THE MIRROR OF ILLUSION SMASHED
By Zafer Yoruk
Kurdish Globe
sp?id=DC5B8FC3C6703485EC2477144F52B027
March 5 2008
Iraq
There will be a lot to be said on the reasons, results and the
consequences of the recent Turkish incursion in Kurdistan, most of
which will unfold in time.
The Turkish Chief of Staff, when stating that the decision to retreat
was not taken under the US pressure but it was the result of a
"military evaluation", effectively admits the first defeat of the
Turkish army in a battle since the First World War. It can be justly
foreseen that the immediate consequence of this will be another
boost in the aggressive nationalist hysteria in Turkey as a first
reflex to suture the wound inflicted upon the national pride. It is
also legitimate to argue that as physical violence cannot represent
anything more than a weakness, nothing can be achieved through blood
or war. However, this defeat on the battleground can lead to some
lessons, that may prevent the repetition of war and the blood that
has been spilt may eventually worth something. In order to argue
this optimistic assertion, an outline of the trajectory of the recent
escalation of the Turkish nationalist hysteria is necessary.
Between 1984 and 1999, an undeclared war against the revival of
Kurdish identity had been carried out by the Turkish political
establishment. However, the Turkish discourse during this war, as
represented by the mainstream media, was based on a persistent denial
of war. Since the Kurds did not exist according to the Turkish State,
there could have been no war at all. Instead of a "national war"
mobilisation, official circles were very careful to present the
Kurdish conflict as a temporary episode of breached state security.
PKK in particular and the Kurdish movement in general were never
portrayed as menacing the Turkish nation’s integrity; instead, they
were systematically downplayed as "a handful of isolated terrorists".
As Leonard Cohen’s lyrics go, a war immediately broke out "between
those who say there is a war and those who say there isn’t". This
discourse on war, that is, "no war", continued until Ocalan’s capture
in 1999. During this "no war", more than 30,000, mostly Kurdish
civilians were killed, tens of thousands of Kurdish villages were
destroyed and more than three million Kurdish people were forcibly
displaced. The involvement of the Turkish media in this "no war"
was not so much different from that of the Turkish jet pilots, death
squads or ultranationalist-Mafioso gangs. Silence and disinformation
were the most favoured media tactics. A comparison is probably
possible with France during the Algerian War. In the early 1960s,
when the North African minority of Paris rioted in protest of the
‘dirty war’ in Algeria, Jean Paul Sartre was screaming: "corpses are
floating in the River Seine; look in the militant press if you want
to see the truth." In the 1990s, there was a small militant press in
Turkey who tried to report the view from the other side. But this
press has been under systematic persecution: their members were
systematically murdered or convicted to lengthy prison sentences
for fabricated charges and harassed on a daily base by the Turkish
police and gendarmes. When the judicial/political/economic pressure
on the distribution of the products of this press fell short, the
State would not hesitate to bomb their central offices, as in 1994.
In contrast, since 2003, when the Turkish Parliament effectively voted
the country away from the possible spoils of the US invasion of Iraq,
the media tactics have shifted to the opposite, to an exaggeration
of "war". The PKK has been systematically presented as a far larger
military threat than reality. So, ironically, once again a war broke
out "between those who say there is a war and those who say there
isn’t", but the sides of each assertion have radically shifted to the
opposite. Although at the outset of this nationalist upheaval there
was no significant military conflict going on inside the country,
it didn’t take long for the agitated Turkish psyche to be confronted
with the PKK violence.
It is in this environment that a storm of popular nationalist hysteria
rapidly picked up to challenge the earlier (1999-2003) climate of
democratic moderation regarding the Kurdish question. By 2005, a total
climate change had completed, consising of strong anti-American and
anti-Kurdish sentiments pumped up by various conspiracy theories and
exaggerated nationalist discourse. The spirit of the times was rather
embarrassingly symbolised with Hitler’s Mein Kamph along with a book
titled Crazy Turks becoming a best-seller around the country. Another
popular cultural product was a movie titled Valley of the Wolves Iraq
which broke Turkish movie industry’s box-office records of all times
with more than four million viewers.
