When the climate changes, history changes too

As is well known, we have no chance of ever understanding history by going back to the conditions of the era in which it was lived, by feeling what those who lived it felt and understanding what they understood. Every reading of the past is made under the influence of developments or interests that lead us to take an interest in some aspect of that past today. That is why history is generally less about illuminating the past than about the quarrels of the present. When the parties to an ongoing quarrel use every material they can lay their hands on, the old ledgers of the past get their share too. The resort of bankrupt merchants to old ledgers has always been a very important source for the writing of history.

The situation is, of course, far graver when we write the history of events we did not actually live through. Historical events have acquired symbolic meanings for today's identities, and nobody is in any mood to be concerned with the clarification of the event itself. All that can be done is to project the struggle over symbols onto history. That is why history is so often the field where ideology is most intensely realized and applied. The most problematic area of the National Education curriculum is also the history lessons and their syllabi, but that is not our subject now.

That is the situation with the history of events we did not actually live through, but there is also a part of history that we actually live. We call it "recent history." We are talking about the recent history that we cannot help recalling when we look each other in the face, about what we did to one another in our recent past. Even that history is not always remembered, cannot always be remembered, as it was lived. All the perpetrators and witnesses of the event are alive, still living, yet while some are eager to remember or remind others of those events, others are troubled with the concern of forgetting and making others forget. The memory of those events, too, keeps changing continuously, together with the events that change and develop every day, depending on our changing positions.

Those whose voices carry louder, for one reason or another, may still be able to keep ensuring that everything is remembered the way they want. But what if the climate has changed? Then even the things we remember begin to change. The things we boast of or grieve over, take pride in or feel remorse for when we remember, change as well. Those who remember change, and so do those who forget or want to forget...

The events of 28 February, which were spoken of with pride only a few years ago, have suddenly begun to be seen as offenses that must be covered up. Because the climate has changed, and with the changing climate, memory inevitably changes too.

To forget what one did in the 28 February process, where one stood at the time, what sort of complicity one engaged in, and then suddenly to think of looking at who profited from the outcome of this process is, in one respect, a search for consolation. That the memories of those who, seized by the delusion of power that the process promised, sank into complicity as if in a trance, are reconstructed differently at the end of the process with sentences beginning with "if only" is a universal human condition, but it generally does no good.

And to go on, in particular, to assess the perpetrators on the basis of who profited from the affair is nothing but the desperate search for consolation of a greedy bankrupt.

Kılıçdaroğlu had earlier given an example of this in his assessment of 27 April. Disregarding his own overly eager support for that process, he had attributed the whole process to a joint Erdoğan-Büyükanıt conspiracy, on the basis of the AK Parti's coming to power as its result. Naturally, it had come across as a bad joke.

Now he explains the AK Parti's coming to power wholesale as the outcome targeted by 28 February. Moreover, this time he is not alone. Suddenly everyone, from Kılıçdaroğlu to Demirtaş, from Bahçeli to the others, has turned into a follower of Erbakan, regardless of where they themselves stood during the 28 February process. They are not content with denouncing 28 February; they are trying to explain that its real great evil was the planning of the AK Parti government.

In an environment where all the details of 28 February are being laid out one by one today, these statements are not something to be simply laughed off. Of course, we wonder what it is that has made them forget this simple yet utterly universal truth:

"Who guaranteed that every murder would serve the interest of its murderer and would end up making the murderer prosper?"

Even if perfectly planned, even if carried out with the aim of reaping great gains, all murders, thefts and crimes, once the perpetrators are caught, upend all of their calculations.

Is throwing the responsibility for one's own attempted murder onto a target one could not destroy merely a matter of memory? I wish it were; I think the problem is graver than that.