![\"taner](\"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/11\/Taner_Akcam00.jpg\" "\\"Taner_Akcam00\\"")
Taner Ak\u00e7am is an occasional contributor to Turkey\u2019s Taraf<\/em>, an off-base newspaper that is a staunch supporter of Turkey\u2019s AKP (AK\u00a0Party, Justice and Development Party). Rumored to be funded by the USA-based G\u00fclen movement, and\u00a0according to some also by\u00a0the CIA, it is staffed largely by ex-liberal socialists that are now far to the right. Cahit Ak\u00e7am is a columnist at Turkey\u2019s left-leaning Birg\u00fcn<\/em> newspaper. The AKP is Turkey\u2019s Islamic-rooted ruling party.<\/p>\n What got Taner Ak\u00e7am into trouble was an op-ed he wrote in Taraf<\/em> titled \u201cSeeking Milosevic\u201d that attacked Birg\u00fcn<\/em>. He took issue with Birg\u00fcn\u2019<\/em>s <\/em>headline news that the referendum had confirmed the 60% right-wing and 40% left-wing split in the country, and that the nationalist conservative votes had consolidated at the AKP. In what was a victory for the AKP, the referendum passed by a margin of 58%.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n By drawing an analogy between Birg\u00fcn<\/em> and Slobodan Milosevic of ex-Yugoslavia, Ak\u00e7am implicitly accused the newspaper of supporting nationalistic, racist and genocidal sentiments.<\/p>\n Neighborhood concept<\/strong><\/p>\n Taner Ak\u00e7am couldn\u2019t accept Birg\u00fcn<\/em>\u2019s view that the 40% of the referendum voters, that had voted \u201cno,\u201d were really left-wing. Noting that mass-killer Slobodan Milosevic, while called a communist and a socialist, had done horrible things, he argued that likewise in Turkey those who voted \u201cno\u201d couldn\u2019t be called true socialists. The naysayers were the main opposition party CHP (Republican People\u2019s Party) and the military-bureaucracy faction. The latter had organized and defended military coups in Turkey, he argued.<\/p>\n According to Ak\u00e7am, labeling these groups \u201csocialists,\u201d as Birg\u00fcn<\/em> did, stemmed from a hatred of the AKP. Ak\u00e7am called the 40% the \u201cbourgeois group.\u201d He maintained that this hatred is best explained through the \u201cneighborhood\u201d metaphor.<\/p>\n In Ak\u00e7am\u2019s view, Turkey is founded on \u201cour\u201d and \u201cother\u201d neighborhoods. The first neighborhood is one of \u201ccity people\u201d that includes bureaucrats, the military, and the like. The CHP and the Ottoman-era \u0130ttihat ve Terakki Partisi (Committee of Union and Progress, CUP) are included in this group.<\/p>\n The \u201cother\u201d neighborhood comprises artisans and peasants that have strong religious identities. This neighborhood is now expanding and encroaching on the \u201ccity people\u201d neighborhood.<\/p>\n Ak\u00e7am sees himself in the \u201ccity people\u201d neighborhood, which he calls \u201cours.\u201d<\/p>\n Contradiction and myopia<\/strong><\/p>\n But by doing so, Ak\u00e7am fell into a gasping contradiction, because this is also the group that he labeled \u201cbourgeoisie.\u201d How could someone, with a well-known Marxist background, and calling himself a socialist, be part of the bourgeois group? (Separate from his self-confessed connection to the terrorist PKK organization during 1981-84, Ak\u00e7am escaped from Turkish prison in 1977 after having been convicted of left-wing terrorist activities aimed at, among others, NATO military and American personnel).<\/p>\n Surprisingly enough, Ak\u00e7am supports the \u201cother\u201d neighborhood – the conservative, Islamic group solidly backed by Taraf<\/em>. This is because he thinks this group has strong democratic credentials.<\/p>\n It doesn\u2019t take a professor\u2019s prescience to know that such an argument is plain vacuous.<\/p>\n With the AKP in control \u2013 political lords of the 60% group \u2013 Turkey today is far removed from democracy \u2013 the illegal wiretappings, indefinite detentions and imprisonment of the opponents (including 47 journalists) of the government, an atmosphere of fear permeating the country, mandatory religious education, widespread penetration of G\u00fclenist elements in the state apparatus, in particular the police, appalling inequality between men and women, systematic efforts (re: the referendum) to bring the judiciary under the control of the government, parliamentary immunity, etc. None of these inequities seems to bother the professor.<\/p>\n In Turkey today the press is under siege, and by Prime Minister\u2019s own admission, \u201cThose that are impartial [to the AKP] should be eliminated.\u201d There are more detainees in prison than those convicted. Many detained under the so-called \u201cErgenekon case\u201d don\u2019t even know the exact charges against them.