The movie narrates the adventures of Turkish secret agents, who
enter Northern Iraq and kill dozens of Kurds before assassinating the
commander of the US forces in Iraq. With this theoretical/ideological
preparation at hand, the Turkish public soon entered into a psychology
of war, with lynch attempts around the country on democrats and
Kurdish political activists and intellectuals. Among numerous
similar incidents, the attack on the Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk by a
nationalist lynch mob during his trial for "degrading Turkishness",
and the murder of the Armenian journalist Hirant Dink received
extensive international coverage.
It is this hysteria, or what the Kurdish psychiatrist Dr. Isik
Iscanli diagnosed as "national narcissism", which has been ignited
to its limits with the recent cross-border attempt of the Turkish
troops. She also interprets the systematic abuse of Kurdish identity
by the media and public as perverted attempts to satisfy a built-in
sadistic drive. ( Ýnterview with Dr. Iscanli, Roj TV, 1 March 2008.)
If the nationalist hysteria blended with the psychic mechanisms of
perversion, sado-masochism and narcissism was carried to its limits
with the recent military conflict, then it is impossible for the
consequences of this conflict to trigger any further nationalist
escalation, but they could well be presenting the possibility of a
therapeutic process. As in any therapy, the first thing to understand
is what we are facing, and I think Iscanli’s diagnosis of "national
narcissism" can provide us with fertile grounds.
Professor Murat Belge wrote about a decade ago that the Turks
were the only nation that loved rather too much to try to convince
each other about the virtues of their nation through nationalist
propaganda. This feature, he related to the fact that the Turks have
no outside audience but themselves. In fact, the lack of an outside
object to project the libidinal energy lies at the foundation of the
definition of narcissism. When the boundaries between self and the
other become ambiguous in favour of the self, a superficial inflation
of the ego leading to a belief of omnipotence becomes inevitable. In
fact, this whole process of narcissism originates from the weakness
of the ego, as an attempt to cover over the reality of the fixation
of the self-formation or identity-building process at a primitive
stage. Therefore, any insight into Turkish "national narcissism"
is bound to reveal the problem of premature identity.
Narcissism is defined by Sigmund Freud as an erotic attachment to a
pathologically weak but artificially overinflated ego, which, when
forced to its limits of abnormality, can lay the premises for the
development of various forms of psychosis, including megalomania,
schizoid paranoia, extreme depression, schizophrenia, etc. Moreover,
according to the findings of the psychoanalytic thinking, the
artificial overinflation of the ego always requires the existence
of a mirror in which the ego projects and perceives a far larger
image of its real self. Ironically, the mirror plays an essential
role not only in the emergence of narcissism but also in the cure
of this abnormality. We know this since Freud’s case study of a 19
year old patient, who persistently resisted therapy until that moment
when she smashed all the panes of glass in a door. Freud wrote down,
after this incident, that "a cure has become possible". Now, without
going into detail, it is necessary to note down that the glass door
obviously symbolises a mirror that needs to be smashed for a cure to
become possible, since it is in this mirror where the narcissistic
subject has managed to reproduce her megalomaniac image.
Consequently, in case of "national narcissism", it becomes necessary
to identify what plays the role of this narcissistic mirror. All the
indicators point to the direction of the suffering of the Kurdish
people in Turkey, when one looks for the illusionary mirror of
narcissism of the Turkish psyche. If so, then 29 February 2008 is
the moment when this mirror was finally smashed, and "a cure has
become possible".
It is precisely due to the existence or not of this mirror that the
democrats of Turkey view the struggle for the Kurdish rights and the
struggle for a democratic Turkey as one and the same thing. The future
of Turkey will be determined by the fate of the Kurdish question and
for this reason their struggle is of special importance for all the
progressive people in Turkey. Moreover, the Kurds of Turkey constitute
not only the most oppressed (here, I’m not merely referring to state
violence but the systematic denial of identity, culture and language
through the 20th Century by the Turkish political establishment) but
also the largest portion in one country of the Kurdish people in the
world. Consequently, the fate of the Kurdish struggle in Turkey will
also determine to a large extent the fate of the Kurdish people all
around the world.
After this emphasis on the importance of the Kurdish struggle in
Turkey, some criticism and lessons for the future can be derived.
