Kenan Camurcu

When the triple-lettered chain market, having become fixed on the image that the newly affluent conservative segment was not particularly happy being around the poor, quickly upgraded to the secular counterpart's four-lettered version, which offered a refreshing standard of time-space, I witnessed this scene in the conservatives' favored market: A mother, upon seeing the product her young daughter had taken from the shelf—now filled with junk food far from being cheap snacks—enacted a movie sequence with her index finger and facial expression: "Boycott, my daughter."

Her attire, demeanor, gestures, and facial expressions were those of a cliché conservative, Islamist. She must have felt good participating in the anti-Semitic boycott charade aimed at things associated with Israel (meaning the Jews). She probably even considered her action quite militant. After all, it's an action that guarantees the clearing of all moral responsibilities by casually dismissing dozens of domestic issues—those most deserving of an uprising for justice—right next to her, in front of her eyes, everywhere.

Her returning the product without asking the price may well prove that she is a happy member of the oligarchy within the incumbent authoritarian regime's economy-political greenhouse, one who never asks the price of anything. They are the wealthy who can afford to boycott a product despite its low price and purchase an alternative many times more expensive. They are not like the poor, who search for the cheapest of everything, first filter products through the price sieve, and have no right to yearn for or crave anything. The economic volume of the households indebted to the economy-politics of the conservative despotism is powerful enough to finance the boycott. This is why they are insensitive to prices, unable to understand why the poor cannot behave like them. And of course, the boycott coding also signifies keeping the national wealth within the closed-circuit conservative communal economy. The resources distributed from the Bayt al-Mal (public treasury) to the supporter stands will be kept in domestic circulation. This is the very meaning of the boycott.

They lack the capacity to critically assess the conditioning aspect of the boycott, which aims to create an automatic and collective behavior. Nor is it required of them. They are entirely unconcerned with the fact that the majority of products on the aid lists delivered from various countries to Gaza are directly or indirectly Israeli-made, and that Gazans consume them with gusto, knowing this fact. There is even a Nutella Café in Khan Younis. Products boycotted in Türkiye and elsewhere are sold in cafés across various streets and neighborhoods in Gaza, and people are happily eating and drinking them.

The fact that the last Qassam leader, Yahya Sinwar, the architect of the October 7, 2023 catastrophe, was found with an Israeli-made Mentos breath freshener in his pocket when he was cornered and killed alone in a ruin holds no significance in the perception of the boycotters. Furthermore, according to one claim, that Mentos came to Sinwar among stolen supplies from aid packages intended for Gazans. Where else would he find it? He already had access to aid with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency [for Palestinian Refugees] (UNRWA) identity card issued in his name.

Allegations that Gazan UN staff participated in the detention of Israeli hostages held by Qassam, and that UN and Red Cross buildings were used both for this purpose and for the fully equipped concealment of Qassam operatives, are being confirmed one by one. Hamas fighters benefited maximally from the immunity of these facilities throughout the war. When Israel struck those places, the slogans in their propaganda bag were ready for global circulation. It's always a win-win scenario. The only losers in the script are the elderly, children, and truly innocent people who did not wish to be part of this madness—those whom the Qassam operatives hid among, thus causing their deaths as human shields. This is why opposition Israelis consider these incidents proof that Netanyahu's war policy, which is well aware of this situation, is geared towards mass destruction.

The Economics of Cognitive Anorexia and Power

In the world of Muslims who are not concerned with truth, what is real has no meaningful counterpart. Their condition is mental anorexia. I had written about the reason. Therefore, the conservative's Palestine is not in Palestine, but in their own country. There, it is directed towards gaining an advantage over a political rival, pursuing rent, and recruiting members to their congregation and organization. The "Palestinian cause" is a thematic tension they use to consolidate authoritarian superiority domestically, suppress opponents, and maintain tight internal political cohesion. The fact that all businessmen, including those who supplied material to the Israeli army during the war, published messages containing keywords like curse, genocide, and children dying is actually an act of mutual recognition. A password-sign ritual. It is a commitment that they have not departed from loyalty to the cognitive and psychic domain of power-mongering. The meaning of the opposition joining the same discourse is submission, bowing down.

Philosophy means the love of wisdom, as is well known, and the love of truth is something similar. The life equation where no variable can replace the love, respect, attachment, and loyalty to truth is meaningless for the conservative-political. They are sworn to the doctrine that "there are things more important than truth." In their universe, there is only one truth, one importance, one cause: to preserve the power they hold and finance this power by any rule-breaking means.

