Şahap Eraslan: 'My Grandfather Was a Grand Vizier'

Rastinews — Charlie Chaplin and The Great Dictator…

I once watched a nature documentary in which a small animal, facing an imminent attack from another, tried to make its body look bigger than it was. It puffed up its fur, spread its limbs, and turned itself into something like a giant. Truly large and powerful animals rarely need such displays. It is usually the small animal, sensing that its mere presence does not inspire enough fear on its own, that has to inflate itself.

Something similar exists among humans. When a person constantly tries to appear magnificent, untouchable and larger than life, what usually lies behind it is an awareness of their own smallness, and an effort to hide it. Ostentatious grandeur is not always a sign of real power — often it is the opposite: a mark of deep inadequacy.

In Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator, there is an unforgettable scene in which two dictators — stand-ins for Hitler and Mussolini — meet. Each keeps raising his barber's chair to gain the upper hand, to look down on the other, to physically outdo him. Chaplin exposes the absurd side of power here: those who constantly need to rise higher to look bigger are, in truth, trying to escape their own smallness. Small men are eager to make themselves bigger; fascism takes that individual eagerness and turns it into architecture, ceremony, uniforms and state spectacle.

What makes fascism so seductive is precisely its ability to turn this sense of smallness to its own advantage. First, the individual is made to feel insignificant, powerless and irrelevant on their own. Then comes the offer of identification: "Identify with me, with the state, with the leader, with the nation — and you too will become great." The person's actual power does not grow. But they begin to experience the state's grandeur as their own, the leader's might as their own. For a while, the individual forgets their own sense of inadequacy inside the splendor of the larger structure they belong to.

Fatherland, Nation and Sakarya…

The poor man's consolation is believing himself to be the true owner of the country. He is even willing to die for the country he believes he owns. One of the nation-state's great tricks is its ability to give the poor — who hold no economic or political power — the feeling that they are the country's real owners.

Old regimes had to pay their soldiers to keep their armies functioning. Plunder taken in war was a major source of income for Roman soldiers. Pay, stipends and money also lay at the heart of the Janissary revolts. Although the Janissary corps was sanctified through the narrative of the "Prophet's hearth," the soldiers' relationship with the state rested not only on faith and loyalty but also on material interest. With the advent of conscription, the relationship between political power, religious authority and military force took on a new shape. Where old regimes had to offer their soldiers money, plunder or privilege to keep their power intact, the modern nation-state can send people to war and to death far more easily — simply by convincing them that they are the country's true owners. For the soldier, for the poor man, death comes cheap.

The poor soldier regards as his "fatherland" land that, economically and politically, has never truly belonged to him. He has no say over that land; he gets no share of its wealth and holds no title to it. Yet he is willing to give up his own life to defend it. And so those who actually own the country go on living, while those who have been convinced that they own it die for its sake.

The nation-state manufactures this sense of belonging not only through war, flags and patriotic narratives, but through the most mundane routines of everyday life. Someone listening to the news learns the weather not just for where they live, but for Artvin, Edirne, Rize, Diyarbakır and Kuşadası as well. Telling someone in Kuşadası what the weather is like in Edirne or Rize looks, at first glance, like nothing more than a routine piece of information. But the repetition gives people who have never met, whose lives and experiences differ enormously, the sense that they belong to the same geography. An imagined but powerful emotional bond forms between someone from Edirne and someone from Sivas, between someone from Rize and someone from Diyarbakır.

In his 2021 book Von der Steinzeit ins Internet: Vom analogen Menschen in der digitalen Welt (From the Stone Age to the Internet: The Analog Human in the Digital World), Lutz Jäncke argues that the human mind and social behavior are shaped by hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary history. According to Jäncke, humans adapted to life in small groups, not in large, anonymous societies. Throughout the Stone Age, people lived in communities of a few dozen and encountered very few strangers in a lifetime. They did not need to interact with hundreds of unfamiliar people every day, as we do now. People knew one another; they knew who could be trusted and who had which skills. Trust rested on face-to-face relationships, long acquaintance and mutual dependence. This way of life was also a product of human vulnerability in the face of nature. Physically, humans are quite weak compared with many animals. We have no powerful claws, no sharp fangs, and we are not fast runners. Protection from predators, successful hunting and survival itself depended on acting together with others. Cooperation, trust, loyalty and mutual dependence were therefore not just moral values — they were basic conditions for survival. The human species survived largely because it was able to cooperate.

Belonging, too, took shape within these small groups. People usually lived and died in the place where they were born. Their world was small, and the number of people they knew was limited. They saw themselves as part of a circle of a few dozen kin, neighbors and allies. Belonging was a matter of the small group. The great religious communities, nations and collective identities spanning millions of people — things we now treat as natural and permanent — emerged much later in human history.

Population figures bear this out. Around 1000 BCE, the world's population is estimated at roughly 170 million. It did not reach half a billion until the 1600s, and only reached about a billion in the early 19th century. Most people never left their own region in their lifetime and met very few strangers. For that reason, the anonymous societies, national loyalties and notions like "dying for the fatherland" that we take as natural today are quite recent inventions in human history. Although the human mind evolved to fit small groups, modern societies require millions of strangers to feel like members of the same community. This belonging is neither natural nor biological; it is produced through historical, cultural and political processes.

