Anti-Turkish sentiment

Anti-Turkism (Turkish: Türk Düşmanlığı), Turkophobia, Turcophobia or anti-Turkish sentiment is the hostility towards Turkish people, Turkish culture and the Republic of Turkey. Anti-Turkism does not always refer to just the Turks of Turkey but it can refer to various Turkic peoples. In addition to Turkey, Turkic peoples characterize the populations of Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China (East Turkistan), and various Russian Republics such as Tatarstan, Chuvashia, Yakutia, Altai, etc.

General Information

When compared with apparently similar phenomena, it turns out to be, at least in its recent form, more of a deliberate misconstruction than an actual hate. However, some hold that the negative Turkish imagery which has been brought forth by legislators in various European parliaments during the European Union accession process, is evidence of Anti-Turkism.

Anti-Turkism apparently lacks a racial and cultural basis, and appears to be mostly based on geopolitics and religion in addition to diplomatic and strategic interests involving the modern state of Turkey. The Cyprus Dispute and the Bosnian War are two examples of possible Anti-Turkism. These facts themselves don't necessarily imply a direct hate towards Turks as a nation, but reflect the various diplomatic tensions of the moment.

Detractors

Anti-Turkism's detractors (most of them Turks) claim on the other hand that Anti-Turkism is merely a handy excuse which has been used to label and demonize all actual or imaginary enemies of the Turkish nation and that Anti-Turkism has been used excessively to justify personal and national failures. They believe that the Turkish state and the Turkish people are no worse than any other democratic country and citizens. The detractors also feel that some facts are exaggerated by the mass media and by some politicians for their own purposes.

Early History

Turkophobia has its origins dating back to the Crusades. The desperate situation of the Byzantine Empire following the Seljuk Turkish invasion of Anatolia led Pope Urban II at the Council of Clermont in 1095 to call upon all Christians to join a war against the Turks.

By the middle of the 1400s special masses called missa contra turcas (translated as "mass against Turks") were celebrated in various places in Europe , the message of these masses was that victory over the Turks was only possible with the help of God and that a Christian community was therefore necessary to withstand the cruelty of the Turks.

Bishop Fabri of Vienna (1536–41) claimed that:

"There are no crueller and more audacious villains under the heavens than the Turks who spare no age or sex and mercilessly cut down young and old alike and pluck unripe fruit from the wombs of mothers".

In the 16th century about 2,500 publications about the Turks were spread around Europe (over a thousand of which were in German), in these publications the image of the 'bloodthirsty Turk' was imprinted on reader. Infact in the period of 1480 to 1610, twice as many books were published about the Turkish threat to Europe than about the discovery of the continent of America.

It is important to remember that during this time the Turks had invaded the Balkans and Asia Minor, subjugating the Christian populations there. Thus European Christians had a great deal to fear from the Turks.

Philipp Melanchthon claimed that the Turks were the Red Jews. Jews because they circumcised their sons and had other Jewish manners and Jewish customs (even customs that were similar to that of Jewish customs). Red because they were bloodhounds that murdered and warred.

Martin Luther had the view that the Turks invasion of Europe was Gods punishment of Christianity because it had allowed the corruption of both the Holy See and the Church. In 1518 when he defended his 95 theses, Luther claimed that God had sent the Turks to punish the Christians in the same way as he had sent war, plagues and earthquakes. The reply of Pope Leo X was the famous papal bull in which he threatened Luther with excommunication and attempted to portray Luther as a troublemaker who advocated capitulation to the Turks.

According to some theologians the word Turk came from "torquere" (translit "torture"), and according to another popular theory the Turks were identical with the Scythians who were considered a particularly cruel race.

Stories of the dog-Turk also gave Europe this negative image of the Turks. The dog-Turk was claimed to be a man-eating being, half animal half human with a dog’s head and tail. Military power and cruelty were the recurring attributes in all these claims about the origins of the Turks.

In Sweden, the Turks were designated the arch-enemy of Christianity. This is evident in a book entitled Luna Turcica eller Turkeske måne, anwissjandes lika som uti en spegel det mahometiske vanskelige regementet, fördelter uti fyra qvarter eller böcker (translit "Turkish moon showing as in a mirror the dangerous Mohammedan rule, divided into four quarters or books") which was published in 1694 and was written by the parish priest Erland Dryselius of Jönköping. In sermons the countrys clergy preached about the Turks' general cruelty and bloodthirstiness and of how they systematically burned and plundered the areas they conquered. In a Swedish school book published in 1795 Islam was described as "the false religion that had been fabricated by the great deceiver Muhammed, to which the Turks to this day universally confess".

