Organized Affairs

Social events cannot succeed, however powerful the organizational structures or conspiracies behind them, if they have no sociological foundations, ground or environment. True, it is also an undoubted fact in this respect that there is a sociality stirred into motion today over the Gezi incident. The hatred and loathing that have existed from the very beginning against the government's actions, or against its ontological existence from much earlier, have a well-known sociality. It is not easy: those who for over a century regarded themselves as the masters of this country have to accept being governed for 11 years by the Negroes of this country..

These people do not have a nature that will accept even being in the same environment with them, let alone being governed by them. Even when the people of this country did not yet have the power and authority to interfere in the slightest with their way of life, these "lifestyle cowards" were taking and applying the most merciless, brutal measures to make life a dungeon for them. The "lifestyle" uproar raised by those who for years closed the doors of universities to the children of this people through the headscarf, the coefficient and various other ways is in fact nothing but intolerance toward the existence of people they regard as the lower class. And this intolerance in fact binds them to no human, positive, democratic or libertarian value. At most it makes them kin to the racist feelings and practices that prevailed in the US until the sixties and in South Africa until the nineties. This is these movements' only link with the contemporary world.

The movement has a sociality, of course, and this sociality was set in motion over a few trees in Gezi Park. The dirty alliances that emerged in the course of the event show how open this sociality is to manipulation and how organized it is. In fact, if we remember, nobody was saying either that the Republic rallies held in 2007 had no sociality. When the masses mobilized over the Council of State murder learned that this incident was a fabrication, would they not have been expected to feel the anger of having been deceived and direct it at those who deceived them? No, that was not what happened; instead they showed how willing they already were to be deceived.

In fact even this was by itself an instructive enough event. But what was more instructive, both in that event and in this one, was how organized some people could be over an entire social ground. Unfortunately, in Turkey coup-ism, fascism, racism and other archaic values have an almost death-defying base of supporters.

We no longer doubt that the Gezi events are a coup attempt. In this coup perhaps the military leg will be missing, or perhaps the plan foresees that, if things go well, a ground will form at some later stage for the military to step in too. Perhaps it is thought that this will not even be necessary, because, being accustomed to all coups being military, we are evidently wholly unfamiliar with a coup without soldiers. Yet countless coups without soldiers have been carried out in Turkey at different times. Making the government unable to govern, escalating street violence, presenting this violence as innocent democratic demonstrations and popular uprisings, presenting the opposition to the demonstrators' violence by the police as fascistic state repression... At every stage of the event, in the very apt expression of Yaşar Taşkın Koç, "carefully and elaborately worked-out moves" stand out.

The typology of the "innocent Gezi Park action" has also been very well worked out, and at every stage it continues to receive the necessary organized support from the media, artist and social media legs. Grand figures of science, art and media wax lyrical in inventing and recounting stories of sociability, humorous language, brotherhood and solidarity from Gezi Park, but they never open their mouths about the banality, the crude cursing, the hatred and loathing there, nor do they allow a speck of dust to settle on it. In the actions that were sought to be spread across the entire country on account of Gezi Park, they ignore the demonstrators' obviously aggressive, violent and vandal attitudes and shamelessly reduce that entire spectacle of violence to the police's disproportionate use of force.

One really has to have worked very well to produce a spectacle of police violence from the sight of those who went up against the police prepared as if going to war, attacking with pre-prepared Molotov cocktails, fireworks and stones.

Indeed, the picture that all these discourses have been worked out, that all these events are organized business, has become ever clearer. The cap has fallen and the bald head is visible. Everyone saw how the respected and famous presenters of the big TV channels, at the cost of losing all their respectability, worked in this affair as if on duty. They heaped thousands of reproaches on police violence, but not once do they ask, or let anyone ask, why the protesters, in the name of what claim to rights, occupied a public space and defended it to the death against the police, or tried to storm the prime minister's residence with Molotov cocktails, signal flares and stones.

All those newspaper columnists, TV presenters, artists, and of course the CHP chairman and MPs made plenty of calls for the police to stop the violence, but not once said that there was no room for violence, and that since the Gezi Park problem had been solved they should end their protests. On the contrary, they went with bellows to every fire. They openly endorsed and supported the protesters' violence.

In organized business, everyone played the role that fell to them. The news Yeni Şafak published yesterday reminds us once more, unfortunately, that before the sociology of the event we need to focus on these organizations. This news reveals that we are facing a plan similar to the coup planned in 2004. Although even if we had never known this news we had already understood the plan by looking at the actors exposed like iodine, knowing is undoubtedly something else.