At METU, a fascism whose apology is greater than its offence

I suppose there is no one left who has not heard the news about the harassment of headscarved students at ODTÜ by their own female peers. The incident, whose video I watched several times, unfortunately did not surprise me much. I say unfortunately because, as a graduate of ODTÜ myself, I have many times witnessed with a bleeding heart how oppressive and fascistic the ideological hegemony there has become.

Of course these words of mine do not mean that all, or even most, of those at ODTÜ are such. I also know that the university has a great many faculty members and students who have achieved truly significant successes in their respective fields and who are free of ideological obsessions. But not only do such people contribute nothing to the formation of that fascistic ideological hegemony there, they cannot prevent its formation either. In the end, an environment determined by organized structures whose leftism is self-proclaimed, which produce fascism as they speak, and which have become unrecognizable even to themselves in the vise of the fascism they produce, comes to prevail.

You have watched the video. Two female students, carrying banners reading "Beware, there is a cemaat," harass the headscarved students and try to drive them away. Faced with the headscarved girls' reaction of paying them no mind, other female and male students come over to join them, and the headscarved girls suddenly find themselves in almost a lynching atmosphere.

The girls carrying the banners are clearly trying to protect a territory; like spitting cats they are waging the struggle of guarding a hinterland. However much the girls they chase try to flee from trouble, they chase their own sex as far as they can chase them, with a great feeling of heroism.

It is understood that the incident was put on the internet by those who themselves supported it, which shows how sure they are of what is being done here. Once the incident was somehow presented as "harassment of the headscarved at ODTÜ," apologies greater than the offense itself began to be voiced.

What's that, sir? The reaction of our banner-carrying heroic girls and their friends applauding them was supposedly not against being headscarved but against being cemaatçi.

In fact, incidents in which, in the periods when the headscarf was banned, the older brothers and sisters of those who shoved and pushed headscarved students applauded in exactly this way were also abundant, both at ODTÜ and at other universities, but let us pass over that. This treatment itself is inhuman, fascistic and shameful. Where on earth do they get the idea that a member of a cemaat deserves it? And what is it about those who are themselves within the most disciplined and hierarchically organized structures demonizing the concept of cemaat so much?

Student rights, student solidarity, students' freedom of association and expression, and so on, let alone these. They have neither the time nor the large-heartedness to devote to such lofty values. For them, what is meant by the freedom of universities is the universities' becoming the property of their own fascistic ideologies. Nothing less will satisfy them.

They go on at great length about students organizing freely and doing politics freely, but what they really mean is nothing other than all students becoming disciples of their own fascistic cemaats. That is why, when a headscarved student asks why she is being harassed, one can say quite shamelessly, as if it were a perfectly natural right, "we do not give cemaatçis the opportunity to organize at ODTÜ."

What kind of sense of identity is this? What kind of spoiledness? What kind of shamelessness? That a generation so intolerant of others can be raised at a university like ODTÜ is, in a word, worrying. This is an authority that can offer the opportunity to organize to those it likes and withhold it from those it does not. One would think it is not a student at ODTÜ but a divine office that can decide for people what is right and what is wrong. The greatest paradox of knowledge since Socrates (of course in terms of the history of philosophy; in terms of the more ancient history of wisdom, since the Prophet Adam) is the possibility that it increases a person's ignorance further. When this learned ignorance takes the place of a wisdom whose humility grows as it learns, and which learns more and more how much it does not know, such a fascism emerges. The most important characteristic of fascism is in any case that it does not know itself, that is, its limits, that is, its place.

That enlightened despotism, in that most self-ignorant state of it, is emerging at ODTÜ is an important indication that this paradox has always repeated itself throughout history. Intolerance toward other people for one reason or another, racism, and the feeling of power and hegemony are the most archaic human feelings, and it is tragic to see that those who regard themselves as revolutionaries at ODTÜ are captive to precisely these archaic feelings.

Unfortunately this incident is not isolated at ODTÜ; there are organizational structures there that do not regard anyone's organizing but their own as a right, and even regard it as a wrong. If you wish, go and look at the notice board of a faculty: can you see the diversity that you can see at Selçuk, Erciyes, Muş, 100. Yıl or any other provincial university? Does this uniformity stem from the absence of this diversity among ODTÜ students, or from the fascistic pressures of those organized structures?

The banners about the Gezi Park protests unfurled at graduation ceremonies show, in fact, that this fascistic attitude is unfortunately considerably encouraged by the ODTÜ administration as well. More than half of the students did not at all agree with the content of those banners, but it is a fascism that, by presenting them as if they were on behalf of all students, ignores and suppresses the other students.

Moreover, the slogan this fascistic language repeats most is "no passage for fascism!" Yet the devil has approached them at their easiest spots and has already taken them captive, and they have no idea; there is no need to look for fascism elsewhere.