FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Erdogan’s Hitler

Rant Number 465 24 November 2011

One distant summer in Kurdistan, Eastern Turkey. My German friend Nicolas and I bumping along and sweating on a clapped-out old banger foisted on us by a Kurdish rogue. Gun-toting Turkish commandos stop us at a road block. We show our passports and get waved on but not before a truculent young officer boasts to Nicolas in German, while fingering his submachine gun: ‘Wir toten Sie alles – We kill them all!’

He meant the Kurds.

Why does Turkish PM Erdogan’s recent warning to Syria’s President Assad remind me of that soldier’s bellicosity? Hhmmm...All about unfunny men with a funny moustache, I fear.

Erdogan has invited Assad to stop fighting against the rebels in Syria. ‘Look at Nazi Germany, Hitler...fought to death against his own people’, Erdogan preached. A five-year-old retarded child would get this: Assad is behaving like Adolf and we all know what happened to the latter...

Ya Allah! Is Erdogan really as dumb as that? Turkish history books are often a bit surreal, I know, but still...Hitler fighting to the death against his own people? I can’t believe it. Yet the Turkish daily Hurriyet reports Erdogan saying that!

That stupid? Or that ignorant? Hitler fought to the death all right, six long years of WWII, yes, but no one seems to have told Erdogan that it was not against the German people the dreadful Fuhrer fought – it was against other peoples! French, Poles, Russians, Brits, Yanks, you name them. Whatever they were, they were not Germans, and they were not Hitler’s people. They were foreign nations.

‘But in a sense Hitler also fought against the Germans’ I hear you mutter, ‘he destroyed his own people!’ Maybe so but that was because Germany catastrophically lost the war. And the Germans, unlike the crafty Italians, master turncoats of the world, stuck by their leader until the bitter end. Despite defeat after defeat and despite the Allied bombers hammering their cities into rubble, night after night, for six long years. Hitler had no need to fight his people – they fought with and for him.

Thus Erdogan’s comparison is idiotic, wrong and, I suspect, offensive. To the Germans. Because, after all, Germany has paid bitterly for her mistakes. By being pulverised and having millions of her men killed or maimed. By rebuilding herself up as an impeccably democratic nation. And by paying handsome reparations to many of Hitler’s victims. ‘Those who live in a glass house should not throw stones’ Germans might well remind the uninstructed Turkish PM. Because, as it happens, it is Erdogan’s state that has been fighting a dirty war for years against...its own people!

The people in question are the Kurds. Sure, they do not consider themselves Turks but, according to Turkish law, they are Turks. Turkish citizens. More than ten millions. In the Ottoman Empire you could be a Greek, an Armenian, a Jew, Arab, Kurd and so on but in post-Ottoman Turkey you can only be a Turk. Kemal Ataturk’s Turkey recognised only Turks in Turkey. Yet the Kurds stubbornly insist to exist. To be Kurds. It is against those Turkish Kurds that the formidable Turkish military machine has been fighting, for over 30 years now. ‘Why doesn’t Erdogan get his own house in order, before playing the old, corny Hitler card?’ peevish Germans might not unjustifiably ask. Oh, they might also mention the unmentionable – the Armenians. The genocide against them. But maybe Erdogan has never heard of Armenians? Given his peculiar idea of historical truth, it would not surprise me one little bit.

Erdogan would prefer not to fight the Kurds, I suppose. As a pan-Islamist, he stresses the religious bonds between Muslims. Muslims should not fight Muslims. Turks and Kurds are Muslims and so...why fighting?

Good question. If religion was all that mattered. Alas, it does not. I have met Kurds who told me they cared not a jot for the greatest Kurd of all time, Saladin. Kurds who believed not in the Prophet Muhammad but in Karl Marx. Kurds who never prayed. Kurds who ate pork. But even Kurds who had no problem with the Qur’an assured me they were Kurds first and Muslims second. ‘The Arabs and the Turks are our enemies’, a handsome young Kurd told me in Van, Eastern Turkey. ‘We will fight them to the death – till we are free.’ Erdogan should have been listening. Pan-Islamism is an ideal, like Christendom. Nobody believes in Christendom anymore, of course, while many do ardently advocate the Caliphate. Its resurrection, after Ataturk slew it, is not impossible. Time will tell but the priest is, ahem, a wee sceptical.

Maybe Assad, that ‘living toothbrush’, as Chris Hitchens called him, like Erdogan is fighting ‘against his own people’ – although he prefers to call them ‘militants’. He has two millions Kurds in Syria but I do not imagine they are in a hurry to be ‘liberated’ by the Turkish Army. Syrians, by the way, must have learnt – unless their history books have been ‘cooked’ like the Turkish ones – about Jamal Pasha. The ferocious Turkish Ottoman governor notorious for his crimes against Syrian Arabs during WW1. He was nicknamed ‘the blood shedder’ for a reason...

So, Hitler is not the point. Or perhaps he is, though not in the sense Erdogan’s asinine comparison suggests. Hitler wanted to conquer Europe and reshape it after his own dreams of domination. Is someone trying to reshape the Middle East? The Atlantic magazine four years ago carried an interesting article: After Iraq. What will the future Middle East look like? The maps and the speculations were intriguing. It left me with the suspicion that certain forces are at work. With certain agendas. We all know about the oil and the Neo-Cons. But what about the Illuminati, the Zurich gnomes, the Elders of Something, the Masons, the men from Atlantis, Elvis...? Are the masses rioting in Tahrir Square being manipulated? Is there a sinister, invisible hand, pulling the strings? Are the people the unwitting playthings of...whom? Is there a Wizard of Oz, a puppeteer, a demonic deceiver behind it all?

God forbid! Best to joke. As Nicolas and I drove through a Kurdish town we stopped to ask a passer-by where the post office was. ‘PTT nerde?’ I meant to ask. Instead it came out as ‘PKK nerde?’ Where are the Kurdish Freedom Fighters? I actually said.

Thank God the man, Kurd or Turk, had a sense of humour.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli