2023 will be a year I will always remember, it was a really frustrating one. It has been a year in which many names, many institutions, many values, and many discourses we respect have actually lost their credibility. And most importantly, we couldn’t face this fact and talk about it.
Turkey has become a society that lives election-focused with all its institutions, intellectuals, academics, businessmen, and all public actors, seeing people not as humans or citizens, but as voters, evaluating any development based on the impact it will have on election results, and really seeing elections as significant thresholds in life. This is a very grave matter.
The coming local election is only an ordinary event for me. I felt this way before the general election too. Because we, people who support the government or the opposition, look at life in a way that we should not. We think we are playing a game of survival, a power game. With the excitement of this, the passion of this, the determination of this, we produce discourses and ideas. We cannot escape this trap, no one can.
I blame no one in particular. This is us. We have become this. For example, the earthquake was a natural disaster in 1999. It had produced sociological and economic results and a humanitarian crisis. It had consequences even in terms of foreign policy. However, when the 99 earthquake occurred, people’s first thoughts were not “Is this government be toppled”, or “What kind of political atmosphere will arise, and how the political actors in domestic politics will be affected by the earthquake”.
The suffering of people after the February 6 earthquake is obvious. There are many people who feel this pain in their hearts. But secretly, circulating among us and in our minds, there is also the issue of the impact this earthquake will have on the political fate of the AKP or its impact on opposition politics. This exists whether we see it or not, whether we admit it to ourselves or not. This is a matter of seeing individuals as voters rather than as individuals or citizens.
Of course, it is not the opposition who create the issue of seeing people as voters. The government started it. This government has turned the act of seeing citizens as voters and therefore establishing a relationship of mutual dependence with voters. This has shaped the political culture in Turkey. For example, the promise of building 100,000 houses for the people by government. In fact, there is a very honest and open relationship of reciprocity between government and voters. But the opponent also thought about the political consequences of the earthquake as soon as it happened and what kind of political atmosphere it would create. I think the most dramatic event of this year was that both government and opposition turned the earthquake into a political interest.
If you ask me, the earthquake was as an external shock. In other words, while many issues were being discussed, the political institution received a shock from the outside. And unfortunately, instead of evaluating this shock as a humanitarian issue, everybody has regarded it as a political concern. I am very sorry about this.
For example, during the hours right after the earthquake, people forced politicians to speak, that is, to represent their anger. Why? For example, I found the statement made by Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu on Monday, the same day of the earthquake, very reasonable. He thanked the people who took part in the rescue activities. He said that they support all of the relief operations and that they would do whatever they could. Again, I think all opposition parties approached the incident very calmly. But we didn’t like this attitude at all.
What did we like? We liked that Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu came out on Tuesday night and told a big political story and represented our anger. We applauded this with enthusiasm. In other words, at that moment, the earthquake actually turned into a political issue, the earthquake lost its credibility, and the pain experienced through the earthquake was instrumentalized. I think that was the moment we lost.
In the minds of AK Party, MHP, CHP, and İYİ Party members, when we encounter any political development, the first image that appears in our minds is the political consequences of the event and its reflection on the election results. We need to accept that this understanding is not healthy. This situation is actually the result of something else: When you divide the country into two camps and you inevitably rely on events that can change the minds of the 1% and the 2%, that is, the people stuck in between. Since you think that no matter what you do, you cannot change the general picture, you think that any influence coming from outside, other than your initiative, will change this picture. We need to confront this approach.
An election was lost where inflation was over 100%, the Metropolitan Municipalities were in the hands of opposition parties, the opposition had the strongest media in its history, and the opposition seriously could not hide their excitement both on social media and on the street. So we lost an election in which the opposition was incredibly motivated. If we lost the election while Turkiye was so poorly governed, we must have done something wrong.
The forest fires could not be extinguished, there was news of corruption everywhere, and the relations of the people who ruled the Republic of Turkey with drug gangs, etc. were being exposed by a former mafia boss. Almost everyone who is investigated as a criminal in Turkey has a photo with the Minister of Internal Affairs. People have lost their purchasing power. In other words, in a situation where all the weaknesses of the executive power are clearly revealed and the opposition is the strongest, and most organized, the election is lost. We need to think about these all.
