Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Demir E., Ünal (Team Leader) A.(Yürütücü), Angay K., Özdemir B.
Yükseköğretim Kurumları Destekli Proje, 2022 - 2022
When observing the Turkish Right, Tanıl Bora makes a classification based on "three states" which are Nationalism, Conservatism, and Islamism (2017: 7-13). Furthermore, according to Fatih Yaşlı (2016: 15-17), a concept that brings almost every faction of the Turkish Right together at a common point is anti-communism, even hostility through religiosity, conservatism, and nationalism. These “three states” can be identified with the three political parties that are the heirs of the Democratic Party within the scope of the wide political freedoms granted by the 1961 Constitution. These parties are the Justice Party, the National Order Party, and the Republican Villagers Nation Party. If we do not consider the interim governments after the memorandum given on the March 12, 1971, and the governments formed by the Republican Peoples Party (RPP) in 1973 and 1977, right-wing parties governed Turkey uninterruptedly. Anti-communism was the “unnamed” official state policy between 1945 and 1961 (Apak, 2018: 149-159; Darendelioğlu, 1975: 311-315). During this period, although the leftist movements in Turkey were mostly underground and there were communist arrests in 1927 and 1951, the Association for Fighting Against Communism was established in 1950 (Meşe, 2016; 104-108), which was supported by right-wing politicians and thinkers. Communism, which was considered a crime until the 1960s, gained a legal identity thanks to the wide political freedoms recognized by the 1961 Constitution, and the communists entered the parliament for the first time in 1965 as the Worker Party of Turkey (WPT). Furthermore, until the 1960s, the main source of anti-communist motivation for the Turkish Right was the Soviet Union. The People’s Republic of China (PRC), which has a communist regime since the Cultural Revolution in 1949, was a distant and little-known threat for the Turkish Right. However, this situation changed when the Aydınlık movement, based on Maoism, was established in 1970 by breaking with the National Democratic Revolution and Soviet Socialism movements (just like the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s) and became an important touchstone both in the internal struggle of the left and in the right-left conflicts. By that, the Turkish Right started to regard “Communist China” as well as the Soviet Union as a "communist threat" (Şener, 2015). During the rise and institutionalization of Maoism in the Turkish left, the international order also witnessed major ruptures like the first signs of China's policy of opening to the world. In this context, as many Western countries, Turkey recognized PRC in 1971, and diplomatic relations were established between the two countries (Akdağ, 2019). With this background, this study aims to answer the question, “How did Communist China and Maoist Left (Aydınlık) resonate in the Turkish Right's political world, and how did this view change after Turkey's recognition of the PRC in 1971?” To answer this question, we will review newspapers like Hürriyet, Hergün, Millî Gazete, Bugün, Yeni Asya and journals like Tohum, Büyük Doğu, Türk Yurdu, Millî Hareket, Fedai, Ötüken, Ülkücü Kadro, Meydan Dergisi, which are accepted as the media outlets of JP, NSP and NAP, respectively.