The "Divine Left" and the Kurds

While waiting for its own Messiah, or, to put it in terms of the typology that entered left-wing literature after Gramsci, while acting with the passion of becoming "the prince of our age," another instrument the Turkish Left has clung to is the Kurds.

At one point the left also looked at Islamism as an instrument that could carry it to the same position of princeship. The feeling of inertia and the trauma that the left experienced in the face of Islamism acting on its own behalf and thereby realizing itself, and the feeling of compensation for it, is another factor added to the left's relationship with the Kurds.

Everything Baudrillard said about the left in his book The Divine Left in the eighties is more than valid for the Turkish left. The left is in fact a movement that has lost in Turkey. There is no suitable reality in Turkey's history and sociology to which it corresponds. With its arrogant attitude in its ivory tower, it can look at the people only as a tool for reaching its own lofty aims, and does not even see that it has produced neither the language, nor the intellect, nor the enthusiasm that could lead a social movement.

In fact, by turning in that ivory tower to interpreting the world, that is, by undergoing the maturation Marx underwent after 1852, the left could at least have made a somewhat more respectable contribution to Turkey's intellectual climate for the high truths it believes it represents. But it played the incompetent aspirant to the hilt. Although it has no quality to lead social change and no organic bond with society, and although society follows a course very different from what it imagined, it has not given up the claim of being the "real actor."

Despite its incompetence, its demand for power led it to seek very different alliances. Its approach to alliances is instrumental to the point of self-destruction.

Those alliances were only tools necessary to carry the left to power. The Islamists, the Alevis, the Kurds, capital, now FETÖ too.. Every alliance it formed at every turn took and carried off much from the left, but took nothing from its ambition to be the prince.

When the only aim is to be in power, it followed no consistency in giving a message, in being consistent in the message it gave, in claiming to really bring good to people. With the Islamists and the Alevis, all of its claims about religion and reaction were turned upside down.

Neither the infrastructure nor the superstructure of the theoretical approach remained.

In terms of lifestyle it is already in an unshakable alliance with capital. In Turkey the left as a lifestyle was the ideology and culture of the middle and upper bourgeoisie, and it remained so.

All of Turkey's big capitalists are leftists too.

The support given to the Gezi incident by bank bosses in person is plain to see.

Likewise,

the Left, while playing to the Kurds and chiefly to the PKK, showed both that it is bound by no ethics regarding violence and that it can comfortably walk the road with a fascistic nationalism. The self-rule practices of the PKK's elements in the southeast, carried out with the most savage fascistic practices and a terrible culture of violence, were sanctified by most elements of the Turkish left almost as democratic movements.

Left-wing circles known for their extremely radical stance against Turkish nationalism showed, when it comes to Kurdish nationalism, that they actually have no problem with nationalism. There is something respectable in being against nationalism in essence. But when you choose between nationalisms, the literature you have developed about nationalism comes to have no importance at all.

If you are against not nationalism but the nationalism of some nations, it is impossible for you to put forward any value.

Indeed, precisely for this reason it has become obligatory to speak of

"the left's problem of text."

That the left has no text left to which it remains loyal is truly a painful situation, but this situation, painful for itself, also makes it dangerous for humanity.

The approaches of the different elements of the left to the Kurdish question therefore constitute yet another important turning point in laying out the genealogy of the Turkish left. The way the left has embraced the Kurdish question in Turkey, especially since the Kobani events, and the arguments it constructed in the process, reveal entirely different elements of the left's genetics.

The genealogy of the left should undoubtedly begin first with a critique of historical consciousness suited to a Marxism that reduces history to the struggle of classes. At this level it is also much better understood that the right-left identification is to a great extent within the history of the Children of Abraham and represents a link in it.

The Kurdish question has been one of the important areas of encounter, especially between leftists and Islamists.

It was supposed that both the Islamists and the leftists had an approach to the Kurdish question beyond nationalism. Yet instead of the openings brought to the Kurdish question by the AK Parti earning the leftists' appreciation, in a short time the leftists were seen to be swept into a different nationalism on the Kurdish question.

Familiarity with the Turkish nationalist example of the Turkish left existed. But the response of the section of the Turkish left that is also distant from Kemalism, swerving into a Kurdish nationalism almost to the degree of chauvinism in answer to the AK Parti's opening on the Kurdish question, has been quite meaningful. This swerve has undoubtedly written another new and instructive scene regarding the relationship between the left and Islamism.

Yet the response of the Islamists to the Kurdish question can be seen as inadequate only from a Kurdish nationalist, even racist, point of view.

The Turkish left's desire to use the Kurds as a prop for its Revolution, which it has never managed to realize, cannot even be hidden.

Far more importance is attached to its instrumentality and its functionality in producing its own politics than to the solution of the problem. That is why there is no place for any defensive approach on the Kurdish question. The attitude of the Islamists on the Kurdish question has not been to answer Turkish nationalism with Kurdish nationalism. Muslims reject every kind of racist nationalism.

This rejection is as principled as refusing to erect another idol against an idol. For what matters is to stand not against the idol but against idolatry. This is also the essence of the covenant of being between the human being and his Creator.