That story is told in almost every book on the history of political thought, but sometimes, and especially in Turkish sources, an equally important phenomenon is curiously left out: The demise of the divine rights of kings did not immediately bring the equal rights of citizens. In fact, some of the political cadres that overthrew kings soon turned out to be much more authoritarian then their predecessors – a fact that George Orwell had brilliantly portrayed in his classic, “Animal Farm.” The French Revolutionaries, and especially the bloody Jacobins, established a tyranny far worse than that of Louis XVI. Similarly, the Bolsheviks, who promised to save the Russian people from the despotism of the Czar, created a much more atrocious regime.

Reason instead of God

Interestingly, the modern autocrats used a justification akin to that of their pre-modern predecessors. There was a crucial difference, though. The divine rights of kings were replaced by undivine but still very powerful and even somewhat holy rights of the revolutionaries. For the Jacobins, the source of these rights was Reason – with a capital R. In fact, they even gave Reason a sacred status by enacting the statue of the Goddess of Reason on the high altar in Notre Dame de Paris. For the Bolsheviks, legitimacy came from “Scientific Socialism,” or, simply, “Science” itself. Their regime would also be empowered by cults of personalities created around Lenin and Stalin. These supposedly all-knowing leaders, whose statues filled Soviet streets and whose names renamed cities, became the source of the unquestioned rights of the communists.

Now, to be frank, something similar has been ongoing in Turkey since the late 1920s. Our official textbooks love to tell us how our revolution saved us from the Sultan – whose regime was, by the way, a constitutional monarchy, not an absolutist tyranny – but they deliberately fail to explain what really happened afterwards. Turkey, of course, never experienced a dictatorship as harsh as that of the Bolsheviks, but our revolutionary cadre soon established an authoritarian state tradition, which would allow democracy only in a very limited sense.

The way our revolutionaries claimed legitimacy has been curiously similar to their French and Bolshevik counterparts: An abstract concept called Enlightenment, and the cult of personality created around Atatürk.

The Kemalist narrative in Turkey really depends on these two pillars. If you have spent time here, I am sure you must have seen that cult of personality with your own eyes – it is hard to miss, right? But one needs to examine the texts and words of the Kemalists in order to see how they justify their war on democracy by referring to the Enlightenment. Chief Prosecutor Abdurrahman Yalçınkaya, for example, in his indictment in which he asks for the ban of the “Islamist” ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), refers to “the philosophy of enlightenment” five times. He defines it as the “effort carried out against the hegemony of religion in all areas of social life, and which has ended with the ascension of human conscious.” And he accuses the AKP of trying to set the headscarf free in a way “which rejects all the achievements of mankind during the process of enlightenment.”

Which Enlightenment?

Now, I am no enemy of Enlightenment, but I am quite distasteful of nonsense such as above. Enlightenment is a heavily loaded philosophical concept, and there are many ways to understand, interpret and criticize it. I very much suspect that the chief prosecutor has any clue on the zillions of critical works on this topic. I very much doubt that he has read, or heard of, books such as Gertrude Himmelfarb's “Roads to Modernity: The British, French and American Enlightenments.” (Himmelfarb notes that the French regarded religion as an obstacle to modernity, while the Anglo-Saxons rather saw it as a source of inspiration.) I am, in fact, quite sure that what the chief prosecutor knows about these matters is limited to a few basic Kemalist tracts and monologues.

But even that is irrelevant. Here we are speaking about a philosophical issue, but the man, the chief prosecutor, is trying to close down Turkey's largest political party. For him Enlightenment is actually only a justification to do away with democracy. It is really not too different from the way the Jacobins referred to Reason and the Bolsheviks referred to Science.

That's how the Turkish version of the Animal Farm works. Its masters legitimize their autocracy by asserting that they have special rights to rule over the people. And we will not have a real democracy until they accept the fact that they are actually not more privileged, let alone smarter, than the rest of us.