Monday, August 16, 2010

The Experts Get It Wrong — Again

Turkish demonstration

Readers of a certain age will remember the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the Soviet Union seemed to be ascendant. After Nicaragua and Afghanistan, with El Salvador soon to follow, was there anyplace in the world that was not destined to become Red?

Sovietologists writing in magazines and newspapers explained that the U.S.S.R., with its centrally-planned command economy, had avoided the crisis in which capitalism now found itself, and which had plunged the United States and other Western nations into stagflation and high unemployment.

“Peace” activists in Western Europe expressed their devotion to the Soviet Union and their disgust with America. Unilateral nuclear disarmament (for the West only) was in vogue.

The Red Dawn was about to break.

Remember those days? How quaint and remote they seem now! The “experts” who told us that the Soviet Union was strong and stable, that communism was more productive and efficient than capitalism, that accommodation with communist reality was the best we could hope for — all those idiot savants didn’t even have the grace to be red-faced when the Soviet Empire imploded one brief decade later. Most of them managed to hold onto their sinecures as talking heads and pundits. Some of them even had the nerve to tell us that they had seen it all coming.

And so it is today with the Turkey experts. Are they known as “Turkologists”?

Since the end of World War Two and the Turkish accession to NATO, Turkey has been touted as the model of a reliable secular Muslim state, the sole democracy in the Islamic world, and a Westernized ally of Europe and the United States. Never mind that “democracy” in Turkey was always a shallow front propped up by repeated military coups. Never mind that the country folk — strongly fundamentalist Muslims — in central Anatolia were outbreeding the effete Westernized elites in Ankara and Istanbul by a factor of four or five to one. Never mind the rise of the Islamic parties, which could only be squelched by the most blatant non-democratic means.

Turkey was the shining beacon of the Islamic world, proof that Islam could modernize and upgrade and be just like us, except with minarets. The “experts” kept telling us that, and that was what we all wanted to believe.

That illusion has now departed. The AKP is ascendant. The secular elements in the army have been purged. Turkey has switched from being an ally to open enmity with Israel. The Turks now thwart and subvert NATO at every turn, even while Europe and the United States pretend that nothing has changed. Turkey is selling gasoline to Iran and providing weapons to Hezbollah.

The Secular Turkish Miracle is as dead as a dodo.

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Dr. Andrew Bostom has written an article about an Israeli scholar named Uriel Heyd who understood precisely the nature of Turkish secularism more than forty years before the “experts” belatedly realized what was happening:

Uriel Heyd on Turkey’s Re-Islamization, Circa 1968: Over Four Decades Ahead of Today’s Vacuous “Analysts”

Professor Uriel Heyd (d. 1968) described Turkey’s tenuous secularization and aggressive re-Islamization fully 42 years before today’s “learned analysts” have finally come to the same pathetically belated realization…

[…]

Since the recent Mavi Marmara flotilla affair — facilitated, and perhaps even orchestrated by the Turkish government — we have been inundated with excruciatingly belated, if not downright delinquent hand-wringing assessments by so-called “expert analysts” of Turkey. These “experts” lament what they view as Turkey’s “precipitous” return to Islamic fundamentalism under the current Erdogan-led AKP regime — as if this dangerous phenomenon emerged suddenly and fully formed from the head of Zeus al-Zawahiri.

A sobering, highly informed corrective to this cacophony of ill-informed Johnny and Janey-Come-Lately “learned analyst” voices was provided by the Israeli scholar of Ottoman and Republican Turkey, Professor Uriel Heyd (1913-1968) — just over forty-two years ago!
- - - - - - - - -
First, a brief biography of Heyd, derived from Professor Gabriel Baer’s opening tribute and Preface (pp. 5-6) to Heyd’s “Revival of Islam in Modern Turkey,” The Magnes Press, Jerusalem, 1968, pp. 5-27, and Professor Aharon Layish’s, “Uriel Heyd’s Contribution to the Study of the Legal, Religious, Cultural, and Political History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey,” Bulletin of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 9, No. 1, 1982, pp. 35-54.

[…]

Heyd’s scholarly pursuits were broad, encompassing Ottoman history (including diplomatic history) and legal institutions, the mid-19th century Tanzimat reforms of the Ottoman Empire, and more generally, how Islamic religious and cultural institutions reacted to the processes of Westernization and secularization, particularly within the late Ottoman Empire, and modern Republican Turkey.

