Insulting Turkishness

You’ve been reading here about the up side of Turkey. The wonderful sights, the culture, the hospitality.

So here’s an article on the flip side. Not content with last year’s aborted prosecution of the author Orhan Pamuk, Turkish fascists have chosen another target, Elif Shafak, whose The Bastard of Istanbul won the Best Novel award from the Turkish Writers’ Association. Her novel, a huge bestseller, has been charged with “insulting Turkishness.”

“Insulting Turkishness” is punishable by imprisonment of up to three years, with a third added if the insult was committed in a foreign country. This in a country that has ratified the European Convention on Human Rights and the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Both writers mentioned in their fiction what the entire world knows: that the Turkish government deliberately killed millions of Armenians, and tens of thousands of Kurds, during the First World War. (The Turkish government, by the way, admits all this, though they dispute the word “genocide.” You say “potayto,” I say “gunned down many and starved the rest.”)

So are the prosecutions of Turkey’s most popular writers, whose works have already been read by legions of Turks, aimed at preventing Turks from knowing the dark deeds committed by their ancestors?

No, because the Turks know all that. It’s not a secret.

I reckon the prosecutions are aimed at keeping Turkey out of the European Union. The attempt to enter the Union compelled the Turks to recognize international standards of human rights, to turn down the heat on their domestic war on insurrectionary Kurds, and to sing sweet reason on issues such as Cyprus, where their current policy is far more reasonable than that of, say, the Greek Cypriots.

Stalwart right-wing Turks want a free hand in Cyprus and against the region’s uppity Kurds, and the prosecutions of prominent international literary personalities (not to mention a score of local journalists) are a way of causing so much anguish and embarrassment that the EU will reject Turkey and leave it to its bad old habits.

I would say something like, “In solidarity with our literary siblings, let us all insult Turkishness together,” except that I happen to like Turkishness. It’s just shithead Turkish politicians I despise.