The blow that struck the word and the nation

I have had a tremendous experience of how special a meaning a word can have in context, and of how much and how quickly an event occurring between the typing of an article and its printing can change the meaning of the word. Although it is not my column day, this experience forced me to appear before you today.

Yesterday’s article was based entirely on an assessment I felt necessary, concerning both the e-mails reacting to the article I wrote about Muhsin Bey and the comments I read on some internet pages. I wanted to draw attention to a morbid condition in the style of those who dismiss at one stroke everything Muhsin Bey lived through in the 30 years that have passed, and who try to squeeze him mercilessly into the role attributed to him in the Maraş events and use him up. Everyone can appreciate that it is not a healthy situation for those who had probably not even been born during the Maraş events, or at best were infants, to chase after metaphysical enmities taught to them afterwards. Those who knew Muhsin Bey as he was in the 90s and 2000s could not have failed to respect him. You did not even have to agree with his views for that; the nobility and purity in him were a truth far beyond political opinion.

Even so, trying to use him up by forcibly pulling him out of that state and constantly recalling claims about the climate of the seventies could have nothing to do with a political view or stance, only with a rancour imprisoned in the primitiveness of the blood feud and feudal traditionalism. One: if it is theoretically true that people can change, there can be no example to prove this better than the Muhsin Bey whom we have known in this period. Two: the claims about Muhsin Bey’s years back then are only unproven claims that ended in acquittal. Three: even if these claims were true, most of those who accuse Muhsin Bey or his relatives were not more innocent than he was in these events. Let us not repaint the scenery of those years, if you like.

In the end, I tried to remind that relying on human types that never change in politics has morbid consequences as a kind of racism, a kind of “metaphysical politics.” As long as you perceive partisanship as a kind of blood-feud fanaticism, without assuming that the world and people can constantly change, you produce only rancour and hatred. Not agreement with people, nor taking the world together to a better point, but only by destroying, eliminating those “people,” and moreover by taking revenge and looking only to your own happiness, can you stifle them.

Wrong. In fact, if you stop and think a little, such an outcome would not make even you happy.

This was the gist of our words, and in fact I had wanted to make the same criticisms through two examples, on the occasion of the attitudes shown toward Obama, which have similar problems. Since it would be hard to deal with the two subjects in the same article, I wrote two separate articles. The first, about Obama, was published on Saturday; the second I sent while I was in Cyprus, at a moment when, because of my busyness, I could not follow the internet.

When I returned to Turkey in the evening, I learned that my esteemed friend Rasim Ozan Kütahyalı, whose writings I always follow with interest and who in fact holds more or less similar views about Yazıcıoğlu, had been punched on leaving the programme by the Istanbul Provincial Chairman of the Alperen Hearths, who was disturbed by his analyses on the programme İskele Sancak on Kanal 7 concerning left-Alevi perceptions of Yazıcıoğlu. Interestingly, I had watched, before setting off, the views that led to his being punched on the İskele-Sancak programme and had agreed with almost all of them. Kütahyalı had neither an insult nor even a criticism that would have warranted drawing Alperen wrath. Besides, nothing can excuse violence against him or anyone because of his opinion, of course, but on top of that, the only thing that created this anger was the scant understanding of those who claim to be Alperen.

It is a strange situation: other people lacking understanding have placed my article, written before this incident, next to this treacherous punch. I am sure that neither Kütahyalı nor understanding readers need such a correction, but I felt the need to state it in the clearest way possible precisely for these people who lack understanding.

As someone who has specialised for years in the semantic fluctuations of words, I should not fail to note that the experience of how a punch can strike the meaning of a word in another context, and turn its meaning upside down, is nonetheless unique.

This punch is truly a very dangerous punch.

It is precisely a punch of the kind that Muhsin Bey stood against for years, trying to prevent it from being raised, and that, when raised, will unfortunately strike democracy, peace and the whole nation, just as it has struck the word that remembers Muhsin Bey with goodness.