[…]

But Heyd’s own candid words, from the remarkably foresighted 1968 lecture excerpted at length, below, reveal another quality almost entirely absent from our present era’s infinitely less substantial “academic experts” on Islam: self-critical humility, and the ability to express mea culpa. Taking his own measure, Heyd confessed — in 1968,

“Until a few years ago many foreign observers, including, I admit, myself, were inclined to think that this development [Turkey’s re-Islamization] was no more than a renewed expression of sentiments which for a long time could not be freely manifested and that the overall process of secularization was going on very slowly but irresistibly. Today I doubt whether this view is still tenable.”

The fact that 42 years later, today’s far less astute “experts on Turkey and Turkish Islam, etc.” nonetheless, offer no apologies for their distressingly belated recognition of Turkey’s re-Islamization, adds insult to irony.

Read the rest (including the footnotes) at Dr. Bostom’s place.

What I want to know is this: Why do “experts” on television and in the newspapers continue to find paid work after having been shown up so many times?

Are they not embarrassed? Are memories so short?

Is no one ready to call them on their demonstrated deficiencies of analysis and prediction?

A generation from now — when we all either live under sharia or inhabit a landscape devastated by a true clash of civilizations — will today’s “experts” on Islam be forgotten so readily?

8 comments:

Juniper in the Desert said...

I do not have photoshop but I would love to be able to turn all MPs families into muslims and send them the pictures, saying: you and your descendents 10/15/20 years from now.

I wonder if they will wake up or if they are not really bothered!

Zenster said...

Remember those days? How quaint and remote they seem now! The “experts” who told us that the Soviet Union was strong and stable, that communism was more productive and efficient than capitalism, that accommodation with communist reality was the best we could hope for — all those idiot savants didn’t even have the grace to be red-faced when the Soviet Empire imploded one brief decade later. [emphasis added]

Much less thoroughly discredited and stripped of their professional credentials if not put on trial for sedition.

Never mind the rise of the Islamic parties, which could only be squelched by the most blatant non-democratic means.

Methinks there is an object lesson here that has yet to be learned by those in the West.

Turkey has switched from being an ally to open enmity with Israel.

Something that has virtually escaped all notice in this latest spate of officially sanctioned anti-Semitism.

Turkey is selling gasoline to Iran and providing weapons to Hezbollah.

How much more clear does all of this need to be?

Are memories so short?

In a word: Yes.

Is no one ready to call them on their demonstrated deficiencies of analysis and prediction?

In yet another word: Totschweigetaktik.

Sean O'Brian said...

Zenster,

Much less thoroughly discredited and stripped of their professional credentials if not put on trial for sedition.

Sedition means fomenting an insurrection against your own government. The conspirators arrested in the Red Scare of 1919-20 would fall under this standard defintion. Merely promoting a rival power bloc is not covered by sedition laws. Locating your dreams and aspirations in another country from afar is a kind of spiritual infidelity more than anything else.

When you think of all the people in high positions of power - Jimmy Carter and Henry Kissinger to name just two - who famously thought "that accommodation with [C]ommunist reality was the best we could hope for" you see it's pointless to talk about prosecuting anyone. Besides, I'm sure all those experts were sincere in their analyses of robust Soviet economic health.

Jocke said...

Well there is a huge difference between overtly advocating a state of "peacful co-existence" with an enemy that poses an enormous, mainly symmetrical, threat and manipulations that can only benefit a sly an ruthless enemy using asynnetrical warfare.

You can easily distinguish todays active and willful promoters of our enemy from yeasterdays 'idiot savants' because today we will stand all the risks from their proposals and our enemy will have all the benefits.

Jocke said...

Carter and Kissinger never suggested that the West should accept many millions of "refugees" from the Soviet Union out of "compassion", nor did even Chamberlain propose to accept millions of Germans into Britain.

Zenster said...

Sean O'Brian: Besides, I'm sure all those experts were sincere in their analyses of robust Soviet economic health.

I hope like Hades that you're being sarcastic as I've yet to see any competent economist (is that an oxymoron?) demonstrate, much less prove, how a command economy like the Soviet Union's was ever supposed to work properly.

Sean O'Brian said...

Yeah it's my sense of humour as well as noticing the way people can sincerely believe things that couldn't possibly be true - particularly when it comes to their utopian dreams. You may as well go to a fortune teller as ask an economist for advice.

EscapeVelocity said...

Turkey, from Ally to Enemy

Michael Rubin

July/August 2010

Commentary Magazine

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/turkey--from-ally-to-enemy-15464