Excerpts from Georgy Sherman,Screams of Avarice - Visions of a Fascist West Asia,(Seattle, Washington State University Press, 2011)
Screams of Avarice is a 2011 popular history book written by Georgy Sherman, detailing the role of fascist ideologies in West Asia during the interwar years and the beginnings of the West Asian theater of the World Revolutionary War. Of particular note is the coverage of Türkiye’s Turanist-Ottomanist government, the Golden Square in Iraq, and the role of the collaborator government in Egypt. It was one of the first non-academic works to cover the ideological currents of Turanism so thoroughly, and received broadly positive reception.
Türkiye was a humiliated nation in the aftermath of the Great War. It had lost the war against the Entente in the worst possible way, losing vast swathes of territory to the Arabs, Kurds, and Assyrians to the south, the Armenian SSR in the east, and - most humiliatingly - had lost the old capital of Constantinople to the Greek-dominated Straits Commission. Kemal was a broken man, barely able to keep the center of the CHP in power against the increasingly loud voices from his right, both within and without his party. The economy was feeling the effect of nine years of war on both infrastructure and demographics, and the shock of going from controlling most of West Asia to only Anatolia.
Desperate for a friendly source of capital, Kemal pursued a “special relationship” with Mussolini’s Italy after the War of Independence ended in 1923 - cordial relations with the British, French, and Americans were unthinkable, and the sore point of Soviet Armenia meant that relations with the USSR were frosty at best. After a series of meetings in Rome and Ankara, Kemal and Mussolini signed a Treaty of Friendship and Understanding. Italian capital flowed into Türkiye, building mines and factories across Anatolia. Advisors from the Regio Esercito trained the Turkish Army in the tactics that had broken Austria-Hungary at Vittorio Veneto. And the Turkish Navy got the first pick when the Regio Marina sold off old or excess ships. Whether Kemal could ensure the CHPs liberal center held or not, Türkiye’s fate would be tied to Fascist Italy in the crises to come.
The recovering Turkish economy was dealt a body blow by the market crash of February 1930. While it took a while to reach the Italo-Turkish market, both markets went into a nosedive in Summer 1930. Investment dried up, and the Turkish government faced a depressed market for their exports. As Mussolini began his campaign of nationalization and economic stimulus, Kemal followed suit. Türkiye soon became an economic mirror image of Italy, with a corporatist economy fueled by state investment and government ownership of key industrial firms. However, this was not enough to save the CHP’s center.
Kemal had been forced to accept a multiparty system under duress from Ottomanist-sympathetic military officers and the Italians in 1928. The new party system would feature two parties challenging the CHPs dominance over Turkish political life: the Ottoman League (Osmanlı Lıgı, OL) and the Peoples Turanist Party (Halkın Turancı Partisi, HTP). Both had originated as factions within the CHPs far-right before being expelled in 1928 during Kemal’s attempts to purge the CHP of fascist elements. But both had established a hold over the military and key segments of Turkish Capital, and had the ear of Mussolini. So when they were expelled from the only legal party in Türkiye, Kemal was forced to allow them to organize into their own independent parties. And to make matters worse, the right wing of the CHP that had avoided purging had grown stronger, to the point that four years later, every key position in the party other than Kemal himself was held by a member of the newly-organized Izmir Group (İzmir Grubu, CHP-IG). From these positions, the Izmir Clique was able to purge the party of its liberal center and the already anemic social democratic left. By the time Kemal retired and died in 1938, the CHP would be a fully fascist party.
By 1936, the double-boon of American capital flight and the discovery of oil in Libya had allowed the economy to begin something like a recovery. But the damage had already been done, and the Turkish political system had been skewed irreversibly to the right. Additionally, the Turanists had displaced the CHP as the dominant party. Over the course of the 30s, they had grown their presence in both parliament and the military, and by 1938 managed to reduce the CHP to joining the OL as the HTPs junior partners in the National Unity Government.
The HTP itself was dominated by three figures: Rıza Nur, Nihâl Atsız, and Zeki Velidi Togan.
Riza Nur was born in 1879, and was one of the key figures in the founding of the HTP. Initially part of the early opposition to Kemal, he was brought into the CHP and the National Assembly as an attempt to create national unity. However, he was quick to join the CHPs internal right-opposition, and soon became a key figure in the small Turanist clique that was purged in 1928. He would then use this expelled clique as a nucleus to form the Peoples Turanist Party, and attracted disaffected nationalists and anti-communists to his banner. He quickly aligned his new party with the more orthodox-fascist Ottoman League, and would eventually muscle his way into government as the Prime Minister and true leader of the Turkish Republic under the puppet-president Inonu after the 1938 elections.
