Dirilus: Ertugrul
Peak Erdogan—Islamic Poetry for a Neo Bronze Age
In my spare time I have been watching the lengthy series called Ertugrul. If you are looking for a manly dramatic series you will not find in anything coming out of Hollywood that competes with this action packed death romp. Game of Thrones is decidedly p-p-p-pussy compared to Ertugrul, and the search numbers for Ertugrul over any Hollywood comparative decimates the competition. Ertugrul easily beheads Jon Snow. One has to travel via Apple Remote outside the Woke States of America to find anything near entertaining as this Series.
Ever since I cut the cord (best decision of my recent life) I left the programming of the Televisual America and began looking for content not sanctioned and supported by the State Department, the CIA, Con, Inc., or the Atlantic Council. I somehow stumbled upon Ertugrul, originally published on TRT (Turkey), but then repurposed for PTV (Pakistan).
The original shows were ambitous. 5 Seasons in all, each episode was over an hour to two hours in length. For the American (and Pakistan?) audience, the shows were carved up to 40 minute chunks—making anywhere between 70 and 100+ episodes PER SEASON. Yikes!
The series has a manly soap opera feel to it and follows a predictable theme played over and over: Ertugrul (a Kayi tribe Bey) wants to set up a permanent lands for his tribe(s), and does so as a faithful Muslim—he is following the Will of Allah. He is the light of Islam; he is its uniter. Problem: so many secularists (political hacks, traitors, power hungry, greedy tribesmen/governors) try to thwart his path. Ertugrul trusts in Allah; his “muslim” adversaries do not—or at least they only feign devout belief. Deep down they are non practicing. Despite setbacks, traps, lies, death (even of some beloved characters), Ertugrul prevails. Once he conquers one traitorous problem, another one immediately takes its place, and the cycle repeats itself with new traitors, deceptions, and intrigue.
The series takes its shots at western and eastern Christianity, and the Mongols (stand in proxy for China), but even fellow Turks are not portrayed in a positive light. There is a human problem exposed in all this—human beings fall to their passions, and those who choose not to order their soul and mind are weak in soul and body. Those who follow Allah are the heroes; those who do not are, well, not. Those who control their passions are stronger than those who do not. Along those lines, few characters are portrayed outside Islam as moral people, but there are a few—Haçaturyan Usta/Master Alvin, the Armenian Eastern Orthodox Christian saved by Ertugrul from slavery is finely portrayed as a gentle and faithful man who is murdered by Etugrul’s evil nemesis in Season 3. Character matters more than Faith. Christians and Jews can follow Allah even if they are not Muslim.
Ertugrul, and the faithful Muslims shine for the most part. Ertugrul is going to bring the light of Allah to the lands (and unite the tribes, to unite his Faith), but, he is also religiously tolerant. Ertugrul’s theme is religious pluralism, but that seems lost on the audience from what I can tell. So, even those outside the Mohammedan Faith are seen, generally, as praising Ertugrul, and his Justice, which comes from his Faith. The series demonstrates in many instances—and especially through Ibn Arabi,—Islam’s correctness, but also its similarity between the other two revealed religions in teaching of how men ought to live. However the aim of the show and its theme song make clear that the fate of Islam needs revived and needs to defend itself from the Global/Modernity elite.
As noted at Foreign Policy:
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has celebrated the show for “entering the nation’s heart” and is an enthusiastic supporter. Its producer, Kemal Tekden, is a member of Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), and the show’s creator, Mehmet Bozdag, is, if not a member, an open admirer. “Eighty-six years of longing has come to an end,” he tweeted after Erdogan and his cabinet offered the first Muslim prayers at the Hagia Sophia after a court annulled the sixth-century Byzantine church’s status as a museum. Nelson Mandela’s grandson, a member of South Africa’s parliament, visited the set and posed for photos decked out in Ertugrul’s Kayi tribal kit as did Venezuela’s head of state, Nicolás Maduro. Maduro was so moved, Bozdag claimed, that he even considered converting to Islam after his visit.
The show appeals to thoughtless socialist tyrants like Nicolas Maduro to be sure, but the intent of the show is not that pedestrian. In fact, the series is meant to combat radicalism in Islam, and specifically to supplant Saudi Wahhabism. Thoughtful viewers will recognize the show’s moderation in this regard.
Let there be no mistake, this series is pure Turkish propaganda—or is it just a Noble Lie? The historical timeline is not even close to being accurate to say the least. This is a show set in the middle ages, late middle ages, around 1200-1300. We know very little about this “dark age” of history. However, we do know some things, like that, for example, Ibn Arabi (d. 1240)—a prominent Sage/Shiekh/Healer in the show who shows Ertugrul (d. 1280) the path (and saves him miraculously through prayer often) could never have met Ertugrul.
There are also all sorts of not exactly true to completely made up events in the show, but Ertugrul is not about historical accuracy, it is Islamic Poetry for a Neo-Bronze Age. And, this is really the point of this long post: the series is about recovery, return.
Ertugrul, the series, is meant to reconvene on a practical level the nation-state (of Turkey). The beginning of every episode makes a reference to how the entire series is a testament to “Our Story.” This poetic license makes the series not just a call to remind Turks of their history, but to recall the old world, the ancient world, the ancient city of its power over the globalists who seek to destroy the old ways—to kill God.
