Gezi: An Ode To a New Generation
I remember receiving news of a woman mistreated by the police, as if it’s yesterday, on social media. While I was watching the infamous video and feeling the rage swelling inside me, I got a phone call from a friend of mine. “Are we going to stay at home? Shouldn’t we do something?” he was asking. He would not just sit and watch, he wanted to interfere, wanted to do something because he’d seen the same video and he was not that type of a guy who’d just complain and do nothing. Neither was I. Thus started our “Gezi Adventure”, together with good old boys, our close knit society.
It was fun, and also full of misery: I remember one of our lads saying “Milk in my eyes, vinegar in my nose, and this damn spoiled egg smell… Well, boys, we’re just a bunch of walking mayonnaise cans.” Milk and vinegar were impromptu cures invented to deal with the effects of the tear gas, after almost a month of protesting, all our t-shirts and scarves were stinking. Yet we were proud. Even when we were returning to our homes, beaten and dispersed by the sheer force, we were proud. Like the famous Turkish poet said, we had “the bliss of having done something good.” We’d gone to Gezi singing marches and were returning weary, battered, yet still singing.
On the way back to home, on the last day of the OccupyGezi protests, I assessed the whole thing. We were staunch nationalists. Our own slogan was “The Scion of the Shamans are Rebelling!”, we were making the “wolf’s head” hand gesture, which was a stark contrast to the V for victory sign, a hardcore leftist sign in Turkey. It was weird indeed, there were many different ideologies; some (the most, to be precise) were uttering the Kemalist slogan “We are the Soldiers of Mustafa Kemal”, while others were covering the walls with graffiti: “We are the Soldiers of Mustafa Keser”, in response to what they deem to be a very militaristic slogan, using apolitical pop singer Mustafa Keser’s name instead of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. However, I thought, what I found there was a brand-new generation of Turkish youth, regardless of their political views, there were some features homogenous, making them a solid front against Erdoğan’s regime, instead of a loose crowd.
Before discussing those features in detail, one has to have a little bit of information about Turkey’s past and social structure. Before the infamous 1980 coup, Turkish nationalists and leftists used to kill each other, the country was experiencing a mild civil war. Although the army and the police were also divided between two camps, what made this war a “civil war” was not a clash between two army fractions, but civilians turned into paramilitaries and fought each other. My own father took a bullet from a leftist back in his day. Back then, Wolf’s Head and V signs wouldn’t be expected to come together.
Moreover, back in my parents’ day, Turkey was a poverty-stricken country, few had access to services and items nowadays we take granted. Therefore their patience was a lot stronger than ours, and especially after the 80 coup eradicated the revolutionary (both nationalist and leftist) movements, most of the people were docile as they were trying to survive, their priority was to earn their living, improving it would come afterwards. And it came when their children came of age. We, unlike our parents, had access to many services and items, we were a generation of abundance, not scarcity. Thus we were a little spoiled, as we were accustomed to acquiring anything we want, when we were hindered, we were a lot quicker to anger than our parents did. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s dream was coming true: A “burgher” Turkish generation was at last born. We were the first ones to be born in a city, most of our parents, or our grandparents, had their origins in the rural areas. And we were not docile, we knew what the world, especially the western world, looked and felt like (thanks to the internet) and we wanted privileges enjoyed by our western peers for ourselves.
However, ideologies and the religion itself was slow to seize the change in the sociology. We, at least most of us, were still identifying with traditional camps, but “friendly horizons were too narrow for our thought” as another Turkish poet put it. There was a tension, something had to change, in fact, many things had to change to accommodate us.
Gezi, in this regard, was not the beginning of something, it was the end. It was the end of traditional camps, traditional identities and traditional society. No matter how hard the leftists or Kurdish nationalists tried, millions that participated in Gezi did not approve of efforts to establish a political party around Gezi movement. It was not a new political movement, but it was the most explicit ultimatum by the new generation to all ideologies: If you do not embrace environmentalism, individual rights and liberty, secularism and nationalism (yes, Gezi generation was nationalist in its own right, yet it was an amorphic, un-defined nationalism that did not feed on the past, but concerned about the living nation) you will not win my heart and brains. This generation valued its liberty above all, and ruling party’s conservative actions angered them, and we demonstrated how dangerous we can be when angered.