Why couldn’t we form a solid opposition or choose a correct opposition candidate? Why couldn’t we have a serious and honest public discussion? Why did we try to kill the men we fought alongside, in our rush to get a bigger share of the spoils? Why have we developed a model of thinking that always aims to ensure the outcomes make us happy? So why did we behave like primitive societies or like children? What pushed us to do this?
While we were emphasizing the arbitrariness, incompetence, and authoritarianism of the AKP, why could we not develop a better public sphere and a more in-depth public debate as an alternative? Why did people lose their skills, characters, and composure, and turn into trolls, no different from AK Party members, as soon as the light of coming to power appeared? 2023 has been a year where I thought a lot about these issues.
Therefore, in my opinion, that blind, low-level, pornographic war for power, that is, the belief that only the strong are right, resulted in the victory of the AKP on the battlefield. I don’t mean to say that if people had been more moral, this election would have been won. But there is another point between morality and immorality. There are two concepts: reason and law. What drove us to be foolish and violate our own law? Maybe we would have lost the election by being very moral, but why couldn’t we establish a law of public space where we could all exist, beyond morality and immorality, beyond subjective concepts? And why couldn’t we act smart?
The saddest part is that the government is not the only one responsible for authoritarianism. So, we will start talking about the actors in the opposition who feed authoritarianism too.
This is what is being discussed all around world nowadays. Could it be that these authoritarian governments derive their legitimacy from the people and the opposition? The story in our minds that there is no such an authoritarian government or a despotism that has seized power with means of oppression, is not accountable to anyone, is outside the organic structure of society, and can be overthrown at any time if the society dares and stands up anymore is unfortunately collapsing.
There is a despotism that derives its power from the people, takes advantage of the weaknesses of the opponents, derives its power from the hostility that oppositional powers feel towards each other, and manages it well. This is what is called the “new despotism” by John Keane. In other words, a new despotism with an organic basis. Of course, they learn, they change, they manage. They direct not only themselves but also other actors. They rule not only through force but also through manipulation.
Wishes for 2024
The world we deal with is full of people who want to perceive us one-dimensionally, who want to label us, and who want to assign us an identity. Everyone around you attributes something to you and wants to assign you an identity. However, individuals do not have one identity. They are more complex. So that truth cannot be evaluated as right or wrong as sharply as we do. The process of thinking itself is actually more valuable than its results.
I really don’t like writing on social media anymore. I don’t like writing an column. I don’t like appearing on broadcasts. I want to return to my own life and engage in things that give me some rest, and make me happy, which are the right things to do. This way may also have a beneficial outcome. So, for example, we need to sit down and talk about the As the Crow Flies TV series. Or, we need to talk about the last novel I read, Yu Hua’s To Live, about the meaning of living. We need to talk about how to talk about any subject.
Social media is full of executioners, it is full of propagandists who receive salaries from the municipalities and present themselves as organic public intellectuals. It’s full of psychopaths who try to hunt heads on social media instead of going to a therapist, and who feel a chill when they get people lynched. I think we should stop being in that toxic atmosphere, fighting there, and sacrificing ourselves for the good of politics or for a great cause. 2024 should be the year of this. This does not mean that we stop fighting. No, we are just changing the strategy of the fight. So, I think it might be more valuable for us to talk about much more modest topics and achieve a tone that includes a different kind of politics.
My old videos pop up. I remember the work I did last year. 4-5 broadcasts per week, Daktilo1984 broadcasts, Medyascope broadcasts; 1-2 national channel broadcasts, Daktilo1984 and Medyascope articles, seem like a great madness, a great madness in constantly telling something on social media. And there was no success in doing these broadcasts and writing these political articles. We have failed. But we are still alive, and we will continue to live. It is not our initiative, we exist and we have to fulfill this duty. Therefore, I think it is better to continue to concentrate on improving ourselves by establishing structures among ourselves and strengthening microstructures.