Firstly, it should be emphasised again and again that for the second
time in modern Turkish history, Kurdish political movement has gained
parliamentary representation in July 2007 elections. Everybody knows
the famous saying, "War is a continuation of politics with different
means". Now, the opposite of this statement must also be true,
that is, "Politics is the continuation of war with peaceful means",
and this is the precise description of the current situation of the
Kurdish question in Turkey. The Kurds have fought a prolonged war
against the policies of denial and violent exclusion of the Turkish
state, and it is, along with a number of other factors, this war,
this violent and painful confrontation with consequences of immense
suffering, that successfully opened the current space of political
representation. DTP (Democratic Society Party) deputies have now the
historical mission to advance this war by peaceful means. Certainly
we cannot load the whole burden on the Kurdish deputies, who are
after all only the tip of that gigantic iceberg called the Kurdish
political will in Turkey. It is therefore the task of Turkey’s Kurdish
movement as a whole to reorganize and reorient themselves according
to the needs of this decisive – and long due at least since 1999 –
transition from the era of what Gramsci called the ‘war of manoeuvre’
dominated by the military conflict to the era of the ‘war of position’,
that is, of political struggle.
One major difficulty in such reorientation is that for some time, there
has been a war within the Turkish political establishment between the
Kemalist and anti-Kemalist elements. This war has escalated during the
recent months around a dispute on the election of the new president. It
looks in the first glance as if the anti-Kemalist bloc has won an
important victory in the July elections and the subsequent election
of the first Islamist President of the Turkish Republic, and that
they are on their way to important constitutional-structural reforms,
which can lead to the elimination of the Kemalist establishment for
good. This, however, is only the surface and I’m afraid that Kemalists
will not go without a bang.
They have proved to be capable of turning the tables in so many
coups-d’Etat, and a similar dirty resistance is imminent by all
criteria. Looking at the developments, including the most recent
attempt to invade Northern Iraq, it will not be difficult to derive
that today, the Kurdish movement is unfortunately trapped in the midst
of this power struggle. I expect similar provocations by the Kemalist
military-bureaucratic elite to escalate in the near future and the
Kurds of Turkey should find a way out of their current location as
the object (and the scapegoat/excuse) of this dangerous conspiracy. It
seems to be impossible to indicate any way out except for emphasising
the significance of what I have already suggested above, that is,
the necessity of a clear-cut transition in political orientation
from ‘war of manoeuvre’ (military conflict) to ‘war of position’
(political struggle).
Thus far is for the Kurdish movement but most of the burden is once
again on the Turkish intelligentsia. In a situation where heavy
wounds have been inflicted by the Kurdish resistance on both poles
of the Turkish national identity or, to be more precise, to the
Turkish oligarchy, including the pseudo democratic Islamists and the
Kemalists alike, the democrats of Turkey have no choice but to seize
the moment. We need to make clear one thing that the question here is
for the people of Turkey to give up for good the completely immoral
(and politically disastrous) choice that they relied on for more
than a century, following its formulation by one of the founders of
racist Turkish nationalism, Omer Seyfettin as follows: ‘the nations
who do not oppress the others are bound to be oppressed’. It is time
to opt for its ethical opposite, that is the great internationalist
Karl Marx’s motto: ‘a people oppressing another people cannot be free’.
This is primarily an ethical choice with grave political
consequences. For instance, history has so far proved time and again
the correctness of Marx over the types of Seyfettin around the world,
and therefore the superiority of the internationalist argument over
the nationalist one. Turkey is no exception. So far, people of Turkey
only manufactured their own chains by participating in the elimination,
exclusion and oppression of other people. And they can only be free
after the freedom of the peoples that they currently oppress. In
short, the real, long-term, political and ethical interests of the
people of Turkey lie in siding with the Kurdish self-determination
and this is a matter of democracy, human rights and ethics.
What I am suggesting to the Turks and Kurds alike can be wrapped up
in a simple phrase: Let’s smash this mirror of illusion! Either of us
have nothing to lose but our chains since this is the only way ahead
for the democratisation of Turkey and the liberation of the Kurdish
people one and the same time. A lot of glass has been smashed by the
29 February 2008, hundreds of young people from the Turkish and the
Kurdish sides have sacrificed their bodies for something that their
souls believed in deep down: the fraternity of the Kurdish and the
Turkish people.
–Boundary_(ID_yL0IINGrRKtGfJGa+JKNsA)–
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