During the early weeks of the Gezi Park Protests in the summer of 2013, the Turkish government banned gatherings in Taksim Square. One man, however, stood alone in front of the Ataturk Cultural Centre (AKM), one of the symptoms around the never-ending events and culture wars, with the police around, obviously "obeying" the ban on gatherings. He instantly went viral on the internet: The Standing Man (Duran Adam), reminiscent of an unknown 1950s Hollywood melodrama The Man Who Stood There, while others began to stand "alone" nearby, but not exactly in the legally described form of an assembly or public gathering. As such, only the man's name was mythified and not the other participants'.
Living in an Orwellian hell is not an unusual feeling for anyone. In both cultural and individual narratives, it owes to the themes crucial to the issue of authoritarianism. The authoritarian question today is usually traced in the nationalist expressions, which ignores the historicity of fascism. What determines similar debates is always the capitalist world economy, functioning in the form of a "nation-state" (sharing world markets at the beginning of the century, especially bringing "nation-states" with borders drawn with rulers to allocate oil wells). The world economy carries out its operations by nation-states, where the citizens and the state are tied through belief, faith, tribalism, patriotism, etc.
In her influential book, Towards a Green Democratic Revolution (2022), Chantal Mouffe exhausts the leftist conceptualization of third-degree liberalism in the post-covid world. Advocating for a democracy aimed at exclusively defending the interests of ‘true nationals’ to “recover” democracy, for Mouffe, is in fact a call for restricting it with “an exclusive ethno-nationalist discourse that excludes migrants, considered as a threat to national identity and prosperity.”
Susan Neiman confirms Mouffe's line of thought in Left is Not Woke (2023), stressing that the left diverged from the universalist idea of ethics and justice for progress toward relativistic progress where justice for one could incoherently turn the other’s life into hell. Both voice the fear today that combines a statist absolutism and a digital control of the public conscience. The myth that authoritarian regimes created this fear continue to exist on the level of theses that evoke certain claims with the trouble with "fascism". On this level, human pluralities are tried to be absorbed into an isolation and "fear of the stranger".
The word “post-truth”, in this sense, is incompatible with both democratic debate and anticipation, reaction and adaptation to a physically changing reality, both conditioning and conditioned by the hegemonically prescribed information in the mainstream. Neiman rests the case in her example of the New York Times. A news media outlet that “sets the standards in more than one country” that incorporated the woke demonstrations lately, the discourse still underlines that “ethnic backgrounds” may determine political perspectives. Her comparison is a news title: “Despite Vice President Kamala D. Harris's Indian roots, the Biden administration may prove less forgiving over Modi's Hindu nationalist agenda”. The caption demands the debate, the fact that it is about India doesn’t show the fact that the harshest Indian critics of the country call it “fascism.” The contrast Neiman drew is the difference of tribalism that flourishes from biological reductionism and the intrusion of tribal politics into the authoritarian discourse of liberal politics in the very similar logics that the woke ideologies function.
Passions that find a chance to exist and find expression in the nationalist forms are neither good nor bad in themselves. Some are motivated by authoritarian interests like fascism, and some by liberating passions like liberalism, socialism. Unsurprisingly to Neiman’s view of “calling out” the woke excesses, the silence of the liberal left has driven these “passions” into the right accounts.
Donald Trump’s discourses conflict passions with rationality for a space of reconciliation within the nationalist perspective. Instead of a refurbished framework of woke politics on the right, this discourse could find a very deep expression within a fascist tradition of the 19th century by German thinkers who acted with the dream of uniting Kulturnation (cultural nation) and Staatnation(state-nation) that aren’t necessarily dependent on each other.
Neiman’s detailed accounts of the unhappy mergers of the Kulturnation/Staatnation perspectives into the right, the intertwining of the cultural and the tribal dead-ends necessitates the intervention of a territorial sovereignty (national borders) constituted by nation-states. Not a synthesis, but rather the proportioning and subordination of Kulturnation to the state’s fundamental needs. This situation is the inherent fascism of a rationality that defines the nation with the population, far from the naive and symbolic "race struggle" conception of the pre-18th century appropriated into the Woke discourses.