<\/p>\n No scruples, and no loyalty<\/strong><\/p>\n Ak\u00e7am\u2019s contradictions and distortions also caught the attention of his younger brother Cahit Ak\u00e7am. Responding to the elder Ak\u00e7am in Birg\u00fcn,<\/em> Cahit Ak\u00e7am couldn\u2019t hide his scorn. In a blistering, two-part rebuttal titled \u201cReally, you are the child of which neighborhood?\u201d he chastised his brother, and mockingly called on him to come to his senses. His article started with a quotation (and an admonition) from Anton Chekhov: \u201cOthers\u2019 sins do not make you a saint.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span> <\/strong><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Cahit Ak\u00e7am called the elder Ak\u00e7am\u2019s \u201cour\u201d vs. \u201cother\u201d neighborhood analysis, with \u201cMarxist-smelling\u201d questions, \u201clight\u201d and meaningless because it was not founded on class distinction. Neither neighborhood as described by Taner embraced the working class. Asking the rhetorical question as to how Taner could overlook the working class, the younger Ak\u00e7am thought that his brother, in what appeared to be sheer hypocrisy, didn\u2019t really care for the working class.<\/p>\n Continued the younger brother sarcastically: \u201cLuckily, Taner at least didn\u2019t ignore the bourgeois class in \u2018our\u2019 neighborhood.\u201d He chaffed at his brother for not mentioning the bourgeois class in the \u201cother\u201d neighborhood, i.e., the Islamist businessmen that the Prime Minister Tayyip Erdo\u011fan had braggingly called \u201cThe Anatolian Tigers.\u201d<\/p>\n Wondering how his brother could not know that the bourgeois class cannot exist without a working class, Cahit mocked his brother: \u201cHe is a big professor. True, not a sociology professor, but a history professor nonetheless. He has licked and swallowed a thousand times more than we have. He knows that, to be so ignorant, one does not have to be a professor. For Taner, the working class has little value.\u201d<\/p>\n The elder Ak\u00e7am was tersely reminded of the struggles of Turkey\u2019s working class since 1900.<\/p>\n Cahit continued his criticism by making reference to a Turkish metaphor \u2013 referring to lentil meal – that this is all that the Taner could muster as an argument. Referring to Taner\u2019s claim that all the \u201cinfamous\u201d events in Turkey\u2019s history emanated from \u201cour\u201d class, he bristled at Taner\u2019s suggestion that the socialists, through the CHP, were like relatives to the military- <\/strong>bureaucracy.<\/p>\n He mockingly called attention to the fact that the socialists had suffered immensely from the 1980 fascistic military coup.<\/p>\n Recalling how the elder Ak\u00e7am had defended the causes of right-wing, fascist elements in Turkey\u2019s recent history, how he had failed to come to the defense of socialists who had been falsely accused of coup attempts, his denialist past, and how he had let down even his own family, the younger Ak\u00e7am weighed in angrily: \u201cHow can Taner accuse his old friends, and even his own brother, as potential perpetrators of genocide?\u201d<\/p>\n Barely concealing his disdain, Cahit asked of his brother: \u201cAs you place the blame on your own neighborhood, can there be a more harrowing psychological ruin [for you]?\u00a0 \u2026 Where is your heart, and your conscience?\u201d<\/p>\n The ultimate indignity came when the younger Ak\u00e7am concluded that only someone who was politically and ideologically blind, and someone who had lost his scruples and his sense of loyalty, could do what his brother had done.<\/p>\n In the background of such emotional outburst was the fact that, while Taner Ak\u00e7am jumped the prison in 1977 into the safety of Germany and escaped the tribulations of the 1980 military coup, in the coup\u2019s aftermath his brother was put on trial for unauthorized activities, faced death by hanging, and was imprisoned for 8 years. Obviously, a lecture on fascism and the struggles of socialists was the last thing the younger Ak\u00e7am wanted to hear from a sibling he considered unscruppled and untrustworthy. <\/strong><\/p>\n A revisionist professor<\/strong><\/p>\n There was more to Ak\u00e7am\u2019s false accusations. He twisted history and put finger on \u201cour neighborhood\u2019 as the perpetrator of the May 27 (1960), March 12 (1971) and \u2013 obliquely – September 12 (1980) military interventions in Turkey. Evidently to hide his own past, and the embarrassment therewith, in his accounting he glossed over the 1980 military coup and the events (including his role) that preceded it.<\/p>\n He dallied further into the past and noted that his \u201cneighborhood\u201d was also responsible for the so-called \u201cArmenian genocide\u201d and the Dersim events (1937).<\/p>\n But he was quick to disown any blame \u2013 a point that also drew ridicule from the younger Ak\u00e7am. Instead, Taner Ak\u00e7am conveniently placed the blame on \u201cour administrators.