Waking up from the Damascus dream to a nightmare

“The Ottoman-Turkish perception in the Arab world and the Arab perception in Turkey are inversely proportional. The West had to construct a reverse consciousness to deflect potential Arab resistance. The masking of energy theft was to be achieved through the “Other - Turk” who exploits and keeps the Arab backward! “Cruel Ottoman / Oppressed Arab” perception engineering based on this contrast has been persistently maintained for over a century.

In Turkey, on the contrary, an Arabophilia that does not coincide with historical reality is being constructed on the basis of hostility toward the Republic and the nation. A segment whose consciousness has been clouded by these suggestions has been led to believe that Arabs are eagerly waiting for the Turks to return to the region as the “New Ottomans.” They imagine that if the caliphate were to be revived, the entire Islamic world would follow Turkey.

Such irrational and illogical fantasies, detached from historical and sociological reality, create a mass hypnosis effect on this segment. Instead of a Turkish consciousness, they are suffering from permanent loss of awareness through an injection of the 'ummah' that has no basis in the real world. As a result, they are turning into an aimless community that looks at history through the wrong end of the binoculars and has lost its sense of direction.

When we look at it by stripping away the effects of the ignorance that clashes with history and reality, and the boasting that is not based on power, there is nothing to be seen but the cadaver of a 'New Ottomanism'—short-lived like morning dew, lost like a mirage in the Arab deserts—which will soon evaporate into thin air!” (1)

It hasn't been long; we wrote the lines above 5 years ago. We still haven't understood that what came out of the fishing line cast into the desert ocean of Syria as bait was nothing other than a Kurdistan established right before our eyes. Just as we supported the establishment of Iraqi Kurdistan with passion and zeal, rather than preventing it! Just as we were lulled to sleep by being told we were building Erbil from scratch with its airport and infrastructure while the Barzani despotism, tasked by imperialism with guarding oil wells, was being established, we are watching the same film once again with the same ignorance!

In our long article titled "Fingerprint" that we penned in 2012, we detailed the role of Turkish capital and political power in the imperial project implemented in Northern Iraq. We hope the conclusion of that article serves as a warning regarding what is being built while Syria is being torn apart, during a process where we, as a nation, have been struck by a paralysis of consciousness with the dream of “Friday Prayer in Damascus.”

“It is understood that the traditional sensitivity based on protecting national integrity at home and respecting the territorial integrity of neighbors abroad, which was maintained from the founding of the Republic until recently, has been abandoned by those who govern Turkey. It is seen that the interests of those who rule the world have become a priority over the interests of the Turkish nation. It is clear that acting as a regional hitman for imperialism, in a manner unworthy of the collective identity and historical heritage of a nation that fought a War of Independence, has become a state preference. It is understood that monopoly capital and political power are in agreement with the system to do what is expected of them in Iraq.

The discourse of democratization, civilianization, and the liquidation of local dictatorships is being used as a lever to fragment national unity and divide society into tribes and religious ghettos. Once the nation-state is destroyed and the consciousness of the nation is replaced by herd mentality, there is no obstacle left in front of global plunder. When one looks at the background of the makeup discourse used to fragment nations, the truth emerges in all its nakedness. The fact that global energy vultures, led by Exxon Mobil, as well as Total, Shell, and BP, are flocking to the spoils in the North one after another sufficiently explains why Iraq is being torn apart.

What is tragic is the effort to deceive the public into believing that a geography of discord, which will eventually reach Turkey, is an earthly paradise where honey flows from its rivers and oil from its plains. It is the construction of an ethnic radiation plant that will jump to Turkey, through the collaboration of Byzantine capital and those who have rendered faith and belief homeless.

Future generations will undoubtedly view with disgust the fingerprints that will go down in history as proof of the joint crime of monopoly capital, which has become an appendage to international capital, and the political understanding that accepts the demands of the transnational without objection.” (2)

At the end of the fairy tale, everyone would get their share of the three apples that fell from the sky; the good would be rewarded, and the bad would be punished. In the fairy tales of the imperial age, don't you find it strange that those who are reduced to ashes by fire rained down from the sky are always the oppressed, and the bad are always the ones rewarded?

1) The Second Lawrence Move from the Silver Screen (December 3, 2019)

2) Fingerprint (August 12, 2012)