Matt Broomfield
Turkey has just suffered what’s being reported by Turkish media as Turkey’s “first neo-Nazi inspired attack”, in which an 18-year-old assailant stabbed multiple people in the tea garden of a mosque, while wearing video-game inspired apparel marked with a swastika, the ‘KKK’ and the ‘Black Sun’ symbol, an esoteric image likewise associated with Nazism.
In a rambling manifesto posted online, the teenage attacker known as ‘Arda K.’ linked himself to far-right ‘lone wolf’ terrorists including Brenton Tarrant, the man who killed 50 people in two New Zealand mosques in 2019; and Andres Brevik, who killed 69 mainly young socialists during a 2011 attack in Norway. Commentators have been right to observe that the attempted attack displays hallmarks of online radicalisation and a toxic political culture imported primarily from the USA, as well as from Europe.
Rather than simply being the result of too much time spent playing video games, therefore, the attack forms part of a broader political culture particularly representing ‘Western Civilisation’ as under attack from external threats and fifth columns within, and inspiring lonely young men to acts of horrific violence in misguided efforts to precipitate a coming war or revenge themselves on these perceived threats. This violence is inevitably misogynistic, marked by a particular hatred of women seen as diluting or undermining Western civilisation through their perceived unwillingness to date the young man in question.
But Arda K’s hate-filled diatribe has also been filtered through the prism of Turkish politics, and must be understood in this light. The founder of the modern Turkish republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk played a particular role in the Nazi imagination, inspiring Hitler perhaps more than any other single contemporary leader as he strove to remake Germany along totalitarian, ethnically-pure lines. There’s an enduring, esoteric element to Ataturkist exceptionalism, with pseudoscientific pan-Turanist theories of widespread Turkish predominance throughout Eurasia emerging in parallel to pan-Germanist theories in Europe.
Contemporary Turkish politics marked by a particular, toxic cocktail of prejudice, paranoia and competing, appeals to both this exceptionalised model of Turkishness and a shared ideal of Muslim brotherhood – from which certain groups, including the Kurds, are explicitly or implicitly excluded. It’s therefore of note that Arda K’s manifesto links Kurds, immigrants, women and Jews as potential targets, drawing together the two bête noires of contemporary Turkish politics in (first) the Kurdish people and political movement, and (second) Syrian refugees, all precipitated with a healthy dash of sexism and anti-Semitism.
Under the guise of secularism, Turkey’s People’s Republican Party (CHP) has long made Syrian refugees particular scapegoats for the country’s economic woes. (And indeed, despite vocally opposing CHP on this point then incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is now courting Syria’s Assad in an effort to remove this unwanted burden from his country). It could further be added that the particular brand of misogyny peddled in these far-right spaces finds its own avatar in the Islamic extremist rhetoric which is also current in many Turkish mosques, and which likewise tells angry young men they have a right to women’s submission.
The abortive stabbing attack, as it broke out in the tranquil Eskişehir courtyard, may have been inchoate. But it’s unsurprising that such toxic ideas will find fertile soil in Turkey’s political culture, marked as it is by antisemitism, prejudice and paranoia. Via the ultranationalist Grey Wolves, Turkey has long exported a particular brand of far-right violence throughout the Middle East and Europe. It’s little wonder that far-right transnational violence is now coming home to roost in Turkey.
Matt Broomfield is a freelance journalist, poet and activist. He writes for VICE, Medya News, the New Statesman and the New Arab; his prose has been published by The Mays, Anti-Heroin Chic and Plenitude; and his poetry by the National Poetry Society, the Independent, and Bare Fiction. His work was displayed across London by Poetry on the Underground, and he is a Foyle Young Poet of the Year.
