‘I Can Sleep When the Storm Breaks’

Years ago, a farmer bought a farm on a hill where storms were frequent. After settling in, his first task was to find a farmhand. But no one from either the nearby villages or the distant ones was willing to work on his farm. Every applicant changed their mind upon seeing the location, saying, this place is too stormy; you’d better give up too.

Finally, a frail, middle-aged man agreed to take the job. The farmer, looking at his appearance, couldn’t help but ask, ‘Do you know anything about farm work?’ The man replied, ‘It is sort of’, and added ‘I can sleep when the storm breaks.’

Farmer thought about this irrelevant statement for a while, then ignored it and hired the man in desperation.

As the weeks went by, he felt relieved to see that the man was doing his farm work regularly, until that storm.

At midnight, he was startled awake by the eerie howling of the storm. The house was shaking. He jumped out of bed and ran to the farmhand’s room.

‘Get up, get up! A storm is here. We need to do whatever we can before it blows everything away!’

Without even getting up from his bed, the man muttered: ‘Don’t worry, sir, go your bed and sleep. When I applied to the job, I told you that I can sleep when there is a storm.’

The farmer was furious at the man’s comfort. The first thing he would do the next morning was to fire him, but now he had to find a way out of the storm. He went outside and ran to the hay bales.

A-ah! The hay bales were put together, covered with tarpaulin, and tied tightly.

He ran to the barn. All the cows had already been brought inside, and the barn door was firmly reinforced. Heading back to the house, he saw that all the shutters had been closed.

Relieved, the farmer returned to his room and lay back down. The storm continued to howl. He smiled and, as he closed his eyes, he murmured:

‘I can sleep when the storm breaks.’

The State and Society of the 20th Century

Turkish society has a heterogeneous cultural structure. This cultural structure is a unique cultural mix in which very different and often contradictory traditions have coexisted for centuries, ranging from ancient Mesopotamian/Anatolian civilizations to Mediterranean culture, from Turkish nomadic traditions to Kurdish and Arab traditions, from Balkan and Caucasian migrations to Islamic and Byzantine (Greek-Armenian) influences. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, there were dozens of ethnic elements, belief systems and sects gathered in the Anatolian geography, which was like an inner castle of the Empire.

Likewise, from the early days of the Republic era, various ideological and political movements—Turkish and Kurdish nationalism, Kemalism, liberalism, socialism, and Islamism—have gained societal support. This complex cultural structure is defined by the coexistence and interaction of old and new civilizations, ideologies, religions, sects, ethnic traditions, and customs. This structure, which can be reduced to the two main segmentary cultures (easternist and westernist, traditionalist-innovative) that are dominant and determinant (if we consider the current situation), has a key role in understanding and changing Turkish society. Because there is a different culture and tradition dominating every part of the country, and a single type, homogeneous and standard understanding of people and society cannot be explanatory in such a society.

In addition to this general cultural map of society, many subcultures can be listed that have formed in big cities and rural areas based on economic and social reasons. These subcultures include the cultures of elites, petty bourgeoises, shantytowners, borgers, peasants, workers, etc. This rich cultural composition manifests itself in the form of provincial modernization in the east of the country as the transition from an agricultural society to an industrial society occurs, and in the west, as neoliberalism takes hold, it produces more diverse cultural versions. The new forms that all these different cultural groups will take, together with the relations they will establish with the developing Islamic social segments, will lead to new and interesting cultural combinations. This diversity is undoubtedly the result of at least 2,000 years of multicultural coexistence, spanning from Eastern Rome to the Ottoman Empire. As a matter of fact, when we look at huge geographies such as Europe, Russia and China, we see that the approach to those who are different, foreigners and immigrants is extremely sectarian and frightening. Even in an immigrant country like the USA, Aryan racism based on the ‘western-white-anglo-saxon-protestant’ identity called WASP is still deeply dominant. In this sense, while pluralism is perceived as a threat in the U.S. and Europe, in Türkiye, it is a source of social depth and richness. The pluralistic social structure is, in one sense, a guarantee of the continuation of our historical tradition, which ensures the formation of a nation through the combination of differences.

On the other hand, there is always a risk of conflict between social elements due to uniform fascist policies that cannot manage this and ethnic nationalist elements that cannot grasp this national composition. The terror of the sickly elements who think they can unite a heterogeneous society by homogenizing it, and who cut down those who do not fit into the Procrustes Bed in their mentally problematic brains, is the most important security problem. Homogeneity should exist only in shared identity, legal principles, and common ideals, not in culture, language, ethnicity, sect, faith, or ideology.

