The American-Egyptian relationship soon approached a level of the grotesque. The United States paid for Sadat’s security detail and trained his guards, provided him with street cameras and electronic devices for spying on Cairo streets, and began loaning Egypt millions of dollars on the condition that they buy American weapons. Sadat opened Egypt up to American corporations. Al-Infitah, as this period was called, ushered in a different kind of desolation in Egypt, “a perpetually dependent market on foreign products.” In his novel The Committee, the Egyptian writer Sonallah Ibrahim catalogued the parade of Western companies invading Egypt: “Phillips, Toshiba, Gillette, Michelin, Shell, Kodak, Westinghouse, Ford, Nestlé, Marlboro.” The era of the 1950s when Europeans and others embraced American goods slid into an era of unease about the new corporate imperial onslaught.
I had not made the connection between such products and imperialism when I visited a small museum in Istanbul near my house called the Museum of Innocence. The novelist Orhan Pamuk had famously built the museum—in one of the remaining wooden houses in old Beyo?lu, down the street from where I now live—as a memorial to his novel of the same name. In essence, it was a fictional museum; on each floor, meticulously constructed dioramas portrayed the many scenes in the novel, which was as much about obsessive love as it was about the 1970s, the years before Turkey, too, opened itself up to Western markets. Pamuk’s museum, a museum of old Turkey, is a paean to the old Turkish products—the Turkish wine, the Turkish fruit soda, the Turkish cologne—before the market was subsumed by Western ones. An American oblivious to this notion of national sovereignty could not have known how the arrival of Colgate would eventually disturb the Turkish or Egyptian people. Ibrahim’s The Committee includes a long, satirical tirade against the tyranny of Coca-Cola: “While the words used for God and love and happiness vary from one country to another and from one language to another, Coca-Cola means the same thing in all places and all tongues.”
In Ibrahim’s novels, corporations like Coca-Cola are regarded with almost the same anguish as an insolent army, and I could see a deep nostalgia in Pamuk’s museum, with its little bottles of Turkish shaving cream and, of course, the locally produced Samsun cigarette packs that preceded the Parliaments I smoked while speaking in Soma to a group of former tobacco farmers. The Egyptian activist who told me wistfully in 2007 that the Turks built their Metro themselves had been referring, in part, to the Egyptians’ even more devastating period of Al-Infitah, as had been so many Egyptians I met in 2011 and 2012. But in those years, Egypt’s Mediterranean neighbor to the north was also trying to hold on to its dignity. In Turkey, the 1970s were the last years of political alternatives, before the country settled on a direction from which it never turned back.
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IN 2014, VASIF KORTUN, the founder of the art space Salt, told me that he was saddened and fascinated to rediscover speeches by one of Turkey’s leaders during the 1970s, Bülent Ecevit. “We have completely lost this history,” Kortun said. “We have no memory of it.”
Kortun looked melancholy, largely because of the disappointment that had set in over the authoritarian and religious conservative tendencies of Tayyip Erdo?an. I looked up Ecevit’s speeches and discovered one from 1974, after he announced his decision to continue poppy production in Turkey against the wishes of the United States. “Our nationalism is not just inscribed on street walls,” Ecevit cried into the crowd. “Our nationalism is inscribed on the soil of Cyprus, the seabeds of the Aegean, and the poppy farms of western Anatolia.” His last clause was a response to American pressure to halt poppy production, which sustained the lives of thousands of Turkish farmers, because too much heroin was flowing into New York City.
The anti-American fury of the 1960s had temporarily ended in 1971 with another military coup, for which many Turkish leftists suspect the involvement of American spies. The coup did little to quell the fractiousness of the nation. Instead, Turkish nationalism, my old obsession, mutated even more into a nationalism of self-protection, which split between two general political spheres. One was Ecevit’s leftist nationalism. The other resembled the anti-imperialist Islamist nationalism of the Muslim Brotherhood. In 1969, Necmettin Erbakan, who would someday be mentor to a young man named Recep Tayyip Erdo?an, had founded the Islamist movement called Milli G?rü?, or national view, which counseled Turks against accommodating the West, urged a closer relationship with the Muslim world, and advocated for a more Islamic society. Turkey would split between these left and right spheres even more violently in the 1970s.
On the leftist side were Maoists, Communists, Leninists, Socialists, trade unionists, students, and social democrats, many of whom shared the sympathies of Ecevit. The pro-American trade union Türk-?? split in two, and a radical new union emerged, D?SK, which was anti-American and Marxist. The influence of these godless trade unionists prompted a harsher response from the right—including from Islamists, right-wingers, nationalists, the Gray Wolves and, often, members of the Turkish army. They were known in leftist parlance as the “Fascists.” It was unclear who exactly was behind this civil war. Both sides believed that the other was being used by one of the two Cold War powers: the left by the Soviets and the right by the United States.
The spiral of violence continued throughout the decade. On May 1, 1977, unknown snipers fired into a crowd celebrating Labor Day in Istanbul’s Taksim Square, killing some forty people and injuring hundreds. In the Anatolian city of Kahramanmara?, in a single week in December 1978, a movie theater was bombed, left-wing assassins hit a coffee shop frequented by right-wingers, two teachers were murdered, and another’s home was bombed. More than one hundred Alevi citizens, many of them leftists, were eventually killed in a right-wing pogrom. The journalist Mehmet Ali Birand compared the atmosphere to 1920s Chicago’s, gang-style violence, a daily cycle of attacks and retribution. Prime Minister Ecevit began questioning whether the United States’ “stay-behind organizations” were responsible for some of the carnage. He discovered that these extrajudicial groups had been established in the covert operations section of a 1959 bilateral treaty with the United States, as a way of mobilizing secret fighters in the event of a Soviet invasion. These groups were suspected of being part of what would become known as the “Deep State.”