Dissent in Turkey and the Discourse on the Young:

Youth, that ambigous entity is the subject of a number of direct and indirect analysis and projections everywhere in Turkey during and after the protests that started in Istanbul’s Gezi Park. The tone that surrounds the discourse on young people stems from the false belief that they beg for representation in the public realm, as though their actions on the street need an explanation, which, in turn, may outline the conditions of the “nation in turmoil.”

The paternalistic take on the future of the young people in this country had always been enhanced by a conservatism of parenting, an overprotection in the face of an uncertain future. Sometimes this future is pre-shaped to order on bodies all across and this is precisely the case in which the young started a revolt against a dominant father figure, this time in the shape of a prime minister. And police brutality, in return, is what the father deemed apt for the young, a kind of ‘beating’ to tame revolt, a pedagogical strategy to set the record straight.

But within the nuclear family, other forms of  protectionist  tendencies reign freely. The most liberal of the parents in an otherwise traditional and conservative culture are barely loose enough to “distant-monitor” their offspring, made available by new technologies of communication. Just as very few people are sure of the resilliance of their dwelling in an earthquake prone country, very few are assured of the safety of their sons and daughters in their teens and early adulthood: anything can happen anywhere anytime. This scepticism and the sense of doom is precisely the sign of old age, from which the young are free. A sense of failure and conformism and blurred images of a past shapes the unconscious of the not-so-young to accommodate this bleak view, because too much blood had been shed on this land.

Meanwhile, the speech on “the better world” to be left to the young for an ecologically sustainable future is a total hypocrisy in the face of the rites and habits of the nuclear family, rich and poor and left and right. It appears to be in the primordial instinct of the family to consume more and protect its right to consume and ‘prosper’ to the best of its abilities. And this, to the disadvantage of its rivals, ie. all other similar institutions with fathers, mothers and children, and nature at large. On the other hand, for the Islamist-conservative power, the family is the god-given entity, in other words, it is ‘nature’ per se, in its heterosexual form. This intelligent design sets up its hierarchical structures starting at home and transfers these relations across generations, meanwhile extending its dominion on all other living beings. For the islamist neo-liberal  power in Turkey, ‘environmentalism’ means planting a couple of more trees in the forcefully evicted Gezi Park, while the whole country, its resources, forests, rivers, minerals and coastal regions are all up for ‘development’. When one meditates nature through the god given scripture adopted to neo-liberal economy, the result is catastrophic.

In public sphere, an extremely manipulated set of thresholds mark the border between the youth and the adults: the age to consume alcohol, to vote, to be elected for office, to do military service and indeed the age for capital punishment, when it was possible in this country. The oppressive state apparatus always had the right to meddle on these thresholds, and the executed left-revolutionaries in 70s and 80s were in their early twenties, and in one case, barely seventeen (Erdal Eren). But then, the nuclear family as an institution in modern – islamic societies may cut across beliefs and ideologies in its backwardness and conservatism. The unpredictable nature of the young is tamed in every opportunity, its creativity is suspect, even when it is encouraged to revolt on the streets of Istanbul for other reasons. The family dictates its own timeline regarding adulthood, and only an ideological consensus may provide a leeway for the youth to dissent.

Being young is everything that the left-liberal intelligentsia claims it to be after these protests. It is peaceful, creative, cheerful, stubborn, full of good humour, egalitarian, and post-ideological. But the real admiration stems from a kind of self-reckoning on the part of the old left, unfulfilled desires in the past projected unto these ‘kids’ on the streets, exacerbated by claims of a genetic continuation so dear to parenthood. June 2013