It would be beneficial for the state memory, which has been stuck in the trauma of the Ottoman disintegration period in the last century, to look back at the Ottoman experience, which has been constantly growing for at least 600 years, constantly meeting and merging with new cultural and social elements, creating a symphonic common culture and identity. In this long period, in cases of peace and order could not be maintained through normal functioning, they sometimes achieved peace and order through housing policies, sometimes through necessary wars, and sometimes through coercive public order measures. The Eastern Roman Empire and the Ottoman Empire were able to establish peace and order to the extent that they could integrate different groups and communities into the system and include them in the normal functioning of the order; whenever they could not manage this, chaos and turmoil emerged.

Dominance in Anatolia and its surroundings can be achieved by constant movement on a wild horse and clever rhythms that keep the horse calm. The intelligent rhythm consists of the scales of justice and the sword of order, balanced by the shield of mercy. The correct use of the scales, sword and compassion of the state, that is, justice and law, ensures that this is kept in balance. If the rulers disturb the balance, chaos and anarchy arise, social decay increases. Everything becomes a threat. In these conditions, the state tries to maintain balance by using surplus power, and in most cases, excessive power deepens the chaos even further.

Home ownership of majority and otherisation

The first condition for managing social differences with justice and compassion is to respect, recognize, and value every social group and community. If the state or a part of the state, society or a part of society, thinks of itself as the owner of the house and creates an other and treats the other in an exclusive, degrading and belittling manner, the other truly becomes other, alienated and looks for another protector. In such cases, social minorities begin to look for this protectorship in between foreign powers. This situation ultimately poisons both the state and the entire society, initiating a process that also alienates the majority from itself. Every policy, behavior, and way of thinking that disrupts the heterogeneous cultural composition and balance does not only harm the minority but often affects the majority even more. After all, every majority is made up of minorities.

In a healthy society, no one should feel like an outsider or the other. And no one should be able to position themselves as the sole homeowner. This principle applies to social justice as well. ‘No citizen should be rich enough to buy another, and no one should be so poor as to be forced to sell themselves.’ (J.J. Rousseau)

The ancient circle of justice is well known: ‘There can be no justice without an army, no army without taxes, no taxes without wealth, and no wealth without justice.’ In other words, in an unjust environment, the state and society become impoverished both materially and spiritually. Not only material poverty but also spiritual poverty is the womb of many unrests.

21st Century; New segmentary conflict axes

Türkiye has now surpassed the innovative-conservative segmentary axis inherited from the Tanzimat era, that is, the modernization process.

The contradictions between the native colonizers and the actual natives, codenamed Kamalism, which emerged as a result of the self-colonization policies implemented in the early years of the Republic era, have also been largely overcome – although they relapsed from time to time – but more importantly, they have become meaningless for the 21st century.

Likewise, the ideological segments – nationalism, leftism, Islamism – that were the products of social engineering planned especially during the coups period all along the post-World War II democracy period, are now invalid.

The Kurdish issue and the secularism vs. reactionism problems, which were deliberately escalated after the September 12 coup, have also been largely solved over the past 20 years through both political and coercive measures.

Of course, all these 20th century contradictions and conflicts have their aftershocks, accumulated residues and the political tradesmen who make a living from them still have some influence within the state and society. But in the final analysis, they do not have any national or universal value that determines direction or makes decisions in the context of the current course of both the world and the country. Because both the paradigms and the reasons for existence of all these segments no longer exist. The strange, amorphous alliances, reunions, syntheses and dubious collaborations between Turkists and leftists, nationalists and Islamists, secularists and religionists, Kurdish nationalists and Kemalists, and again leftists and rightists, Islamists and Kemalists in the political arena, stem from the existential crisis of these moribund Cold War ideologies, and their demise is inevitable. Just as the tools and equpments that once served the vital needs of hunter-gatherer tribes were transformed into totems or fetish objects upon their transition to settled life, the segmentary tribes in the past of our society—leftists, rightists, Kemalists, religious, ethnic, sectarian, and ideological factions—will likewise turn their existential tools into mere symbols and totems, worshiping them for a while longer. (The boasting of those who put Atatürk’s picture or the letters of the Scandinavian Runic alphabet in the hands of young people in the name of Turkishness or Zoroastrian Aryan symbols in the name of Kurdishness should not mislead anyone. These habits of ignorance are symptoms of despair, not of the hope for future, but of the exhausted past. Animist-pagan habits recur in every age.)

The positive functions of the tribes of the past, which motivate society, politicize the youth and bring them out of adolescence, socialize people and include them in the political process, have been replaced by meaningless tribal fights, blood feuds and a new type of asocial fanaticism that talks to each other in echo chambers set up in small modern ghettos. These ghettos, which destroy social energy, turn the intelligent children of society into sociopathic victims, and  revolve around themselves in closed circles, just as the Yazidis cannot escape from the circle that has been built around them, are hell wells that draw the whole society along with themselves into a schizophrenic pit and destroy it, instead of creating a new dynamism that can face the coming wave.

