@e_flux wrote:
By Ahmet Öğüt and Hito Steyerl
Visuals by Nilbar Güreş“The Solution”
After the uprising of the 17th of June
The Secretary of the Writers’ Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
—Bertolt Brecht, 1953“Min ev sond ji bo Gelê Kurd û Tirk xwend.”
—Leyla Zana, 1991In 1991 Leyla Zana, a new MP in the Turkish parliament, took the formal oath of office in Turkish and added the Kurdish phrase above. Three years later, in 1994, Zana lost her parliamentary immunity and was arrested and put in jail for ten years along with three other Democracy Party MPs—Hatip Dicle, Selim Sadak, and Orhan Doğan.
Twenty-five years later, on November 4, 2016, Selahattin Demirtaş and Figen Yüksekdağ, the co-chairs of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) in Turkey, were jailed along with eleven other elected HDP lawmakers on so-called “terror” charges after a series of raids and detentions. Several others were detained. These events followed the arrests of dozens of other HDP lawmakers, mayors, and administrators, as well as nine journalists and editors of the secular newspaper Cumhuriyet over the previous weeks, in addition to the sacking of more than two dozen elected municipalities. A cartoonist was arrested and a Kurdish-language satellite television station for children was shut down under an emergency statutory decree.
After the failed army coup in Turkey in July of this year, a new era started with the declaration of an expanded version of the so-called OHAL regime (Governorship of Region in State of Emergency). This regime originated with the civil war of the 1990s, and was preceded by several periods of martial law due to military coups since 1960. The coercive power of the current state of emergency far exceeds the état d’urgence in France. A comprehensive crackdown is now being carried out by the government against the the half of the population that does not support domestic autocracy or aggressive foreign policies. Kurdish-majority areas have been first in line, subject not only to purges targeting the secular, liberal, and leftist opposition but in fact to a population exchange and ethnic reorganization, if not “cleansing.”
Why is the fate of the HDP so crucial for everyone—well beyond the region?
In post-truth politics everyone knows the system is failing, but no one can imagine any alternative. People pretend there is a functioning society—and constantly overlook the massive violence and systematic perception management needed to sustain this illusion. Alternative realities divorced from facts proliferate. People all over the world will immediately recognize this pattern, in which facts are denied in order to benefit autocracy. It is a system in which anything inconvenient about reality is purged through the use of sprawling fictions. Post-truth politics in Turkey today works by relentlessly escalating oppression against anyone who opposes it, or who voices inconvenient truths.
A civil war has been raging for the last year in the Kurdish regions. The Turkish army, special forces, and anti-terror units have been heavily patrolling the wrecked and razed Kurdish cities. Mounting violence and curfews have created inhuman and extraordinary conditions for civilians in Şırnak, Silopi, Diyarbakır, Nusaybin, Cizre, Silvan, Yüksekova, and other Kurdish-populated areas. Many civilians, including children, have lost their lives; many more have been displaced and dispossessed. The population is further pressured by wholesale dismissals of civil servants, blanket internet cuts, and major restrictions on the ability of people to even access their bank accounts. As of today large parts of the Kurdish regions are under massive and relentless occupation on multiple levels—military, judicial, administrative, urban, and architectural. Visibility is blanked out, as is communication. Huge white screens hung across streets hide operations. Whoever mentions or attempts to reveal this reality is treated as an enemy.
After the failed workers’ revolt against the East German government in 1953, Brecht famously suggested that perhaps the government should just dissolve the people and elect another, less inconvenient one. But in the case of Turkey, the government has started to replace, displace, disown, oppress, and detain its people—especially the ones that had nothing to do with the attempted military coup against it. All this clearly resembles the forced migration tactics of the Ottoman Empire, which used demographic engineering to guide deliberate state-directed intervention in population figures. The government’s current “solution”—trying to replace and disband an inconvenient population—returns to the source. The government not only confuses and spins reality, but violently alters the facts on the ground to conform to its national fictions.
In contrast, the HDP has not only presented an alternative to a failing system but has started to implement it, against all odds. It even temporarily overcame the AKP parliamentary majority by democratic vote. The HDP has pushed for a progressive, secular, egalitarian, and non-nationalist transformation of society, building coalitions of all different ethno-linguistic and religious groups: Turks, Kurds, Arabs, Armenians, Turkmen, Assyrians, Yazidis, and many others. It has rallied feminists, leftists, and LGBT activists across the country. The party received over six million votes in the June 7, 2015 general elections. It fully embraces women’s struggle for freedom and liberty, and became the first party to implement the co-chair system in Turkey, giving equal representation to women. It has achieved the highest representation of female MPs in the history of Turkish parliamentary politics. The party’s grassroots, bottom-up, democratic vision has been a beacon of hope well beyond the country itself—while also threatening the hegemony of older Kurdish organizations like those factions and spin-offs of the PKK committed to armed secessionist struggle. These too have at times reacted jealously to the challenges of the transformations brought about by the HDP.
But most of all, what the HDP has threatened is the idea that there is no alternative and that everything is fine as it is. This is exactly why both the party and its electoral base are now being so mercilessly targeted. And this is also why the political vision of the HDP is important in a much more general sense: because it has proved that there is an alternative and that progressive change can only be halted by the most brutal military oppression, including the elimination of facts and the representations sustaining them, and the erasure of parts of physical reality.
Current events are not only extremely dangerous for friends, family, and civilians living in Turkey but also for the future of the region—and the rest of the world. We appeal to all institutions, organizations, politicians, scholars, and friends to demand the urgent relaunch of a peace process and political pluralism in Turkey—as well as an end to the criminalization of reality, both in terms of the political process and those reporting on it. In our field, we have debated the difference between political and aesthetic representation for a long time: now this difference is made entirely irrelevant as both kinds of representation bring jail sentences and as reactionary lies run rampant. Debate is replaced by arrest warrants, detention, and demonization.
There is always a metanarrative. When Posta, a Turkish newspaper, and Potsdamer Tageszeitung, a German newspaper, announced Clinton as the winner of the recent US presidential elections, our first reaction might have been to laugh. But in fact total misinformation is precisely what happens on social media all the time. On the other hand, in Turkey major internet blackouts are equally weaponized. In both cases, over- and underinformation, the control of infrastructures and platforms, is removed from any kind of oversight. Both extreme censorship and the algorythmic proliferation of parallel realities are based on black-box operations, reminiscent of the white screens that render both destruction and construction as undercover activities. Corporate interests intersect with disruptive perception management.
In Turkey everything we thought was a joke, unlikely, or ironic and probably not going to happen did happen. The same occured with the US presidential election. In recent years the rule of probability and Big Data has displaced the reign of facts: black swans and statistical outliers have paradoxically become the new normal. Probability has replaced causality. When effects are unmoored from causes, everything becomes possible, including the unthinkable. The World Wide Web enabled people to become citizen journalists, but it has turned into a powerful tool of algorithmic governance for manufacturing public consent as well as a playground for trolls, haters, and anonymous wimps and cowards. The new autocrats have learned to mobilize real estate bubbles, liquidity bubbles, and filter bubbles, and to leverage them for cold or hot aggression—or in the case of Turkey, open civil war.
As we demand an end to a de facto civil war, de facto occupation, and de facto autocracy, we also demand an end to the rule of utopian reactionary fictions and to the relentless assault on resistant realities.
Posts: 1
Participants: 1