Internet-based social networks put us in touch with the people we already know. Unfortunately, people act more open and edgy on the Internet.
[1] Since 2009, my Turkish friends and family started to embrace Facebook, along with, I discovered, some of their radical political tendencies.
[2] During the aftermath of 9/11, many people became unreasonably critical of the US.
[3] According to some Turks, events like Ergenekon trials, which were almost exclusively about Turkish internal corruption, were also designs of outsiders like the US and Israel. When the Mavi Marmara incident occurred, and Israeli troops killed nine Turkish citizens, it was further explained in these premises.
Also, most Turkish nationalists saw the September 12, 2010 referendum as an attack on their secular-national identity. During the build up to the referendum, many changed their Facebook profile pictures to the Turkish flag, an image of Atatürk or to the simple word
Hayır (no), indicating that they were against the reforms. For example, my aunt M began to spend hours on Facebook posting nationalist literature denigrated AKP’s credibility.[4] Another trend was inviting people to join Facebook groups against the reforms. Most popular among these had around half a million members, a remarkable number if one considers that most popular Facebook games like FarmVille had less than 60 million players.[5] During this time my friend T also changed his profile picture to the Turkish flag and started posting anti-AKP propaganda. T cross-listed anti-Kurdish Facebook groups and argued that the referendum was designed by EU to free Abdullah Öcalan and give unlimited legal rights to the Kurds.
[6] He shared derogatory images of the Kurdish MPs, like Emine Ayna.
[7] One of his favorite videos showed a group of Turkish soldiers beating a Kurdish man.
[8] T’s friends celebrated these posts. When one of his female friends wrote, “This is not the right way to treat these people. It is too violent,” she was quickly rebuked. I saw that she eventually gave up under peer pressure and decided that the best thing to do was de-friend T. Under the video, I wrote that T was a racist, and we could not be friends anymore. T was very angry, accusing me of not knowing anything about Turkish politics. Perhaps having lived in the US for so long, he argued, I had become a sympathizer of the US/Israeli alliance. T had clearly forgotten that it was the US/Israeli alliance that handed to the Turks the most valuable trophy of the war against Kurds: Abdullah Öcalan himself.
By de-friending T, I realized that I had to be more careful on Facebook or I could lose access to my own words. When I cut myself off of his network, my words and name remained on his side of the conversation, but I could not see or edit them. Ironically, T could not erase my words either, unless he also erased the video and his friends’ celebratory remarks.
I was also disappointed for having lost my small window to Turkish racism.
Luckily, I soon became friends with my cousin K, who described himself as a
ırkçı/faşist (racist/fascist). I decided to act cautiously. K was a true family member and M’s son. He had previously told me that he considered me a role model and wanted to move to the US. I asked him why he considered himself a racist/fascist. He boldly wrote that he was not a universal racist; he only hated Israeli Jews. I told him social networks were not safe places to declare radical political opinions. After all, you are in the tourism business and want to come to US, I told him; if you want to reap the benefits of US capitalism, you have to renounce your racism and fascism. To my surprise, K agreed. He cleaned his profile; however, he continued to post announcements promoting a no vote for the referendum. K believed AKP and the Kurds, along with the EU, were pawns of a larger conspiracy designed to destroy Turkish sovereignty.In the end, Turkish people overwhelmingly voted
Evet (yes) for the reforms. I was relieved that these friends and relatives were a minority. M went back to playing FarmVille, and K started posting Rhianna videos. Meanwhile, I accepted the friendship request of F, another cousin. As soon as I clicked on F’s profile, I discovered two pictures of Hitler. I asked him what he liked about Hitler in particular. He wrote that in Turkey, it was not a crime to like Hitler. I let this comment pass and pressed him: Why Hitler and not Atatürk? He wrote that he liked many people, along with Atatürk, but his real hero was Hüseyin Nihal Atsız, a valuable historian of the early Ottoman historiography. Unfortunately, he was also a leading voice of Turkish racism. I told F that Atsız and Hitler were shallow political thinkers who did not understand that hating ethnic groups destroyed the culture and economy of multi-ethnic societies like the Ottoman Empire and Turkey. Atsız, I wrote, disliked everyone, including Boşnaks like us. My suggestion that he had Boşnak origins made F furious. He wrote that he was the grandchild of Ottomans and a true Turk. He argued that because I lived in US, I probably had Jewish friends and liked them, but one day they would surely betray me. My conversation with F died after this post, and my comments just lingered beneath the image of Hitler.Obviously these incidents do not constitute a large enough sample group to analyze contemporary Turkish fascism, nor do they mean that during the recent months Turkish fascism gained a new momentum. Nevertheless, they underlined one irritating fact: When we become members of social networks, we also expose ourselves to the opinions of others. In the discourse of my Facebook account, Turkish fascism emerged as a recognizable strain of what Ernst Renan called “the daily plebiscite,” and AKP and Kurds represented a union of collaborators serving under a larger conspiracy designed to undermine Turkish identity. The same discourse shared common elements with its historical brother, European fascism; it was anti-Semitic and admired people like Hitler. Nevertheless, the hatred of the Jewish people and admiration of Hitler came as a reaction to a so-called covert US/Israeli alliance against Turkey. Most unfortunately, this discourse belonged to people whom I considered friends and family.
[1] Although it focuses on intelligent humor, following website underlines some of the general personality disorders found in Internet users.
http://www.cracked.com/article_17522_6-new-personality-disorders-caused-by-internet.html 
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