Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently added to his growing list of odd declarations by claiming Muslims discovered the New World some 300 years before Christopher Columbus.
We’ll never know whether Mr Erdogan really believes what he says. But we do know what interests his claims promote. Trading in fringe history, as Mr Erdogan has, is a page right out of the playbook on nationalising the past. Modern Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, went as far as propounding the “Sun Language Theory”, which described how Turkish was the world’s original language from which all others were derived.
Whether Atatürk really believed this matters less than the purpose it served in the early years of the republic: to bolster a new nation’s national consciousness.
Drawing together wide tropes of history and identity, such theories were part of Atatürk’s massive programme of social engineering, which was intent on creating a new republican citizenry with looks, lifestyles and values reflective of what was considered the modern European civilisation that Turkey belonged to.
Despite vast differences of circumstances, there remains a sense that Mr Erdogan’s openly-admitted efforts to engineer a new society and citizenry resemble a 21st century version of Atatürk’s project. The difference is that his version promotes Sunni, conservative, populist and neoliberal values, with an external reference that is less European and more Middle Eastern.
The subtext of Mr Erdogan’s speech in which he claimed Muslims discovered America fits this running narrative: Muslims have not been imperialists, unlike the New World’s Christian conquerors and foreign powers in the Middle East today.
Last month, Mr Erdogan claimed modern-day “Lawrences of Arabia” were agitating in the region just as TE Lawrence did during the First World War. Prime minister Ahmet Davutoglu speaks of Turkey closing a “hundred-year parenthesis” during which Turkey was “cut off” from the Middle East.
Artificial borders, drawn a century ago according to imperialist interests are causing suffering today, Mr Erdogan said.
Mr Erdogan suggested he would build a mosque in Cuba to commemorate Muslims’ American discovery and then segued into pronouncements that insinuated certain beneficiaries of the imperial design of the Middle East had neglected this duty.
Mr Erdogan’s rhetoric may sound erratic, but it also serves to bait anti-government and anti-political Islam polemics in Turkey and the international press, which in turn help him consolidate his constituency even further. Mr Erdogan’s statements also operate as a disciplining test of allegiance.
But to focus on whether this rhetoric is erratic is a mistake George Orwell identified in a 1939 review of British philosopher Bertrand Russell’s book Power: A New Social Analysis.
Orwell appreciated Russell’s analysis of tyranny: namely one that depends on a “huge system of organised lying” to keep “their followers out of contact with reality” and that only democracy accompanied by “an educational system tending to promote tolerance and tough-mindedness” could protect society. But Orwell faulted Russell for believing “common sense” would ultimately prevail against tyranny.
This same bias is at the heart of analyses of Mr Erdogan’s rhetoric in terms of whether they make sense. Orwell argued it was far from certain that common sense would prevail, and that making this hope the centrepiece of liberal resistance was a recipe for impotency.
“It is quite possible that we are descending into an age in which two and two will make five when the Leader says so,” Orwell wrote. “It is quite easy to imagine a state in which the ruling caste deceive their followers without deceiving themselves.”
Instead of focusing on whether Mr Erdogan makes sense, liberals should take Orwell’s criticism to heart and worry why they cannot compete against nonsense in Turkey.
Caleb Lauer is a freelance journalist who covers Turkey
