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Cihan Tugal 17 February 2016
The resemblances to interwar Italy are unmistakable, and the results are gradually turning out to be almost as fatal. “Humanitarian aid to [civilians] must be allowed immediately. ‘Surrender or starve’ tactics are directly contrary to the law of war.”Any western leader might easily use these words to scold the Turkish state, and its starvation of Kurdish towns to the south-east of the country. But it would be highly unlikely. In fact, John Kerry’s tweet was aimed at the Syrian regime , not the Turkish one.
The party’s neo-fascism is also a response to the unravelling of global neoliberalism.
Salafi-jihadism has emerged as the only dynamic option that can channel Islamic anti-establishment energies.Broader than these, the civic networks of newspapers, debate circles, Qur’an courses, dormitories, and so on, intensified their activities with an explicitly anti-capitalist and anti-western discourse, from around 2010. Many nodes in the movement-regime complex began to sound like Third World revolutionaries of the 1960s-1970s. An excessive focus on the person of the leader, even though he might have parallels to the Führer here and the nephew Bonaparte there, obscure these structural dynamics driving Turkey’s new regime.
The AKP is building a very creative, revised version of fascism.