Systemic dehumanization of Kurds (not just PKK) has been going for the past two years, since the conflict Erdogan unleashed against PKK in order to justify his manipulation of the elections, as AKP floundered in a failing economy. Of course, the conflict ended up largely targeting civilians, and included burned buildings, tortures, murders of women and children, and a widespread crackdown on civil rights in the entire region, which precipitated the rise of authoritarianism across the country.
Now, books about Kurds are being banned on national security grounds.
Historically, using pejorative language against a minority ethnic or religious group, and consequently claiming that the entire group is a national security danger, a fifth column, or an enemy within has been used to justify attempted mass elimination of that group.
The group may be a historic rival of another group, or it may just be a convenient scapegoat, but whatever the political grievances used as a justification eventually end up being largely used against civilians and innocent bystanders.
We have seen the Nazis compare Jews to rats until that concept became firmly lodged in the minds of much of the country as the Nuremberg Laws were being imposed, and as the FInal Solution was adopted.
We have seen this in Rwanda, where a politician would call Tutsis "cockroaches", leading to the perception of that group as inferior, inherently worthless, destructive, and disgusting. Regular people were so brainwashed into believing that other human beings had nothing human about them that they were living to stand by or even partake in mass murder.
Kurds are increasingly being portrayed as all members of PKK and all a national security danger to Turkey. There is an implication that they are disloyal, that they spy for foreign governments. Professors at universities have been fired for being Kurdish, sometimes under the excuse that they were a foreign element, and sometimes for no reason other than the fact that they were a minority.
Kurdish newspapers have been shut down; Kurdish politicians thrown in prison; Kurdish social media accounts and websites have been blocked.
The entire group is being indiscriminantly treated as members of an uprising.
Turks are being conditioned, programmed to believe that you cannot trust members of that community, that anything written about Kurds is by definition against unified Turkish identity; that identifying oneself as a minority is a threat to Turkish culture and to the government, that speaking any language other than Turkish means that you may be planning a government coup or that you are a separatist that wants to split the country apart and start a civil war. This incendiary rhetoric coupled with action distracts the population from Erdogan's crackdowns on other fronts; scapegoats the Kurds, and creates an internal enemy linked to external enemies - the Kurds in Syria, who wants to form an autonomy, with territory that would be contiguous with the Kurdish areas of Turkey, and with KRG, that just voted to form an independent state and is claiming Kirkuk - an area that Turkey insists it has historic claims on - as its own.
Now, Erdogan's expansionist, neo-Ottoman ambitions have a solid justification: security of Turkey, which is under threat from a militant nation that is surrounding it from all sides and is trying to take away Turkish land. And it has coopted a signficant portion of its population, into a fifth column, and the PKK is not just a terrorist organization, it's paid by enemies. And anyone who supports Kurdish aspirations for independence is opposed to Turkish national sovereignty.
See how it all works?
Unless the United States and its Western powers, utilizing all the significant leverage that they have, make it clear to Erdogan that this dehumanizing campaign ends full stop or else, we are very likely to see further significant infringements on human rights of the Kurds in Turkey and outside of it, and possibly, if the events continue to unravel in the same direction, bloody massacres and other atrocities that will not spare women or children, to follow.
Erdogan is on a path of no return, and the more he is appeased under the pretense of NATO alliance and dealmaking, the more he is likely to utilize this freedom against his own population, starting with the people that make a very compelling target for a bloodthirsty dictator, obsessed with staying in power, and the brainwashed masses who are being increasingly whipped up by an Islamist, nationalist frenzy - a terrible combination, to be sure.
I hope the international community, and particularly the US government, firmly intervenes before it's too late.
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