The Fundamental Contradictions of the New Era

History is evolving beyond the modernization process that has been gradually dismantling institutionalized religions, military-agrarian empires, and master-slave dialectics over the past 500 years. In this last phase of time, where scientific-philosophical inventions and ideas that explode especially in the 30s of every century progress by transforming the following decades and become an increasingly faster flowing river or even flood, it is clear that there will be another qualitative leap as we approach the 2030s. This process, in which the institutionalized representatives of the People of the Book (Christianity and Islam) who dominated ancient history, shaped fundamental values ​​and especially established political and military orders, are unable to produce solutions to humanity’s new problems, and as they fail to do so, they are excluded from life and as they are excluded, they become fanatic, continues at a much faster pace, whether it is called modernity, capitalism or any other name. This development dynamic, which even the experience of socialism could not stop, has now reached a new phase with the digital revolution.

The course of this process, which is advancing with new physical theories on a scientific level, financial capitalism on an economic level, unmanned weapons of mass destruction and asymmetric war armies on a military level, and which is ending the American century for now and advancing towards the Chinese century, points to a much more comprehensive and shocking storm.

The most important, fundamental and genuine division of Türkiye- and now the world – on the brink of this storm seems to be taking shape along two fundamental axes that are parallel but interrelated.

The first of these fundamental axes, is the contradiction created by the new economic, military and political conditions created by the new scientific-technological revolution, and the second is the crisis in the existence of the mankind created by the digital-artificial tools that developed in parallel with the first fundamental axis.

The New Caste System

The first contradiction seems to be the universalization of a new class stratification similar to the old Indian caste system. The dichotomies of bourgeois-proletariat, worker-peasant, white-collar-manual laborer, and even rich-poor in general, which modern capitalism has organized and somehow urbanized in side-by-side living conditions, are now forming a pyramidal system where the upper class is more distant from the lower castes, the richest, high-ranking bureaucrats and military aristocrats are in the upper class, a large class of workers regardless of their level of education, profession or line of work is located towards the bottom, and at the bottom there is an army of educated unemployed people created by digital technologies, the unemployed mob, refugees and millions of people from the non-production poor – the elderly, the sick and the disabled. The most significant difference between this new class structure and the classic capitalist order is the diminishing or increasingly rigid mechanisms that once allowed those at the bottom to rise. Just like in the Indian caste system. For this reason, the authoritarianism, excessive cruelty and exploitative violence of the upper castes will increase, while the excessive reactions, types of perversion and new types of obedience and rebellion of the lower castes will increase in parallel with their diminished humanity.

In this process, states will either reorganize according to this new system or be dismantled. In this structure, class conflicts exist mainly among the lower classes themselves, and no one even considers changing this order or challenging the top caste. This Aryan fascism, which invented the political use of religiosity based on the belief in reincarnation, that is, the expectation of salvation from paying the price of the previous life by being born into a higher caste in the next life, has identified the Abrahamic religion of the People of the Book, which destroyed this very order and restored the dignity of all people by making them equal in the sight of Allah, as an enemy and, through cunning reflection, has liquidated Abrahamic beliefs by accusing them of being a tool for the ruling classes to oppress the poor. They still continue this dirty propaganda, accuse Islam, which is still alive, of being reactionary, and in order to be convincing, they constantly feed and promote truly reactionary and savage organizations and sects that are hated by the majority of Muslims, and they try to humiliate billions of Muslims in the eyes of humanity. Aryan fascism is the attempt of a savage humanoid species, one step before the evolution of humanization, to take revenge on humanity.

The Ancient War Between Humans and Subhuman Species

This new Aryan age will impose its new global official ideology on humanity with new scientific discoveries, new history, geography, physics, mathematics, biology discoveries, new philosophical and religious interpretations and movements, new human-new life perceptions, which will probably be announced as of the 2030s. Hostility towards family, LGBT, asexuality, biopolitics, porn, drugs, gambling, betting, and gratuitous entertainment will no longer be considered as moral indulgences of humanity, but will be tried to be made normal for people, and ancient moral values ​​and standards will be belittled and the beliefs of the People of the Book will be tried to be completely destroyed. Since the subhuman species has not yet completed its human evolution, it tries to corrupt the advanced species it envies, humans, and make them like itself. For this purpose, it constantly encourages animist-pagan habits such as ancestral religious habits, animist-pagan rituals, racism, tribalism, lust-fame-power worship, desire to kill, alcohol and drug addiction, perverted sexualities, spiritualists-warlock, mystical delusions, magic, sorcery, fortune telling, heretic-rafidi beliefs, bigoted religious beliefs, nonsense discourse of alien, nihilism, deism, atheism, etc.

