The tragedy of the left

The Ergenekon case has been concluded at the first-instance court level and many people received various sentences in response to the charges attributed to them. We said from the start that the lightness or heaviness of the sentences does not matter beyond a certain point. There is no point in debating this case over the fact that this or that defendant received this or that much of a sentence. This serves only to divert us from the essence of the matter. What matters is that those in Turkey who regard themselves as above the law and who have an unnamed immunity without any legal basis have been touched, have been tried, and that this trial has been brought to a conclusion. What is being tried is not this or that name but a mentality, a culture.

When the subject is the trial of a tradition of coups, the verdict reached by the court on 5 August should not be seen as the one and final verdict. Cases that began later, such as Balyoz, 28 Şubat, the unsolved murders, the Musa Anter murder and 12 Eylül, are also links of a trial in this concept. In each of these cases the same kind of things were done. In the end, these cases have made it possible to bring before the law an authoritarian and totalitarian state elite in Turkey that regards itself as above the people, the law and everything.

When the subject is the trial of a mentality and a culture, the claim that too many people are being tried also becomes laughable. Looked at from this side, the number of people tried in the Ergenekon case alone is only 275, and for a case of this scale the number of defendants is not at all large.

In the first phase of the case, regarding the weapons found buried in the ground, the question "will a coup be made with these?" was often asked mockingly and flippantly. Since it was repeated after the verdict, let us repeat the answer too: those weapons are enough for not 1 but 10 coups. Because those weapons are surely not the ammunition the putschists would need to control the country. On the contrary, their function is nothing more than being a trigger to set the coup mechanism in motion. That being so, sometimes even a single pistol can be enough to do that job. Indeed, what was used in the Council of State murder was, after all, a pistol, yet it managed to change the atmosphere of the whole country in an instant.

After all, with how many weapons, how many bullets did they carry out the 28 Şubat coup? Or the 27 Mayıs or the 9/12 Mart coups? Making a coup is a matter of art and culture, and evidently what our people do best. Just look at Egypt's putschists: they clearly set about it by imitating ours, and smeared it all over their faces. They have regretted bitterly having made the coup.

With Ergenekon a mentality, a culture was tried, and perhaps some have still not come to realize it, but Susurluk was included in this trial. That Susurluk, in which the deep state was caught red-handed and which suddenly aroused in people the feeling that "nothing will ever be the same again." Yet before long everything had become worse than before and we had entered a new dark period, with all its unsolved murders and coup processes. Yet whatever was left as a lingering regret and could not be touched in that case process was touched in the Ergenekon case process. Colonels and Generals who did not even come to give information to the TBMM commission in that process, though even more powerful, were brought before the court, tried and sentenced.

Yet the oddest aspect of the matter is that those who, in the name of settling accounts with the authoritarian, coup-making, dirty state in Turkey because of Susurluk, organized "one minute of darkness" and pots-and-pans actions were not very pleased with this process.

Today the same circles bang their pots and pans against the Erdoğan government that illuminated the darkest form of the Susurluk darkness. That Erdoğan who, since the hour he came to power, has taken democratization steps that even the most radical form of the left could not have imagined, has pushed the state back against the individual and society as far as possible, and, while in power, has opposed the fascistic state as a politician. If he had done nothing else, he has made possible the trial of Ergenekon, which reached even beyond Susurluk, and of the mentality and practices behind it. It is meaningful that while doing all this, that is, while empowering the individual and society more against the state, the leftist circles' feelings of revolt have stirred even more, let alone their giving support to this process.

Hilal Kaplan expressed it very nicely in yesterday's column: in so many good things that have been realized in Turkey even from the standpoint of leftist ideals, "in NONE of them do you most liberal-rather leftist-very oppositional ones have the slightest contribution."

In fact even this shame would be enough for the left, but that all the political and non-political versions of the left do not see where their obsessive production of anti-Erdoğan sentiment has left them is a sign of an entirely different tragedy for them. The tragedy of the left is in fact much deeper and can bear much more being said. The tragedy begins with a political habitus as useless and hopeless as opposition for the sake of opposition. It continues with being blind and deaf to the rapid transformation of a community formed of those who regard themselves as the only worthy actors of history and revolution into a privileged-class ideology. It reaches its tragic end when the revolutionism whose merit it has lost, once it comes from someone else, sets that chronic habitus in motion with its most archaic forms of jealousy and denial.

In the future it will also be asked, while in Turkey the coup-making, unsolved-murder-committing, authoritarian, totalitarian state was being pushed back with a revolutionary performance under the leadership of Prime Minister Erdoğan, what was the left doing. Will it be possible to recount with pride that the left was putting up a reactionary resistance at that time?