Benedict Anderson, whom I have mentioned in earlier columns, defines nations as "imagined communities." "Imagined" here does not mean nations are not real. It describes how millions of people belonging to the same nation, who will never meet one another, nonetheless think of themselves as part of the same whole. Nations are not biological communities; they are forms of belonging constructed historically and politically.

In this sense, the nation is an imagined kinship. People with no biological tie to one another come to see themselves, through a shared identity, as members of the same family and as each other's siblings. In other words, a symbolic, imagined and fictional biological bond is invented. Slogans like "Turks are brothers" or "Muslims are brothers" do not describe an actual blood tie; they express this symbolic kinship, built politically and culturally. People count one another as kin simply for belonging to the same nation, religion or ethnic identity, even if they never meet in their lifetimes. A shared identity thus produces a sense of imagined kinship among millions of people who share no actual family tie.

Conscription and the education system play a central role in manufacturing this sense of shared belonging. The nation-state's school does not just transmit knowledge; it standardizes what people should know, what they should remember, what they should forget, and how they should feel. A child growing up in Edirne and a child growing up in Rize, Kuşadası or Diyarbakır have different local cultures, different family histories and different everyday experiences — yet the system works to make them feel like members of the same nation. A shared identity is laid over these differences through a common history, common heroes, common enemies, and the same anthems, ceremonies, flags and symbols.

People from Edirne, Rize or Diyarbakır thus come to see themselves as children of the same fatherland and parts of the same whole. Even with no direct relationship between them, even knowing nothing of each other's lives, a shared sense of belonging and common fate is produced. This emotional identification also forms the psychological basis for being willing, when called upon, to die for the fatherland. That someone living in Kuşadası becomes willing to sacrifice themselves over an event in Rize or Diyarbakır is possible precisely because this shared sense of fatherland has been built up over years through education, media, ritual and symbol.

Vamık Volkan, also mentioned in my earlier columns, argues in his theory of large-group identity that nations need not only shared stories of triumph and heroism to forge a common identity, but shared traumas as well. Volkan's concept of "chosen trauma" describes how a major defeat, loss or humiliation that a group suffered in the past is passed down through generations and placed at the center of its collective identity.

What is at stake here is not some past suffering settling into collective memory on its own. The large group selects a particular trauma out of its past, retells it, magnifies it, and makes it a founding element of its identity. Around this trauma, the group produces not only shared mourning but also shared anger, a sense of threat and an image of the enemy. A defeat from the past turns into a living narrative that feeds present-day political conflict.

One of Volkan's most important examples is the symbolic weight the 1389 Battle of Kosovo, and Prince Lazar, who was killed in it, carry in Serbian national identity. The defeat at Kosovo was not left as a mere historical episode; it was turned into a chosen trauma and retold across centuries. Lazar became more than a historical figure — he turned into the symbolic figure of sacrifice, heroism, loss and national honor. Under Slobodan Milošević, this historical narrative was revived, and the past defeat was tied to a rhetoric of present-day threat and revenge. An event from centuries earlier was thus turned into a source legitimizing today's political anger, enmity and violence. People were made to believe not only that they belonged to a common fatherland, but that they were heirs to the same historical wound, facing the same enemy.

The nation-state thus does not just draw borders on a map; it draws the borders of people's knowledge, memory and emotion. It decides who is remembered as hero and who as enemy, which event is recalled as victory and which as trauma. Millions of people who have never seen one another are made to believe that they own the same country, share the same fate, and must, if called upon, give up their lives for this imagined whole. This sense of national brotherhood, this unity, is not built by telling certain histories alone. Alongside the history that gets told, there are other histories and stories that are silenced, defamed, forgotten, or pushed toward forgetting. National memory determines not only what will be remembered, but what will be forgotten. Who is cast as hero and who as traitor, who as victim and who as threat, is settled through this selective memory. In the official narrative, for instance, Sabiha Gökçen is cast as a heroine while Seyit Rıza is branded a traitor. The different sides of the same historical event thus do not become visible on equal terms: the state's perspective is centered, while the experience of the suppressed is pushed into silence. For this reason, the nation-state does not merely tell a shared history — it also produces a shared regime of forgetting. Even as it teaches people what to remember, it decides which pains will go unseen, which voices will go unheard, and which stories will not count as legitimate history.

The human mind, evolutionarily accustomed to trust, attachment and solidarity within small groups, redirects that ancient inclination in the modern age toward large, abstract communities like the nation. The belonging once built through the small group's face-to-face relationships is transformed, through school, media, historical narratives, heroic tales, chosen traumas, flags and ceremonies, into a large-group identity spanning millions of people. A community that is not biological but historically and politically constructed thus becomes, in people's minds, a whole that feels utterly real, emotionally charged, and — when called upon — worth dying for.