The greatest nightmare for the sailors, especially for a ship commanding officer or a captain, is dragging the anchor. Because of heavy wind or strong current, the dragging ship is unable to hold its position, even with engine power. At some point, the ship will likely strand. If the stranded ship hits the sand there may be a chance to recover, but if the ship is dragged and stranded on rocks, the hull will be pierced and begin to take on water, thus becoming unrecoverable. At that point, the ship becomes shipwrecked. If there is one thing we have learned from the coronavirus crisis, it is that the same can happen to entire governments.
GOVERNMENTS CAN ALSO STRAND
Governments can also become stranded because of wars, internal conflicts, uprisings, economic crises, natural disasters and plagues. Some can survive these extraordinary conditions without turning into wreckage, some can not and are eradicated from history. Very rarely, a new state is built on that wreckage with a new spirit, identity and with fresh power, as was the case for the Atatürk’s Republic of Turkey.
THE WORLD DRAGS ANCHOR
World Wars, climate change, environmental disasters, natural disasters, economic crises and plagues can also drag the anchor of the world. Although the community, tribe, or nation systems founded by more than 100 billion people who have ever lived on earth since the first Homo Sapiens have faced five different extinction threats over the last few millions of years, they have never faced a threat of total annihilation. For that reason, the world, which has dragged anchor for various reasons, has nonetheless never been turned into a total wreckage.
THE NUCLEAR THREAT
After 1945, the earth experienced a sixth period of self-destruction, this time due to human innovation. The first step of this process was the detonation of the nuclear weapons in Japan. Nuclear weapons had become the greatest destructive force in human history. For the first time, humanity was initiating a potential process of self-destruction by its own will. At that point, this will was synonymous with American will. That is why Oppenheimer, the mastermind behind the American atomic bombing on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, spoke these words which he read in a Hindu scripture, when the first test of the Manhattan Project was successful:
“Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds.”
Pixabay
According to reports from 2012, 9 countries in the world (the US, Russia, the UK, China, France, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea) have a collective 4,400 nuclear weapons ready to use at any time. If those being kept in silos are included, roughly 19,000 nuclear weapons are reported. The destructive power is big enough to completely eradicate life on earth. The surviving creatures would have to live with heavy nuclear fallout.
THE ENVIRONMENTAL THREAT
The other devastation has come from the environment. With the industrial revolution in the end of the 18th century and the start of the Oil Age in the early 20th century, the most advanced species on earth, human beings, have rapidly expanded their power to control nature. The actual reason that started this process was mankind’s ambition to produce more, something which eventually went out of control. The liberal-capitalist West wanted to gain more, exploit more and to live a better life. When we reached the 21st century, the earth was roughly 4.5 billion years old, and humanity had existed for 200,000 years. The earliest of civilizations was 10,000 years old; and the first monotheistic religious scripts dated back to roughly 5,000 years ago. Aside from the last 260 years, humanity and the economy have improved on mainly muscle and wind power.
Things changed after British inventor James Watt’s invention of the steam engine in 1773. With the resources of the earth, coal first and then petroleum one hundred years later, we developed industrial civilization to a greater point than we could have possibly imagined. At the same time, however, we devastated nature.
Petroleum has impacted every area of human life from energy, to plastics, fertilizers and chemical industries. As the 21st century came to an end, the demand for natural gas has begun to increase. As a result, the hydrocarbons; petroleum, natural gas and coal has offered a great development with larger energy demands than were never experienced before, all of which has further devastated nature, mainly with the carbon dioxide, SOX, NOX emissions and by-products such as plastics, fertilizers, etc. Today, all the non-human biological beings will likely be obliterated and human life will cease to exist on earth if this consumption and extraction isn’t slowed. Since 1970, the world’s human population has doubled, while the wildlife population has been reduced by half.
Some scientists define this period as the sixth extinction period. The level of CO2 in the atmosphere is more than it was in millions of years. Organisms that supply the oxygen to earth, thousands of meters deep in the ocean, are dying. Seas, rivers and lakes are dying, and ice caps are melting due to global warming. Sea levels are rising. Droughts, floods, hurricanes are occurring more frequently. Due to the solid wastes and plastics, garbage islands with the size of Turkey are being formed in the oceans.
Needpix.com/https://www.needpix.com/photo/1183990/green-planet-futuristic-design-background-abstract-3d-animation-technology
THE COVID-19
The earth was giving signals of distress, such as melting glaciers, extinct species, destroyed rainforests, and limitations in resources seized by the neo-liberal capitalism. The earth was dragging its anchor. The capitalist system took over the command of the world-ship after the 18th century. Capitalism, shaped by the protestant ethics, has evolved into imperialism, and with the comfort of winning two world wars and the Cold War behind, the US has transformed itself into neo-liberal capitalism, and spread throughout the globe.
This system, which has expanded its imperialist sphere of influence under the name of so-called democracy, has eliminated all the mechanisms of controlling the natural resources of competing nation-states by using its psychological superiority and its financial, cultural power under the umbrella of destructive nuclear military power. Now, the control of nature has fallen into the hands of the neoliberal elites who know no boundaries. The ship was destined to stand, despite all the warnings of the first half of the 21st century.
The system was wrong, the theory was wrong, and the practice was wrong. Humanity was committing suicide. One percent of the world’s population has 80 percent of global wealth. The imbalance of income, population growth and the destruction of nature are all intertwined. This imbalance is not only a result of human-to-human exploitation, it is also due to the exploitation of nature by the neoliberal capitalist economy. The global system which had previously developed nuclear weapons was now destroying nature altogether. Covid-19 has put an end to this process. On the other hand, it has also accelerated the anchor dragging of the global economic system.
SAVING THE SHIP IN THE NEW WORLD ORDER
This virus, which has left almost 3 billion people in lock down within a month, has proven that the world and nature can survive. The new order will not have to carve a path through millions of dead and wounded, devastated cities and nations in a world war, it can arise in response to the pandemic. The West faces the reality of the two monsters that it has created (nuclear and environmental destruction) both need to be brought under control without causing further unprecedented disasters.
The era of the empowerment of nation states is beginning. In this new era, we can say that the teachings of Kemalism, or the six arrows for short, will guide every state for harmony, prosperity, peace and stability since Kemalism values nature, human life, the state and the people. It is a statist, populist, secular, nationalist, republican and reformist ideology. A new world that takes Kemalism as a guide for entering into the coming Asian Era is the only possibility for taking a stranded humankind to the high seas of peace.
Those in Turkey, who are in search of a new hope after witnessing the collapse of the Atlantic system and those who see nationalism as a disease will hopefully now come to a better understanding. When the Titanic hit the iceberg 108 years ago on April 14th 1912, at 23:35, no one from among the passengers and the crew, even the captain, could foresee that the ship would sink in just two hours and 45 minutes.
What a pity! These lands, which gave birth to the Republic of Turkey and to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk might be subject to the same misjudgements as those aboard that ill-fated ship. The problem is not their existence: we have seen their ancestors during the Moudros ceasefire era of 1918-1919.
The Grand Vizier Damat Ferit once told Admiral Arthur Calthorpe, the High Commissioner of Great Britain, “the Sultan and I hope that our salvation would only be from Great Britain after Allah.”
The problem is the existence of such people, deceiving them by telling them that the setting sun is rising, along with the presence of those who keep believing in this shameless lie. It is our duty in this beautiful country to warn those who still believe in this lie and those who want to believe for only little gains implied, in today’s political atmosphere, are the crypto-Gulenists, the outright enemies of Ataturk, as well as the fake Kemalists.