The fundamental contradiction of this age is between all the global and local elements that aim for the destruction and degradation of humanity and all of humanity itself. The problem is no longer the contradictions of social differences that are at least partially real, such as master-slave, bourgeois-proletariat, religious-irreligious, Christian-Muslim, Alevi-Sunni, Turk-Kurd, etc., but the struggle between being human or not, remaining human or returning to pre-human times. This struggle already includes the overthrow of class inequality, exploitative and slave systems, and the master-slave dialectic in favor of the establishment of an equal and free world for the humanbeing, and is even the basis of this.

In this sense, the second fundamental existential problem of the new age is the separation and conflict between the humanbeing and the subhuman species, between the existential truth of man and the untruthful lies that are hostile to existence itself, between the real and the unreal, the authentic and the artificial.

Artificial intelligence technology, by producing endless counterfeits of reality, will gradually condition people into mental illusions, detaching them from the real world and erasing their ability to distinguish between what is genuine and what is fake. This nightmare scenario will destroy the masses of people who are already fighting with each other for numerous reasons, by establishing parallel worlds and endless conflicts, in meta universes. While people’s weaknesses such as money, property, status, lust, etc. will be satisfied in a fake metaverse world with devices such as mobile phones that will be put in everyone’s hands in this artificial intelligence world, in the real world a society of selfish, soulless, insensitive, perverted pariahs will emerge who destroy each other like microbes and do not trust each other.

People and societies should strive to preserve basic qualities such as reason, virtue and awareness in order to preserve this existential difference of the human species, without being deprived of the equipment that will allow them to distinguish who is a real human and who is not, which statement is sincere and which is not, what is true and what is false.

States should now make their ancient duty of ensuring the security of mind, generation, life, property and faith the first article of their constitutions with a more conscious understanding.

When the Storm Breaks…

This is the approaching storm, and all extant social segments from the past to the present like ethnic tribes, political factions, ideological groups, religious formations, and of course, states themselves, are facing a serious threat. While everyone is busy with the revenge of past accounts, the howls of another storm is coming from beneath the clearly visible phenomena, and it is up to every sane person to prepare for this approaching storm. For this reason, the divine values—that is, the Abrahamic-Hanif religion—which once humanized the human-like creatures by evolving them, must now wage a struggle once again to elevate humanity to the nobility and reunite the mankind with the quality of being vicegerent of Allah on earth that inherent in humanity’s essence, by dismantling the current corrupted institutionalized religiosities and initiating a liberating resistance against the imposed degradation. This is the cause of mankind reason, virtue, and liberty, and it will open a page of true universal struggle, rendering all geopolitical, ideological, philosophical and religious contradictions meaningless and invalid.

It is imperative that each individual and each political and ideological civil group turn towards this transformation with their own willpower. In the national and universal context that goes beyond individuals and groups capacities, of course, states must first take the necessary measures, put an end to the vulgar and trivializing fights of daily politics, and reformat countries on the basis of this universal survival problem.

If Türkiye can interpret the essence of Islam, namely Abrahamic-Hanif-People of the Book, distilled from a thousand years of practice, with a universal interpretation, by giving up the mission of self-colonization that has been assigned to it, and if it can get rid of Sabataist conspiracies such as Francophone laicizm and Anglophile secularism, it is a candidate to become the heart of a universal civilization by establishing a national and regional peace order. Because the issue is not a low-level, fake problem like the religion-state relationship, which is one of the absurd conflicts that Westernists attack and traditionalists defend the peasantry by calling it religion, but a more serious issue at the level of civilization and humanity. And these serious issues are beyond the perception and decision-making capacity of the self-colonizing elements, that is, the Westernizing groups.

Likewise, if Türkiye can transform its heterogeneous social composition into a symphonic nation by eliminating the segmentary conflict causes of the last century and format itself with the spirit of the Sublime State (Devlet-i Aliyye), it will be able to enter the 21st century with more hope. Then, domestic policy, foreign policy, education, health, economy, agriculture and culture will be the subjects of a real renewal in a different context, with a constructive spirit that establishes the future.

The Westernist groups, who undertook the mission of Latinizing our country on the pretex of modernism, which the Crusader West could not do during the Latin invasion in 1204, usurped the state in the 1920s, when the nation was in desperate conditions, and they deformed Islam, Turkishness, Kurdishness, Arabness, Alevism, Sunnism and other identities with a Sabataist format. Unless the hollow arrogance and the still ongoing insolent hostility towards the people of these groups, who imposed themselves as saviors for the purposes of the victors who destroyed the Ottoman Empire and aimed to Latinize the world and our country, and who actually made themselves the colonizer guards of the West, are eliminated, that is, unless the problems and consequences produced by this smarmy order are eliminated from top to bottom, this country will never experience the historical and universal rebirth it deserves.

Only if such a political will and understanding emerges, then we can ‘sleep when the storm breaks’.