The epic that broke up the theatre stage: 15 July

That the social order we live in resembles a theater order in which people are compelled to mask their natural and real personalities from one another is partly due to the nature of social relations themselves. Otherwise, if people tried to behave toward one another with their most natural instincts, a human social life would not be possible.

This is precisely the paradox: by his nature, the human being becomes human to the extent that he moves away from nature. Seen from this angle, there is no aspect of the sanctification of naturalness that suits the human. Unless the human moves away from nature or naturalness, he cannot become human. If so, when people express their longing for naturalness, are they expressing that they have grown weary of humanity? What do we lose in moving away from naturalness and approaching humanity that people long for it, or is losing what we lose in moving away from naturalness a fate?

On first consideration, let us say that when people sanctify or long for naturalness, what they are actually looking for is honesty, so that we do not entirely squander the search for naturalness. We know that where civilization is the stage of hypocrisy, elegant betrayals and cheap courage, it reveals its troubles.

If the distance between the backstage and the front stage of the theaters we have to play in the name of sociability widens too much and the two become diametrically opposed, it brings moral collapse in people along with it. For gradually this contradiction begins to be lived and felt as hypocrisy.

While this is the general picture of our daily social relations, let us repeat that the order of international relations constitutes a far more striking theater stage in this respect. A stage on which everyone performs, hiding their true face, intention and discourse behind diplomatic courtesy. As things go very differently behind this stage, the credibility of the front stage is of course lost.

There are also cases that reveal the theatrical character of this theater, its hypocritical character. In proportion to the striking power of such cases, they can have the power to re-establish the order of the entire theater stage. We can say with ease that 15 July, the coup attempt, has a very special place among these mask-removing cases.

In the face of the 15 July coup attempt, we saw how much the democrat mask that seemingly friendly international actors wore in the theater had in fact been constricting them, and how the news of the coup in Turkey gave them the luxury of casting these masks aside for a moment.

Who said what between the first hours of the coup and the hours when it became clear that the coup had failed was spilled out one by one. In the meantime it also became clear how much of the democracy mask everyone wore on their face was a matter of playing a role and how much of it was their true face.

In the first hours, when the coup attempt still held promise for them, many American politicians and writers who connected to the famous FOX TV broadcasting in America were making comments that greeted with great enthusiasm the possibility of a coup in Turkey, the possibility of a coup of the coup. A coup attempt that would bury democracy in its grave for ever, against a democracy that was functioning in Turkey, seemed to them quite cheering. With values they claim, such as democracy, human rights and freedoms, they saw no problem in this structure. Moreover, they did not hide that all their expectation of the putschist soldiers who staged a coup against Erdoğan, whom they identify with Islam, was in fact to deliver themselves from Islam.

While these things were happening in the USA, what was the situation of the EU countries? They too, during the hours when the coup took place, for two days, that is, while the putschists killed 250 people and wounded 2200, kept silent and watched what happened. When did they speak? They came into play on the footage of the arrest of the putschists who were the perpetrators of these massacres and spoke to express their concern about the treatment of these putschists. Thus they made it so plain that they were in fact in expectation of the coup taking place, even at the price of the destruction of democracy in Turkey.

Their expectations were so high that at that moment they did not even notice that they were nullifying all their values, such as democracy, human rights, opposition to coups and freedom of expression, which they had claimed for years. All of that is in fact nothing but the lines of a theater they wanted to play. Lines that mean nothing to themselves. Lines that serve to persuade or compel the other partners in the play to play as they wish.

Likewise we saw how the media centered on the UAE-Egypt and SA covered the coup attempt in Turkey. Sky News's announcer, who for hours had been broadcasting as if giving good tidings, began broadcasting, the moment he understood that the coup had failed, with the qualifier "unfortunately": the sentence "The coup in Turkey unfortunately failed" said enough.

In this sense, 15 July was also a magnificent test of where everyone stands and how loyal everyone is to which of their claims.

Although the deputies of his own party took an open stance against the coup, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu's stance toward the coup was very contradictory. Even if in the early period he joined the general consensus formed against the coup, that shortly afterwards he repeated the defense rhetoric of those who carried out the coup and characterized the event as a scenario made one wonder what kind of mask he might have put on his face, to appear how and to whom. While 15 July, which removed the masks and showed the backstage of the theater in all its nakedness, opened the eyes of the whole world, what was it that made Kılıçdaroğlu shut his eyes?

In the face of an epic that brought down a great scenario of which he is responsible or a part, what was the nature of the desire to see or claim yet another scenario behind the plain reality that emerged?