The problem of "crowds getting out of control"

What is the role and responsibility of the HDP in the urban terror that was whipped up under the pretext of Kobani, which led to the deaths of nearly 40 people and the destruction of hundreds of public and private buildings? In the course of events unfolding before everyone's eyes, we all heard and saw that, just before the events began, the HDP called on the people to rise up for Kobani, and incited them with harsh rhetoric, to say the least.

We also saw that at every stage of the events, in the arson and destruction, HDP cadres played the leading role. When HDP officials in the cities said, "If Kobani cannot sleep, no one here will sleep tonight," an attempt was made to create a full-blown war atmosphere in all the cities.

Libraries, museums, orphanages, student dormitories, schools, and the workplaces and homes of innocent civilians were burned and looted, some with people inside. Many cases of theft occurred in the process.

All these vandal acts in fact showed not how strong a movement is, but only how far it can become vandalized, and how far out of control it can go once it breaks loose from its chains. No movement that goes out of control is strong. It may cause destruction, but it cannot bring about a positive change or gain, either for itself or for any movement it represents.

After mobilizing in the name of supporting Kobani, when it became clear that the resulting picture had nothing defensible in it, we saw the HDP shamelessly trying to shrug off responsibility for the affair. Selahattin Demirtaş's statements, which reduced the matter to "we did it, but what's the problem with our having done it?", stuck on him an image of shamelessness that sank him deeper just where he was floundering.

But undoubtedly, the statement "we cannot control the protesters," made after events reached this point, is in itself a declaration that deserves scrutiny. Meanwhile, it does not escape attention that these crowds, said to be uncontrollable, are cited not as a matter of complaint but as a matter of threat or "warning."

Was it not known from the start that crowds invited into the streets could not be controlled? Or were the actions these crowds carried out unexpected? You cannot convince anyone of that. This is not a community you do not know. As Altan Tan rightly noted, this community's style of action, style of speech and style of communication are by now well known.

It is a community that has ceased, or been made to cease, to be a body that communicates by talking. And do not even try to invite anyone to forced empathy by saying "let us try to understand this community, let us look at what they have been through." There is, plainly, a drilling and discipline under your control that teaches, instills and incites in this community a vandal language, other than speaking like human beings.

This drilling and discipline sees a potential for blackmail and a trump card in the sight of "crowds out of control." It is a drilling and discipline based on poisoning very young children by putting stones and Molotov cocktails in their hands and parading them through the peaks of the pleasure of play.

True, from the moment you put that weapon, that Molotov cocktail, even that stone, in the hands of those children, those children also slip out of your control. This is not a subject too complex for social psychology to understand and explain. After wandering at those peaks for a while, that child will, when told to, kill even his mother and father.

Indeed, Pol Pot, the communist leader of Cambodia in the seventies, as a primary school teacher formed his first army by organizing units from his own pupils, all under 15, and in the first stage had them kill their parents to prove absolute loyalty to the revolution. For a long time, BDP circles reaped serious gains for these poisonous training processes through the stereotype of the "stone-throwing children." At the point we have reached today, it is clear that the most important source of these "uncontrollable crowds" is nothing other than an ugly form of child abuse.

Ha, you truly cannot prevent the weapon you give to children of that age from taking you captive too.

The threat in the statement "We are the last generation you can talk to; you will not be able to talk to the generation coming after us" was preparing and motivating just such an army of children in the background. But this motivation was also preparing a radicalism that would take its own author captive and destroy his control completely.

Today the HDP may indeed have fallen into a state of being unable to control its own crowds, but this does not absolve it of responsibility for the terror, vandalism, looting and savagery these crowds have produced.

This savagery deliberately took 40 lives. Among them was 16-year-old Yasin Börü, who was savagely murdered by the lynching of those whipped-up crowds while distributing sacrificial meat, thrown from a roof, stabbed and having his head crushed.

No positive value can come from a politics that produces the monsters of the savagery inflicted on Yasin, one of those innocent babes.

Let no one try to threaten or blackmail by relying on the violence produced by this uncontrolled power. For uncontrolled power is not power; it is a calamity in itself.