Research Catalogue

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.