The Fault in our Symbols: Turkish Culture Wars in Context
In the 1930’s, the Turkish state usurped the Surp Agop cemetery in Istanbul. Tombstones from the cemetery were used to construct the National radio station headquarters and the stairs for the famous Gezi park. Why is this act of violence forgotten? Why does symbolic oppression often take precedence over real violence and injustice?
I have become cautious about building arguments over notions like "western media", "globalism" or "orientalism". Words like these have turned into worn-out symbols on the tongues of nutty conspiracy theorists and political administrations who want to hide their own atrocities behind those committed by the global North. In Turkey, it has always been commonplace to claim collective victimhood in relation to the first world. While a sense of victimhood is certainly justifiable, it often comes with a tendency to erase Turkey's own violence against ethnic minorities. This perverse understanding of reality brings with it equally absurd political performances.
Last year during a diplomatic row with the Netherlands, enthusiastic government party cadres took to stabbing oranges as a form of protest. The hot new trend with patriotic youths this year is to smash their iPhones as an act of defiance against US trade sanctions. These fiery, yet ultimately ineffective outbursts of rage bring to mind scenes of Alex Jones ripping his shirt while raving about gay frogs.
The staged fanaticism displayed by the likes of Alex Jones and AKP apparatchiks reflects the enthusiasm of their opponents to condescend and ridicule them. Calling Erdogan a Sultan or incessantly pointing out Trump's similarity to a cheeto, is the liberal left's own way of expressing impotent rage. US NGO Freedom House's decision to downgrade Turkey's "freedom status" from "partly free" to "not free", is another act in the same theatrical performance. Turkey had a stellar rating back in 2011 when 34 people, 17 of them children were killed by aerial bombardment in Roboski. The ratings have barely moved; Turkey held onto its "part free" status when violence against Kurdish civilians peaked after the 2015 elections. It turns out we have suddenly become "not free" when relationships with the US soured abruptly this year. The problem with organisations like Freedom House is that their benchmark for evaluation has less to do with any genuine concern regarding human rights, and more with that country's friendliness to the US. This also explains why Israel is rated as "free". This duplicity serves as ammunition to jingoistic political regimes. Words like "freedom" become the property of arrogant Westerners; the rest of us are only allowed to borrow it with strict conditions.
We have grown accustomed to hearing that the world has become increasingly polarised. Depending on your geographical or ideological position you may know this polarisation as populist/democratic, religious/secular, right/ left, conservative/liberal. Each one of these frameworks sounds hollow and meaningless. This is not only because the words are emptied of their meaning to be used for propaganda purposes, but also because the symbols and characters that are associated with ideologies can swap at a nauseating speed. The present ideological muddle hasn't emerged overnight with the creation of Facebook. The inability of Western thought to understand the world as anything other than an eternal fight between good and evil is present everywhere from St Augustine's theology, to cold war ideologies. All human experience which exists outside this binary is hoovered in by think tanks and NGOs to be crushed until it is made digestible.
Power of Symbols
In 2010 I was living in Taiwan and working on my PhD thesis about sexualised racism among the white "expat" community. I was invited to give a talk to a small discussion group composed almost entirely of Europeans. One of the pivotal aspects of the talk was about the expatriate tendency to project gender roles on locals through a reductive reading of symbols. This happened every time they saw a Taiwanese man carrying his girlfriend's handbag. The calculation is simple: a handbag is 'universally' considered a woman's item. Femininity is the opposite of masculinity. Thus, if a man is carrying a handbag you subtract a certain amount of points from his manliness. And thus, compliance with gender norms can be measured just like freedom. Ultimately, this is nothing other than being blinded by symbols. Depending on the context, a man carrying his girlfriend's bag can also be read as imposing patriarchal control. I argued that the expatriate tendency to project racialised femininity is both homophobic and racist. My accusation created ripples of grumbling across the room. After my talk was finished, some German guy asked me my opinion about Turkish women wearing the veil...