The discontent expressed by Neiman in her latest book is not a new expression of the liberal eclipse in the post-covid world. The French philosopher Barbara Stiegler describes "the ideology of cognitive biases" in Adapt! (2019) for the constitution of authoritarian liberalism qua biological liberal politics that misappropriate the scientific darwinism into an idea of adapting less with or to the advanced technologies than adapting these into the growing liberal values that themselves have become more authoritarian in their unwritten rules of entrepreneurship, self-sufficient individuation, privatization, speed, deregulation. The idea of adapting Buddhist ethics to liberal ideologies, for example, is seen as an ethical mode and a rejuvenating spirit for the endless distraction of the capitalist economy demands unlimited attention.
Stiegler makes the case for the evolutionary idea of adapting the cognitive sciences and how science and technology could be assimilated into the ideology even when that’s liberalism, an “ideology without an ideology”. She finds Walter Lippmann’s work in the USA as revelatory to refute the adaptation hypotheses in new liberal darwinism to biologist politics that inevitably misappropriate the sciences. The ideas emerged historically at the fin de siecle that paved the way to wars and depressions, and structured in the post-war international laws, treaties and institutions, and incorporated the information available into their prescribed discourses.
For Stiegler, these were the phases of liberal globalization envisioned by Lippmann who later incorporated the “rhythm” of human life to contrast with the pace of the capital mobilization where humans need to be less mobile than the capital. Lippmann’s version of darwinism concerned a comprehensive and realistic study of human nature avoiding any rationalist bias and the exhaustive adaptive activity in the pace of industrialization compared to human life. The ideology of participatory democracies is unproductive due to the alienation and stereotyping involved in the process, which is far from the industrial realities.
Conceptions of delusional constructs, illusions, and the explanation of beliefs in reality debates lead to understanding the discursive regimes relating to the collective productions of the unconscious capable of shaping the cores of psychic truth which are not undisclosed. These reality fictions solicit the unconscious dynamics for those who adhere to them would represent a distorted and displaced way of expressing what does not find a representation in the mainstream discourse.
A Note on the Greywolves and Menzils in Turkey and the EU
What if the EU joins the Counter Extremism Project in including the Greywolves in their terrorist list?
In 2020, the EU Parliament proposed to include “Greywolves” in the union’s “Terrorist List” due to shaking their integrity in the long procedure of Turkey’s inclusion. The non-profit Counter Extremism Project already included the Turkey-based organization in their list, helping counter their narratives and online recruitment for regulations and policies.
Significant portions of the coalition administration of the Republic of Turkey today were born from the 1960 coup, illustrating the influence of the army groups in politics via organizations (“ocak”/”teşkilat”) across the lower economic strata both in Turkey and Europe, mainly Germany and France.
Satisfying and channeling “human passions” is not very difficult indeed. All parties in Turkey have equally applicable potentials to use such spirits and passions found in the causes and narratives of this and similar groups’ extreme discourses, such as religious sects (tarikat) — see how the Menzil Tarikat made its way right through the state and the police following the fall of the Gulenist sect as a terror organization. Some rise to coalition accidentally, some intentionally.
All fall inevitably.
The Greywolves in Turkey use a logo with a color pattern almost the same as that of the UN. For this, Deutsche Welle, with its similar color and logo, made an ironic documentary “Why is a ‘death squad’ from Bangladesh allowed to go on UN missions?” in 2024. The head of the organization in Turkey was assassinated following accusations of drug trafficking in Turkey with connections even to Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Karl Marx’s infamous motto must be updated for the Turkish experience of the Gulenists, Menzil and Greywolves and the likes: “ideology is the opium of the masses”.
The “banned” in the EU would call for “exclusion” and “oppression” as if they were the “underdog majority” who could simultaneously find an expression in the “Good” deeds, the allowed existence in Turkey. The end of the ideological circles, the contradictions of consciousness that reproduce themselves in reiterative ways.
