Politics, terror and academic wretchedness

Trying to evaluate political stances by academic standards, and regarding academic titles, positions or discourses as confirming or legitimising political stances, is, in the simplest terms, a bad abuse of science. But this abuse is at the same time a primitive tactic in the effort of a positivist ideology to cunningly dominate the field of politics. In the formation of the modern world, political engineering was highly skilled at drawing rightfulness and legitimacy for itself from scientific validity, or from the power of science.

Politics sheltering behind scientistic discourse used to legitimise all of its practices with science. The privilege of speaking in the name of science was of course not something politics derived from any argument of science. Of course, from within the logic of science, even in its most positivist form, no normative principle that would commit one to a particular politics could be inferred. Even so, positivist scientific practice has not been able to escape being treated as the theology, even the catechism, of modern politics.

Academic titles or levels neither confirm nor justify a person's political stance. Likewise, there is no place for judging someone's political stance with academic discourse. Mixing the academic title of a person whose political stance one dislikes into the criticism directed at him is wrong, but just as frequent. The criticism most often heard from opponents because of the academic title we happened to acquire is the "he became a professor, but..." criticism.

If you dig beneath this criticism, we can easily see that there lies either a metaphysical expectation that would exhaust all political stances in favour of science and the academy, or a much more banal confusion of levels.

When, in a debate I got into with Ömer Laçiner in recent months, I saw that his criticism of my political stance began directly with a jibe at my title of Professor, I felt only pity for those floundering in this confusion of levels. I remember he started from the same place in a debate he had with Atilla Yayla too. Yet the debate you are having is not an academic debate with me or with Atilla Yayla, it is a wholly political debate. Making the academic title of someone whose political stance we dislike the subject of a debate is partly a bewilderment of levels, partly a greedy dive into a cheap tactic. Since you are playing to the gallery anyway, in trying to strike at your interlocutor's academic level, you do not even notice that you have hit the very bottom of misery at the level of humanity and intellect.

I personally have never put forward any political stance or view by sheltering behind my title as an academic. I never lose sight of the fact that, even in my capacity as an academic, every one of my views may be the subject of debate, and I have never been drawn to the cunning of making my political stance beyond debate through my academic title. Even if knowledge produced in the scientific field is not beyond debate either, once you lose the difference between academic discourse and political discourse, you end up confusing everything with everything else.

The primary problem with the declaration announced to the public as the "academics' declaration" is not about the view put forward in it on this or that subject. Above all, it is a significant problem that an extremely superficial, makeshift political text is presented by appealing to the sanctity assumed to belong to the profession of "academic," hoping for some power from that sanctity. That is why I consider it unnecessary to make a political critique of the text. Politically no one is obliged to hold the same view. But since the declaration is being marketed as a text of academics, it deserves all the more to be criticised academically.

Frankly, the text falls apart in terms of coherence, is a complete example of wretchedness in terms of language, and has the air of a complete propaganda text in terms of its connection with reality. It is a shameful situation in the name of the academic level of Turkish academics. It seems oblivious to the existence of a terror reality in Turkey and to the need for a struggle against this terror. Worse, of course, it has surrendered to the propaganda language of the existing terror and become the spokesman of that language. That so many academics are in a position to sign such a declaration, so far removed from reality, is first and foremost a disgraceful situation for Turkish academia.

A statement that characterises the fight against terror as a massacre against the Kurdish people and calls on the Turkish state to abandon these massacres is absolutely extremely detached from the Southeast or from Kurdish reality. That these academics, most of them social scientists, are so far from reality, and moreover surrender to the propaganda language of an organisation that is a party to the events, is in itself an approach that would paralyse social science practice and faculty.

The great majority of those who signed the declaration evidently do not know the Southeast, that is, the place where the events are taking place; they have not gone there, have not seen it.

Some of them evidently have a mindset that can sanctify the terror committed by the organisation as a kind of "redemptive violence" against the current government. They either are unaware of how this redemptive violence has condemned the Kurdish people to the trench policy, to the KCK gangs and to YPG fascism, and of how this policy is condemned by the great majority of the region's Kurds as an inhuman demand for power, or they have covered their ears to those cries.

For them, terror is good, right and likeable if it is the only chance to get rid of the current legitimate political power, formed with the people's votes within the limits of democracy and politics.

The political critique and assessment of this declaration, which openly supports terror, will of course be made separately, but because a text that is political from its first line to its last has been published as an "academics'" declaration, I think it deserves to be assessed first of all from the academic standpoint. Viewed from this angle, what one sees is only academic wretchedness. And this wretchedness explains why Turkey's universities, despite all the political support, have still not been able to find a place within world academia.