As Prime Minister, Nur deftly played Italian and Deutsch interests against each other in order to advance Türkiyes position in the Mediterranean and Caucasus. He would frequently butt heads with the Soviets, notably demanding the return of Western Armenia from the Soviets every three months from his ascension to the premiership to the declaration of war in 1942. He would give each of the 16 deflections and rejections to Atsız for him to use them for propaganda. He would be the biggest promoter of exterminationist rhetoric against Armenians and Greeks, only really including Arabs on the list to humor Atsız. He had a somewhat paternalistic attitude towards his fellow Triumvirs, seeing them as his children or students, even as his advancing age and declining health meant that they assumed more and more governing responsibility.
Zeki Velidi Togan was born in the Russian Empire in 1890, to a Muslim Bashkir family - he was one of the few members of the HTPs leadership born outside of the former Ottoman Empire. As an adult, he became active in Bashkir nationalist politics, and fought for the Whites during the Russian Civil War. However, he defected when the Bolsheviks announced their national autonomy program and joined the Red Army. After the Civil War, he became active in Soviet attempts to promote communism in West and Central Asia. Over time, he became skeptical of the Bolsheviks ability to deliver on their promises of national liberation for the Central Asian peoples he identified with first and foremost, and began to read and write more and more fringe historical and linguistic theories, eventually gravitating towards Turanism. He emigrated to Türkiye in 1925, and soon fell into the political circles that would form the HTP. He became one of the party’s leading personalities, and when the National Unity Government formed, he was appointed Foreign Minister.
It was in this capacity that he notably traveled frequently to Japan under Yasuhito, meeting with the Regent and Shimoi. He notably exchanged very frequent and pleasant notes with Shimoi throughout his time as Foreign Minister. He would lead the HTP’s Concordist “left” wing, advocating for an Archaeo-futurist approach to the Turanist Identity. This would bring him into conflict with the other more orthodox members of the HTPs triumvirate.
Togan was notable for objecting to the exterminationist attitude of his fellow Triumvirs towards Armenians and Greeks, instead advocating for a “softer,” slower cultural genocide via “Turan Academies” modeled after the Indian Residential Schools in Canada and the Old United States. This would be much less resource-intensive, and would allow for more resources going towards technological research and architectural development of the “Turanist Future.” These policies would be implemented against conquered Arab populations (to Atsız’s displeasure), and were planned to be applied to conquered “non-Turanic” Iranians.
Nihâl Atsız was born in 1905, to an Ottoman Navy family. He came into ultra-nationalist politics early, and notably was expelled from the Military School of Medicine when he refused to salute an Arab officer of superior rank. He was a vocal critic of Kemal from the end of the War of Independence (notably saying that his death was “no great loss” in 1938), and became a rabid anti-communist after the Soviets pressed the claims of the Armenian SSR to western Armenia. He self-identified as a “Turkic Racist” and was notable in the burgeoning Turanist movement of the late 20s in being a biological racialist instead of a linguistic chauvinist. He was among the most radically reactionary of the nascent HTP, dipping even further into anti-communism after the Red May Revolution in 1933. Luckily for him, this also coincided with the rise of the Nazis in Deutschland, granting him a powerful patron in the form of NSDAP outreach.
From his position of influence in the HTP, and his new position as Information and Education Minister after the formation of the National Unity Government, he pushed the party further towards a bespoke version of National Socialism. He cemented a National Socialist line in the Party’s rhetoric, and pushed genocidal rhetoric against Greeks, Armenians, and especially his personal bete noire , Arabs. He was the chief advocate for exterminationist policy towards conquered Arab populations, but was molified by the combination of the Turan Academies advocated by Togan with a “land for service” program intended to eventually displace Arabs from the Levant entirely. His clique would later create a good deal of conflict within the party by proposing de-islamization programs, replacing Islams hold in West and Central Asia with a resurrected - and creatively interpreted - version of Tengrism. Such was his Arabophobia that the alliance with Iraq had to be kept secret from him, and when he found out he had a screaming fit and would not meet with any other party members for a week. He would also assemble the most radical territorial claims made during the 1940 claims conference, laying claim to any territory currently or historically populated by a “turanic” people, from Thrace to Mongolia and Xinjiang.
“Great Turan,” as defined by Atsız, was the sum total of all territories “rightfully” occupied by peoples speaking the “Turanic” languages - a largely discredited collection of the Turkic and Mongolic languages. While much of this territory - notably Iraq, Iran, and the Levant - were largely not populated by people speaking these languages. This was handwaved away as either linguistic degeneration or the unrightful conquest of these lands by non-”Turanic” peoples. Never mind that places such as Anatolia only became largely turkic-speaking sometime in the last 500 years.
