Stand up in Solidarity

This is the transcript for my first video on my YouTube channel Cogitationland: Solidarity and Equality.

As long as modern government acts both as a rich and coddling father for women and as a substitute husband for them and empowers women socially to the detriment of men, women will keep looking down on most men, the socially weakened sex.

Biologically speaking, a woman will always want her man to be socially more powerful than herself, so that the man will be able to contribute to protecting and feeding the less muscular woman and her offspring. As women are empowered against ordinary men, no men except the 2-per-cent upper class remain capable of fulfilling this condition for a woman's continuing respect and love, and therefore the human family becomes impossible to survive all this social engineering perpetrated by the rich and pampered --ostensibly in the name of women's rights but actually for the unjust and unequal aggrandizement of the rich at the expense of ordinary men like you and me. 

Extremely Different Attitudes in Turkey Toward Marriage with Cousins

The attitude within a whole modern "ethnic group" (1) toward marrying cousins is yet another topic on which it is not a good idea to make a generalization. In fact, there is great variation, or actually diametric opposition, between regional practices among us so-called “Turks of Turkey”, that is, us “Rumi”s (Turkish-speaking Anatolians and Rumelians) with respect to cousin and kin marriage.(2)

A Story of the Arab Spring as Tragedy, Betrayal and Hope*

I've had the chance to reconsider what I know and guess about the "Arab Spring" and the Syrian civil war upon watching a video that discusses them. The video is that of a talk given by an Arab Spring activist named Iyad al-Baghdadi. I don't know him and cannot comment on what kind of a person he is, but his speech was interesting, though a bit sentimental: Iyad el-Baghdadi - إياد البغدادي - The Arab Spring Manifesto. I believe that in one sense the Arab Spring was made by the common people of the involved countries but was hijacked by the Western "Great Powers" that used it to install new tyrannies instead of the previous outworn ones. In another sense, the opposite happened: It was made by the Western Great Powers, that is, their intelligence services and then was hijacked by the common people. Let me try to briefly explain what I mean by this.

Re-evaluating the Mendacious BBC and the Turkish Elitist Left after a Year

When I wrote my previous post On Understanding the Mendacious BBC and the Turkish Left-Wing Correctly, the November 1st elections in Turkey had not yet been held, and the July 15th coup that was to fail was 11 months away. It is now understood clearly that both the pro-Western left elites of Turkey and their White-Man masters were preparing for both of the two great events. With their belligerent publishing and broadcasting at the end of the "solution process" by which they made the PKK seem to be in the right and the Turkish government in the wrong, they were meaning to initially weaken our President Erdoğan by humiliating him in the eyes of the people and making him look bad and then to lay the groundwork for the next year's Gülenist coup.

On Understanding the Mendacious BBC and the Turkish Left-Wing Correctly*

Halil Berktay of Sabancı University, a prominent Turkish professor of history, wrote this article, which surprised me in some ways: Dulce et decorum est to be able to lie like the BBC. Do not take me wrong. Whatever he wrote over there is correct, and it is a great and wonderful article which everyone interested in current Turkish politics must definitely read. What I am surprised at is his apparent naive expectations from the BCC in terms of journalism and truthfulness.

Halil Berktay sounds stunned at BBC's cold-blooded twisting of the truth about Turkish politics and Turkey's relations with the PKK --the Kurdish nationalist and avowedly Marxist militant-revolutionary organization trying to fully dominate the Kurds of Turkey (and now, of Syria) and force them into accepting a future independent government by it over a portion of what is today Turkey. In the article Halil Berktay suggests that this travesty of journalism which consists in telling all kinds of lies in favor of the said Marxist revolutionary organization might have possibly stemmed from a deception of BBC English by its Turkish version, which is known to be heavily staffed with educated members of a militant and regressive Marxist faction advocating communist revolutionary violence. My point is that one would expect Professor Berktay to know better than to assume that BBC would behave differently in any language version of it.

The Original Meaning of the Word "Turkey"

Sultan Selim III exchanging eid greetings in front of the Gate Of Felicity**

An important fact that I suppose many people do not expect is this: The Ottoman administration and people never named their government or state "Turkey". The word "Turkey" (or Turchia, Türkei, etc.), which was used in European languages to mean "the land of the Ottomans", must have begun to be used in Turkish only toward the middle of the 19th century. Europeans, on the other hand, used to refer to the Ottoman dynasty, their state and the entire Muslim community under their rule as the Turks. There was also a similar usage among the Ottoman population in the Balkans. For example, if you would have asked a Muslim Albanian (or, for that matter, a Muslim Bosnian or a Balkan Turk), he would have said: "The pillars of Turkishness are five: To say the word of the testimony [i.e. the shahada, the statement that there is no other deity than Allah/God and that Muhammad (God bless him and give him peace) is His messenger], to pray the five daily prayers, to fast, ..." (These are actually "the five pillars of Islam".) Furthermore, even in our present time, oldish Muslims in the Balkans or with roots in the Balkans often form very similar sentences and understand the word Turk in this way.

Two Objections to Our Ottoman Heritage and Their Answers

1396 Battle of Nicopolis (Niğbolu)**

Below is a translation of a blog post of mine in Turkish. I feel the need to write this introductory paragraph before the actual text because it may sound odd to foreigners how come some Turks can claim to be something other than descendants of Ottomans. It is indeed strange, but it has tangible roots in in the history of the last 90 years or so on account of the fact that, since around 1925, authoritarian Westernization and secularism, coupled with a continuation of Western-style nationalism of the hard-line type widespread in the 1930s, has dominated the Turkish educational system and politics under the official jumble of Europe-inspired opinions.

Objection: “When most members of the Ottoman dynasty have gone out to Europe and the like, how can we be descendants of the Ottomans?”