The State Watch

That power corrupts even the best of people is hardly surprising when viewed through the window of history. This corrupting effect of power usually stems from being seduced by its dizzying allure or from becoming arrogant. In Turkey, however, the corrupting effect of power is not limited to this. The burdens imposed by the state ideology have the heaviest and most corrupting effect on well-intentioned people who assume power, and they must struggle against it.

It is typical for people who have been under the pressure of the state ideology and its practices at every stage to suddenly feel like the state toward other people when their turn comes, and to adopt the authoritarian and exclusionary language of the state persona. Moreover, this language circulates among all the oppressed by turns, and seems to be able to turn all the oppressed into oppressors, again by turns. Those who have just had their turn at being oppressed can become the oppressors of the next issue, and this can bring oppression and victimhood together in the same person at the same time.

Thus a Kurd who suffers from the pressure of a state that does not let his own language be spoken can find himself in a position to debate how far headscarves may or may not be permitted. A woman who has been barred from school and excluded because of her headscarf can express her concern that if Kurds were granted the right to education in their mother tongue, it might go on to extend who knows how far, for instance whether a demand for a federation would follow, and in an instant she is enrolled in the watch of speaking the language of the state. I honestly cannot decide whether this is the success of a state that can put everyone through a gauntlet of beatings, or whether it is our social culture that produces such a state mechanism.

I thought about these things while listening to Prime Minister Erdoğan's unfortunate speech saying that the hundred thousand Armenians working illegally in Turkey could be deported if necessary. As is evident from the statements of representatives of both parties, the MHP and CHP supporters were quite pleased with it, and as you will appreciate, it is hardly cheering to see what kind of kinship this statement reveals. Would an Erdoğan who does not speak on behalf of the state, an Erdoğan with a pure conscience, an Erdoğan with the purest Islamic references, ever entertain, even as an idea, "making someone else, unrelated, suffer the punishment for somebody's sin"?

Let us leave aside genocide politics, the debates, and the economy of political profit that history can produce on today's ground. Even at that level, we have reached a level of knowledge at which a pure conscience cannot utter big words without shame, and yet I still want to attribute the evident lapse reflected in this statement to the corrupting effect of the state ideology. I believe the prime minister has the solid references to notice this effect and free himself from it. But it must be noted that this is a statement that neither Islamic values nor the scales of conscience could weigh.

Unfortunately, the defensive discourse adopted within Islamic circles toward the events of 1915 can very easily slide into producing a myth of "innocent ancestors" that no Islamic value could ever compensate for. What this entire myth, which attributes innocence to the "ancestors," ends up resting on and protecting, even cleansing and washing, is in fact all the sins of the mentality of the Committee of Union and Progress. The Unionists, who in nothing they did cared about any value of Islam, are thus being, and have been, acquitted by the pious segment through a religious-psychological protection.

Yet, leaving the Unionists aside, it is far more in keeping with the essence of the Quran to think that "our ancestors" are not free of error, like everyone else. Everyone can make mistakes. Those we call our ancestors may have made them too. But not getting stuck on them is also certainly urged as a positive value. The sins of those in the past belong to them; you should look at what you yourselves have done.

It can be said, from this hour on, that the Armenian bill constitutes the hardest test of the line the prime minister and the government have developed so far. The moment the prime minister's idea of deporting illegal Armenians was voiced, it in a sense revived the perception of "annihilation and deportation" that Armenian nationalists tried to establish regarding 1915. It is not at all difficult to tie together, with a mutually reinforcing argument, the thought that one could do this today and what may have been done in the past.

Indeed, in the face of the international political actors who try to make Turkey confess to genocide, an approach that is cooler-headed and never lets go of conscience needs to be worked out. Falling for the temptation of a politics that would win applause from CHP or MHP supporters is one of the most important areas of risk awaiting the prime minister and the government. Yet there is not the slightest place for conscience and common sense in that applause. Nor is there anything in the fervor of that applause that will bring good to the AK Parti.