The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
A history lesson to make Erdogan jittery
The 1960 downfall of a Turkish leader offers a cautionary insight into the country’s modern-day divides
A COUP IN TURKEY by Jeremy Seal
352pp, Chatto & Windus, T £14.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £16.99, ebook £9.99
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One general rule of modern military coups is that victory goes to whoever seizes control of the state TV studios. Yet when troops tried to overthrow Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in 2016, they forgot that today’s leaders have access to smartphones. Minutes after they announced on state TV news that his “autocratic” government was over, Erdogan FaceTimed a presenter on a rival channel, insisting he was still in charge and urging his supporters to fight back.
Thus did Erdogan loyalists take to the streets to thwart the coupmongers, who feared that his Islamist populism was undermining Turkey’s secular republic. Yet in the harsh reprisals that followed, he has perhaps proved their point about his autocratic streak: more than 50,000 people have been thrown in jail on suspicion of being coup sympathisers.
Then again, as Jeremy Seal points out in his new book, Erdogan has good reason to feel jittery. A Coup in Turkey tells the story of a previous elected Turkish leader, Adnan Menderes, who was the target of an earlier military putsch, in 1960 – this one ending in his execution. Like Erdogan, Menderes was a populist who courted the religiously devout. And in similar fashion, that provoked the wrath of the generals in Turkey’s secular elite – who, Seal says, distrust any politician seeking the “prayer rug vote”.
Today, Erdogan cites Menderes as one of Turkey’s greatest political martyrs, although in the West the name is barely remembered. In 1959, Menderes briefly made the headlines in Britain when his official plane crash-landed near Gatwick, killing most of those on board. He walked away with barely a scratch, convincing his religious supporters that he was “in Allah’s care”.
Seal opens his book with that fateful plane crash episode, showing how Menderes’s rise and fall has echoes in the Erdogan era. Then, as now, Turkey lived in the shadow of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, who steered the country to secularism after the Ottoman Empire’s collapse at the end of the First World War. Education was made compulsory, women given the vote, and the role of Islam curbed in politics. Such was the pace of westernisation that when Turkey’s Arabic-style script was replaced with a Latin one, Turks had just four months to master the new alphabet before the old one was outlawed.
At first, Menderes and his new Democrat Party seemed a benign influence on this aggressive modernisation. After the Second World War, he championed a free press and democracy, ending a period of one-party rule by the secular Republicans. He brought pipes, roads and buses to Turkey’s rural voters, whom the Republicans had shunned as ignorant peasants. His followers, who gave him three election victories between 1950 and 1960, acclaimed him as the man “who had taken their feet out of rawhide sandals”.
At the same time though, Menderes permitted mosques to thrive once more, infuriating the metropolitan secularists, for whom every temple was “a breeding ground for provincial fatalism and inertia”. As Seal puts it: “In the land of Atatürk, the unforgivable sin was to court religious reaction and so condemn the country to obscurity and superstition.”
Indeed, the secularists soon claimed Turkey was drifting back to Ottoman-era backwardness. Statues of their revered Atatürk were defaced by religious zealots, decrying his “infidel” ways. Once again, the pious felt free to tut at couples holding hands in public, or men bringing their wives to restaurants. Menderes also hastened his own downfall. When rampant inflation led Turks to nickname their country “Yokistan” (the Land Where Nothing Is Available), he proved allergic to criticism, shutting down the free press that he himself had championed.
Yet whatever Menderes’s shortcomings, in overthrowing him, Turkey’s generals overlooked how Atatürk himself had expressly forbidden military interference in politics. They also set a regrettable precedent, meddling at least three further times during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Coups, Seal says, are to Turkey “what farmers’ strikes are to France, missile tests to North Korea and school shootings to the United States”.
A travel writer by calling, Seal writes this book as a travelogue, retracing Menderes’s story via visits to his old haunts and encounters with Turks who remember him. He writes beautifully, although once or twice I did feel I was overdosing slightly on rich, descriptive prose, like a tourist eating too much Turkish baklava. Instead, I could have done with a little more about the coup against Erdogan, given that this is why Menderes’s story has resonance today.