Gray Mirror (Moldbug/Yarvin) recently made note of a nice little book on Turkey’s Erdogan—Scott Alexander’s “The New Sultan”. It was that post that got me thinking of the Series I was watching, and the ensuing post about that book by Astral Codex Ten. Now I should say that from the first episode, I knew this had to be official state sponsored propaganda, but it is not merely that: this show has spread across the east with such popularity, Erdogan (indirectly) has tapped into something broader and so have the creators and writers of the series.
This is not legacy retail political (dis)information. There is something more important going on here. It spans countries—it is certainly more prevalent in this reclaiming of a sense of humanity. Now you do not have to like or approve of the nationalistic message of Ertugrul the series. I don’t. Constantinople is….Constaniople, thank you very much. Erdogan’s political intent in the series plays heavy though.
From Gray Mirror:
Alexander writes a whole essay about the Turkish strongman Erdoğan, and Hanania quotes the sting in the tail of Alexander’s essay—then adds this unusual note:
To put it in a different way, to steelman the populist position, democracy does not reflect the will of the citizenry, it reflects the will of an activist class, which is not representative of the general population. Populists, in order to bring institutions more in line with what the majority of the people want, need to rely on a more centralized and heavy-handed government.
The strongman is liberation from elites, who aren’t the best citizens, but those with the most desire to control people’s lives, often to enforce their idiosyncratic belief system on the rest of the public, and also a liberation from having to become like elites in order to fight them, so conservatives don’t have to give up on things like hobbies and starting families and devote their lives to activism.
I’m not suggesting this is the path conservatives should take; they might feel that a stronger, more centralized and powerful government is too contrary to their own ideals. In that case, however, they’ll have to reconcile themselves to continue to lose the culture into the foreseeable future, at least until they are able to inspire a critical mass to do more than just vote its preferences.
Yarvin is not a fan of Alexander, and he has choice words for Erdogan in the process about what it all means. Yarvin is not all that inspired or confident that Erdogan’s provincialism of the strong man will succeed. But that’s not exactly right—the entire world is becoming more tribal partly because of the proliferation of digital. Yarvin misses the point in this decisive sense. But it misses a crucial point of what is habbening in Turkey that Erdogan has tapped into—the actual war against the elites who have failed us. All. of. US. The globalists cannot survive in their own system and expect to keep their exalted position as Lords. It is not just a specific problem facing the United States—this is the real global pandemic. Yarvin again:
The essential problem with Alexander’s picture of this process is that, since like most smart people today he inhabits Cicero’s great quote about history and children, he simply cannot imagine replacing one kind of elite institution with another. Nor can he imagine high-IQ elites—human beings as smart as him—which are as loyal to a new sane monarchy as today’s elites are loyal, slavishly loyal, to our old insane oligarchy. Does he think that Elizabeth’s London had no elites? Caesar’s Rome?
***
Every pundit is a Cicero. And amidst all the greatness of his rhetoric, Cicero could not imagine a world that had no use for Ciceros—a world governed by competence, not rhetoric. By the time Caesar crossed the Rubicon, nothing had failed more completely than the whole Roman idea of governance by rhetoric—an idea many centuries old, an idea whose execution had beaten all competitors to capture the whole civilized world, but an idea that was past its sell-by date. Rome herself was no longer suited to it. The republican aristocracy of Rome no longer meant Regulus and Scipio and Cincinnatus; it meant Milo and Clodius and Catiline. Its factional conflict was the choice between Hutu Power and Das Schwarze Korps. Caesar was not a disaster; Caesar was a miracle.
Yarvin has a valid point about the power of rhetoric and writing and the real problem of creating a new elite to replace the old elite in the age of decay. The old elite must fall. Ertugrul wants to resurrect (no pun intended) the manly spirits but not in a misdirected way.
Caesar was a “miracle” because he was not Sulla—moderation needs sane monarchs not the global insanities we have today. Strongmen may rise, but Yarvin says the provincial kind like Erdogan will fail. Why? Erdogan is thinking too small. Is He? The tribalization is already happening, and for better or worse, it will proliferate. We don’t need a Ceasar and he is not inevitable (Yarvin thinks he is), but small tribal relations are inevitable and power can be diffused. But, Yarvin misses another key point: the aim of Erdogan is not provincial—it’s regional on the map, and global in Faith. He is thinking bigger than Yarvin is thinking he is. Islam has come under the religious destroying control of the secularists in the east as the entirety of The Church has gone woke. Erdogan wants to unite and revive Islam, and that means being at the center of millions of Muslim believers across many continents.
What does Ertugrul do? He reminds people of their particular Ancient Faith, sure, but more so that they are human, and human greatness can be predominately more an human act than, say, anything coming from the European Union. Allah is God, not the cult of human bots. Western Christianity has become feckless and trendy in this world. There will be consequences for the unwoke west in all this, do not fool yourself. People should watch this show (and Erdogan) with eyes open. But, there is no reason why Erdogan/Ertugrul cannot serve up wonderful unintended consequences for Christians and Jews alike to revive their faith. The first religious Christian figure to openly challenge the tyranny of the age will immediately draw millions to the suffering of the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches. Perhaps that will be the first real effort at true unity in a thousand years?
The overarching message of Ertugrul even as it prefers Islam to all others? Revelation from any of the three great revealed religions carries more wisdom than the golden calf of the globalists.
Inshallah.