However, the capacity of political conservatism's ASPAVA economy-politics to cope with the financing cost of the authoritarian regime is rapidly declining. The rent that could initially be easily channeled even to the most peripheral supporters has now shrunk to a level barely sufficient for the inner circle. No one can keep up with the arithmetic of maintaining the order through domestic and foreign borrowing. In the last 5 years, the Central Bank President has changed 5 times, and the Finance Secretary 4 times. The lifespan of those put at the helm of the economy expires in two years. Despite the real problem being public finance, the authority defined for managing the economy is limited only to the maneuvering of money. Their mandate is to find money for the leader to spend. To press down with a deterrent, intimidating, and wearisome force that stops even the people's essential expenditures to avoid dishonoring the leader. The Central Bank's plunge into deficit during every crisis period stems from the economic paradigm preoccupied with money. As long as the extravagant and wasteful power holders are not sated with spending, the money flowing into the black hole at an increasing rate is multiplying the impoverishment of the populace. It is impossible to sustain such a regime solely through tax revenue.

The link between highly risky endeavors, such as embracing the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas fighters just as developed democracies began taking harsh measures, and the urgent need for money must be evident. Qatar, the ATM of global jihad, is indeed pursuing sabotage efforts intertwined with jihadists due to its struggle for existence—its survival as a state and country in the "new Middle East." But what is Türkiye doing on that narrow path?

Although, when the topic is political conservatives, it is more accurate not to tie the issue to efforts to merely save the day. There is a more fundamental issue. The impossibility for Türkiye to ascend to the league of developed democracies—those flirting with an evolution towards anarcho-capitalism—with this political regime needs to be explained through the lens of modernity, urbanism, and culture.

The Conservative Digging into the Magma of Absolutism

Let us recall that when the Paki-Scottish Humza Yousaf became Scotland's First Minister (2023), those who couldn't get enough of the celebrations for days mobilized to prevent the election of even Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, a man from the cultural basin of Islam and the original Anatolian root of the Alevis, let alone a Christian or Jew. Kılıçdaroğlu became the second leader to go into an election with a dagger in his back. He experienced the same thing as Erbakan. Every card was played to sabotage and obstruct his election, right down to the "Path of Omar" doctrine.  Some criticized the campaign on the grounds of the secular-nationalist İYİ Party's shift towards conservatism. However, there was a completely different subtext, a subliminal crypto, there. I had explained the matter in my article, "The Theo-Political Crypto in the Mobilization to Prevent Kılıçdaroğlu's Election" . And they made Meral Akşener, a Balkan migrant from the fertile habitat of Bektashism, execute this.

Who are the ones who made her do this? They are Idriss Küçükömer's "them," Hobbes's Leviathan, the specter, the ghost, the ogre. The 'being' that cannot be pointed at. A whisper, rumor, or gossip is enough to feel its existence and act upon its commanded ruling. What constitutes it is precisely this network of rumors.

I personally know of significant activities that the Ankara-originated 'whisperer' or 'big mouth', who continuously whispered in Erdoğan's ear after the February 28, 1997 alarm, managed to have canceled using the code "Pasha does not deem it appropriate"—referring to Çevik Bir—even though they were part of the finalized plans of the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (İBB). He carved out his domain this way. Given that he was able to rise to the position of the party's indispensable commissioner, one wonders what other logistical leverage helped him.

Anyway. It's none of our business, of course.

The personnel of conservative capitalism are impatient to wait for the afterlife to make life prosperous and flourishing. This explains why their hysterical desire in this world is for power and money. Therefore, one should not be surprised by the rapid transformation of the political agnosticism that clung to their tongues when they embarked on the path to power in 2002 into dogmatic agnosticism over time.

Islamists/Muslims cannot resist financial dealings. They love money, this worldly life, and all things base. Gold plating, ostentation, display. They are boiling inside. While there are so many issues awaiting reform, the only reform they obsessively guard is the Tender Law, which has been changed 200 times.

They needed a strong central state for the accumulation of wealth. They focused on it and succeeded. This is why an Islam that can only exist through wealth and power cannot be without a state and an authoritarian regime. The Iranian thinker Soroush called this experience the "despotism of the righteous"—holy despotism—in contrast to the "despotism of the wicked" attributed to secularists. If we disregard the marginal and ghulat (extremist) Khamenei faction of Twelver Shia Islam, the issue of state and political legitimacy has been extensively debated in Shia Islam. However, since the essence of Sunni Islam is political power, it lacks a body of knowledge formed through debates on legitimacy.

If only ethics had been adopted from the West. The state is unpopular in the civilization of the West. How wonderful. This is the truth the Germans also grasped, suffering greatly after the Hitler experience. They were late, but they built a solid foundation this time. Konrad Adenauer hoped that people would not be foolish enough to give all authority to a single person again. But Muslim communities admire the delicious state that satisfies their endless appetite for dominance and wealth, to the point of worship.