Are Taiwanese men emasculated by handbags? Are Turkish women oppressed by headscarves? This bewildering fixation with symbols is not the product of ignorance, endemic to isolated communities of expatriates. On the contrary, they are enabled by ideological frameworks constructed by prestigious institutions. Take for example, the revered Marxist philosopher Adorno. He was so virulently against jazz music that his essays read like Rudolf Hess writing for the Pitchfork magazine:
The aim of jazz is the mechanical reproduction of a regressive moment, a castration symbolism. 'Give up your masculinity, let yourself be castrated,' the eunuchlike sound of the jazz band both mocks and proclaims, 'and you will be rewarded, accepted into a fraternity which shares the mystery of impotence with you, a mystery revealed at the moment of the initiation rite.
Adorno's bizarre musings were part of an intellectual fashion taking over Europe and the US in the 1960s. This generation of thinkers came up with the brilliant idea of mixing Marx with Freud and creating a tepid cocktail. While the rest of the world was still reeling from the destruction of colonialism and trying to not get obliterated by cold war related proxy wars or military coups, the cream and crust of Western philosophy were getting giddy over combining the ideas of two dead white dudes and calling it a "revolution".
Venturing too deep into their philosophical contortions of is a torturous process. These new Marxists were obsessed with the symbolism of emerging popular culture because they thought it was a distraction from revolutionary enlightenment. They interpreted consumer culture as a new form of domination called 'hegemony'. This form of domination is enabled by the development of modern mass communication and it relies on the volition of the dominated. This anti-consumerist ideology has produced it's own cliché symbolism: rodents with suits running on threadmills, zombies with mobile phones, the movie Fight Club and Pink Floyd's entire body of work.
Although there is much to be said about how advanced capitalist societies destroy the human soul, their suffering is largely symbolic. The misery they inflict to sustain their appetite is far more urgent. The Marxist fixation with hegemony is like Vietnam war movies. These movies invariably centre on the traumas of US veterans and turn the victims of their violence into a mere background image.
There is an almost conspiratorial logic to the notion of hegemony. Zizek's entire corpus of work repeats one idea ad nauseam: power is most effective when it is invisible, we are most oppressed when we think we are free. This thinking typifies the alt-right. Liberal symbols like multiculturalism and feminism are placed at the core of an evil plot to destroy white masculinity. The intellectual dark web is inhabited by lonely men who think that being placed in the friend zone is more painful than systematic misogyny and racism. This is why the Men's Rights movement calls itself "the red pill". These people genuinely believe that they are living in a "post-feminist" world where women have achieved unquestionable hegemony.
The obsession with invisible oppression and symbolic victimhood is a core theme in Turkish politics also. Secular left and religious right dominate the centre of social life. While it is true that both sides victimise each other at times, the suffering they cause to others is on a wholly different nature and scale. Nothing illustrates this better than the 2013 unrest of Gezi Park.
What's in a Square?
In the 1930's Istanbul looked very different. The vast area which stretches from behind Gezi park to Harbiye used to be an Armenian cemetery. In place of the park itself and the adjacent Taksim square, stood a magnificent building which was originally built in 1806 by reformist sultan Selim III as an artillery barracks. The area was first infused with political meaning during the 31 March incident in 1909. This period marks a constant seesawing between loyalists who support sultan Abdulhamid II and constitutionalists organised around the Party of Union and progress. Taksim happened to be where the loyalist troops were stationed. The Armenian cemetery had also changed political meaning. The plot was given to the Armenian community in 1560 by Suleiman the Magnificent, upon the request of his personal cook Manuk Karaseferyan. Karaseferyan had saved the Sultan's life by refusing to participate in an assassination plot. Relations between Muslims and Armenians deteriorated over centuries. By the 19th century, Armenians were perceived as traitors. `This mistrust culminated in the genocide of 1915.