Great Turan, as defined by Nihal Atsız in his 1934 pamphlet “Language, Land, and Blood”
A more modest proposal was the “National Pact” proposed by both the CHP(IT) and OL, claiming territories claimed to have been populated by “Turks, or Turks besotten by false national consciousness” before the implementation of the King-Crane Commission’s findings. Not seeking Great Power status the way the HTP did, the National Pact proposal intended to create a regional power able to exert power in the Eastern Mediterranean, Black Sea, and Caucasus at will. The critics of the National Pact claimed that this would inevitably subordinate Türkiye to Italian interests, as this territory would not contain enough resources or population to allow for Tükiye to be completely independent and self-reliant. The supporters of the National Pact pointed out that their claims were actually viable, while the most extreme Turanist Claims were essentially impossible to achieve.
The CHP(IT)/OL “National Pact” claims
As the new government took form, the Triumvirs agreed that as international tensions heightened, it would be useful to have a coherent series of territorial claims be made by all members of the coalition. As the Turanist party could not agree internally on how far to take its claims, let alone the coalition as a whole, this took some deliberation to reach a compromise. But a compromise was reached after about two months of negotiations, and in May 1940, the Turkish government published its territorial claims.
Territorial claims made by the Turkish government throughout their involvement in the World Revolutionary War
The Italian invasion of Greece provided the National Unity Government a chance at something they had been waiting for for close to twenty years - the opportunity to reclaim the old capital of Constantinople. A week after the Italians crossed the border into Greece and the British and French made it clear that they would ignore their treaty obligations, the Turkish Army sent divisions into the territory of the International Straits Commission. The ISC had practically no troops under its command after the USMC garrison was recalled during the Second American Civil War, and the Turks faced practically no opposition. Two days after the first Turkish troops crossed the border, the Star and Crescent flew over Constantinople once more.
What followed was the prototype for the Turanist ethnic cleansings that would come during the World Revolutionary War. The Greek and Armenian residents of Constantinople that had not fled abroad found themselves treated as second-class citizens, forced to carry internal passports and register with the new city government. Churches were heavily fined, then attacked by street gangs, then destroyed by government decree. Official and unofficial violence against Greeks and Armenians skyrocketed, with entire families being murdered by soldiers not being uncommon. Eventually, the government ordered that the Greco-Armenian population in Constantinople be rounded up into processing centers at gunpoint, with an attempted attack on the city’s garrison as justification. The Greeks of Constantinople faced a choice : leave for the Italian puppet kingdom, or be relocated to the Taurus Mountains. About 62% chose deportation, with the rest choosing relocation. The Armenians were not given a choice : all would be relocated. Communication with the relocatees was lost, and friends and families feared the worst for the next seven years.
During the JDPON period, the truth was unveiled as survivors came forwards, and road construction teams found a series of mass graves in the Pontic foothills from July through September of 1947: all but a scant few had been killed - some by bayonet, some by bullet, some by exhaustion. While this had long been suspected, things were not certain until the bodies were found. Testimony from POWs and defectors laid things out in more detail : while they had boarded trains in Constantinople or other towns, they were forced to detrain once they were out of the old ISCs borders. From there they had been force marched into the Pontic Mountains, where those who had survived the march were murdered and tossed into mass graves. There were (later confirmed) reports that among the personnel committing these atrocities were observers from the Nazi Schutzstaffel, among whom were Friedrich Jeckeln and Otto Rasch, who would become key members of the Einsatzgruppen.
This nightmare was the vanguard of the horror that would soon sweep over the world in the coming years. It was the template for Babi Yar, Lujan, Catalonia, Burdwan, and countless other massacres at the hands of the Axis.
1941 proved to be something of a pivotal year for the HTP and the Grand Strategy of the Republic of Türkiye.
The border skirmishes with the Soviets were producing nothing but shelled villages and unexploded ordnance, and the military, while still loyal to the government, was increasingly closer to the OL than the HTP. On July 10th, Fevzi Çakmak, Chief of the General Staff, gave Nur a rather pessimistic report as he was recovering from his July 8th surgery: Türkiye would be destroyed if it went to war with the Soviets as things were. Çakmak was careful to note that this did not preclude expansion as a whole: moving south against Britain and France was viable if they were tied up in a broader war, and this could eventually enable a war with the Soviets and the conquest of Soviet Armenia and Azerbaijan. But that meant that Türkiye was dependent on other powers to open and maintain additional fronts in what was becoming a war to dwarf the last one. So Nur told Çakmak to try to deescalate the border skirmishes, and reorient the army to act in case a southern opportunity presented itself. He then sent invitations to the German and Italian foreign ministers and military, requesting a meeting to discuss the possibility of Türkiye joining the war.
