In a movie theater, people sitting behind you start to talk. When you ask them to be silent, the people sitting in front of you tell you to be silent. If you tell them that you were telling the people sitting behind to be silent, then the people in front of those people warning you […]
In a movie theater, people sitting behind you start to talk. When you ask them to be silent, the people sitting in front of you tell you to be silent. If you tell them that you were telling the people sitting behind to be silent, then the people in front of those people warning you to be silent now tell them to be silent. At the end, you would be the noisy person. We have now a full circle. Maybe there are some people among you who have been kicked out of a concert or a restaurant after a similar plot.
The negative reaction to those people who are subjected to police violence while they are actually protesting the police violence refers to the similar circle with a different color. Since the first days of the Gezi struggle, various NGOs, politician have called ‘all sides’ to be prudent in their reactions. If we evaluate this call with good intentions, we may take this as an example to their naivety. They may not be able to understand what the protestors complain about or they may have full confidence on police not intervening when there is not a problem. They may think that police’s intervention to the protestors does not pose a problem but they may be disturbed by the disportionate violence of the police. Those naiveties of the people may be attributed to the silence of the mainstream media or its biased portrayal of the protests. On the other side, there are people who perceive the protestors as a threat. Let’s leave them aside for the time being.
Therefore, our NGOs can not see when the police unleash water cannon to people eating pasty. While our economy rapidly thrives, almost to the point of ascending to outer space, when they sit down in their peaceful homes, they hear the sound of pots in their peaceful homes and they watch the TV. Guess what they see on TV!.: people gathering in streets, squares. They can not see due to tear gas but they say ‘there are probably clashes’. Some of them remember ‘the old dark days’(these days they used to call ‘Anarchist’ rather than Çapulcu). They say ‘god saves’. ‘no one is prudent ’. In front of the video camera, NGOs are very father like. They all call people to be prudent. They call those people literally ‘standing’ against the violence to be sober. The very same time, the streets were full of tear gas and the news and the newspaper columns lost its meaning.
However, the calls for prudence to everyone may occur with bad intentions when these calls point to ‘every side’. Then in these instances, those statements for prudence are no longer a simple call. These statements are fallacies which invert the position of cause and effect. Calling all sides to prudence is an attempt to label both sides imprudent. Consequently, the legitimacy of the protestors’ peaceful demonstrations are targeted. The people who protest due to the lack of conveying their messages in other means have to struggle to preserve their legitimacy. Due to these new struggles, new calls for prudence emerge. The circle turns around upon itself.
The resistance have showed its strength not only against the violence but also against these fallacies. When the people whom we have never seen protest for their rights, we see how the calling of news reporters, the police commissioners, and the government the people to prudence is completely pointless. For instance, the people who call those people who were found guilty of searching the bones of their tortured and killed children as terrorists now meet in Lice with those ‘terrorist’.
July 2, 2013
* Assistant Prof. Bilge Terzioglu / Isik University – Economics
Translated by: Mehmet Deniz