ISTANBUL - THE ECONOMY'S FORTUNE TELLER

While the rest of us were grieving over our broken financial instruments last October, there was a man somewhere on the Asian side of Istanbul, or perhaps scooting around the Bosphorus in his yacht, who realized something awesome.

You know Iceland? The tranquil little island nation northwest of Ireland that looks like a flying cow without legs? No place had been immediately hit harder by the economic tailspin, its banks having gorged themselves full on a plate of Europe’s most toxic assets. So get this: no other country has a higher rate of belief in monkey-to-man evolution—not one. Coincidence? The man thought not.

Earlier that month, I went to Istanbul to interview Harun Yahya, a.k.a. Adnan Oktar, who has spent most of the last few decades obsessed (to the tune of writing 200 or so books) about how all the world’s problems derive more or less directly from Charles Darwin’s brain. He’s also the handsome guru-in-chief of an allegedly criminal, several-hundred-strong religious brotherhood of Turkish elites that operates an international Islamic creationist media network and a tidy import-export business on the side.

I asked him about Scandinavia—after all, those countries seem like pretty nice places to live, even without having fallen utterly into the thrall of his Versace-creationist version of Islam. He explained that my impression was mistaken. “There is an inner chaos going on in those people’s hearts and minds,” he said, through a young and nimble translator. “They are not really people.”

He goes on. Suicide, drugs, rock music...many, many maladies. “Theirs is not real happiness,” he says. “We cannot call artificial happiness real happiness.” Their economic meltdown was fantastic confirmation of his entire reason for existence.



I’m sitting before the man in the house of one of his associates, each of us with a glass of peach juice, and it’s getting past midnight. Lights and cameras are there to record the conversation for his website. The camera crew, the translator, and I are all in socks, but Yahya is wearing shoes. I can’t stop staring at them, resting on the black-and-white animal hide rug beneath us. My defenses collapse in jet-lagged fatigue and presence of cult-of-personality. He goes through three or four glasses of juice; I get halfway through one.

I feel, in some manner of speaking or other, he has to be right. The coincidence is too uncanny. Evolution is the demonic gateway to fiscal implosion. Back home, where Lower Manhattan feels like a graveyard for modernist giants, I read over the press release again and again.

As a requirement of savage capitalism, the poor have to be eliminated. Poor countries have no right to life. According to this perverted perspective, the strong must grow ever stronger and ever richer. That is why available cash is kept back in the interest system for the enrichment of the wealthy, rather than being used to help the poor or make production. The basic idea on which savage capitalism is based is, naturally, Darwinism.

Iceland in the global financial crisis is another tragic example caused by the materialist, capitalist system. With regard to Iceland, however, we also need to emphasize that it comes as no surprise that the effects of social Darwinism have appeared very swiftly in the country. According to a public opinion poll conducted by Science magazine in 34 countries in 2005, Iceland emerged as the country with the highest level of belief in Darwinism:

Turkey’s on the bottom! And, next... oh. The United States. That’s weird.

NATHAN SCHNEIDER

Comments

[Neal]

I did a report on Iceland in third grade. They also have one of the highest literacy rates in the world. It was number one at the time of my report, handed in with a clear plastic cover and yellow plastic spine.

[florence]

why did he keep his shoes on I wonder.

here is my train: of the fittest = survival of the richest. This is his axiom: you cannot be (real) happy living under this belief.

Question: Does the shoes thing or his animal skin rug betray his points?

[smokey robinson crusoe]

america's bar looks like a skinny french flag.

[anti-hero]

@NEAL

wow, you actually remember stuff like that from 3rd grade?

[fake n bake]

only thing i know of iceland is that it is green. and greenland is ice.

[Anonymous]

Cuba's got a really high literacy rate also. Too bad they're not on the list.

[göksun]

how the hell did u find this lunatic charlatan ? u came all this way to interview him , you sure have something wrong with you too.

[Babaca]

That's crazy talk. Get him on Oprah...she will totally digg his views.

[dingo dick]

i love him. shades, double-breasted white suit over an versace t-shirt and a yellow sports car. when you're that rich you get to think whatever you like.

[AE]

Seriously? This guy actually wrote a book about the holocaust, which basically describes the whole thing as fake, a part of the Jewish conspiracy. He claims the foundations of the Jewish faith lie in paganism and (guess what) Darwinism. He is also well known around Turkey (which is where i'm from) for charming the idiotically rich into funding him through coke and orgies with models, who join his so called cult for "networking" reasons. He places himself as the new and absolute prophet in his books. He is such a past figure of 90s around here, i thought nobody took him seriously anymore. What he claims here is like saying Hurricane Katrina happened because of all the sinning that took place in New Orleans.

[@ AE]

"He claims the foundations of the Jewish faith lie in paganism."

The half of the Koran is based on the Hebrew scriptures so it's sort of a catch-22 to say this and not offend his readers.

[Ummmm]

The fact that Sweden and Denmark have the most stable economies on the planet seems to have slipped his grasp. Whoops.

[aleke]

Hahhahhahahahahahah does this guy even know what Darwin wrote? Marx knew what he wrote. And what Darwin wrote wasn't "survival of the fittest" as much as it was "natural selection" where we have mutual cooperation in the human specie, which is extremely social and tribal. This is why Bologna has economic democracy, plenty of co-ops, and has in the past couple of years reached the top five richest areas of Europe. Not by exploiting others maliciously, but through hard work and scientifically-efficient cooperation. Sociopathy and extreme selfish individualism is not only immoral, but also unnatural for humanity. Sorry.

That guy is a moron, old religion impedes civilizations. It's likely why the Protestant empires started kicking around the catholic ones all over the world, and now it seems Islam is doing the same. Problem is, science is newer and far more rational than their Abrahamic bullshit. So we better switch and switch soon or we're going to kill ourselves off and wipe out half of the entire world ecosystem with us: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqxENMKaeCU

[Seda Aral]

Anyone who falls for the lies of Adnan Oktar must be naive in the extreme.
Oktar AKA Harun Yahya, does not even write the cut and pasted plagiarism that passes for his work.
Oktar's madly twisted fantasy world portrays the Taliban as closet Darwinists and not Islamic fundamentalists.
He also seems to think that the president of the united states would like to interview him.
I'm glad to write that this deluded megalomaniac is in prison for blackmail. However his propaganda machine still extolls the same old ignorant refrain that Oktar has demolished evolution. Perhaps he has, in his own little fantasyworld.

[Milen Bilyanov]

This guy is a real sham. He created a ring / organisation of crime and fraud in Turkey. He is the guy behind lots of, so called "islamic media" guided attacks on secular scholars. He is also the guy responsible for most of internet restrictions taking place in Turkey. And so on... and so on.