southeastern europe

As I came across today a set of deeply disturbing photographs of  Turkish soldiers having stripped off the clothes of a young Kurdish girl after killing her, posing with her naked body, shared on social media, I remembered  Klaus Theweleit's  book Männerphantasien (1977), translated in English ten years later as Male Fantasies . In this unique book, Theweleit, provides an insightful  analysis of the proto-fascist consciousness of the Freikorps fighters who roamed the Weimar Republic during the interwar period to fight communists and 'other' enemies. Their ambivalent but, at their core, deeply misogynistic attitudes were central in their worldview and eventually formed one of the cornerstones of national socialist ideology as it was eagerly adopted by the Nazi party and, later on, by state discourse and policy.  The Turkish state, waging war against its own Kurdish citizens allows and encourages similar fantasies to be enacted at the 'battleground' and buttres

An extensive interview that covers virtually all one would like to know about today's Turkey by one of the best Turkish social scientists. Sociologist Ayhan Aktar: Polarization is among elite, not men in street Sociologist Ayhan Aktar says the division in Turkish politics is mostly in regards to the elite, not ordinary people, considering the tension in society in recent years when the country’s agenda has been full of weighty issues such as an ongoing investigation into a clandestine organization known as Ergenekon, the government’s efforts to settle the Kurdish issue and a hotly debated constitutional amendment package. Read more in Today's Zaman (3 May 2010)