So one should not say "what have I become"

An old Greek proverb says: "God tests his very intelligent servants with very foolish things. He also watches with a chuckle as they simply fail these tests." I remember this proverb most when I see the situations that the left-wing intellectual segment falls into in the face of the AK Parti and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

In my last two columns I tried to touch on the positions that Birikim, the Monthly Socialist Culture Journal, has been displaying on Gezi, December 17-25 and, most recently, on the relationship between the left and violence by way of the PKK. Naturally, within the limits of this column, a very detailed, example-laden critique was not possible. The forty-year-old Birikim's discourses and positions regarding these three events, of course also in the context of relations with the AK Parti, more than deserve to be dwelt on at length as exemplary and instructive cases. It is clear that for social scientists this is an extremely fertile field that relates, in its own particular way, a series of key words such as left and violence, power, strategy, tactics, identity, indigeneity, politicality and nationalism.

In response to the barb in my first column, Ömer Laçiner, the owner of the 40-year-old Birikim, has reacted with a disproportionate anger and harshness. We cannot say he replied, because all his expressions are words in a nervous frame of mind seized by a fit of rage, in which the emotional movement can be followed more easily than any chain of logic. In this emotional movement, arrogance and hatred are the most striking. Although he says he does not take the critic seriously, the criticism has quite plainly touched the beloved's lock; he knows it and he sees it.

We can understand his being so sensitive about a Birikim to which he has devoted forty years of labor being touched, but this labor makes him neither untouchable nor exempt from criticism. This "authoritarian rage" of his, which makes him foul-mouthed in the face of the simplest criticism, hardly falls short of the authoritarianism he attributes to Erdoğan, the object of hatred that has recently become an obsession for him. That is why, just as he gave no answer to our criticisms of either the Gezi incident or December 17 or, most recently, the HDP-PKK relationship, he presents the 40-year history and his Birikim as a kind of guarantee that certain things can never be attributed to him.

That is why he says: "Everyone who does not like Birikim but has a minimum of intellectual honor knows and acknowledges that one of the 'raisons d'être' of this 'forty-year-old' journal is to break the quite widespread mental pattern that revolution can only be achieved through violence and arms."

True, the particular stance the journal Birikim displayed in the past on the relationship between the left and violence, and even on the relationship between the socialist Kurdish movement and the PKK, is not unknown. Is this not exactly what is surprising and what makes one ask "what happened to forty years of accumulation"? This theoretical stance Birikim showed against violence in the past proved to be no guide at all in practice in the test Gezi and the PKK's HDP violence presented. On the contrary, it threw it into a frenzy to convince people that the violence displayed in both events was not violence, that it was within acceptable, tolerable limits. So, one should not say "what have I become." In a test you face after forty years you can fail, in a way that runs contrary to all the values you have accumulated.

I wonder, does the HDP appear to Laçiner as a party far from violence, from the PKK for instance? Judging by the support Birikim has given the HDP despite all its relations with the PKK, it is impossible for him not to see this relationship. Even the deaf sultans have heard that in the election process the PKK personally ran all the election campaigns, first of the BDP and then of the HDP. We heard not the slightest criticism of this in Birikim, but we did read a series of articles that tie the operations aimed at ending this process to Erdoğan's war policy and thus directly use the PKK's language.

The Birikim writers I know and used to read would assess and judge the claims of democratic autonomy and the practices carried out these days at the hands of the PKK as typical examples of fascism. Yet now in the pages of this journal we read pieces that embellish these practices as "the restoration of politics against war." Accepting the label "democratic autonomy" for the practices of the KCK, which does not even allow the Kurds to vote for the party they want and which organizes and holds captive an entire society from top to bottom through fascistic practice, is itself, from beginning to end, an example of complete intellectual wretchedness.

Birikim's sensitive stance against every kind of nationalism and in particular against Turkish nationalism is famous. Opposing nationalism is among the requirements of a Marxist socialist theology. We can understand this, but why do we not see the same sensitivity toward the nationalism that the PKK or the HDP display in the name of Kurdishness? For Birikim, what superiority does the PKK's chauvinist nationalism have that sets it apart from the others?

Laçiner accuses me of attacking Birikim by caricaturing it. Is there any need for me to do this? He is not even aware of what state his obsession with criticizing the AK Parti over the last two years has put his own image in. Let us remind that even in the AK Parti's early stages Birikim resisted calling the AK Parti by its own name and refrained from showing it even the most minimal respect. This attitude is the most typical example of how prejudiced it has been against the AK Parti and Erdoğan from the beginning.

In this piece too, Laçiner uses expressions such as "AKP partisan, speaking from the mouth of the powerful" that would not come out of the mouth, with a sober head, of someone with forty years of accumulation. The movement you call the AKP has in Turkey a tradition, a stance, and a solid practice demonstrated in every field, which has carried the country from one point to another and which can be proudly defended everywhere. Is being a partisan of the left-socialist movement, which has no practice or vision other than burning and destroying and an obsessive whining opposition, not the partisanship one should really be held to account for and be ashamed of?

The only noteworthy joke in Laçiner's piece is the phrase "In place of Yasin" that he put in the title. In response to a criticism he has killed me off and, in his reckoning, set about reading Yasin over my soul. Of course, those who do not perform ablution cannot read Yasin, but even if he did, he should know that in our belief Yasin-i Sharif is read not to the dead but to the living.