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Curzon
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Curzon

Date

March 24th, 2005

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Anatolian Dispatch #6: “Bestseller”

Younghusband brought this little fact to my attention: “ËœMein Kampf’ becomes best-seller in Turkey!

Yikes! I was in Turkey when he wrote that and I hadn’t noticed anything! But no sooner had I read the post, I looked harder at the bookshelves and did indeed spot it at several locations. Here’s the photographic evidence.

I think there is little doubt that Turkey is a very competitive society where a high premium is placed on financial success. What does it bode for the future if today’s frustrated young ones are reading “My Struggle”? Food for thought.

Comments to this entry

Saru
March 24, 2005
4:51 am
I am reminded of a video I watched in an undergrad IR class in which the narrator, upon visiting Turkey points his camera towards a mountainside, upon which is written in gigantic letters: "How sad is the one who calls himself Kurd," and "Happy is he who can call himself a Turk." I realize I should probably read Mein Kampf before intelligently commenting, but drawing a relatively uneducated conclusion, if this is a best seller, how sad to be a Kurd indeed!
Mutantfrog
March 24, 2005
4:10 pm
I read Mein Kampf several years ago, and I couldn't figure out what was supposed to be so damn compelling about it. Unless there has been a massive surge in all types of WW2 related history books, there's no way that this is bodes well.
Curzon
March 24, 2005
4:39 pm
I don't think this has much to do with anti-Semitism or anti-Kurdish sentiment. Rather, I see it as resentment: many people work very hard in Turkey and do not get ahead. That's what Hitler spoke too, and that's probably what appeals to readers.

My sympathy for the Kurds in Turkey is pretty low. These are not a downtrodden people. There have been Kurdish PMs and Presidents. It isn't like Blacks in America circa the 1960s or the ethnic minorities in China, where they want to join society and play by the same rules and yet can't. As long as Kurds are Muslim and speak Turkish, they're welcome and are wholly accepted, as are the other Turkified people of Anatolia: Arabs, Greeks, Bulgarians, Armenians, and the vast majority of the Kurds. That was Ataturk's great gift to Turkey: the measure of whether or not you are Turkish is not skin-tone, it's merely language.

Consequently, I have much more sympathy for the Uyghurs in China, the Hazara in Afghanistan, the Darfurian Christians, the Chechens, the Palestinians, and probably even the Tibetans.
ComingAnarchy.com » Blog Archive » What’s Wrong With the Turks?
October 14, 2005
7:42 am
[...] First it was a bestseller about the United States attacking Turkey, then Mein Kampf was number 1 (Look at Curzon’s picture, what book is right above Mein Kampf?). Now this: Turks embrace novelist’s war on EU [...]