Politics of farce in Turkey

When I expressed my concerns about the signs of a move from authoritarian rule to fascist political discourse in Turkey (in daily Cumhuriyet last week), I only wanted to underline the danger of ever increasing militarization and "statization" of politics and party in the country. 

The state model, the quest for a homogenous "nation/community," imperial nostalgia, suppression and intimidation of dissent, and the rise of the intelligence state, is widely understood as a warning of coming fascism - rightly or wrongly. Fascism was a tragedy that human history witnessed in the West, between the two World Wars. As famously said, tragedy can be repeated the second time only as farce, and we have witnessed many different forms of farcical petty dictatorships in many non-Western countries since then.  

Now, in the post-industrial age, farce has become an even more appropriate word for late imitations of fascist politics and discourse; indeed, this is the case of Turkey.

In fact, Turkey's slide into authoritarian rule shares similar lines with many other experiments of once praised "non-Western modernities" and so-called "illiberal democracies." Turkey has been an experiment of economic growth based on illiberal politics and on celebrated "native values," which happened to be defined as "moderate Islam" in the case of Muslim majority countries. Turkey also witnessed a kind of "de facto democratization" in the process, as the so-called moderate Islamists were struggling against military hegemony over civil politics and successfully managed to remove it - even if they were only motivated by the desire of eliminating a secularist power center. What's more, that process reinforced democratic social and political dynamics by creating a middle class...