şehit yolmaz (or how I learned to stop worrying and love the wirklich Schranke)
It sometimes seems that Turkey never got the memo that we've all passed into the age of cynical we-know-well-but-nevertheless ideology. For the casual visitor it is most noticed by the Omniscient nom-du-pere hanging on classroom walls and ebony busts and on every piece of money (a colleague recently, while listening a litany of complaints against the Islamic AKP party who is engineering a mullocracy from the inside, decried their changing of the currency so that he was only on one side of the money). It's like wherever you go you can use him to orientate you daddy-mommy triangulation and Oedipalize yourself on the basketball court, the classroom, the movietheatre.
A few weeks ago we got out of class to go down and see a reenactment of the battle of Gallipoli (a battle I distinctly remember John Keegan dismissing as almost an afterthought) preceded by a dry talk about the world-historical importance of the battle (did you know it made possible the Russian revolution?) and how it should not be either forgotten or diminished in importance. Like a cross-eyed Turkish McCarthy with a mom-haircut, she fell short of brandishing a pitchfork against anyone trying to doubt the absolute truth of young boys carrying artillery shells on their backs during the battle. (Does this count as diminishing the battle? Am I going to get my residency permit revoked?) If that wasn't bad enough immediately afterwards was a highschool rendition of the battle complete with screaming mourners, baby-dolls being killed by shrapnel, Baglama ballads about sacrifice and the nation, and a boy who screamed all of his lines at the top of his voice (he was Ata-pus himself). It was uncomfortable and loud and I couldn't help looking around for the tell-tale sign on irony on someone's face.
Which made me think at the time of the great Analysis in the NYtimes and that there is some irony to be found after all. It is the Islamic party that has the monopoly on progress. But that is, as Mr. Oran says, because they are bourgeois and the bourgeois still have their historical role to play. We should get the Muslim brotherhood some lucrative shipping rights in the EU and then they'll be on the right side of history again.
Another ghoulish sight of nationalism I saw here was news coverage of the death of some soldiers fighting in the Mountain Turk areas and a soldier who died two days before his child was born. Needless to say its a sad event, but the news murdered the mankind of his going. They show the toothy village father telling a top-brass that he has another son to sacrifice to the nation, and the colonel politely refusing. Then the mother screams and drapes herself over the Turkish flag-draped coffin and the camera zooms in and slo-mo's a tear falling from her cheek.
One more thing, in slight reference to Krystina's post on Islamic semantics, it is interesting how there is not a tension, or at least there seems to be an intricate but settled co-operation, between Islamic ritual and nationalistic veneration at the funerals of Turkish soldiers killed in combat. I don't know enough about it but on the surface it is very interesting how even the meaning of martyr, şehit, originally the Arabic and therefore Islamic شهيد, has been overtaken by its nationalistic meaning. The first website that comes up when you right the Turkish word in a search engine is related to the multiple support organizations for families of Turkish soldiers and other sorts of jingoist fanclubs.
I don't really mean any of this as disrespect, I just still after all this time find such a conventional form of ideology to be an almost welcome throwback to the glory days of cults of personality and anthems. Neoliberalism is such a schizophrenic boogeyman, hyperrealism, finance capital, the service economy, how the hell do you burn those things in Effigy? I remember trying to convince the Yemeni kids in our government sponsored multicultural roundtable who turned every discussion around into an anti-American policy hate fest (see that's the kind of irony I can sink my teeth into) that their real enemy wasn't a zionist kabal, or evangelical oil magnates, or cowboy boot warhawks, or the multinational corporations, or even the military industrial complex, but rather the more abstract logic of accumulation and Capitalism as the wirklich Schranke (well I wasn't nearly so wordy in Arabic, to be frank). I wonder if they thought in their heads what that would look like slopping around on a pole on fire.
A few weeks ago we got out of class to go down and see a reenactment of the battle of Gallipoli (a battle I distinctly remember John Keegan dismissing as almost an afterthought) preceded by a dry talk about the world-historical importance of the battle (did you know it made possible the Russian revolution?) and how it should not be either forgotten or diminished in importance. Like a cross-eyed Turkish McCarthy with a mom-haircut, she fell short of brandishing a pitchfork against anyone trying to doubt the absolute truth of young boys carrying artillery shells on their backs during the battle. (Does this count as diminishing the battle? Am I going to get my residency permit revoked?) If that wasn't bad enough immediately afterwards was a highschool rendition of the battle complete with screaming mourners, baby-dolls being killed by shrapnel, Baglama ballads about sacrifice and the nation, and a boy who screamed all of his lines at the top of his voice (he was Ata-pus himself). It was uncomfortable and loud and I couldn't help looking around for the tell-tale sign on irony on someone's face.
Which made me think at the time of the great Analysis in the NYtimes and that there is some irony to be found after all. It is the Islamic party that has the monopoly on progress. But that is, as Mr. Oran says, because they are bourgeois and the bourgeois still have their historical role to play. We should get the Muslim brotherhood some lucrative shipping rights in the EU and then they'll be on the right side of history again.
Another ghoulish sight of nationalism I saw here was news coverage of the death of some soldiers fighting in the Mountain Turk areas and a soldier who died two days before his child was born. Needless to say its a sad event, but the news murdered the mankind of his going. They show the toothy village father telling a top-brass that he has another son to sacrifice to the nation, and the colonel politely refusing. Then the mother screams and drapes herself over the Turkish flag-draped coffin and the camera zooms in and slo-mo's a tear falling from her cheek.
One more thing, in slight reference to Krystina's post on Islamic semantics, it is interesting how there is not a tension, or at least there seems to be an intricate but settled co-operation, between Islamic ritual and nationalistic veneration at the funerals of Turkish soldiers killed in combat. I don't know enough about it but on the surface it is very interesting how even the meaning of martyr, şehit, originally the Arabic and therefore Islamic شهيد, has been overtaken by its nationalistic meaning. The first website that comes up when you right the Turkish word in a search engine is related to the multiple support organizations for families of Turkish soldiers and other sorts of jingoist fanclubs.
I don't really mean any of this as disrespect, I just still after all this time find such a conventional form of ideology to be an almost welcome throwback to the glory days of cults of personality and anthems. Neoliberalism is such a schizophrenic boogeyman, hyperrealism, finance capital, the service economy, how the hell do you burn those things in Effigy? I remember trying to convince the Yemeni kids in our government sponsored multicultural roundtable who turned every discussion around into an anti-American policy hate fest (see that's the kind of irony I can sink my teeth into) that their real enemy wasn't a zionist kabal, or evangelical oil magnates, or cowboy boot warhawks, or the multinational corporations, or even the military industrial complex, but rather the more abstract logic of accumulation and Capitalism as the wirklich Schranke (well I wasn't nearly so wordy in Arabic, to be frank). I wonder if they thought in their heads what that would look like slopping around on a pole on fire.
Comments