Prisoners of Ourselves: Totalitarianism in Everyday Life.

• Author: Raw, Laurence
• Position: Book review

Prisoners of Ourselves: Totalitarianism in Everyday Life

By Gunduz Y. H. Vassaf

Istanbul: Iletisim Yayinlari, 2011, 275 pages, ISBN 9789750509629.

Turkey and the Dilemma of EU Accession

By Mirela Bogdani

London and New York: I. B. Tauris & Co., 2011, 234 pages, ISBN 9781848854598.

Towards a Social History of Modern Turkey: Essays in Theory and Practice

Edited by Gavin D. Brockett

Istanbul: Libra Kitapcilik ve Yayincilik, 2011, 184 pages, ISBN 9786054326426.

ALTHOUGH written from a variety of perspectives at different points in history, all three books reviewed here offer penetrating insights into Turkish politics past and present, as well as commenting on how they are interpreted both inside and outside the country.

Written in English, while he was guest professor at the University of Marburg, Germany (having quit his post at Bogazici University in protest at the law curtailing academic freedom), Gunduz Vassaf's Prisoners of Ourselves comprises a series of meditations mostly written between October 1986 and March 1987. His basic thesis is straightforward enough: although human beings consider themselves members of the free world, they are actually subject to totalitarian rule. He surveys some familiar binaries--for example, madness and sanity--and shows how they are used to cur tail individual liberties. Western historians have conventionally accepted that the Nazi period in Germany was one of collective madness. However the validity of that judgment can be called into question in the light of Adorno and Horkheimer's research, which discovered that anti-semitism in the United States was much higher than it had been in Germany after Hitler came to power. Vassaf concludes that everyone is part of that "collective madness," in which one nation is willfully prioritized over another as a means of sustaining power (p. 35). Anyone questioning that notion is abruptly silenced.

Vassaf believes that this kind of discrimination--which he terms a "we against them" paradigm--dominates all nations, classes, and religions. It lies at the heart of the west/ east binary, in which an individual's affirmative choice--to embrace "democratic values," for instance--implies a condemnation of others (p. 124). The belief also influences those who might have been members of "the other" at another time and place; those who once inhabited "the east" might subsequently turn out to be "the east's" strongest critics after they have decamped to "the west." For Vassar pluralism is nothing but an illusion propounded by those prioritizing one lifestyle over another: "Organisations that we form in the name of freedom often end up limiting our ability to see the limits of our own freedom" (p. 127). He cites the example of humanitarian initiatives originating in the west for the purpose of helping Third World countries.

The constraints placed on human freedom are also apparent in one's personal life. From an early age human beings embrace a...