Is being in opposition a virtue in itself?

A political discourse that always sanctifies being in opposition is either unaware of itself or a hypocritical, fraudulent discourse.

Like the discourse of Nietzsche's priests, it is the expression of a sly lust for power that hides itself well from the world.

It is a discourse far from honesty, either too cowardly to express its desire for power or treating people as fools. In fact, to put it in the Anatolian idiom, it comes from the fact that "he cannot get up from where he sits."

It is possible that, after a while, those who voice this discourse begin to embrace it themselves, and that the path of perpetual opposition really does look beautiful through these rhetorics, but in popular speech the situation is no more complicated than calling the grapes sour because they are out of reach.

That the right and the left are described as the two stances that sum up all the possible positions of people toward power in the world is, in the end, a success of those who describe themselves as leftists. It is a success such that it gets its own opponents to reduce their position to a reactive one. It becomes the very reason for its opponents' existence. One who agrees to define himself as rightist also consents to a state of existence with the left at its center.

Claims to the contrary notwithstanding, it was Marx who completed this terminological distinction that began with Hegel and who took out the patent on its conceptual dualism. After that, those who describe themselves as rightists too have taken their seats at the table the left set. And the left maintains at every stage the advantage and power of having set the table.

That is why, even when in opposition, it feels itself to be in power, and when in power it displays all the despotic urges within it through aestheticized ways such as the dictatorship of the proletariat. It exhibits the most despotic, bloodiest, most ruthless, most tyrannical practices of power that history has recorded, and yet it does not surrender to anyone the privilege of being progressive, of being right or siding with the right.

We can see that in Turkey the left has displayed peak examples of shamelessness on precisely this point.

The left has never made any positive contribution to Turkey's history.

Because its claim to populism never found the support it wanted from the people, it was forced to put forth this populism despite the people.

Although it always sanctified being in opposition, coups engineered through all sorts of intrigues, in order to come to power, have in fact always formed its most typical strategies of power. The left has been a master at managing the difficult task of making intrigue, and its presentation as beautiful, legitimate and justified, through rhetoric, that is, through talk.

It sought not to bring the people to power through coups but the way to be in power over the people. Efforts to transform the people, to educate the people, to bring the people, whom it regarded as suffering from historical backwardness, up to the history they had missed, require a good deal of talk, of course.

It convinced itself that it could get cheese ships to sail with talk, but it always made the cheese stink, because the ship did not move even with those ornate words. Behind the left's ornate words were the Cold War machines of mass killings, exiles, and iron politburo dictatorships that placed bans on human will and dignity.

To the extent that leftists regarded a position of eternal rightfulness as an acquired right of their own, they became alienated from the sorrows of the truly wronged and oppressed people and remained leagues away from the position they had assumed by their essential definition.

That those who have been left weak on earth be made, through a historical rotation, heirs of the earth is one of God's practices (sunnahs). But the termination of that inheritance, when these heirs turn their chosenness into a means of superiority over people, despite being subject to certain principles, is the complementary part of this sunnah.

The Children of Israel, while being crushed under Pharaoh's oppression, were made heirs of the earth through God's mercy and under Moses' leadership. But this position given to them was not an eternal property that would not be taken from them whatever they did; they supposed it was, and considered themselves superior to people in every case.

The story of the left in our age -even if they have no relationship with God- evokes somewhat the story of the Children of Israel in terms of God's relationship with them. But once you catch the resemblance, the others follow it as well. Just like the Children of Israel, they see the Prophet who comes to warn them as a confirmation of their own superiority. Seeing it that way, they do not shrink from treating the prophet who comes to them in the worst way, from killing him. The last prophet to come, the Prophet of Islam, they rejected on the grounds that he was ummi, that is, he had not received the education they had received, had no share in their books, and was not from their lineage.

Yet they had known and understood very well that the Prophet of Islam, whom they saw saying it, carried the knowledge they had with them, the wisdom and insight they had long claimed; but what business could that knowledge have in that ummi, in someone "not of us"? For them this had become a devastating question. The devastating nature of the question, of course, did not come from the question itself, but from their own sense of ownership of truth, which had reached the point of asking it, and from the envy it produced.

Today, if you scratch beneath the surface of the left's attitude toward Islamists, not much, just a little, a similar envy emerges. They were the scientific ones, they were the ones on the right side and at the right place of history, they were the ones who had swallowed and digested all intellectual, critical knowledge, and moreover they were the hope of the oppressed strata. So it was they who would be the classical, modern, even postmodern "prince" who would give direction to history and save the world. Where did these Kasımpaşa folk, provincials, this rabble come from?