In the wake of Nihat Genç

I never had a face-to-face conversation with him. We never sat down for tea, nor did we ever share a meal. We first met at a book fair in Ankara while I was performing my national service as a reserve officer at the Military Academy. Over the last 10 years, we would have long conversations over the phone, on average every month or two. 

He usually called me "brother," and I called him Nihat Ağabey. After one of my articles or a comment I made on a television program, he would call to congratulate me. The topics we discussed were always the same. They concerned the future of our country, our Republic, foreign policy, and politics. Shortly before he was hospitalized, we had another long conversation. 

We spoke closely, as if we were friends of 40 years. Like all people who know that walking the same path is more important than coming from the same lineage or tribe, ours was a friendship based on consciousness. It was ideologically grounded. 

Nihat Genç was a thinker and a writer who had an ideal, a concern, and a claim regarding his country, and who viewed life through principles. In one aspect, he was a man of letters; in another, a warrior and a man of cause. Nihat Genç was a Turkish intellectual with a straight line of thought. 

Above all, he was a Republican. His Republicanism was a solid, holistic Republicanism that had not only political, ideological, and philosophical dimensions but also conscientious, moral, and human ones. 

Nihat Genç was a brave Kuvayı Milliyeci (National Forces member) who came from the nationalist tradition, reached the socialist, populist, revolutionary, and national Kemalist line, and embraced the Young Turk tradition to the end. He was an anti-imperialist to the core. He was a Kemalist who fully embraced Gazi Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s sensitivity toward full independence and national sovereignty.

Nihat Genç was the brave heart, the gentleman, and the lover of Turkey and these lands. His infinite and boundless love, loyalty, and affection for our homeland, and his courage and effort in defending the mountains, stones, wolves, birds, air, and water of our country were great, very great. 

Nihat Genç was a Turk. He was not just "from Turkey." Nihat Genç was a Turkish intellectual. He was not a "Turkish-based" intellectual. For this reason, the fact that İletişim Yayınları—one of the important centers of the liberal left in our country, a favorite publisher of ethnicist, sectarian, and Westernist circles, which calls a German a German and a Frenchman a Frenchman but cannot call a Turk a Turk—stopped publishing Nihat Genç’s books years ago was one of the dozens of medals of honor on Nihat Genç’s chest. Moreover, these medals of honor were not given by Western funds, think tanks linked to foreign intelligence services, or lobbies, but were medals given by the nation after battles won in the trenches of pen-and-paper struggles. 

Nihat Genç was one of the distinguished representatives of the tradition of thinkers and intellectuals who possessed ideological clarity, intellectual consistency, and conceptual consciousness. That is why he had a very high sensitivity, consistency, and determination regarding positions, titles, money, and fame. He proved this with his morality. He was populist and of the people. 

In our country, where there are many—so many—political tradesmen, writers, academics, union bosses, journalists, commentators, lawyers, engineers, and bureaucrats who pretend to be leftist and live off the left, pretend to be Atatürkist and live off Atatürk, pretend to be nationalist and live off nationalism, and pretend to be Republican and live off Republicanism, Nihat Genç was the commentator and writer who gave all of them a piece of his mind. It suited Nihat Genç to rebuke these people and put them in their place. 

At the funeral ceremony in Ankara, attended by thousands of our citizens, I saw for myself that our citizens who have a sensitivity for the homeland, the nation, honor, and the Republic—regardless of which political tradition they come from—embraced Nihat Genç, just as my master Attila İlhan likened it, whether they belonged to the star, the crescent, or the kalpak, which gave blood and life in the Turkish War of Independence. 

Our young people who chant the slogan "Down with tyranny, long live liberty," which we know from the Young Turks and the Committee of Union and Progress, our brothers and sisters who shout "We are the soldiers of Mustafa Kemal," our comrades who say "Neither the USA nor the EU, a fully independent Turkey," and the children who shout "Enver, Cemal, Talat, Union, Union, Union" all knew that Nihat Genç was one of the bravest representatives of our country’s generation of self-sacrificing fedayeen. 

Erdem Atay said that Nihat Genç’s last words were, "Keep the Republic alive." This is a farewell, a testament, and a final word that truly suits him. 

We also have a word for Nihat Genç, the brave, enthusiastic, passionate, and upright writer of these lands. 

We will keep the Republic alive, and we will do so forever.