Many vices in the world were associated with the Turks:

• In Italian phrases such as "bestemmia come un Turco" (translit "he swears like a Turk") and "puzza come un Turco" (translit "he stinks like a Turk") were often used. One of the most infamous Italian phrase (and one much used by headline writers) was "Mamma li Turchi!" ("Mamma the Turks are coming") this is used to suggest an imminent danger.[1]
• The French called rude behaviour, cruelty and greed "turquerie".
• When the Spanish wanted to make disparaging remarks about a person, he/she was called "turco".
• The English expression "to talk turkey to somebody" means to give a frank opinion to the opposite party.
• The German repertory ranged from "Türkenhund" ("Turkish dog") to "Türkenknecht" ("Turkish farm-hand"), "Kümmeltürke" ("caraway Turk") and "er qualmt wie ein Türke" ("he smokes like a Turk").
• In the Austrian countryside you can still hear today how children are called in from play: "Es ist schon dunkel. Türken kommen. Türken kommen" (translit "It’s already dark, The Turks are coming. The Turks are coming").
• The Greeks sometimes call Turks "vromoshillous" (translit "stinky dog")

Modern Anti-Turkism

When the Turkish national football team played a Euro 2004 qualifying match in the stadium of light against the English national football team, a large number of English football fans chanted, the chants were easily audible live on television:

"I'd rather be a Paki than a Turk"

Anti-Turkish examples in film and theatre

Shakespeare's famous play Othello, Othello says the following before stabbing himself

Set you down this;

And say besides, that in Aleppo once,

Where a malignant and a turban’d Turk

Beat a Venetian and traduc’d the state,

I took by the throat the circumcised dog,

And smote him thus.

Lawrence of Arabia who helped the Arabs during Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire during the First World War made claims that he was raped by a Turkish soldier, but this was proved to be incorrect. Some people view Lawrence's accusations as slanderous against Turkish people. [2][3] What caused the most controversy was the film called Lawrence of Arabia. The film caused a storm of protest and indignation in Turkey.

Another example was Oliver Stone's Oscar winning film Midnight Express. The film is about a young American called Billy Hayes who has been given a long prison sentence after being arrested for possession of hash. All the Turks in the film are portrayed as bloodthirsty and sadistic torturers with homosexual inclinations, unshaven and swarthy with unkempt moustaches. All the buildings are dilapidated, washing hangs over dark and ominous alleys full of people of menacing appearance and on the pavements idle men with dull eyes sit smoking their hookahs. Istanbul was changed into a third world city characterised by violence, disorder and chaos. All through the film, the imprisoned Billy Hayes and his family talk of the Turks as "pigs". The film had scenes where Billy Hayes was raped by fellow Turkish prisoners even though the book written by Hayes doesn't mention getting raped but does admit consentual sex. Although it must be added that Oliver Stone has apologized for any offence, saying "many hearts were broken in Turkey" because of the movie

In a episode of the Simpsons entitled Mobile Homer, Homer says to a Turk:

Bring back our children, you Cyprus-splitting jerks!

Many Turks and especially Turkish Cypriots took offence to this considering the sensitivity of the Cyprus dispute.

Anti-Turkish quotes

Voltaire characterised the Turks as:

"tyrants of the women and enemies of arts".

He also spoke of the need:

"to chase away from Europe these barbaric usurpers"

He accused the Turks of having destroyed Europes ancient heritage from :"the Orient’s Christian realm" and wrote:

"I wish fervently that the Turkish barbarians be chased away immediately out of the country of Xenophon, Socrates, Plato, Sophocles and Euripides. If we wanted, it could be done soon but seven crusades of superstition have been undertaken and a crusade of honour will never take place. We know almost no city built by them; they let decay the most beautiful establishments of Antiquity, they reign over ruins."

In this passage Voltaire refers to the brutal 500 year Ottoman occupation of Greece.

Cardinal Newman described the Turks in the 1926 book The Blight of Asia as:

the "great anti-Christ among the races of men."

He also said:

“The barbarian power, which has been for centuries seated in the very heart of the Old World, which has in its brute clutch the most famous coun­tries of classical and religious antiquity and many of the most fruitful and beautiful regions of the earth; and, which, having no history itself, is heir to the historical names of Constantinople and Nicaea, Nicomedia and Caesarea, Jerusalem and Damascus, Nineva and Babylon, Mecca and Bagdad, Antioch and Alexandria, ignorantly holding in its possession one half of the history of the whole world.”

William Ewart Gladstone former British Prime Minister was quoted in the same book as saying:

“Let me endeavor, very briefly to sketch, in the rudest outline what the Turkish race was and what it is. It is not a question of Mohammedanism sim­ply, but of Mohammedanism compounded with the peculiar character of a race. They are not the mild Mohammedans of India, nor the chivalrous Saladins of Syria, nor the cultured Moors of Spain. They were, upon the whole, from the black day when they first entered Europe, the one great anti-human specimen of humanity. Wherever they went a broad line of blood marked the track behind them, and, as far as their dominion reached, civilization disap­peared from view. They represented everywhere government by force as opposed to government by law.—Yet a government by force can not be main­tained without the aid of an intellectual element.— Hence there grew up, what has been rare in the his­tory of the world, a kind of tolerance in the midst of cruelty, tyranny and rapine. Much of Christian life was contemptuously left alone and a race of Greeks was attracted to Constantinople which has all along made up, in some degree, the deficiencies of Turkish Islam in the element of mind!”

David Lloyd George former British Prime Minister said in 1914 that:

The Turks are a human cancer, a creeping agony in the flesh of the lands which they misgovern, rotting every fibre of life ... I am glad that the Turk is to be called to a final account for his long record of infamy against humanity.

External Links

Patriotism versus Patria by Vartan Harutiunyan