The asymmetrical trust relationship between army and people

The relationship of trust between the Turkish people and the Turkish army is a thoroughly asymmetrical relationship. In all the polls conducted, the army always comes first in the ranking of the institutions the Turkish people trust most, but for some reason this trust meets no serious reciprocation from the army. As it shows at every opportunity, the Turkish army does not trust its people, who trust it with such self-sacrifice and love.

On Thursday evening, the guest of the program Endaze, presented by Mümtazer Türköne and Faruk Mercan on Samanyolu Haber, psychiatrist Assoc. Prof. Dr. Erol Göka drew attention to the strangeness of this relationship between the army and society. The army shows this distrust at every opportunity by not trusting democracy, by evaluating in one way or another the power possibilities that democracy brings forth as a source of threat to the country.

All the developments that have so far been the subject of the TSK's threat assessments have been situations that the Turkish people produced within democratic processes. Each time, the army, finding in the dynamics the people developed elements containing a threat to the country's security, has not held back from displaying its distrust of the people. The army, which has never seen its own people as mature enough to use their own reason, therefore wants to keep permanently in its hands the authority to intervene directly in many matters that have nothing to do with the military profession. It wants to go on exercising tutelage over its people in every matter, from what they wear to what kind of friendships they should form with whom. To the extent that it cannot see the developments, it experiences deep disappointments toward its people, and yet it thinks that the people have been led astray under the influence of some dark centers. This "perception of centers" requires turning the whole country into a battlefield continuously fought with internal enemies.

On the other hand, despite all the coups it has lived through, despite all the bad treatment it has received from the army in military life or as civilians, the people's undiminished love and devotion to their army: here is an asymmetrical love-trust relationship for you.

While political scientists or sociologists evaluate this love relationship as they please, the subject, whichever way you look at it, is a psychiatric one, and the question has been put to the expert in the field. After explaining this asymmetrical love relationship at length with his striking analyses, Erol Göka does not neglect to warn that this trust, whose reciprocation the people have never been able to see, is not an inexhaustible source of power and is gradually coming to its end.

The army sees this trust as an inexhaustible source of power, but unless it pays it back by trusting the people, it is about to be questioned and to lose this trust. One must also understand well the nature of this trustworthiness. It cannot be understood as a visa given to the army to attempt coups, to establish tutelage over politics, to stand above the law.

In people's eyes, the army, indeed the concept of the TSK, points to a very abstract category. Whereas the politician or the jurist corresponds to a more concrete human reality in people's daily lives, the soldier works as an abstraction supported by secondary meanings through people's religious discourse, such as martyrdom, ghaza, the Prophet's Hearth and Mehmetçik. This feeling of trust is in fact directed to this abstraction that the people identify with themselves; for a soldier who touches concrete life, it cannot turn into a value either in politics or in daily life. Soldiers' having to cut a very poor profile as they step outside their own field also plays a big part in this, of course. The role performed with all its dignity in the field of military duty, when it plunges into other fields, especially politics, "reciting a ghazal from outside," creates no beauty at all and does not evoke the slightest respect.

Indeed, it has never been seen that the people have given credit to the guidance of TSK members so greatly trusted on the political stage. Nor has it been seen that the masses have followed a commander who has taken off the uniform and plunged into politics.

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Having related Erol Göka's findings, it would be good to mention also his latest book, which has been at hand for a long time. In his latest book titled "Ölme", Göka describes how the perception of death has been transformed in the passage from traditional society to modern society. The reality of death, whose role as a warning constantly reminding itself over life was constantly reproduced in the traditional world, is increasingly pushed away from life in the modern world. We live life in order to forget and make forgotten death, and this also pushes us into indifference toward the bare minimum of commonality we have with other people. In our individual lives and in the arrangement of our daily lives, forgetting death does not make us more sensitive to life; on the contrary, it only keeps us buried in our own lives, while we watch the deaths of the people who remain every day insensitively and pass by without taking into account that they say anything to us.

The book I can recommend to everyone who has questions about death has come out from Timaş Publications.