When the Republic was founded in 1923, both the barracks and the cemetery had become symbols of the past which had to be destroyed. The young Republic had a uniqe fixation with symbols and appearances. The parliament passed a "hat law" to ban the use of the fez. The "modern" Latin alphabet was adopted, which has made subsequent generations dependent on intermediaries to interpret their history. The single party regime even forced mosques to read their call to prayer in Turkish. The first decision taken by the democratically elected government in 1950 was to reverse this ruling. Most amusingly, a 1931 report submitted to the US State department, notes that Atatürk forced his private guard regiment to play tennis at regular intervals. During this period, the barracks had long fallen out of military use. For a while, it served as an interesting public space with occasional circus performances. There is even a fascinating picture of a great white shark that was caught in the Marmara sea being exhibited to the public, with men and women of all ages gawking at the defeated carcass. The place later served as a football stadium and hosted national games.
French urban planner Henri Prost came to Istanbul in 1936 and he seized on the winds of change to completely knock down the Armenian cemetery and the Taksim barracks. Instead, he offered a new "modern" vision of Istanbul with an enormous park. The construction started during the second world war when the Turkish economy was already under heavy strain. Tombstones from the cemetery were torn down to make the stairs of Gezi park. The crowning jewel of Istanbul's modern face is not only built over the graves of a persecuted minority but with them. Before Prost’s arrival, The barracks already served as an exciting space converted for public use. The kind that 21st century urban developers are slobbering over to create "that TATE modern vibe." The 2013 project to rebuild it as a shopping mall (of all things), had a similar motivation. The 1930's desire to mimic modernity is replaced with a desire to mimic emerging neoliberal models of urban planning.
The Gezi protests of 2013, erupted over this contentious public space. Secularists who have traditionally been sustained in power with the help of the armed forces, clashed with conservatives who have recently replaced them. During the protests, both sides were adamant that they are the true victims of state repression in Turkey, that they are the ones whose beloved monuments are in danger. Both sides forgot all about systematic state violence against religious and ethnic minorities, conducted under every single administration. We have all witnessed scenes of spontaneous nationalist outburst in the park. These outbursts often came in the company of homophobic and misogynist slogans. Each incident fell in the middle of the park like a meteorite. Those of us who did not want to partake had to crawl back home and recover before going back out again.
When the protests erupted, representatives of the Kurdish movement were engaged in talks with the government to map out a peace process. Selahattin Demirtaş, the currently imprisoned leader of the Kurdish political party (then BDP now HDP) was reluctant to give political support to the protesters. He cited his concerns about nationalist groups who had a large presence at the square. His stance was condemned by many metropolitan leftists. They felt let down by Demirtaş's prioritisation of the peace deal over Istanbul's development plan. Since 2013 the same rumours about Demirtaş "selling out" re-appear at every election to challenge his political credibility on the left. Even while he is in jail.
It would be unfair to write off Gezi protests as a xenophobic nationalist movement, after all, it has laid the foundation for collaborations that blew fresh air into society. But we must be able to come to terms with the problematic aspects of this historic moment. Disputes over petty symbols were allowed to dominate concerns about systematic violence. This is not to deny the importance of symbols, but to expose how an artificial sense of victimhood derived from symbols alone, can erase prolonged and systematic brutality. Gezi was a time and place where emblems collided with each other. In the fertile chaos of the park, we occasionally witnessed the sprouting of new and exciting symbols. But they were cut down in the name of mobilising for a "greater cause."
One political sapling which was crushed at the park was the attempt to revive the memorial for the Armenian genocide. It seems implausible now, but a monument for murdered Armenians was built in 1919, then mysteriously removed in 1922. It stood at the vast Armenian cemetery which has now been replaced with Gezi park, TRT radio headquarters and several hotels. During the protests, a group of anti-racist activists attempted to erect a symbolic monument to commemorate the original. They were promptly surrounded by hostile demonstrators and their initiative was terminated.
Symbols are powerful, they can direct public attention toward or away from real instances of violence. This quality makes things like language, architecture and fashion into crucial battlegrounds for political struggles. It is this crucial importance which makes it so easy to forget what is being signified and obsess over the signifier. The global culture wars don't look like they will end any time soon. But it is important to constantly remember what the fight is for.