He also sent Togan to meet with Iraqi Prime Minister Rashid Ali al-Gaylani - an ardent Arab nationalist and anti-British partisan - to secure an alliance of convenience, with the goal of partitioning Mandatory Kurdistan and French Syria between the two. This would allow the Turks and Iraqis to expel the Colonial Powers from West Asia considerably more quickly, allowing them to make their dominance a fait accompli before they could retaliate. This would enable the Turks to act independently in case they were unable to gather support from the Anti-ComIntern Axis. However, these talks had to be kept secret from a member of the Triumvirate: Atsız. His hatred for all Arabs was legendary, and he had been outraged that Iraq was not part of the final territories claimed by the government, only being prevented from resigning by Nurs reassurance that the claims only represented an initial phase of expansion. The mission to Iraq would prove to be a wise decision, as the German and Italian designations agreed with Çakmaks findings of Türkiye entering the war being an unwise decision, but wavered on the possibility of going to war with the Western Powers; the war in the East was not going to plan, and opening a second front with two globe-striding powers seemed suicidal. However, Nur was able to extract a promise from Ribbentrop and Ciano that if either power changed their minds, they would give him early notice to begin preparations.
Such an alert would come in December of that year, as Berlin and Rome heard Petain’s request of support for his “military vote of no confidence.” Realizing this opportunity, and understanding that after the invasion of Norway this would bring the British into the War, both Ribbentrop and Ciano sent cables to Ankara, promising they would have both an opportunity to strike south, and full support in doing so. It also stated that said support was contingent on opening a front with the Soviets within 90 days of the completion of the conquest of the British and French Mandates in the region. While unsure of their ability to pivot the army so quickly, the Triumvirate agreed to this. They felt that this was an excellent opportunity, and another of this scale would not present itself for some time.
In July of 1941, Nur’s health was beginning to fail. He had been complaining of stomach pain for a few months, and an apparently benign tumor was found in his stomach in June 1941. He underwent surgery to remove it in July, but while he experienced a modicum of relief, his symptoms would return, alongside fatigue and intermittent headaches. Subsequent procedures revealed that the tumor was not in fact bening, and was actually symptomatic of stomach cancer. This cancer would continue to weaken him, as did his continually severe treatment. This kept him away from his duties as Prime Minister, and he delegated more and more of his decision making to his junior Triumvirs.
As 1941 turned into 1942, it became increasingly clear that Nur would not survive the next six months, and so a power struggle within the HTP and the Republic’s government began between Togan and Atsız, and challengers from the OL and CHP. The HTPs internal power struggle was mostly defined in terms of foreign alignment, and whether Türkiye should look more towards Europe or Asia, and National Socialism or Concordism. It should be noted that this power struggle was somewhat more low-stakes than what would be expected in a fascist state, with both parties being dedicated to the collegial nature of the HTPs leadership, and willing to work with the other once they had secured the leadership. It was more a struggle of strategy and policy than personality.
Atsız led the pro-German, pro-National Socialist faction. He pointed at how important Germany was to the economy (it had eclipsed Italy’s presence in the Turkish market by 1939), and that Hitler had been vocally supportive of Turanism, going so far as to call it “an eccentric regional facet of Aryanism.” Additionally, he found the Germans to be much more authentically anti-communist than the Italians or the Asiofuturists, and his own Turanism shared a great deal of sentimentalism with Hitler’s National Socialism.
The Concordist, pro-Japan “left” faction was led by Togan. Togan was a personal friend of Shimoi, and maintained a regular correspondence with both him and Regent Yasuhito. Despite his more forward-looking outlook and ideology, he rooted his arguments for aligning with Japan in the past: in his mind, the Turans had originated in Asia, and were a thoroughly Asian people. This was, in his mind, enough to warrant aligning with a power halfway around the world, with barely any shared interests or involvement in the Turkish economy.
This power struggle remained at a low boil for the rest of 1941, as Nur, despite his poor health, still took control of the overall strategic direction of the country, carefully delegating and re-delegating to the other two Triumvirs. The next year would be a big one, and Nur needed to ensure that unity of command and control was maintained in the campaigns to come. *[WPA]: Works Progress Administration *[NBI]: National Bureau of Investigation
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