Conspiracy theories in Turkey

Conspiracy theories are a prevalent feature of culture and politics in Turkey. Conspiracism is an important phenomenon in understanding Turkish politics. This is explained by a desire to "make up for lost Ottoman grandeur", the humiliation of perceiving Turkey as part of "the malfunctioning half" of the world, and a "low level of media literacy among the Turkish population."

Prevalence

Roots and causes

Turkish author and journalist Mustafa Akyol describes the reason for the prevalence of conspiracy theorizing in Turkey as "it makes us feel important. If the world is conspiring against us, we must be really special. It is, I believe, the way we Turks make up for our lost Ottoman grandeur." Turkish economist Selim Koru has pointed to the humiliation of perceiving Turkey as part of the "malfunctioning [half]" of the world.

Turkish consumers are the second-most media illiterate when compared to countries in Europe, leaving them especially vulnerable to fake news, a 2018 report released by the Soros Open Society Institute said. A combination of low education levels, low reading scores, low media freedom and low societal trust went into making the score, which saw Turkey being placed above only North Macedonia. According to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2018, Turkey with some distance is the country with most made-up news reports in the world.

Distinct features

A distinct feature of conspiracy theorizing in Turkey is that at the alleged command and control end of an alleged conspiracy scheme is usually narrated to be governments because the worldview taught in the Turkish education system is massively focused on the state.

Doğan Gürpınar, a scholar whose areas of study include nationalism, historiography, and ideologies in Turkey, argues that conspiracism's power to shape intellectual discourse and ideological standpoints and to represent the state tradition is "unique to Turkey".

List of conspiracy theories

• Anti-Israel and antisemitism: In the course of the 2006 Crimean–Congo hemorrhagic fever outbreak in Turkey, Felicity Party member Abdullah Uzun claimed that the tick species that spread the disease was brought to Turkey by Israeli female tourists. In May 2012, a dead European bee-eater with an Israeli leg-band, used by naturalists to track migratory birds, was found by villagers near the southeastern Turkish city of Gaziantep. The villagers worried that the bird may have carried a micro-chip from Israeli intelligence to spy on the area and alerted local officials. The head of the Agriculture and Livestock Provincial Directorate in Gaziantep, Akif Aslanpay, examined the corpse of the bee-eater and stated that he found that "the nose of the bird is very different and much lighter than others" and that it "can be used for audio and video," which, "in the case of Israel, they do." A counter-terrorism unit became involved before Turkey's agriculture ministry assured villagers that it is common to equip migratory birds with rings in order to track their movements. The BBC correspondent, Jonathan Head, ascribed the event to his view that "wildly implausible conspiracy theories take root easily in Turkey, with alleged Israeli plots among the most widely believed."
• Armenian genocide is invented: Turkish Armenian genocide denialists typically argue the academic consensus of it being a genocide as anti-Turkish propaganda or as a conspiracy spread by the Armenians, instead claiming that it either did not occur or that it was somehow justified at the time.
• COVID-19 misinformation: After the COVID-19 pandemic started in early 2020, false information regarding the virus's place of origin, treatment, diagnosis, etc. has been widely spread through social media, news outlets, and political biases. That caused an "infodemic," as dubbed by the World Health Organization, however that was a global phenomenon not unique to Turkey. The numerous false claims regarding the treatment of the virus have caused harm on various fronts in the fight to subdue it.
• Death of Özal: Some people believe that Turgut Özal, 8th president of Turkey, was assassinated in 1993. The main supporters of this theory are Özal's wife Semra Özal and their son Ahmet Özal. Retired brigadier-general Levent Ersöz was accused of the "assassination" and tried, but was found innocent and received an amnesty. Özal's body was exhumed in 2012 for an autopsy following long discussions and controversy over his death.
• HAARP: After the 2023 Turkey–Syria earthquake that took place on February 6, 2023, millions of Twitter posts claimed that the earthquake was caused by the powerful HAARP transmitters in Alaska, USA. Similar claims were also made for the 1999 İzmit earthquake.
• Mastermind narrative: The term "mastermind" (Turkish: üst akıl) denotes the alleged command and control institution, somewhat ambiguously placed with the government of the United States, in a comprehensive conspiracy to weaken or even dismember Turkey. Erdoğan as well as the Daily Sabah have often alleged that very different non-state actors, like the Salafi jihadist Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and the Islamist cult with political ambitions around Fethullah Gülen, were attacking Turkey at the same time in a well-coordinated campaign. Journalist Ömer Turan asserted that Netflix Turkey's teaser trailer for Money Heist contained messages aiming to incite the "second wave" of the Gezi Park protests.

