The Theater of Conspiracy in the Run-up to Turkey’s Elections

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http://www.juancole.com/2014/03/conspiracy-turkeys-elections.html

The Theater of Conspiracy in the Run-up to Turkey’s Elections
By Juan Cole | Mar. 13, 2014
(By Erdağ Göknar)

The novel Snow by Nobel-prize-winning Turkish author Orhan Pamuk exposes the logic of Middle Eastern nationalism. Not surprisingly, political conspiracy has a prominent role to play in it. Turkish realities and their ideologically colored representations are constantly switching places in the novel.

As a result, it becomes harder and harder for characters to distinguish fact from fiction. For example, the newspaper prints events that will happen rather than ones that have happened; a military coup erupts from the performance of a didactic play; the mere hint of a political Islamic electoral victory provokes the (then) established secular order to acts of violence; women who want to veil are prevented from doing so and are driven to suicide because of what veiling represents to the state. Similar surreal scenes have been common in modern Middle Eastern history and are currently playing out in Egypt, Syria and Libya.

In this world, rhetoric and reality are often conflated. But in Turkey today, we are witnessing the emergence of something beyond the fictions of political representation: the rise of conspiracy as a political force.

The discourse of conspiracy is so powerful that incriminating evidence of corruption against Turkey’s ruling AK (Justice and Development) Party, which first led to the resignation of four ministers, has done little to dampen Prime Minister Erdoğan’s political power before local (March 30), presidential (August) and general elections (June 2015). The conspiracy theory tells an alternative story to explain away an inconvenient truth.