A famous film that was banned in Turkey during the 1980 coup typifies this governing contradiction. The film version of the Turkish scholar Aziz Nesin’s 1961 hiciv (satire) Zübük, also screened during the Gezi Park Protests in 2013 in the midst of tear-gas. The book was published following the 1960 military coup, where Zübük stands for a common Turkish stereotype in politics: whoever cynically and platonically lies and works in the shadows with an entrenched desire to be entitled.
Nesin’s subtitle to the book, “The Dog in the Shadow of the Oxcart”, has a Freudian reference, the untranslatable word unheimliche, the unusual, the psychocultural Id, the “evolved wolf”. It is the unusual that made its way to ruling Turkey in the 1950s, and was taken down in the 60s, and found another “cause” in politics following the 1960 military coup. Similarly, the 1980 film version of Zübük was set to be released on the same day of the 1980 coup, and banned for a while. Working in the shadows define these stereotypes in politics.
A lot is told about the psychology of their “terrorist stereotype” in literature. In numerous research, terrorist is depicted without an ideology, a consequence away from all ideological designs, a cliché of excuses of the modern world’s despairs and so forth. A life without ideological stance, thought and cause. Sounds like there’d be no terror if the means of “psychic healing” worked adequately.
Allegory doesn’t need to be an error. In the film Chicken Park (Jerry Calà, 1994), the Hollywood parody of Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993), a Native American gets out of a time-travel capsule and ends up in the film set, wonders if it is the set of Dances with Wolves (Kevin Costner, 1990), and gets back into the time machine.
Allegory, for Fredric Jameson in Allegory and Ideology (2019), is initially “dramatized by the way in which synonymy, homophony, ambiguity, polysemy, association, puns, faux amis , and the like — a whole materialist zone of that non-materialist collective dimension called language — offer the hinge on which local signifying systems (ideologeme) are constructed.” Notion of ideologeme is the particular unit of ideology that has a “dual structure”: an “opinion” and an “articulation”. Political psychologists could never disentangle that double structure of tyranny today.
For sure, Marxists like Jameson easily accept without questioning the “synthesis of opposites”, the dialectics of “extreme opposites”. This would itself oppose the idea of ”synthesis”, putting a “tension” instead of “synthesis”, reaching the “overturned” points of the duchampian works of tension among “extreme subjectivity” and “extreme objectivity”.
Terror is both a deviation of those without the political sphere of expression and a protest directed to the existing politics. In one way, “protest” is the answer of an individual or community, group or “movement” without reservations. The aim is to be hidden and unnoticed, directly attacking the ethics of “openness” and “transparency” of the modern world. Modern democracies had to recognize these answers without questions and try to domesticate these within their existence in the media.
A “guerilla” action that plays in the areas of urbanism and globality, “Greywolves” isn’t in politics for struggle, it changes or shape-shifts while rendering its danger on the living and the spirits. Furthermore, the organization is affiliated directly with a coalition party, and the Turkish government disregarded the EU call. Instead of addressing a misinterpreted logic of the organization, dealing with the EU’s attitudes in encountering terrorism illuminates the monopolization of the description of “terror”.
The benign Turkish state compromises the “service” to legitimize itself and its actions vis-a-vis the negative terrorist actions, and instead, transfers/outsources the terror to some other parties. For Weberians, the state is the only legitimate heir to violence and to decide what is terror and what is not. Of course, they wouldn’t have thought if the violence was direct or indirect.
What if the EU joins the Counter Extremism Project in including the Greywolves in their terrorist list?
“Terror” doesn’t have a bureaucratic form under the yoke of “complaints and objections”. In the EU, it is clear that sufficient strength cannot be gained with pure objection and complaint. It is closer to the corporeal language of events, rather than the spoken.
A danger that could emerge from anywhere, terror has a virutic domain, finding its platonic or domesticated description in “violence”. Violence is more of the externalization of terror, maybe an unavoidable conclusion, and never a must-condition or postulate. It references a superficial theatre where experiences, desires and slogans play, not the reckoning in the world of opinions and judgements.
The expressions like “shaken integrity” or “attacked lifestyles” are symptoms of the inability to describe. Evidently, the EU and most developed countries understand the inaccuracies of these descriptions.
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(last entry by Tolga Theo Yalur - 07/03/2025 at 17:35)