Atatürk with a top hat, a common male headgear in the West at the time (1925). His many reforms secularizing Turkey have made Atatürk the target of Islamist conspiracy theories.

• Modernism and secularism: The belief that the modernist and secularist movements and reforms in the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic were Judeo-Masonic conspiracies is dominant among Islamists. Because of their adherence to traditionalist elements and their creation of cults of personality for the Ottoman sultans, Islamists portray anything contrary to Islamic tradition as evil. According to them, the constitutionalist movement ended absolute monarchy, the end of traditional religious institutions, and the introduction of a secular state were the work of Jews, Freemasons, or Dönmes. For example, according to their conspiracy theory, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was a Dönme.
• Mustafa Kemal Atatürk: Various conspiracy theories against Atatürk, the founder of the Republic of Turkey, have been put forward by Islamist circles who did not support his secularist reforms. Kadir Mısıroğlu, known for his hatred of Atatürk, is behind many conspiracy theories about Atatürk. One of these conspiracy theories is that Anatolia was invaded by the Greeks as a result of Atatürk's agreement with the United Kingdom to overthrow the caliphate. Another conspiracy theory about Atatürk is that he was poisoned to death by the Freemasons due to the closure of Masonic lodges in Turkey in 1935. In 2015, Yeni Şafak claimed that İsmet İnönü was in charge of planning the murder.
• Recep Tayyip Erdoğan: In 2007, the bestselling book in Turkey was Musa'nın Çocukları: Tayyip ve Emine (The Children of Moses: Tayyip and Emine) by Ergün Poyraz. Poyraz claims that there is an international Jewish conspiracy pulling the strings behind the world, including installing Erdoğan as prime minister of Turkey.
• Sèvres syndrome: A reference to the Treaty of Sèvres of 1920, there is a popular belief in Turkey that dangerous internal and external enemies, especially the West, are "conspiring to weaken and carve up the Turkish Republic".
• Treaty of Lausanne: Islamists have put forward many conspiracy theories about the Treaty of Lausanne. For example, it had been claimed in civil and formal circles that the treaty will expire in 2023. According to the conspiracy theory, Turkey is forbidden to mine its natural resources (such as boron and petroleum) due to the "secret articles" of the treaty; therefore, Turkey will rapidly become a developed country by mining and exporting its resources once the treaty expires.
• War against Islam, also called the "War on Islam" or "Attack on Islam", is a conspiracy theory narrative in Islamism discourse to describe an alleged Islamophobic conspiracy to harm, weaken or annihilate the societal system of Islam, using military, economic, social and cultural means. The perpetrators of the conspiracy are alleged to be non-Muslims, particularly the Western world and "false Muslims", allegedly in collusion with political actors in the Western world. While the contemporary conspiracy theory narrative of the "War against Islam" mostly covers general issues of societal transformations in modernization and secularization, as well as general issues of international power politics among modern states, the Crusades, are often narrated as its alleged starting point. The English-language political neologism of "War on Islam" was coined in Islamist discourse in the 1990s and popularized as a conspiracy theory only after 2001.

See also

• Adnan Oktar
• American political conspiracy theories
• Büyük Doğu
  • Necip Fazıl Kısakürek
• Cevat Rıfat Atilhan
• Conservatism in Turkey
• Deep state
  • Deep state in Turkey
• Millî Görüş
  • Necmettin Erbakan
• Neo-Ottomanism
• Xenophobia and discrimination in Turkey
  • Antisemitism in Turkey
• Ulusalcılık

Bibliography

• Baer, Marc David (2013). "An Enemy Old and New: The Dönme, Anti-Semitism, and Conspiracy Theories in the Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic". Jewish Quarterly Review. 103 (4): 523–555. doi:10.1353/jqr.2013.0033. S2CID 186383845.
• Göçek, Fatma Müge (2011). The Transformation of Turkey: Redefining State and Society from the Ottoman Empire to the Modern Era. London: I.B.Tauris. ISBN 9781848856110.

Further reading

• Dumont, Paul (July 2005). D'haen, Theo (ed.). "Freemasonry in Turkey: A By-product of Western Penetration". European Review. 13 (3). Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press: 481–493. doi:10.1017/S106279870500058X. ISSN 1474-0575. S2CID 145551813.
• Pipes, Daniel (1998). The Hidden Hand: Middle East Fears of Conspiracy. St. Martin's Griffin. ISBN 978-0312176884.
• Gürpınar, Doğan (2019). Conspiracy Theories in Turkey: Conspiracy Nation. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-429-67046-6.