15 - Erdogan and the Rebirth of the Empire

15 - Erdogan and the Rebirth of the Empire

(Interview given to Gercek Hayat, Istanbul, special issue, 24-29 February 2020, pp. 32-34)

In 1453, the imperial succession passed from the Greeks to the Turks. In 1821, the Westerners through the Eastern Question started the dismantlement of the Empire by persuading the Greeks that the 1453 succession was made to their detriment and that they had to come back to the values of pre-Christian Greece.

The main result was double fold: to enslave the Greeks to the Frankish West and to destroy the Empire after a hundred year civil war (1822-1922) between the two brother nations that had formed the Ottoman Empire.

The extraordinary courage of the Turkish people and their leader Mustafa Kemal who refused to give up to Western imperialism led to the liberation of Anatolia but only after sacrificing the traditions of the Turkish people by throwing the Turkish cultural baby with the water of the bath tub i.e. Islam in the same way than Venizelos had thrown away the Greek cultural baby of Orthodox Christianity.

Since 2002, the extraordinary feat of Erdogan was to put back in place Islam in the heart of Turkish tradition without betraying Ataturk principles of independence of Anatolia while at the same time in Rumeli Greeks through Archbishop Christodoulos were coming back slowly to their Christian traditions.

The result of these evolutions on both sides of the Aegean was a revival of nostalgia for the greatness of the defunct Empire that had been destroyed in the 100 year Greek-Turkish civil war by the West.

On the Rumeli side, Kitsikis was the first Greek that through his numerous publications openly promoted the idea of the coming back of the Ottoman Empire, already in the 1960s while Erdogan followed on his path and on the path of Kitsikis’s spiritual son  Ozal, by promoting openly the rebirth of the Empire around its long time prestigious capital Istanbul.

Nevertheless such a political revival which Kitsikis called the Çamlica dream, referring to the hill on the Asian side of the Bosphorus facing Istanbul as the center of the future federal capital, was considered by everybody an unattainable dream even though one should have known that only dreams make great history.

The seemingly unsurpassable difficulty for the realization of such a bold dream was the existence since the I5th century of the Russian candidate to the Istanbul throne as Third Rome and also the activity of the destroyers of the Empire through the Eastern Question represented by the Western imperialist Powers who wanted a free passage to their Asian colonies through Eastern Mediterranean, a passage that was permanently blocked by the Ecumenical Byzantine-Ottoman Empire.

Nevertheless, 2016 marked a decisive turning point. The coming to power of President Trump and the defeat of former President Obama who failed to assassinate Erdogan. Trump seemed as a present of God.

His seemingly chaotic foreign policy, in fact directed exclusively against China, reversing the century long Western policy of expansion from West to East through the Eastern Mediterranean to an East West expansion using the new Silk Road of Chinese conquest of Western Europe, gave to the Intermediate Region of Civilization which center had always been the Ecumenical Empire for the last 2500 years a new importance: it had to become a wall against China drive to the West.

So President Trump through his seemingly chaotic foreign policy had one and only aim: stop the Silk Road Western expansion by all means. This meant trying to form a chain of alliances with as many nations as possible in Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East and first and foremost with Russia to form a barrier against Chinese expansion.

The dismemberment of the Ecumenical Empire had to be stopped and even it had to be rebuilt. Turkey, since 2002, because of Erdogan, had become a stabilized geopolitical entity which could form this barrier by reviving the Ottoman Empire.

But this could not be done without the reunification of the two shores of the Aegean lake not by splitting it between Greece and Turkey but by reuniting it in the form of a Greek-Turkish Confederation.

I have many times compared the Aegean Sea to a human body with two lungs: the Rumeli lung and the Anatolia lung, with a trachea in the middle for the body to be able to breathe freely: the Aegean Sea. It is nonsense to cut the trachea in the middle: a Rumeli half and an Anatolia half. Because then the body of the Empire would suffocate. This happened in the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913 with the result to have created the present disputes between Greece and Turkey.

So, in order to reunite the Aegean lake the Lausanne treaties have to be revised, even abolished.  Unfortunately the terrible crime of the exchange of populations cannot be mended today. But why not? The Cretan Muslims could come back to Crete and the Karamanli Christian could go back to Cappadocia.

God gave Erdogan the mission to accomplish the dream. The dream of the revival of the Ottoman Empire, perhaps with the help of President Trump. Erdogan represents the forces of unification (Empire) againt the forces of division (Eastern Question). It is neither in the interest of Turkey to be dismembered between Kurds and Armenians nor in the interest of Greece to be dismembered between Thracians and Cretans

I, as an intellectual, I will continue with all my enthusiasm to promote the  reunification dream. Lets God accomplish  his scheme.

Dimitri Kitsikis                        29 February 2020