This is another publication announcement.
The last copy of my Turkey: A Very Short History was sold, and I wanted to keep it in print. This meant bringing it up to date, so it is no longer so “Very Short.” Still, that subtitle fits, in that it is extremely informative for its size!
Click on “Publications” above, or go straight to this page, where you can (if you wish) order.
What started as a leaflet for the folk who went on our expedition to the Turkey eclipse of 1999 became a little book densely filled with geography, ethnography, history, and more. And I don’t pull punches on issues such as the Armenian genocide and autocratic rulers.
There are now 46 side-boxes – supplementary tidbits on matters such as the derivations of names, features of the Turkish language, the battle stopped by an eclipse, the Egyptian queen who asked for a Hittite husband, the Lydian king who insisted on displaying his wife’s beauty, the Pontic king who inoculated himself against poisons, the many names of Istanbul, the other Turkic and “Turanian” peoples, a river that flows under a mountain range…
If for no other reason, I had to do another edition so as to include this illustration, which I was just too late to get into the previous one:
– A tugra or monogram, with the names and titles of a sultan superimposed, in a beautiful example of Ottoman Turkish calligraphy.
The price has had to rise by one dollar because there are more pages. Sorry!
Conspiracy victim?
I also rather regret that in my satire of anti-vaxx conspiracy theories, on Jan. 31, I fell to the temptation of including what could be taken for a joke: “the 8th president of Turkey was poisoned with DDT-laced lemonade.”
By “conspiracy theory” we imply that it’s untrue, and some or most are. Perhaps the very concept arose from the most monstrous of them, the doyen of conspiracy theories, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forgery purporting to reveal a Jewish scheme for world domination. But the Guy Fawkes conspiracy, for example, was real.
Turkey’s 26th prime minister, and then 8th president, was Turgut Özal.
His mother was Kurdish. He was an electrical engineer, a negotiator for miners’ rights, and an economic reformer. He pardoned a political hitman whose bullet passed close by his head. He wanted Turkey to be modern, progressive, and scientific, and believed that Islam was compatible with this. He worked to improve relations with many other countries, such as the traditional enemy Greece. He tried, with great and doomed political bravery, to get Turkey to grow out of its denial of the Armenian genocide. He was about the only politician interested in negotiating with the “terrorist” Kurdish independence fighters. His contact with Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan led the latter to declare a unilateral cease-fire on 20 March 1993. It lasted only till 15 April, when, just before he was to begin personal talks with Öcalan, Özal unexpectedly died, of what was said unconvincingly to be a heart attack. His wife said he had been poisoned with a drink of lemonade. There was no autopsy, and blood samples taken to determine the cause of death were “lost.” Popular indignation continued so strong that in 2012 his body was exhumed, and found to contain ten times the normal level of DDT. A retired general was charged with murder but acquitted.
The other whom one must admire is Öcalan, who has been imprisoned since 1999 on an island. His humane philosophy sounds like a blueprint for a good society. Loyal to it, including its gender equality, are the Kurds still holding out – no longer with American help – against Turkey, Isis, and Assad in northeastern Syria.
And in northwestern Syria, that is, Idlib, the democratic opposition is still holding out. It’s hard to see how people can survive a day under the air-strikes. If they’re caught they’ll go to Assad’s torture dungeons. Joe Biden has many priorities, but if Russia and Iran can so blatantly intervene on Assad’s side…
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Sometimes I make improvements or corrections to a post after publishing it. If you click on the title, rather than on ‘Read more’, I think you are sure to see the latest version.
This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.
Dear Guy, I know the situation in Syria is extremely complex, but I have to admit to being skeptical of the purity of US intentions there. My understanding is that pre-civil war Syria under Assad was pretty tolerant of a diverse set of religions and ethnicities. Also, I understand that the civil war itself was more a result of a lengthy drought making much of Syria uninhabitable, leading to a large number of internally displaced people in desperate straits. I’m not convinced that Assad is all that terrible. Certainly the US has supported a number of very shady groups there, including several that we claim to be fighting in other places. I don’t trust the news reports we get here in America regarding the use of chemical weapons. Seymour Hersh cast doubt on at least one of those allegations that the Assad government was responsible for using chemical weapons in an article in the London Review of Books a few years back. I’m sure that Seymour Hersh is not infallible, but he certainly deserves respect. I have great respect and sympathy for the Kurds, but am very doubtful that US military action is making anything in Syria better. I suppose I should hunt around for documentation of all the things I just said. If you know things that I don’t, I would be glad to hear of them. Thanks! Alan
Good points. I don’t know more than you do. Assad is of the Alawi religious minority; such minorities are endangered in the Middle East; one had to wonder whether defeat for Assad would mean persecution, and a disproportionate number of Alawis have died in the war, though I think I read somewhere that Alawis dominate in the government’s forces. If the claims of chemical attacks were exaggerated, one might hope that the same applies to reports of torture in the government’s prisons; but see Amnesty International on this:
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2016/08/syria-torture-prisons/
This Guardian article mentions sources for the chemical weapons reports:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/07/ten-grim-lessons-the-world-has-learned-from-a-decade-of-war-in-syria
You say that “his body was …. found to contain ten times the normal level of DDT.” Interesting claim. I had no idea that it was normal for the body to contain DDT. Can you please tell what this :normal” amount of DDT is quantitatively?
I have no idea. A Wikipedia article about Ozal gives a reference to a source in Turkish, apparently something in an online system called called Wavyback. I imagine that the normal level of DDT in us has decreased since it was banned.
Thanks for keeping attention on the plight of the Kurds.