America, which completed the revolution of federalism; Switzerland, the country of cantons that anarchists cannot stop praising; the federative Germany, Italy, and others. Even France, the unbreakable stronghold of unitarianism, has an unacknowledged regime of decentralization with its powerful local governments. All of Europe is full of examples on the verge of anarcho-capitalism, and the internal dynamics there are pushing the political models of these countries towards the anarchic universe. Türkiye, which speaks of entering this league or at least blending in with them, has reached the bottom of centralism and absolutism, and would penetrate its magma if it could.

The Supplier Despotism and the Limits of Autocracy

At every point of the Geo-Islamic blueprint, political ethic(slessness) is historically afflicted with the ailment of unitary ambition. That singularity is also based on a specific religion, sect, and temperament. Those who are different are inevitably the other. A foreigner, in a sense. There is no possibility for this conception to produce any result other than despotism. The only exception to this mainstream in Muslim countries was Syria. There, the Christian Michel Aflaq, the trio of the Socialist Ba'ath Party, led the emergence of revolutionary governments in Syria, Iraq, and Egypt, both intellectually and politically.

The financial source of the supplier despotism, the ASPAVA economy-politics, is currently gasping for air. In Iran, where a counterpart experience was observed, the political regime sharply retreated into public buildings, abandoning civil society. The mullahs, symbols of the regime, cannot step onto the street without their turbans and robes. Does anyone see the politicians representing the government in Türkiye in the marketplace? Disregard the staged scenes recorded for social media.

The reason we consider Türkiye and Iran together is that they are a perfect example of quantum entanglement, a concept that is an abstract proposition in physics but has the quality of an objective reality frequently confirmed in the discipline of international relations. The happenings in their political histories are twin, symmetrical, and synchronous. What happened first in one has inevitably infected the other. In Türkiye, what impoverishes the public are treasury-guaranteed investments. Recently, they also include defense expenditures that have gone off the rails. In Iran, what impoverishes the public are nuclear activities and military spending. Like a virus consuming the budget. People in oil-rich Iran are experiencing severe poverty.

The economic power of the authoritarian regime is now proving insufficient even for its own supporter layers. The fragmented breaks seen in satisfaction surveys are evidence of this. For example, what remains of July 15th? Does July 15th look like the event where the populace took to the streets and prevented a military coup? There are now only cold, grim, impassively hurried anniversaries and commemorations conducted with the crude force and coercion of the state. I saw a park—a municipality had dedicated it to the memory of July 15th, featuring sculptures recreating the night on the Bosphorus Bridge and a space dedicated to coups—quietly stripped of all its elements and turned into a simple park. The phase has been reached where pro-government factions do not want to be part of, or be seen as part of, the government's mistakes. Whether this situation translates into voter behavior is another matter. Different dynamics operate there.

Authoritarian regimes need unhappy, depressed, and uncontrolled men. The violence created by the masculinization of life has been the subject of various studies. Masculinizing life is a great necessity for dictatorships, and they do this under the name of strengthening the family. Their emphasis on the institutionalization of harsh patriarchy in the family in the public sphere stems from this. Because the strengthening of male values in the public sphere facilitates the social legitimacy of the authoritarian regime. The toxic masculinity highlighted in TV series, social media, and sports plays an active role in steering social emotions and acts as a battering ram for the male representation of political power.

The conservative despotism's need to maintain its dominance with brute force stems from its absolute failure in the competition for cultural hegemony. The striking example is the sect leader's daughter attempting to justify herself with excuses when a courier warned her about driving with flashing lights in the emergency lane. Aside from the sense of inadequacy and vulgarity that necessitates the thrill of driving in the emergency lane with flashing lights, despite possessing tens of thousands of followers, countless money, property, wealth, political power, bureaucratic influence, and indescribable might, the fact that this dazzling power is zeroed out the moment it is questioned by a poor courier delivering an order on a motorcycle is a profound lesson, of course. This is what Sedat Peker meant when he said, "You will be defeated by a telephone and a tripod."

The situation that emerged from Deleuze's soft power contribution to Foucault's model of surveillance/disciplinary societies secured by hard/brute force can be vulgarized by defining it as spreading authoritarianism to the grassroots. The authoritarian nature of conservative capitalism can only be understood this way. It would be unnecessary courtesy to filter and refine the vulgar and present it with expressions that inspire admiration. That is why it is impossible for this vulgar level to generate power energy from scientific, artistic, or cultural sources. It can only sustain its existence with pure, sole, unadulterated economics. And the source of that economics does not have an unlimited surface flow to feed it. The underground resources, in any case, do not go to the Beytü’l-Mal. For this reason, the political regime's despotic capacity is low. This is why it needs terrifying shows of terror. However, in civilized societies with strong cultural metabolisms, there are limits where this campaign will run into trouble. Excessive forcing cracks, shatters, and demolishes the hardened plate. Therefore, what is being tested in Türkiye is not the resistance point of autocracy, but whether or not the society is civilized.

Translated by Gemini