With permission from @Ephraim Ben Raphael I'd wanted to write something about my own homeland after thinking so much about their... unique situation ITTL. Without further ado, I hope you all enjoy...
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Because no dystopian story is complete without its eerie music...
Kuşatma Altında Bir Millet: Türkiye'nin Son Günleri (A People Under Siege: The Last Days of Turkey) by Melih Iskender
To live in Turkey in the 19th Century is to live in a country under siege.
It is to live in an entire nation driven by fear and sorrow, by vengeance and anger. Fear of an uncertain future, for no one knew if tomorrow would be the end. Sorrowful tears, shed because of countless futures lost to the great struggle that endlessly consumed their nation, and left them a shadow of their former selves, sorrow felt because of a vital innocence left behind long ago. Vengeance for all the great betrayals that brought them to this low, and a need to reap their bloody toll on those tho had inflicted upon them.
Does one even need to describe the burning rage that all of these emotions brought upon them?
To live in Turkey, is to be distrustful of the very sky that might suddenly be flooded with chemical weapons meant to murder you, your entire family, your entire people. It is to live in a place where every city has turned into a deadly maze, every forest made into a death-trap, each mountain a shelter, once pristine countrysides riddled with mines. Where each child sleeps with one eye open and a knife under their pillow, their parents already sleeping with their rifles. Where those children are sent to school to learn not just a learn things like math and science, but to also learn how to shoot a gun. Their recess' reminiscent of Boot Camps, their leisure time spent in factories to make weapons...
The loss of the Last Crusade broke something in the Turkish People, they who had once led a great Empire that had made mighty Europa quake in it's boots reduced to nothing more than a mere backwater whose every accomplishment had been erased by the simple turn of a valve. It made them believe that their God had abandoned them, it made them believe that the whole world wanted to slaughter them, it made them believe that they could trust no one.
This belief was not something that happened immediately after their loss of course. Rather, it was a gradual built-up that came to be as they watched the world and the madness progress around them. It might not have even developed had circumstances been kind, but of course they weren't. It became widespread only because event after event came to pass with everything seemingly conspiring to make life harder for the Turkish People.
The further dissolution of the Ottoman Empire with the loss of Albania and eventually Hedjaz, the rise of the Vile Drakian Empire and their horrifying ideal of Societism, the perceived betrayal by their fellow Muslims; the Kurds, Rhomania's adoption of the Societist ideals, Rodina Zemlya's alliance with Drakia, the Russians selling their fellow Turkic People into the slavering clutches of Drakia. These blows kept on hammering on hammering down on their already withered sanity until every single men, women and child living in Turkey believed that the whole world wanted them dead.
The result was a rather bizarre mix of Rexism and Fascism unique to the Turkish people. It basically boiled down to a belief that the Turkish people should always be vigilant, for they were always under the threat of extinction. That every man, woman and child (disabilities ceased to matter when people were faced with what they perceived to be their extinction) should unite and do everything in their power and beyond to resist their approaching hour of twilight, or make it a bloodbath for the harbingers of it.
The ideology doesn't touch on religion, but it has been shown to be rather secular in the way it conducts foreign and domestic affairs. Entirely out of pragmatism, with the sidelined Ottoman Sultan reduced to nothing more than a figurehead, the Junta that ruled the nation made sure they were going to receive aid from the ever-religious West without letting religion get in the way. The people themselves are a different matter, a wide swathe of the population have indeed doubled down on their zeal and are preparing for the 'End Times'. Others, while religious, do not hold to the same zeal as their fellows, and instead prepare to channel their energies into preparing for the Final Struggle instead of praying.
It used to sing the tune of Pan-Turanism, though that was quickly replaced by a call for a homeland that stretched from the Aegean to the Caspian (the fates of the non-Turkish peoples living there were not considered, though there were disturbingly tempting voices calling for a Turkish Bonded Labor System) once the Russians started selling Turkic people's to Drakia and the Turkish Military stumbled upon a group of 'Political Prisoners' who spoke a similar enough language for them to recognize entirely by chance when those prisoners managed to slip their jailers and slip into the country via Drakian Kurdistan.
This led to a somehow overnight birth of 'Turkish Insurgency' in Drakian Kurdistan (there were still some Turkish people living in Drakian Kurdistan, though that didn't last long after these raids started), but was actually the Turks leading daring raids into the country rescue Turkic people's sold to Drakia by Geoist Russia and see to their subsequent resettlement into the Turkish Heartland. Helped by the fact that the Turkish Army had wholly embraced the German concept of
Blitzsoldaten, it was also considered a bonus that these new
Bozkurtlar (Grey Wolves, the Turkish national animal, OTL Ultranationalist Paramiltary, Turkish
Blitzsoldaten ITTL) happened to be rabidly zealous and utterly merciless soldiers. This led to a slight boost in population (not every raid succeeded, but this bizarre Underground railroad saw some actual results) that was further boosted by the massive birth-rates championed by the Turkish Junta.
Relations with European countries were tense because Turkey made it so with her excessive paranoia (somewhat justified), but her strategic position could not be overlooked, so her 'allies' (Turkey was not suicidal enough to refuse aid it dearly needed) held their nose high and allowed them to join the Alliance. This led to an outpour of American aid to the country that helped it rapidly modernize with zeal that was rarely seen before. It led to cultural developments such as the adoption of the Latin script (people were eager to get rid of the Arabic script, helped that it was easier to write the Turkish language with it, so literacy skyrocketed).
Not all cultural developments were all that good however. Seeing as this modernization was not healthy toward the already fully mobilized and paranoid Turkish Mindset. Child-labor was a common sight in factories, mothers were making bullets instead of sweaters for their children, fathers were always off in training or in a factory. Turkey in the 19th Century was the perfect image of a dystopian society.
Colorless, full of fear and paranoia.
The only thing that kept it all together was the fear of annihilation, for everyone knew that the Great Trial was coming.