A petition signed by 1,128 Turkish academics and supported by scores of world-class intellectuals ranging from Noam Chomsky to Immanuel Wallerstein and Etienne Balibar has exposed the prevailing nationalistic and jingoistic frenzy in Turkey. But much more important than that, it indicated that the authoritarian drift of the Turkish regime is moving into a stage of totalitarianism that reminds one of passages from George Orwell’s "1984."

It all began with a press conference held simultaneously in Istanbul and Ankara by academics from various Turkish universities. They announced the petition signed by 1,128 academics from different fields at universities in Turkey and abroad, including Turkish scholars affiliated with Harvard University, Cambridge University, Humboldt University of Berlin, Paris-Sorbonne University and many others from Stockholm to Los Angeles, Amsterdam and Milan. They stated that they were part of the Academics for Peace Initiative.

The strong-worded petition in both Turkish and Kurdish under the title “We do not want to be partners to the crime” demanded that the government lift the curfews — which have been in place for weeks or even months in some places — in various Kurdish towns in the southeast of Turkey, where an armed confrontation is raging between Kurdish militants and the Turkish security forces. Casualties from the civilian population and security forces dangerously drift the country into a civil war. While accusing the Turkish government of its heavy-handed approach to the Kurdish issue, the petition also invited all parties involved to sit down at the negotiation table to seek a political and peaceful settlement to the conflict.

It did not take long for them to be rebuked and reprimanded by, not surprisingly, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Employing an extremely harsh wording that has been a characteristic of his speeches and discourse for a long time now, Erdogan attacked the academics and labeled them as “so-called intellectuals, unscholarly” during the annual Ambassadors Conference in Ankara. His speech came only hours after the suicide attack in Istanbul on Jan. 12. He only paid a lip service condemnation to the Islamic State’s terror victims.