    Ottoman Empire, please come back!

    (published in the Turkish weekly Yarin)

    Israel Shamir

    On Mt Carmel, there is a pleasant townlet, slightly more than a village,
    called Zichron Yaakov. Now known for its robust wine and Frenchy
    restaurants, in the days of World War One it was a home for the Zionist
    pro-British espionage ring, NILI. Its members, prominent Zionist
    settlers and citizens of Turkey, communicated with the British troops in
    Egypt, delivered to them news of the Turkish forces’ disposition and
    contributed to the Empire’s defeat. They were connected with Haim
    Weitzman, who squeezed the Balfour declaration from unwilling Brits and
    became the first president of the Jewish state. To this day, the NILI is
    greatly venerated in Israel, and schoolchildren are often taken to the
    museum where they are indoctrinated in Jewish loyalty to the Jews only,
    and in their duty to betray any other power if it is called for by their
    loyalty as Jews.

    They had a good reason to betray their country, the Ottoman Empire, for
    if the Empire were still intact, the Jewish State with its millions
    deprived natives immured beyond the high wall, its millions of equally
    deprived guest workers locked in shantytowns would have never come into
    existence. Incidentally, the US attack on defenceless Iraq with its
    hundreds of thousands dead and ensuing civil strife would have never
    materialised, either, for Iraq was a part of that powerful Empire.

    And not only has the Middle East suffered from the Empire’s demise, but
    NATO planes would have never had the fun of bombing Belgrade, if the
    Empire were still with us. Even Greece, the first break-away province,
    now devastated by the introduction of the Euro, and reduced to the
    status of an hotelier for wealthy Northerners, has a good reason to
    regret the days when Greeks formed the elite of the Empire from
    Alexandria to Constantinople. The Turks, the Empire-building nation,
    were admired and feared in Europe, while now they are treated as
    unwanted competitors for dish-washing jobs in Frankfurt and London.

    We, the heirs to the Byzantines and the Ottomans, have now to deal with
    a great new challenge, the American colonisation project. The Mammonite
    forces now at the helm of the US are using the dismantlement of the
    great continental Empires to build their world-embracing neo-liberal
    one. In this new Empire, Western Europe will be ‘the old country’,
    Greece to Rome, an impotent object of imperial benevolence and guidance;
    while the rest of the world will be re-colonised. Instead of trying to
    fit into this plan by trying to join the EU, as some Turkish leaders
    hope to do, a better response would be to re-establish a big
    civilisation-based framework. Mankind is ripe for a new stage in its
    development, the re-formation of civilisation blocks. By the end of this
    stage, there will be five super-states, five civilisations: the US,
    Europe, China, Latin America and ours, the Commonwealth of the East. The
    alternative is a world colonised by Mammonite America.

    Indeed, it is the right time to give a thought to bringing the Ottoman
    Empire back. The Empire did not fail because it was too big and
    unwieldy: in its heyday it was smaller than Brazil or Russia. It failed
    because inexperienced local elites grasped the poisoned fruit of
    nationalism, offered by the western Masters of Discourse.

    Nationalism, this European invention, has probably killed more people
    than the Black Plague of old. Worse, it has not offered a plausible
    alternative to the unity of the Empire, where dozens of tribes and
    ethnic groups felt at home, in peace with each other. None of the
    break-away countries has succeeded in creating a viable state, and the
    Western predators continue to spread strife among smaller and smaller
    groups, as the Kurdish rebellion in Turkey and Iraq reminds us. The
    Pan-Arabism of Nasser and the Ba’ath Party, the Islamism of Osama, the
    Pan-Turkism of Ziya Gökalp and Halide Edib Adivar have all failed to
    propose a viable ideology to counteract the continuing onslaught of the
    Mammonite forces.

