over by conservative and right-wing students in 1967 with the election of İsmail Kahraman (future minister from the Islamist Welfare Party [Refah Partisi] in 1996–97).¹³ The student union declared ‘Zionists, Communists, and Masons’ as its foremost foes. However, its main ideological thrust was its staunch and uncompromising anti-communism, which associated communism with every kind of vice, moral corruption, and cosmopolitanism. The Turkish rightist discourse was arguably crafted in the mirror image of the pervasive Communist threat, which was tantamount to immorality, social degeneration, materialism, and atheism.¹⁴ The Turkish right exploited the prevailing clichés regarding the Turkish left and communism. A new publication industry boomed with the publication of anti-Communist books (many of which were translations from English and French) printed in the thousands. These works were distributed gratis by state publication houses in addition to a private supply of volumes written by alarmed anti-Communists, who devoted themselves to exposing the ominous, dark face of the socialists and the left.¹⁵ Leftists were not to be reproached for their dismissal of capitalism and private property. It was their transgression of the social and moral order and codes of behavior that made them treacherous in the eyes of the rightists. According to this view, communism threatened not an economic regime but ‘the territorial integrity of Turkey’,¹⁶ ‘the last surviving Turkish state’, ‘the sacred treasury of this nation’,¹⁷ and national values and consciousness.¹⁸

This rhetoric did not remain abstract, but brought about the mobbing of the offices of the socialist Labor Party of Turkey (TİP) and other leftist organizations (most notoriously, the assault on the Union of Teachers of Turkey in Kayseri in 1969 and the assault on the leftist protest against the 6th Fleet in 1969 known as ‘Bloody Sunday’)¹⁹ in various towns. These attacks were most likely coordinated by the Turkish para-state organization. Whereas in the second half of the 1960s, this anti-Communist violence was perpetrated by overtly religious mobs, by the 1970s the Islamic character of the anti-Communist mobs and anti-Communist vigilance was trivialized and the Islamic motifs were incorporated into a nationalist right-wing sentiment.²⁰

Given that anti-communism constituted the thrust of this new temperament, it lacked a clear ideological content and agenda.²¹ This new rightist worldview was an amalgamation of religious, nationalist, centrist, and populist sensibilities based on the identity of the foe: the left, communism, and cosmopolitanism. In the 1970s, according to İlhan Darendelioğlu who headed the Association for Fighting Communism, ‘Turkish nationalism finally fused with Islam and was imbued with a Turkish-Islamic consciousness at a time when the feebleness of patriotism devoid of any faith and religion was acknowledged.’²² In this environment, Islam/religion emerged as a relatively prominent and hence legitimate component of this burgeoning political sentiment that was to be upheld as an antidote to socialism and communism. The Turkish (national security) establishment tilted to the right as socialism and leftist dispositions among youth swelled. Reshuffling its network of alliances, Islam began to be endors...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Propoganda and Discourse
• Part II Culture and Sport
• Part III Foreign Aid and Assistance
• Index