Onion symbolism and freedom

The handover ceremony of the TCG Anadolu, which is Turkey's largest warship and is also described as the world's first UCAV ship, to the Naval Forces Command was held last week with the participation of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Among the many other openings made in recent years and accelerating within the last month, it seems like an ordinary event. TOGG has come off the production line and begun to be delivered to its buyers.

The President carries out another opening every day at some point in the country. None of these investments are ones that were begun recently and rushed to completion in the run-up to the election; they are the fruits of a twenty-year investment environment that happen to coincide with today.

Turkey is freeing itself from the chains of all the impossibilities, restrictions, learned or real helplessness and dependencies that have constrained it; it is being liberated and flourishing. All these openings are the clearest picture of this.

In contrast, on the very day of these openings, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu had a message that was broadcast on screens with an onion in his hand: None of these things are edible, Turkey has come to need a dry onion. If Erdoğan stays in office, the onion that is 30 liras today will go up to 100 liras.

Of course it is a language of meaningless prophecy and intimidation, with no source. How would he know what an onion costs, or the role of the game being played on the onion today, of market speculation? Meanwhile, on the other side, we are also watching the reports on the stocks that big brokers have laid in to raise the price of onions, and on how onions and other vegetables, which actually cost far, far less in the field, have been turned precisely at the height of the election season into material for a perception operation.

In other reports we watched how tons of dry onions were destroyed solely to cause this sensation, and this is not the first time, either. A few years ago, before an election as well, a similar incident took place. It is understood that in Turkey there is no onion shortage; there is a shortage of conscience, of reason and of morality. Otherwise God has given this country onions, garlic and lentils enough for its people, but merchants and politicians whose eyes know no satiety stomp all over the provision that God, by His grace and generosity, has given in abundance.

That the vegetable chosen for such perceptions is the dry onion is no coincidence. The onion has always had a strong symbolic power throughout history. Today too, the onion represents the staple food of the poor man. In agriculture, that a product the field yields in abundance should be expensive is a serious contradiction. A product that can be grown so easily and that yields so abundantly is not expected to be expensive. In fact, at a certain level of economic prosperity, it is a product whose consumption and importance diminish.

However, for it to be expensive, there must be some serious fishy business going on, a special intervention is required. Those who turn the onion into political material at such times, without realizing it, confess their theft in this immoral intervention.

Onion symbolism in fact appears also in the Holy Qur'an, which we read a great deal in these days because of Ramadan. You know how the Children of Israel, enslaved by Pharaoh, under oppression and persecution, were brought to their freedom by Moses after a long and exhausting process.

Moses, as the result of a journey full of miracles, takes his people across the Red Sea as well and saves them from Pharaoh's last-minute pursuit. Their lives are saved and, more importantly, they have attained their freedom. That is, for the rest of their lives, the Pharaonic tyranny will not hold absolute dominion over their bodies and over their wills. They will build a future for themselves and for their children as they wish.

Freedom has been attained, the most valuable virtue, to be lived to the full, to be savored, and to make one feel human dignity. Instead of appreciating its value and expressing gratitude, the Children of Israel do not stop making whims at Moses that they had never made before. First they ask what they will do in these mountains without water or food. A miracle is again bestowed on them: manna and salwa (quail) rain from the sky. After living for a long time, so to speak, with bread at hand, water from the lake and a free life, after a while they start to grumble: "Are we going to eat these all the time? Is there nothing else, what about onions, garlic, lentils?"

Here, in that environment of freedom provided for them under Moses's leadership, and moreover in the face of foods of the highest quality, perhaps peculiar to upper-class people, the demand for onions is again no coincidence. The onion is an expression of nostalgia, a longing for the past, that so often haunts those who have become accustomed to a certain comfort and live it as routine. The past, that is, the times of slavery they lived with all its oppression and tyranny under Pharaonic tyranny, which had stripped them of their character, split them into fragmentary groups and set them against one another, and thereby maintained its own rule.

Is there anything to be missed about those times? For a person in his right mind there is not. Especially for one who knows the value of freedom, there is nothing in such a longing that can be explained by reason and logic. But psychology, the self, works in a very different way. It gets bored and wants change. And the change it wants is not something further along, better, a change with a broader horizon than the present situation. It is reaction toward the past. A taking refuge in the past that contained slavery, in the past that contained tyranny, oppression, being disregarded.

Let it not be misunderstood. The onion is by no means an unimportant subject. Its importance also carries a symbolic meaning that goes back historically all the way to the time of Moses.

But those who put forward the onion, as throughout history, always at the same time put forward the worse against the better. And this is a matter that completes onion symbolism. Just as it is said in the Qur'an: "Do you want to exchange the superior for the inferior? Then fall upon that city and encamp there, and then what you want will surely be yours."

Unfortunately, in politics populism often opens a very broad field to the illusions of being able to present the better to people as if it were the worse, and the worse as if it were the better.

People who have been granted freedom can, from within that environment of freedom, forget all the bad, destructive, humiliating sides of the days when they were slaves, and somehow miss certain moments.

This has, of course, its own distinct psychology, its own distinct state of mind. Not everyone can bear freedom, and blessings do not always and in everyone lead to gratitude.

Freedom wearies some, spoils others, drives still others to excess, and the one who has the consciousness and character of humanity it makes roar, exult and give thanks to his Lord.