\u201d Socialists like him, while closely affiliated with the administrators, had deep disagreements with them. It was all the fault of the administrators, not the socialists like him, he argued. <\/strong><\/p>\n Nice scapegoat, these administrators were! All that exonerated Ak\u00e7am and made him squeaky clean!<\/p>\n As to why \u201cwe socialists\u201d never faced up to the criminal acts in Turkish history, Ak\u00e7am argued that animosity toward the \u201cother\u201d neighborhood was far more important than facing up to criminal acts. \u201cOur culture was such that we [preferred to] blame the Armenians for cooperating with the imperialists while we were fighting our war of independence, and the Dersimians represented a backward and feudal system.\u201d<\/p>\n Then Ak\u00e7am made his grandstand by calling on \u201cour\u201d neighborhood to face up to its crimes.<\/p>\n In such argumentation Ak\u00e7am conveniently dismissed the criminality of the Armenian gangs in the massacre of more than a half-million Moslems, the fatal blow that the Armenian rebellion had inflicted on the fighting ability of the Ottoman armies in wartime, and ignored the fact the Dersim episode was instigated by reactionary feudal lords that had conspired against the young Turkish republic.<\/p>\n Ak\u00e7am also chose not to mention the bloody 1993 Madimak episode in the Anatolian city of Sivas. A crowd of fanatic Islamists (from the \u201cother\u201d neighborhood), amid chants of \u201cAllah-\u00fc Ekber,\u201d set fire to a hotel where a group of left-leaning intellectuals had assembled. In the ensuing mayhem 37 artists and writers lost their lives.<\/p>\n Ak\u00e7am\u2019s analysis of past events is the hallmark of an academician who follows a one-track, necessarily biased, approach to historical events.<\/p>\n In his call to confront one\u2019s criminal history, Ak\u00e7am should turn the tables and first ask the Armenians and \u201cother\u201d neighborhood to confront their criminality. Why, for example, are the Armenian archives in Yerevan and Boston closed while all Turkish ones open? What are the Armenians hiding?<\/p>\n And when will the likes of the \u201cMadimak crowd\u201d see the light of Enlightenment? <\/strong><\/p>\n Summing it up<\/strong><\/p>\n The Taraf-Birg\u00fcn<\/em> episode raised the specter of a history professor who, by the reckoning of his own brother, was long in false accusations but short in scruples and trustworthiness. The episode also caught the professor in contradictions and brought to light his biased, one-track approach to traumatic events in Turkish history in the past 100 years.<\/p>\n Will all this make any difference as regards Ak\u00e7am\u2019s credibility as a scholar for the Armenian money masters who sponsor his academic career \u2013 like the Zoryan Institute and the Cafesjian Family Foundation when Ak\u00e7am was at the University of Minnesota, and now the Arams, the Kaloosdians and the Mugars at Clark University? Considering that the professor\u2019s criminal past has so far made no difference, the answer must be a firm \u201cno.\u201d Obviously, the professor is serving a useful \u2013 in fact very useful – purpose for the Armenian lobby.<\/p>\n It must be a wondrous world when the “golden” Armenian coffers can sustain an academic chair in history when, as in Ak\u00e7am\u2019s case, the holder of that chair happens to have his degree in sociology.<\/p>\n In fact, we should not be too surprised if the spinmasters of the Armenian lobby call on their \u201cprince charming\u201d to come to the aid of the Armenian mob charged last month with the largest Medicare fraud in U.S. history. Could the professor argue that the mob job was actually the \u201cdirty work\u201d of the Turks? Never say \u201cno.\u201d<\/p>\n To rephrase his brother\u2019s question, in which \u201cneighborhood\u201d does Taner Ak\u00e7am stand when it comes to truth?<\/p>\n Surely, the professor must be able to answer that question himself without help from his old-time mentor, Professor Vahakn Dadrian.<\/p>\n A deeper question is, why Ak\u00e7am-the-professor would write in a newspaper such as Taraf <\/em>which has a reputation <\/em>of acting as a rogue agent of the government on unsubstantiated allegations relating to the opposition, and whose executive editor, Ahmet Altan, in his own words, would be willing to sell out his country \u201cfor a woman\u2019s breast and the shade of a cherry tree.\u201d …. But that would be a different story.<\/p>\n ferruh@demirmen.com<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n Addendum<\/span><\/em>: The above article was first submitted (as an exception) to \u201cArmenian Genocide Resource Center,\u201d <\/em><\/em>.\u00a0 Initially, the host welcomed the article and published it as an \u201cexclusive\u201d on its website. Half a day later the post was mysteriously removed from the website. Query as to why it was removed elicited no satisfactory response.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n