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.
A short explanation is needed at this juncture concerning the Marxists controlling BBC Turkish. First and foremost, in Turkey, communist revolutionaries come from higher social classes. Moreover, even though it may sound paradoxical, absurd and far beyond astonishing the first time, the persistent call for a communist revolution, but probably not an actual communist revolution, is indeed one of the favorite ways of maintaining and even enhancing the elite social privileges. This has a lot to do with Turkey's peculiar social progress. Increasingly since the middle of the 1980s, and acceleratingly since the Ak Party's election to political power in late 2002, Turkish working class masses, who are predominantly more or less pious or at least faithful Muslims, have been becoming middle class and having a greater say in the political system, thereby causing the system to become a more democratic one each passing day. This is unacceptable to the West-friendly elites of Turkey as well as their postcolonial "partners", so to speak, as this means that the non-secular Muslim masses are taking the country away from the entrenched secular elites' control, shattering the established secularist, pro-Western socio-politico-economic order right at its foundations. The well-to-do left elites cannot respond to this through fair competition. One of the few ways that occur to them for the purpose of stopping the rise of the people whom they see as mere ignorant non-secular Muslim masses is by trying in vain to persuade those masses that they should stop working hard and attaining middle class status but instead should join their high-status left-wing masters in a so-called people's revolution. When the would-be masters of the imagined people's revolution understand that they will not be able to dupe the Muslim masses like this, they call either for the help of that bastion of secularism in Turkey, which is the military, or the friendly and adorable West. Since the army option does not seem viable enough any more due to the current leadership of it, they now have faith in the big Western powers.**
Coming back to my one little objection to Professor Berktay's otherwise great article, I do not believe that the reason why BBC in English tells those lies so blatantly and brazenly could be because they are naively deceived by this Marxist-leaning Turkish section of theirs. I am quite certain of the professionality and intelligence of the people who lead BBC on an international level. Therefore, I have to conclude that those employees of BBC Turkish have been being recruited with full knowledge of their ideological position and actually for the very reason that they hold that position. The far left in Turkey is the ideologically closest and most loyal to "secular Western values". They are the ultimate Westernizers, the staunchest modernizers in an ideological pro-Western sense. Furthermore, their zeal for modernization does not go beyond ideology, so that economically and socially they are quite regressive, hence a liability for the economic and social progress of a "developing" country like Turkey, which is supposed to remain in the developing status forever and ever. This makes them infinitely loveable and employable to the official people who are the top supervisors of BBC because this is what to the latter's point of view is bon pour l'Orient (i.e. good for the East).
Professor Berktay should then realize that neither BBC Turkish nor BBC in general are being surprising or abnormal. They are doing what they are supposed to do. Those people in BBC Turkish have been educated, trained and given those privileges in American or British institutions of education only in the hope of this kind of behavior --or, if you wish, service.
Footnotes:
* When I first wrote this article I used stronger expressions, as I was extremely overwhelmed by the intense assaults of lies and slanders directed against the political administrators and the common people of the Republic of Turkey from the media and social media that included the BBC. Since what befits a Muslim is to speak kindly and nicely however belligerent his enemies might be, I later tried to tone down my expressions as much as possible. (1 May 2017 Monday)
** After I wrote this article, it was realized that the secular-totalitarian elites actually still had the army option thanks to the secret Gülenist terror formation within the army. Furthermore, the secularists were consciously contributing to the process toward the Gülenist coup through such methods as have been described here. Their purpose was to re-take the country through both Western support and the Gülenist alliance and to stop the rise of the Muslim, non-secular common people.
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