Politics & Governance / Political Philosophy & Theory / Nationalism & Identity

How Turkey Erased 30 Million Kurds: The Violent Blueprint of a Nation State

The Kurdish Question in Turkey: On the Violent Implementation of the Nation State

Ismail Küpeli

There are 30 million Kurds living across the Middle East, but on the world map, they are completely invisible. No flag, no capital, no UN seat. How did that happen? It wasn't an accident of history—it was a calculated, decades-long project of ethnic engineering. In this video, we break down Ismail Küpeli's groundbreaking 2022 study, 'The Kurdish Question in Turkey: On the Violent Implementation of the Nation State,' to reveal the exact blueprint. We explore how the modern Turkish state, acting as a 'gardener,' systematically uprooted non-Turkish populations—first Christians, then Kurds—through laws, military massacres, forced resettlement, and even pseudoscientific theories. From the 1915 Armenian genocide to the 1938 Dersim massacre, and from the 1934 Settlement Law to the 1942 Wealth Tax, we uncover the brutal machinery behind the myth of a homogeneous nation. This isn't just history—it's a warning about how states manufacture purity at any cost. Watch to understand the hidden logic of nation-building and the price of erasure.