THOSE WHO DID NOT self-repress barricaded themselves against the Turkish state in other ways. The true-blue leftists I had met over the years in Turkey—the young Communists throwing rocks at May Day parades, the Kurdish intellectuals who merely wanted to preserve their independence, the members of the labor union D?SK who still sounded like they lived in the 1960s—were frozen in time at the point where they had been cut off by the 1980 coup. Entire neighborhoods of Istanbul existed in this parallel universe, still holding on to not only their leftist values but a part of their history. This rebellious leftism eventually, for some, became focused on ethnic identity. The long-oppressed Kurds, the ones who rebelled against Atatürk’s daughter Sabiha G?k?en, who could not legally speak their language or watch Kurdish television shows, and who suffered from discrimination in the workplace, on the street, and in school, began agitating for independence. Many Kurds joined a militant group called the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK. When I moved to Istanbul, in 2007, most of the Kurds I met had a family member who had, as they said, “gone to the mountains,” to join the PKK and fight the Turkish state.
One of the Kurdish neighborhoods in Istanbul was called Okmeydan?, which I began visiting in 2013. Okmeydan? had once been a gecekondu area, made up of homes illegally “built overnight,” some of which still had little yards, as if in the countryside. Other buildings sagged from neglect, and most had been decorated with leftist graffiti, the names of martyrs painted and stenciled across storefront facades. One evening, boys giggled on street corners in the poor street lighting, like on some film noir set, and a lingering fog hung in the air. It was actually tear gas: every week—seemingly every day—the people of Okmeydan? clashed with the police. Originally many of the migrants who came to Okmeydan? were left-wing Alevis from the east, who traditionally had opposed right-wing Sunni Turks like Erdo?an. In the 1990s the Kurds fleeing the military’s war against them arrived, and Okmeydan? took on the character of resistance. “Thugs” or “Fascists” didn’t dare come to Okmeydan?, just as they didn’t go to Gazi Mahallesi, or Sultangazi, because they knew that the Kurds who lived there would fight them. In Okmeydan?, residents who suspected an imminent attack by Fascists—or the police—sometimes openly policed the neighborhood with guns. As the war against the Kurds began again in 2015, the police intensified its daily harassment of Okmeydan?.
“The armored police vans have been circling, peering inside shop windows, which is a provocation,” one storekeeper told me. No one in Okmeydan? wanted me to use his name. “There is a lot of rage waiting to explode.”
The Kurds had even begun to look elsewhere for true independence from their Turkish overlords. Kurds from Syria, allied with those in Turkey, began to form an independent state in a Syrian region called Rojava, which was even attracting leftist intellectuals from my friend Caner’s university and beyond. I met one man in Okmeydan? who had lost his son in Syria. He had been fighting against ISIS for the PKK. “The Kurdish youth knowingly go to death—they stand in front of the tanks,” the father said. “It’s a very brave fight and I’m proud of it.” He looked at me with tenderness and some pity, knowing that Americans couldn’t understand why the Kurdish people are willing to die for such beliefs.
I left his house that evening with Caner, and a group of Turkish and Syrian Kurds who lived nearby.
“I can’t speak Kurdish—you know why?” said one, laughing. “This animal country. They would lock me up in a room if I spoke Kurdish.”
“Why doesn’t America help the Kurds build a state?” one asked me, the American. “There are thirty million Kurds.”
“They don’t. No one does!” said another.
“They only help the Kurds when the Kurds help them,” I said.
Silence.
“Kurds always help them!” Caner said.
“I know, they always claim to love the Kurds, but they don’t ever really help them,” I said. “Now because of Erdo?an … they love him. I mean, they don’t love him, they hate him, but they need him.”
“It has always been like that,” he replied. “The United States prefers the large states more than the people without power.”
*
IN SOME WAYS, military coups were no more violent during the 1970s and 1980s than economic intervention—especially in Egypt, where, by the time of the invasion of Iraq, the period of forced political and economic submission had become unbearable. Under Hosni Mubarak, American-style neoliberalism meant that “the collective well-being of the nation is depicted only in terms of how it is adjusted to the discipline of monetary and fiscal balance sheets,” as the academic Timothy Mitchell writes. Through its myriad aid agencies and NGOs, America administered an insidious form of empire. But why hadn’t the Turks or the Egyptians ever said no to the United States? “Simply because we are forced to say yes,” writes the Egyptian economist Galal Amin. “Coercion is not exercised directly by the hand of the colonizer but at the hand of his local agents.” Thus the schemes of modernization theory through right-wing dictatorships that had been drawn up at the most esteemed educational institutions in America had succeeded in vanquishing human will. When Egyptians protested the invasion of Iraq of 2003, the Mubaraks threw them in jail and tortured them on America’s behalf.
Americans tend to believe the Muslim hatred for the West is irrational. “Since the rejection of the West is existential, the argument goes, Western nations can do little to appease Arab and Muslim wrath,” the historian Salim Yaqub writes. But the problem with the theory of the clash of civilizations is that it dismisses grievances against the West that are completely genuine: its blind support for Israel, its propping up of dictators, its brutal economic policies, and its stunning carelessness with Arab lives. “Bin Laden rejected the secular, liberal language of universal human rights and international law,” Makdisi writes, because “they had done nothing to protect Muslims around the world.” The Americans have over the course of sixty years made the Arabs feel as if they could be broken. By 2013, a military dictator was back in power in Egypt. The Egyptian-American journalist Mohamed Soltan, who was sent to jail under this new regime, later spoke of his experience in the notorious Egyptian jails. “The one thing that everybody in the prison had in common—the ISIS guys, the Muslim Brotherhood guys, the liberals, the guards, the officers,” he said, “is that they all hated America.”