People I (don’t) Know
The year 2023 marks the hundredth anniversary of the foundation of the Republic of Turkey. It was to be a century of modernization, of progress accompanied with the hope of democracy and equality. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a hundred years of unfulfilled promises and defied justice. Looking back, this morbid view is intensified by several military coups after which death penalty was delivered to former ministers and a prime minister, to revolutionary youth leaders devoid of violent crimes, and on one occasion to a 17 year old. Coups were also followed by incarcerations of thousands (predominantly of left-revolutionaries) and by torture chambers. All these were succeeded by a civil war waged on Kurdish guerillas and unspeakable atrocities to Kurdish people, citizens of the republic. Violence begets more violence outside the state terror. It becomes an epidemic. Massacres were carried out by the mob in the 70s and 90s on the Alevi population; assasinations of journalists, professors and Kurdish businessmen followed. ISIS affiliates bombed hundreds to death in this country in the twenty first century, while the Kurdish guerillas carried out similar attacks. As of today, a kind of civillian coup by the ruling party and an authoritarian leader keeps freedom of expression and justice suspended, with journalists, activists and politicians in jail, pending multiple trials and given sentences on bogus charges. For almost half of the population, the elections of May 2023 brought dismay and gloom, facing an uncertain future.
Whenever I write in English on matters relating to my country, I feel that the tone is that of a complaint, trying to convey what is wrong with this place to non Turkish speakers. On one hand the writings sound a little like dispatches by a reporter from a foreign country, attempting to give an informative background to otherwise unaware readers. On the other hand, with a degree of professional deformation, they carry characteristics of a lecture. I think I know that this is problematic: first, my priorities are never journalistic or educational and secondly, the cases of injustice, inequality, chauvenistic nationalism, fundamentalism and their relation to the history of the republic have resonances and counterparts in other select countries. Meanwhile the primitive accumulation of capital, neoliberal tactics, the pillage of commons and ecocide are (and were) the signs of vileness (of power) both here and in the rest of the world, and they should relate to many different experiences across the globe. Still, there must be something unique to this country (and its people) both in its villainy and in its virtue that genuinely contributes to universal knowledge, as in ‘enlightenment.’ For a long time I assumed that the traces of this wisdom are to be found in archaeological sites and features, historical and pre-historical, that in turn shape the unconscious and morality of the people living on this land today. This sounds like wishful humanism, but it was a necessary axiom in order to keep going. The vague sense of hope and its relation to deep history found its concrete expression in ‘The Dawn of Everything,’ a book by late David Graeber and David Wengrow. As I discussed elsewhere, for me the book bridged the gap in between the distinction of the experience of the Anatolian plateau and many other sites of enviable organizations of the social body all over the world, as evidenced in archaeological research. Yet in trying to account for the peoples of this country I look at the faces and dream of archaic sculpture, in search of a unique revelation. And I get away with this semi-demented vision because many of these writings are accompanied with images.
All the negative vibes aside, the Republic of Turkey is still not a failed state, owing not very much to hollowed and quasi-functional laws and institutions, including education and the courts of justice, but possibly to the sanity of its peoples. For sure the regime aims to shape docile subjects ever more unable to alter their predicament with the help of class consciousness. But today, with all clientelist relations of favor and profit, and with all the fervor that the adherents of political Islam and racism agitate in support of violence, majority of people stay calm. One is also tempted to believe that for even the most fervent supporters of the regime, somewhere deep inside, the injustice and corruption out in the open is causing a slight pain every now and then. And for the majority, I think, what tickles and disturbs the conscience is something larger than the fear of the judgement day, something primordial buried deep in the ground long before the sacred books were around. With some insight, women can be recognized to be the bearer of this ancient wisdom, not only because the cult of the mother goddess is intrinsic to this part of the world or because Gaia suggests a feminine fortune, but especially because they endure. Women endure hardship, misogyny and male violence. They also endure poverty and helplessness more than men. For a long time in this country women also endured coercion by men, into the Islamic garb and duties. But for a socialist it should be clear: public disposition of privilege and arrogance know no boundaries of ‘conservative’ or ‘liberal’ attire, so do the signs of poverty; the boundaries are entwined with social class. Women deter violence. In certain ways they are emancipated, sadly through the experience of oppression and misery, but also by the wisdom they retained and kept alive. Women represent hope for the future of my country as they do for the fate of the globe in these troubled times.
September 2023