Violence is the opium of the left

The latest issue of Tezkire magazine, which this year has entered its thirtieth year of publication, has come out under the title "Violence Is the Opium of the Left." Probably no better definition has been made that conveys the relationship between violence and the left in just three words so clearly and so strikingly.

In the appropriate and just use of violence there is, of course, a dimension of being an unavoidable support for both law and justice, but in the hands of an understanding that sanctifies it, places it at the center of existence in this world, and regards it as a means of making others accept its own political superiority, claim and program, it naturally turns into an unjust and cruel process. Of course, at this point different political ideologies, even religions, may compete with one another in displaying an approach that legitimizes, sanctifies or looks kindly on violence as a way of forcing others to accept their own truth claims. But the left's relationship with violence is undoubtedly much deeper and much more typical. For the left, violence is like an ideology in itself, like an opium equivalent to the epithet Marx applied to religion.

In fact, violence's inclination toward the left is like a relationship of addiction. Beyond the side of violence, the subject of these debates with all their philosophical implications, that is affirmed by its potential existence as law-founding, law-preserving and order-establishing, violence as a means of establishing domination over people entirely by force, in the most archaic manner, of subjugating or destroying them, is for the left not even a tool but an ideology. Marx's expression depicting ideology or religion as an opium for the masses would be fitting to state, in this sense, for the left's relationship with violence: Violence is the opium of the left.

The violence that the PKK has systematically carried out for years against various ethnic and religious minorities, inside Turkey or in Syria, has caused tens of thousands of people to die or be displaced. Its treating the option of laying down arms granted to it during the resolution process as an opportunity to further consolidate its own armed struggle, and its turning, immediately afterward, the cities where its own target audience lived into a field of trench terror against the will of their inhabitants, is not a matter to be charged only to the PKK and its untrustworthiness. The solidarity that other left groups displayed with that terror at precisely this time revealed what kind of kinship lay deep down.

Violence, as we have noted, of course has a necessary, even protective dimension related to justice, order and law. In this issue of Tezkire, violence is presented not together with these ontological implications, with its aspect inseparable from human existence, but rather with the particular aspect that confronts us. That is, in the dimension of the left's relationship with violence, or the left side of violence. The editor begins by warning: "Since we also know how far from human reality a discourse or ideology that categorically rejects violence can remain, there is no point in aspiring to the position of history's lustful eunuchs."

The relationship of left thought or practice with violence at times aspires to go beyond this position. While the anger displayed against the violence of the state or of capitalism is presented as a categorical opposition to violence, the naive disregard and denial of the violence contained in the socialist struggle, in revolution strategies and in the lust for power is generally the summary of the left's forbidden-love relationship with violence. Yet no one has any doubt about what the practice of the socialist struggle, which at best regards a dictatorship of the proletariat ultimately as a historical necessity, requires and brings in practice for the revolution. It is evident that revolution, besides signaling a systemic transformation, is in an absolute sense a movement of violence.

When we look at historical events, it is seen that every revolution brings mass massacres with it, during, before and after the revolution. From the French Revolution to the Bolshevik Revolution and then the October Revolution that brought with it the establishment of the USSR, it draws attention with its aspect of engraving in minds that the revolutionary process cannot be bloodless, of attributing sanctity to the blood spilled, of exalting violence as a duty to be undertaken with great pleasure by the actors of change. Not only during the revolution, but also in the name of protecting the "gains" of the revolution, much blood will have to be spilled and many heads will have to be cut off... Left theology has engraved in minds a god of severe revolution, manifested in the killing fields in Cambodia under the Pol Pot regime, from this state of necessity it attributed to spilling blood in order to reach the goal.

In the magazine, to which I tried to contribute with two articles titled "Violence Management, Ethnic Nationalism and the Kurdish Question" and "Violence as a Method of Seeking Rights (Ihkak-ı Hak)" and an interview, Ertuğrul Başer takes part with "Exit from the Land of Violence"; M. Veysel Karataş and Ata Demir with "Freedom, Ontology and Violence in the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy"; Mehmet Birekul with "Left Music, Ritual and the Aestheticized Discourse of Violence: A Study of Grup Yorum's 'İlle Kavga' Album"; Aydın Aktay with "From Enlightenmentist Anger to Leftist Violence: The Ideological and Psychological Origins of the Turkish Left's Inclination to Violence"; and Fatih Sevgili with "Left and Violence in Turkey: The Case of Devrimci Sol and the PKK." In the interview conducted with him, Aytekin Yılmaz, author of the book "Son Diktatör" published by Vadi Yayınları, reveals a type of violence much overlooked in the PKK's violence-filled record. In this type of violence, which he names "Killing Your Comrade," Yılmaz draws attention to the executions, tortures, prison-within-prison and isolation practices suffered by organization members, almost more of whom, particularly because of intra-organizational executions, than of those who died in the conflict with the state, and to the aspect in which the PKK outdoes other left organizations in violence. "There is one thing I learned from what I lived through, and it is this: those who feel no pain are always more radical than those who do," says Yılmaz.

Asking "I wonder why?", Aydın Aktay says that the left's inclination to violence has come to feel more and more like violence's inclination to the left, and tries to examine the origins behind this by resorting to psychology. Of course, an even more striking emphasis by Yılmaz concerns the exaltation and sanctification of Che Guevara that is valid in all left movements: This, I think, is the first thing leftist revolutionaries in this country must confront. The taboo and spell of "revolutionary violence" and Ernesto Che Guevara has not yet been broken in these neighborhoods.