Securing oil and resources has always come before ethnic minorities and the right to life. It would be difficult to find any other similar ethnic groups who have faced as much continuous and repeated injustices as the Kurds very openly have endured, almost year on year. Kurds have lived under political and economic fear and insecurity for a century. They don’t have an equal basic right to life, which goes against the fundamental premise of the French Revolution (1789), the Genocide Convention (1948) and the Helsinki Declaration (1975).

People facilitate evil

When a country or government does not have any critical voices around them anymore, successfully eliminating a whole variety of critics and melding the whole of society under the regime’s single umbrella of nationalism or religious fundamentalism, this creates a new evil in the shape of a scorpion type of suicidal action, beginning with weak minorities, then spreading to the state itself and its own population.

If any strong public opposition had arisen before the genocide took place in Eastern and Southern Turkey, Auschwitz, Halabja, Bosnia, Rwanda, the Cambodian Killing Fields, Tamil Land, Sinjar Mountain, then we would not have had to talk about all these serious crimes against humanity, and we would not call the twentieth and also twenty first century the centuries of genocides.

The publics are the creators of these dangerous tyrannies, even though some studies argue the opposite. Social science has also failed to deal with the problem of the corrupted public which is directly or indirectly responsible for giving power to tyrannies. Most of them are the beneficiary of actions which take place against innocent people. Instead of being a ‘rescuer’, as discussed in Robert Meister’s book, After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights, they prefer to take the side of the perpetrators and be one of the beneficiaries of those crimes.

The benefit does not always take a materialist form, but to be a member brings with it the artificial self-importance of being involved in a crime that claims to benefit them and their future generations. To not stand against morally damaging actions can simply afford an opportunity for another tyrant to seize power. The increase and repetition of evil, is like a snowball effect. If it is not challenged and then stopped, it paves the way for the future power of empire. As Hannah Arendt discussed in a very detailed way in her several works, but especially in Eichmann in Jerusalem. A report on the banality of evil – we lack a common measurement that can embrace both gigantic evil and the sheer banality of people who have chosen to take the side of evil. Yet they commit these crimes together. Most common people who support tyrants are ready to do anything for him or her just to be part of that regime, and to become a beneficiary of the regime’s crimes.

The level of societal racism in Turkey may have made it one of the most racist countries in the world, but this has been exacerbated and ramped up to its highest level only in recent years. People, even so-called educated people who hold a doctoral degree from one of the western universities, now attack you with the aim of preventing any criticism of these evil regimes. This is because he or she directly benefits from the regime, probably receiving a scholarship to study from them in the first place with the further promise of grabbing a government position with the help of similar nepotist relations. Antonio De Lauri discussed the case of Italy, which has many similarities with Turkey, where the nature of education is such, especially the academic system, that it has become “nepotistic and exclusivist.”

However, this is not only a present day phenomenon, but it has taken many past, repetitive actions to feed into creating this situation. The state and its education system, based on a strong and destructive nationalism and religious fundamentalism, have paved the way for Erdogan-type leaders and people corrupted by nepotism to occupy powerful positions.

Criminal publics

Public support is the main driver of Erdogan’s sovereignty and his governmental style, which has created such a huge threat to stability and peace in the Middle East and the world. There is hardly any group or publicly known individual left in Turkey who can openly be critical about what is going on. Even unknown individuals who send a critical tweet or Facebook message are being arrested and tortured by state forces if they are not discovered and often punished by their neighbours first.

The media is not just silent, but it is gleefully engaging in the war, celebrating the government’s crimes with unqualified lack of restraint. There is hardly any opposition view or discussion. The stories of failed ‘heroes’ are covering the whole media either in the form of news or as part of hours-long Turkish soap operas. The only knowledge of these events many Turkish people have is based on this very simplistic, emotive, brain washing. Many people spend many hours of every single day watching these nationalistic, racist and bloodthirsty soap operas, their sole reference point.

There is hardly any resistance from the Turkish public in general. Passively and actively, as Foucault argued in his Lectures at the College de France, people have been sucked into and actively take sides with the sovereign power. Any small resistance from a few liberal voices, protest from a small group of academics and especially criticism from Kurdish political representatives, have been immediately snuffed out with imprisonment, unemployment, restriction of any life prospect, including working and travelling.

Meanwhile, almost all NGO's, civil and government institutions, business people, art gallery curators, and tens of thousands of Turkish academics, almost all Turkish political parties, including the main opposition ones, have lined up behind Erdogan to become embedded in this very regime of crime.