Still, while I doubt it will delight the Turkish tourist board, this book offers an excellent historical lens through which to view the country’s political landscape. It’s also a reminder that whatever the current rows in Europe are over Islam’s role in public life, that same row has raged far longer – and harder – in Turkey.
‘Coups are to Turkey what farmers’ strikes are to France, missile tests to North Korea’
JEWS DON’T COUNT by David Baddiel
144pp, TLS Books, T £8.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £9.99, ebook £3.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ
Soon after beginning David Baddiel’s clever, controlled book, I began to feel my own powers of control loosening. My heart started to thud and – as the author intended – my body filled with the chemicals of fury. As a comedian, Baddiel is a master of the telling example. When it comes to the anti-Semitism that goes on almost unimpeded in an otherwise racism-obsessed society, his examples are so many and so brazen that, from the first page, one is electrified by the clarity of the problem.
On New Year’s Day, 2017, Jeremy Irons was on the radio reading TS Eliot’s description of Jews as being lower than rats, without so much as a twitch. “However great the writer, however great the writing, no other minority group would be compared to rats, or envisaged as any similar negative racist stereotype, on Radio 4,” notes Baddiel.
When in 2019 Falsettos, a Broadway musical with almost entirely Jewish characters arrived in London, with no Jewish cast, Jewish actors wrote to The Stage about it, coining the term “Jewface”. As Baddiel points out, nobody cared. There was no outcry, no viral #jewface hashtag. The few who could be bothered to respond reprimanded the Jewish actors: how dare they appropriate “blackface” – denoting an important form of racism – for such a trivial cause as anti-Semitism?
It is impossible to imagine this response being applied to any other minority. Ditto the non-responses to an ongoing cascade of slights, deafening silences, and outpourings of bile from public figures. Indeed, an alternative title for Baddiel’s book could be: “nobody has ever been cancelled for anti-Semitism in the history of the world”.
He highlights motifs that appear to permit anti-Semitism to function, unchecked and without consequence. Anti-capitalism, and the falsehood that Jews are all rich, is one biggie. Another is that Jews are necessarily white, and therefore protected within the walls of privilege. “White really means: safe,” says Baddiel, before quoting from an EU report into anti-Semitism which shows just how far from safety, physical and otherwise, Jews actually are. It’s all spot on, almost.
Baddiel stresses that he is concerned more with the “silence” that surrounds anti-Semitism than with the bile itself. But an awkward silence – about Israel – lurks within Baddiel’s own book. Or perhaps it’s more a coldness than a silence: “My position on Israel is: I don’t care about it more than any other country,” he says, “and to assume I do is racist.”
This “nothing-to-do-with-me” attitude towards Israel is puzzling. Israel is one of the glossiest fig leaves used by contemporary antiSemitism to cover its Goebbels-y bits. To ask that Israel be left out of the conversation because it would be “racist” to include it, is to use the logic of the progressives, skewered in Baddiel’s book, who think that Jews don’t count.
Baddiel’s stance on Israel is intended to present him as a regular, honest Englishman first and foremost – one who not only happens to also be an ethnic minority himself, thereby meriting inclusion in the intersectionality club, but also supports oppressed minorities equally. He says that he does care about Palestinians, “but not more than I care about the Rohingya, or people suffering in Syria, or Yazidi women, or starving children in Burkina Faso”. Fair enough.
But why are his comparisons not to fellow Western democracies? Why are they to the most violent, sadistic regimes in the world? One of the main components of the ageold system of deranged morality that produces anti-Semitism is the blood libel. In comparing Palestinians to “starving children in Burkina Faso”, Baddiel – no doubt unconsciously – is echoing a version of that falsehood. Baddiel therefore exhibits a confounding, ironic blind spot of his own, which darkens this otherwise perceptive polemic. Yet, even so, Baddiel’s book ought to be read and enjoyed for its elegance and authority, and most of all for the expertly marshalled panoply of examples that have the power to expose, and perhaps even to persuade, those who think Jews don’t count.
‘No other minority group would be compared to rats on Radio 4’