dBSPL
SENIOR MEMBER
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- Mar 2, 2018
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First of all, I'm very sorry for your loss. So please accept my condolences. Good friendships are always remembered with good memories.And just to clarify, I am not against all white turks. The traditional definition of them has been the non-religious class of Turkey.
I knew a white Turk from Istanbul who would visit us in Karachi when I was a child. Her name was Deniz and she was such a loving sweet woman. Very gentle and kind.
I think she connected with us easily because we both belong to the non-religious upper class of Turkey. She was Westernized and weren't that different. But she had no prejudices towards us. Why would she visit our country if she thought like that.
She had dark blonde hair with slight Central Asian features. One of our housekeepers from Bangladesh thought all Turks look like her. He said she was a very nice person. He asked me is she Muslim? Because he confused her with Europeans because of her European looks.
She dies of cancer about a year ago. But at the same time I knew a middle class one working as a chef. He was not upper class.
But he had very cranky views on Pakistanis and said very derogatory and stereotypical things about us. He was a Kemalist type.
Very fanatical and insecure. Only I years later I began to learn who he is where he got these beliefs from.
Such are the Turks I am against. But now I realize, they do not represent all Turks or even the majority of Turks.
He also lied most of what he said. Typical denialist and liar. But again, he does not represent all Turks but a certain class or subculture of Turks.
Unfortunately, alienation from one's own culture is a real phenomenon in TR. In other words, these stereotypical and ignorant things that are unpleasant to you and your culture are also unpleasant to our general. The only thing I can say about this is not that there is no such thing, but that generalizing from ideological stereotypes does not always produce accurate analysis.
We are guests here and to be honest, there are not many of us, so the discussions we have among ourselves on such sociological issues are not visible here. However, I can assure you that this supremacist point of view can be seen even among religious people, and even we see it. While we are already fundamentally opposed to this orientalist way of thinking of the West, we are equally disturbed by this erosion of culture within ourselves.