Modern Turkey: Same Old Dirty Ottoman Underwear Worn Inside Out

Just as the bloodthirsty Turkish Ottoman empire (aka "the sick man of Europe") was on its last, decrepit, leg in the waning days of its turgid greatness, and just before The Ottoman's doomed fez and proverbial last shoe was set to drop, it had already bequeathed posterity (modern-day Turkey) the honorific Ottoman legacy of sheer ruthlessness, corruption, butchery, and yes, genocide -- make that plural in capital letters -- GENOCIDES of Bulgarians, Greeks, Assyrians, and last but not least Armenians.

On numerous occasions, including both, before and after 1915 [ the worst year in total of 1.5 million Armenians massacred] the Ottoman Turks pillaged hundreds of Armenian villages, stole their properties and wealth, set their churches and schools on fire, burnt parishioners and schoolchildren alive, decapitated their writers and intellectuals, gouged the eyes of their poets and musicians, destroyed their books and libraries, maimed their defenseless babies and children, bayoneted their young and the old, raped their women and their daughters, drowned their helpless people in the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, and brutally drove the rest of the indigenous Armenians on a forced march out of their ancestral land to meet their destiny of certain death under the torching sun of DerZor's desolate desert. Ironically, all of these Turkish brutalities happened on Armenian historical land, where Armenians lived since time immemorial, in fact, prior to anyone had ever heard of the four-letter word "Turk" before. The book, "The Burning Tigris," by Peter Balakian puts my depiction of the Ottoman savagery to shame when you read the Author's detailed and well-researched historical accounts of that dark era.

After world war I, the "founding father" of modern Turkish republic, Mustafa Kemal, with oft-used "Ataturk" (father of the Turks) title attached to his name -- who, by the way, was no more a fitting father to the Turks than his children's Ottoman grandfather was to him -- staged the greatest escape from Ottoman forefathers historical tie when he performed the mother of all Houdini-acts on the Turkish people without them knowing it. He declared the dissolution of the Ottoman empire and conveniently disassociated himself and his Turkish herd from the immediate past of the genocidal sins of his forefathers. Instead of forging a national identity based on historical authenticity, Ataturk masterfully leapfrogged over 600 years of brutal Ottoman Turkish rule of the lands; He revised, distorted and falsified history books and began an inculcation process of indoctrination on the undeveloped -- and underdeveloped -- tabula rasa of Turkish minds. He successfully erased the existential traces of Armenians and other ethnic groups. He mercilessly punished anyone who dared question his revisionist narrative. His biggest fabrication yet. Well, just like that, in a flash, he pulled a new 'national identity of, so-called, "monolithic Turkey"' nonentity out of his allegorical butt whose identity was built on pure myth and its purpose was to concoct an artificial Turkic identity that fits the void of nationalistic air pocket that Ataturk's legerdemain move had created. Subsequently, he romanticized this new factually-challenged imaginary "Turkish " fiction and made it stick like wet noodle on the collective skull of the Turkish populace.

A couple of oblivious generations later, Turkey's mind-inoculation campaign of "Turkishness" became a bittersweet success. In Turkey, being clueless about the real unvarnished history, though, could be a double edge sword at times; on the one hand, ignorance of facts keeps the masses' mental boat quite afloat, but on the other hand, they could quickly turn violent and resort to murder when that little voice in their collective head is challenged with factual accounts of the land -- just as the 17-year old Turkish ultra nationalist punk did when he gunned down a Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink . This sort of violence is just a small example, reflective of the Turkish "statehood-of-falsehood" by-product which is squarely built on the ashes of 1.5 million Armenian genocide victims and other christian subjects.

You may find this hard to believe, but Post-Ottoman Turkish government -- beneath its transparently phony, revisionist structure -- has been worse than their predecessors on matters of historical facts, historical facts, and btw, did I mention historical facts. Hang on to your tasseled red fez for just a second longer and you'll see why. This time the joke is on the entire Turkish citizenry, compliments of Ataturk, the Turkish putz's pelvic wisdom which helped create this factually-challenged partial-birth anomaly known as modern-day Turkey. "Real history" tells us that the Turkish ancestral umbilical cord tie this savage nomadic tribe directly to central China and nowhere near the current geographical lands captured from the native Armenians of Anatolia and other ethnic groups of those lands.

It is quite apparent, also, that all subsequent Turkish leaders after Mustafe Kemal Ataturk, had to stick with the same reverse-engineered historical spin in order to save the country, essentially, from itself by constantly keeping the nation in a state of deep freeze of denial. As a result, the Turkish government has successfully straitjacketed the Turkish masses into an ideology based on falsehoods, lies, obscurantism, and last but not least, penchant zeal of denial, particularly the DENIAL of the Armenian GENOCIDE.

Unfortunately, this philosophical straitjacket has constrained the Turkish nation from the cerebral growth it badly needs; Turkey has become an intellectual orphan to its ancestral past. No wonder, Turks feel unnerved and threatened -- perhaps, even a bit "un-Turkish?" in an obsessive-compulsive "Turkishness" sense of the word-- specially when the index finger of history's steady hand points to Armenian presence on those stolen lands. More importantly, though, this sham was cobbled together to create a black hole within which all memories of their forefathers shameful acts, including genocides, would forever be lost. or, so they thought.

To sum it up, Turkey of pre-1923 did not suddenly disappear from planet earth, in fact, don't let "brown clad Turk" fool you anymore. Post-Ottoman Turkey is the same underwear worn inside out with criminal skid marks clearly visible to the whole wide world -- except Turkey. Perhaps Modern-Turkey will be better served doing real modern things for a change: drop those soiled ones for a set of crisp, fresh white political undies.