Chasing every wink with the word "revolution"

The Gezi Park events undoubtedly contain dimensions that need to be evaluated from every angle. The politics of the future will have to take into account the language of the social demands that emerged with this event and the sociology of the social segments that took part in these movements. Taking this into account, studying the nature of these stirrings, is not something that only an innocent politics that will respond to the demands of new social generations will do or is doing. Sociology or political science is not knowledge open only to people burning with a passion to serve society.

It is worth remembering at precisely this stage that knowledge is not always enlightening, and that being a slave to one's own ego is also a means of establishing power over others.

Most of those who say that lessons must be drawn from Gezi Park, and in particular that the government must draw lessons, do not even see that they themselves have a heap of lessons to draw from it first of all. Yet when this event is examined in all its dimensions, every stage of it is full of scenes of admonition for them.

Those who gathered exclusively around the park in the Gezi Park incident and found a way to express their purposes in this place draw from the whole incident the conclusion of "the wink of a small-scale revolution" and put on airs about it, but they express their discomfort that their actions are described as violence and vandalism.

Yet the reason the Gezi actions resonated so much, were heard around the world and occupied such a place on the agenda of the whole country is none other than precisely those images of violence. Without the images of more than a hundred municipal buses, nearly 300 private vehicles and hundreds of workplaces destroyed, some 1,000 people, half of them police, injured, and the place turned into a battlefield, everyone can guess that the demands expressed around Gezi Park would have remained at the level of the routine demands of civil society. Had it remained so, we would not have heard so many analyses on Generation Y youth, on participation in urban politics, or on the politics of lifestyles.

Therefore, the Gezi Park actions preferred violence as a means of making their voices heard from the very beginning. From the very beginning no effort was made to distance themselves from vandalism. Because the Gezi Park action felt that it owed its existence, its voice and its power to that violence, and it was not unjustified in this. That is why, while constantly bearing down on the disproportionate violence of the police, not once was a word of criticism uttered about the violent demonstrations against the police, which are the routine form of action of organizations that are obviously entangled with terror.

The violence of the police keeps the incident on the agenda and makes it heard around the world, but one also has to work to trigger the violence of the police. Putting forward a discourse of victimhood because of police violence is, in a word, a fraud, but a fraud needed in order to get the targeted result in this business. Of course, the sad part is that it is inevitable for this fraud, tactically adopted on the path of "revolution," to become a character trait.

The performance these days of old-guard leftists, whose dreams of a revolution that stuck in their craw have begun to stir on the occasion of the Gezi Park actions, is also an instructive spectacle in its own right. It is clear that they have no foresight about the cost of this movement and where it is leading. Their praise and eulogies for the participation of young people in the Gezi actions are of a kind that will be the subject of a psychoanalytic study rather than of a political debate. Frankly, it appears that the unrealized goals about the world of the leftist generations of the sixties, seventies and eighties are being loaded, in their final years, onto the generation of the 90s, which is idealized far too much.

Yet Alain Badiou, one of the world-famous French Communists, to whom they themselves turned to seek support, rightly warns them, while there is still time:

"We, the intellectuals and militants of France and of the other countries of the imperialist West, ask you to avoid the emergence of a situation similar to ours. We say to you, our dear Turkish friends: the greatest favor you can do us is to prove that this uprising of yours is taking you somewhere different from where we are, that is, to create a situation that will remain impossible for our old, sick countries, which are decaying materially and intellectually today." (www.yarinhaber.net)

What do you say: do the experience and guidance of old-guard leftists, who time and again have been the plaything of coup-makers and have paved the way for the junta members, seem sufficient today to save the young people they applaud in the streets from being dragged into a different adventure?

Badiou also does not neglect to ask the Gezi Park protesters the following questions:

"Do they want to overthrow the capitalist oligarchy that, as seen in France and as may be repeated, is also served by anti-religious segments in Turkey? Or do they want to live as the middle class lives in the core Western countries? Is the movement guided by the idea of social equality and freedom? Or is it a desire to create an established middle class, which is the basic support of a Western-style 'democracy' and is entirely bound to the authority of capital?"

These questions must in the end remind one, from some angle, of the "interest lobby." That the alliance Gezi Park actions ultimately attracted has, first and foremost, Turkey's interest champions is not merely a claim of Prime Minister Erdoğan; the picture they themselves have provided also says so.