    We should take a leaf from the book of our brothers in the EU. Europe
    has succeeded in bringing back the Empire of Charlemagne, which
    collapsed a millennium ago; our Empire is still alive in the memories of
    people, and in the glorious palaces, fortresses, mosques and churches.
    Our reconstituted Empire may and should embrace the entire
    post-Byzantine expanse: the bright future of Turkey, the Middle East,
    and the Balkans lays in joining in with Russia, Ukraine, and the Turkic
    republics of Central Asia.

    These two heirs to the glory of Byzantium, the Russian and the Ottoman
    Empires, fought each other for centuries; but the same can be said of
    the French and the Germans, the heirs to the Western Roman Empire. If
    these eternal enemies in the West could succeed in uniting, it can be
    done in the East, too.

    This summer as I travelled in Russia and Ukraine, I noticed much in
    common between the Russians and the Turks (or Tatars, in Russian usage).
    “Scratch a Russian and you will find a Turk”, fumed Churchill, his cigar
    in full blast. “And the other way around”, quipped Leon Gumilev, a great
    and late Russian historian, the guru of the Russian pro-Eastern
    tendency. Indeed, Russia as a state came into being as the union of the
    steppe-dwelling Muslim Turks and the forest-based Orthodox Slavs.
    Gumilev demolished the Western myth of the ‘Tatar (Turk) Yoke’ and
    correctly described the Moscow Rus as the successor state to the Golden
    Horde founded by the Turkic Genghisid princes. “Russia is unbeatable in
    its union with the brave Turks”, said Gumilev who identified the West as
    the greatest source of danger for Russian identity.

    The National Bolshevik leader and a prominent writer, Edward Limonov,
    wrote recently of Russia being ‘a Turkey with German coating’. Russians
    still prefer ‘sharovary’, baggy trousers popular among Anatolian
    peasants and the Ottoman nobility of old. They squat like the Turks do,
    noticed Limonov. This positive feeling of Russians towards the Turks is
    so different from the European mistrust of them. It finds its way into
    the cinema: the new Russian blockbuster called The Turkish Gambit
    describes the Russo-Turkish war for Plevna without the usual, for
    Hollywood, racist overtones and presents Osman Nuri Pasha as a hero.

    The commonality of Turks and Slavs goes back a long way. In northern
    Ukraine, I visited the erstwhile capitals of Russian princedoms,
    Novgorod, Chernigov and Kiev. Their princes married Turkic princesses,
    daughters of the steppe, and Turkic warriors formed an integral part of
    their retinue. The Russian epic lay of the 12th century depicts a
    Novgorod Prince Igor war raid into Turkic steppe; the prince was
    defeated, but his captor Konchak Khan gave him his daughter in marriage,
    and he returned home to Novgorod. A sizable part of Russian nobility
    still has Turkic names, be it Nabokov, the author of Lolita, or Usupov,
    the wealthiest Russian prince at the court of Nicolas II.

    In a recent book, The Eurasian Symphony by St Petersburg writer van
    Zaichik, an alternative history of our part of the world is proposed.
    What would have happened if the Turkic Golden Horde’s enlightened ruler
    Sartak Khan, a friend of St Alexander Nevsky, had survived an
    assassination attempt and, as a consequence, the Russians and the Turks
    had remained in one prosperous state? Van Zaichik calls this resulting
    empire ‘Ordus’, an amalgam of Horde and Rus, embracing the bulk of the
    Eurasian landmass. Ordus is a land where modernity has incorporated
    tradition and religion; the family has remained intact; and even though
    there are wealthy men, the unbridled pursuit of wealth is frowned upon.

    “We work together and contain our egoism”, this is the credo of Ordus, a
    model suitable for the East. Mosques and churches are plentiful;
    however, all the citizens are united in harmony. This image of an
    alternative universe was so attractive to the Russians that I spotted a
    few cars carrying stickers “I want to live in Ordus”. By the way, Ordus
    includes a Jerusalem Vilayet, where many of the descendents of Jews
    found refuge from Hitler’s rise in Germany (yes, there was a Hitler and
    a Germany even in the alternative universe), but live as equals with the
    native inhabitants.

