It has always been a very intriguing question how Turkey jumped on the anti-Soviet bandwagon so quickly and so easily at the end of the Second World War. Turkey managed not to get burned in the undeclared war between the U.K. and France during the waning of the Ottoman Empire. That secret war has given us what we call today Israel. It has created the Middle Eastern Question and before it Pipeline Politics. Even the first and second Iraqi invasions by the U.S. and the creation of Daesh terrorism are the unfortunate fruits of the super-power policies of the turn of the century. It is like an endless gift - it keeps on giving: its contemporary aspect is the policies that might result in Syrian dismemberment. Turkey also successfully maneuvered around the Axis and allied camps during World War II, but became a charter member of the anti-Soviet bloc almost overnight.

Years ago, in 1989, after a Voice of America interview with him, I asked Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser from 1977 to 1981, this question. But before his answer to this question, let's remember the man who was a perfect epitome of a staunch anti-Soviet mentality, better yet the "enmity of Russia."

BRZEZINSKI'S POLITICS

Dr. Brzezinski is the man behind the policies that distanced China from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), and by doing so, isolated it. As the logical extension of these policies, the USSR could find no ally when they commenced the occupation of Afghanistan. Dr. Brzezinski is also the man who brought the dead word "mujahedeen" back to life. When he penned the posters that adorned the walls of Cairo, Egypt, Khartoum and Sudan calling the Arab youth to fight to liberate Afghanistan from the "infidels," Dr. Brzezinski never mentioned the political aspect of it: for those young Arabs it was portrayed as a jihad and they would become mujahedeen. He didn't care about the fact that the sword of Islam had been in its scabbard for more than two millennia; the word has been used to mean self-improvement, ethics, etc. Great Britain and the U.S. needed foot soldiers against the Godless communists in the Hindu Kush Mountains and a $110 monthly fee might not cut it! The 42 maidens waiting the martyred mujahedeen in paradise could be an added incentive for those unemployed and hopeless Muslim youth instead of languishing on inner city corners.

As many witnesses and researchers attest, when Dr. Brzezinski, the British and U.S. army commanders congratulated the local commanders of the mujahedeen, put laurels of victory on their heads, and picked up their tents and packed their loads into planes, they left behind an army of murderously trained and very angry people who could (and eventually did) get different ideas. The local commanders of this so-called army of mujahedeen were mostly political opponents of the regimes in their countries: if Islam could be used as an ideology to topple a political regime and hang its leaders in public squares in Afghanistan, why could it not be done in Pakistan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia?

Dr. Brzezinski simply advised the leaders of these countries that they should re-educate these groups and retrain them to be integrated to their societies. Only problem was that he did not mention how to accomplish this? Remember please that one of the "local commanders" of those celebrated mujahadeen was Osama bin Laden and the first thing he did was to adopt Afghanistan as his homeland and topple the Soviet-erected leaders there.

Dr. Brzezinski and his generals came back, chased Osama bin Laden and his gang, and made a power sharing plan with "moderate Islamists." It lasted peacefully. Or Dr. Brzezinski thought so. Osama and his ilk had better plans like taking their war to the shores of America and Africa. As they say, the rest is history.

In that VOA interview, Dr. Brzezinski (or simply "Zbig" to his friends) discussed the theme of the day, "the convergence" theory of communism and capitalism. According to many political scientists then, the withering demise of the Soviet Union would also bring about the collapse of capitalism and there would be some sort of "coming together" or "convergence" of the two regimes. Dr. Brzezinski was of course dead against it; he defended the idea that the continuing revolutions would soon declare the demise of communism. As a matter of fact, the revolutionary wave in the late 1980s and early 1990s resulted in the end of communist rule in central and Eastern Europe and beyond. He said, in his view, what was happening that time in the communist block is the death of the communist doctrine and in effect, the fall of communist systems. He suggested that that fall may be evolutionary in some countries, but in the end there would be a transition to a pluralistic-democratic system. He also believed that in some cases, the fall of communist systems might have elements of deeper political upheavals.

It was a long interview and a long day; after the refreshments, the discussion turned to his strong beliefs about the end of the USSR. He said he had lived in Germany and Poland during the rise of Hitler and Stalin's occupation of Poland. He witnessed the disappearance of peaceful societies in these two countries. He said he saw first-hand how two neighbors who would take care of each others' children when one of their parents was not at home, turned against each other and would call the soldiers to kill those parents in front of their children and take the kids away to the concentration camps.

He also said his eyes fixed on some remote memory, we should read Czesław Miłosz, the Cold War poet if we really want to appreciate what the intellectuals and statesmen of the 1950s imagined when they heard the names "Stalin" and the "Soviet Union."

WHAT IS AN 'ENEMY'?

As today, in the late 1980s nobody really sat down and read Miłosz's poetry. But in the late 1950s and 1960's in the U.S., Europe, and Turkey too, many people read his poems and tried to see from a Marxist's window how Stalin, in four short months, leveled not only cities but cultures, humanities, personalities of European in general, and Polish in particular, intellectuals. Unlike his contemporaries, Miłosz's conclusion was that it was not the war machine of the British nor the U.S. that would overcome the brute force of Stalin's soldiers, but human nature itself was "the enemy" of totalitarian control.

He returned to his beloved Warsaw and saw the human and urban destruction personally: "A prison inhabited by people steeped in hatred for those who ruled over them, people whose faces expressed fear... To live in Washington and reflect on the diabolical essence within communism was one thing; to hear firsthand from an old friend, 'We are slaves here,' is another."

For Dr. Brzezinski, the Soviet Occupation of Afghanistan was another Poland that if not Stalin himself but Stalinism was responsible for. Anything that ruined Poland should be ruined in turn.

Young readers everywhere today may not feel the same tremors Miłosz and Brzezinski felt when they saw the images of Eastern Europe. For Brzezinski and his contemporaries, those images were so vivid that anything preventing their reappearing anywhere else using any means humanly possible was acceptable. After all, it was done before by the masters from whom Brzezinski and Kissinger and other geopolitical chess players learned the game.

Now back to that intriguing question: how come Turkey easily jumped on to the anti-Soviet bandwagon at the end of the WWII. For Dr. Brzezinski, the answer was simple: Turkey did not want to be occupied by Stalin. The wounds of Poland were so fresh, and the Turkish psyche was so shaped by the migrating Jewish scholars, Turkish leaders could not but seek refuge under the wings of an alliance that was taking shape against the Russian (then Soviet) bear. The same fear years later helped Brzezinski to gather mujahedeen armies in the Afghan mountains that simply exacerbated the problem the Anglo-French antagonism created in the Middle East.

The question as to what were the bases of this fear that Stalin would create another Poland in Turkey still needs to be answered.