Violence management and ethnic nationalism: did you say the Kurdish question?

There has always been a serious historical bond between nationalism and the wills of states. Whether nations found states or states form nations has ceased to be even a subject that political sociologists debate. Famous sociologists whose names I can list off the top of my head, such as Ernest Gellner and Erich Hobsbawm, Craig Calhoun, Benedict Anderson and Anthony Giddens, have shown how states bring into being the definitions of the nation that they need, together with their content. In our own country, Erol Güngör's studies on this subject make quite comprehensive contributions to understanding the relationship between state and nation from a Turkish-Islamic nationalist point of view.

Giddens' work in particular, with its approach that regards the relationship between the formation of the nation-state and violence as necessary, has made a contribution that dispels the mythological narratives about the concept of the nation. According to this approach, the nation does not exist before the state, or even before an institution capable of using violence. And if state violence subsequently cannot establish justice or the politics of a healthy body politic, it is inevitable that it will give rise to another violence against it. For it is a frequently encountered situation that the elements which the existing body politic has failed to make part of the organic whole develop a resistance and reject the political body.

These situations become the main source of disturbances within nation-states and of threats against national integrity. But in every case a violence that will feed this disturbance and bring forth an alternative body politic from it is also necessary. Sometimes, however just things are and however harmonious the existing body politic is, an element within the organism can have its harmony with the body disrupted by sown violence. Violence and its dialectic can supply the conditions necessary for a new nation by creating alternative feelings and perceptions of identity.

The leftist movement, with its promotion of the "working class," managed to create a labor-based class identity even among masses that had nothing to do with the world of the proletariat. In many places, for example, the demographic structures that really fed socialism were not workers but ethnic or religious minorities. Moreover, in many places these minorities were not at all close to the lower groups in class terms. The action strategy of socialist movements attributed special importance to building identity consciousness in the masses through violence. In practice this has been a very effective method. When masses drawn into violent action face police violence and then meet the disproportionate cruelty of the state, a sense of identity begins to settle in violently. In masses bound to one another through "exercising violence" or "being subjected to violence," and sharing the same sense of belonging through the sharing of similar memories and experiences, a sense of common identity, if not a nation, inevitably begins to develop.

This is also part of the background to why leftist-socialist movements have adopted violence as a reason for existence. With its socialist roots, the PKK too is a movement that has memorized this relationship with violence well enough. It managed to turn tender children, whom it first trained by having them throw stones at the police in street demonstrations, into monsters of violence in a short time by bringing them together with police stations and prisons, which it regarded as a training camp. If, on this process, you prefer to read not Selahattin Demirtaş, who with even his romantic literature cannot wash away the blood of hundreds like Yasin Börü, but Aytekin Yılmaz (The Last Dictator and Killing One's Comrade), who recounts his lived experiences in the plainest manner, you will certainly see a completely different and clearer picture.

Years ago, the supposedly very wise, elderly figures of the HDP showed us these angry children, whom they themselves had incited in the streets and who had turned into machines of violence, as a threat, and said: "We are the last generation that can talk to you on behalf of the Kurds; you will not be able to talk with the generations that have grown up after us." By this they meant: "If you are going to solve the problem, you can solve it with us; if not, those after us cannot be reasoned with." What kind of solution did they want by this? It was of course obvious that they displayed the cunning of presenting themselves as the only bridge that could reach a deaf, thick-headed terrorist mass. And that they wanted to use the violence in the hands of that terrorist mass as a bargaining chip...

They thought it was not seen that they themselves were inciting those youths whom they called the "mass that does not listen to reason," and that they were pursuing a politics that would keep them away from education and reading so as to make them unable to listen to reason. Yet it was they who drove that mass into the streets in the events of 6-8 October. It was also they who had the schools, libraries, public education centers and student dormitories burned, where those children could receive an education, refine themselves, and become people who listen to reason.

Without seeing that this "management of violence" is truly the essence of the Kurdish issue, let no one speak to us about the Kurdish question. Behind what is called the Kurdish issue are not the Kurds but, to a great extent, this management of violence. There is the delusion that a feeling of ethnic identity can be fed through the successful management of violence and that over time it can turn into a nation. There is a quest to establish a Zionist fortress that they can govern and use against Turkey and the Islamic world in general.

Meanwhile, the management of the violence in question is carried out not by the Kurds but by a professional organization that nowadays acts in every kind of cooperation with the USA, Israel and the EU countries.

There are efforts to found a state that would produce a nation out of an organization that they have trained and equipped in Syria with 10 thousand truckloads of weapons given to the PYD. Of course, there are also racist ignoramuses who regard this as a blessing, wherever it comes from.