    A fascinating new Russian historian, Fomenko, has proposed a heretical
    model of history: in his eyes, there was always an Empire, or rather,
    The Empire; and the city on the Bosporus is the natural capital of
    Eurasia. Whether or not it was ever the case in the past, it can
    certainly be the case in the future.

    Instead of fighting for leadership in Eurasia, the Turks, Slavs, Arabs
    (and their smaller neighbours) can unite their forces and make
    Constantinople (‘Istanbul’ is just a corrupt reading of Constantinople)
    their joint capital and the seat of the Imperial government.
    Constantinople can be our answer to Brussels, New York and Beijing.
    While the centuries-long quest for hegemony in Eurasia has caused many
    wars, a union would satisfy all desires: the Russians will have
    Constantinople as their capital, without dislodging the Turks; the Turks
    will have lifelines to the Crimea and Tashkent, even to the far-away
    diamond reserves of Yakutia, the land of the Pravoslav Turks, restored
    without fighting a single Russian. The Middle East will once again be
    incorporated in Eurasia as it was; and it won’t have to listen to orders
    from Washington, London or Brussels. Instead of being a far-away place,
    Turkey will become the meeting place for the people of Baghdad and Kiev,
    Belgrade and Cairo, Vladivostok and Ankara.

    Let us raise the twin-headed eagle of Byzantium once again as the symbol
    of our Eastern Civilisation’s unity of the Orthodox and the Muslims,
    invest our ruler with the twin crown of Caliph of Islam and Emperor of
    the Orthodox, bury petty nationalisms of the recent past and begin an
    exciting new page in our history and the history of the world. The
    reconstituted Commonwealth of the East, the rightful successor to the
    Eastern Roman, Byzantine, Russian and Ottoman Empires, will possess vast
    material and spiritual resources, making it a world superpower, next to
    a united Europe, to the US and to China.

    This Commonwealth will be united by an idea, as well as by material
    considerations. For East and West are different, split by a metaphysical
    cleavage. In the West, the Mammonite heresy brought in the American
    troop carriers of the World War, had won the day. They accepted a brutal
    faith of greed, of unbridled desire for individual success, of the right
    and duty to grab and consume as much as possible. They rejected
    solidarity in the name egoism they call “absolute freedom of man”. They
    destroyed Woman by turning her into an imitation of man; they destroyed
    Man by making him compete with women. Having rejected God, their
    churches are empty, their cities are centred on the business quarters,
    while ours are centred on learning, art and prayer.

    The East has retained its Christian identity, for Islam is just a form
    of Christianity, though as distanced from the Nicene Orthodoxy as is the
    Calvinism of the Swiss. The East denies Mammon for we have not rejected
    God; we put spirit above material considerations as we have not rejected
    Christ al Mesih, we adore Woman for we have not rejected His Mother,
    Sitt Maryam. The East still loves nature, despises the dishonest rich,
    believes in the value of work, and prefers harmony to success. We like
    manly men and womanly women. We respect tradition and family. The US-led
    West creates a nomad civilisation out of an open society of atomised
    individuals disconnected from family and soil. In the Commonwealth of
    the East, we shall proceed in the opposite direction. We will discourage
    immigration and encourage capital transfer. We shall be in favour of the
    autochthon, for the autochthon knows the needs and desires of his
    locality better.

    The West has proclaimed the sanctity of private property. We respect it
    so long as it is small, but reject its excesses. We shall rule against
    greed by taxing the super-rich, confiscating their property and sending
    them for re-education and ‘de-greeding’ to a friendly Anatolian or
    Siberian village. There will be no privatisation of resources, no sale
    of lands to foreigners, no dispossession of peasants. We shall
    discourage the growth of cities and promote the countryside. The West
    over-regulates private life; we shall uphold the eternal liberties of
    the East. We shall be good friends to our neighbours, or terrible
    enemies, if they so choose.

    This fantasy is actually the only plausible alternative to having our
    lands colonised by the US or by the rising superpowers of Europe and China.