Kurdish nationalists deserve a paragraph of their own. At first, HDP, Kurdish nationalist party offset of the terrorist organization PKK, approached Gezi reluctantly, their leader, Demirtaş, even said “I saw [an attempt of] coup d’etat in Gezi.” But, after a while they poured into the Gezi square and were utilized by Erdoğan in a unique manner of false flag operation. They, like their hardcore leftist allies, tried to turn Gezi into a Kurdish demonstration, but they failed. Millions there did not heed them, but they prevented other millions from participating, this is the most crucial damage inflicted on Turkey by them after terrorist killings perpetrated by PKK. People still remember how Öcalan, PKK leader, urged Kurdish youth to burn Turkish forests to harm the tourism. As a matter of fact, PKK and other Kurdish movements still burn forests as of 2019. People knew Kurdish nationalists, while wearing a liberal mask in the west, favored feudalism and saw women as second class. They were, being Turks, aware of the fact that “Female fighters of PYD in Northern Syria”, no matter how wonderful they appear to the ignorant westerners, were worshipping a leader, Öcalan, who mistreated and humiliated the Kurdish women before all. Of course, PKK was still killing people in terrorist attacks, and many in Turkey have “martyr”s in their wide families. Thus, their participation in Gezi just strengthened Erdoğan’s position, people’s allergic reaction to Kurdish nationalists prevented many conservatives from attending the protests, though they liked some of the arguments put forward by the protesters.
What is curious in Gezi is, it all started as an environmentalist protest, and though everyone knew “it is not just a couple of trees”, it retained this image to the end. Why, one has to ask. It was due to the inefficiency of the traditional camps: Only such an apolitical reason could and would unite the Turkish youth; my own nationalist band of brothers with left-leaning CHP voters, apolitical yet impatient university students who were angry at Erdoğan with small and marginal political organizations who seek new recruits among the protesters. A really interesting survey by Ipsos says, in 2012, “environment” was the second most common value among Turks, slightly behind religion.
Now, that generation is becoming the median of the population each year. There are signs of change in the politics thanks to this generation: A former nationalist party member Mr. Mansur Yavaş has become mayor of Ankara, but as centre-left party’s candidate. And his first actions were to start music festivals once again, restrict use of water consuming grass species in landscaping, prevent forests of Ankara from being hacked for construction projects.
Gezi generation is unaffected by concerns of their parents. Gezi generation is immune to old school propaganda. Of course it too has its flaws: It still has no well defined position and ideology, and still in the progress of re-shaping. This may lead to confusion and maybe the result will be a frustration. However, its impact on the Turkish politics is already (and at last) felt and I am happy to see that: Happy to see that Turkey’s youth is embracing a civilized, liberal and secular nationalism. Happy to see that we have a rebellious youth. Happy to see that we are undaunted by the threats and our voice is always loud.
Kurdish terrorism issue, undoubtedly, will keep hindering Turkey’s mental development. It is a tool for all; for foreign nations to utilize as a threat against Turkey and more importantly, is a regime tool to favor a security-first approach nationalism. It reminds me and old story by Ottoman author Ömer Seyfettin: How a Bulgarian diplomat managed to send thousands of Turks out of newly independent Bulgaria. Turks proved themselves to be hard to be rooted out by force, each armed attempt would face fierce reaction. Yet, Seyfettin says, the Bulgarian genius discovered a vulnerability: Turks hated pigs, it was forbidden by their religion and Turks turned it into a taboo. When he sent some sows into a Turkish village, he discovered all Turks departed due to the “very soil of the village being damned due to pigs.” He, then sent pigs to all Turkish settlements and managed to get rid of them voluntarily. Kurdish nationalist movement is the Bulgarian pig in this context, and Turkish nationalism is losing its ground while it is trying to evade its taboo. When this generation manages to de-sanctify its own taboo, and face with the Kurdish nationalism blatantly, and come up with a solution to persuade the Kurds that Turkish westernization progress is what is going to save both Turks and Kurds, we will prevail.
Gezi was not the mark of a new era, but the gravestone of an old one. The new era will begin in the post-Erdoğan Turkey, and all ideologies in Turkey must take Gezi generation’s behavioral patterns and paradigm shift into consideration to be leading force in that era.
M. Bahadırhan Dinçaslan
