From a slogan to banks: 'There is no salvation alone, either all together or none of us'

I think we all know which vehicles have the right of way on the roads: ambulances and private vehicles carrying emergency patients, fire trucks, police, gendarmerie... We could extend the list like this. When it comes to the economy, the right of way here is undoubtedly given primarily to banks. Life itself is one thing, banks are another. Because the system is built upon these structures. In the words of Miguel D. Lewis, if capitalism is a religion, banks are the church, and money is God! Where banks are the church, property is naturally sanctified. That is why banks are seen as the temple of this "religion." Because to reach God, one must first go to the Bank!

Banks are the name of the system where, while half the world lives in poverty, bundles of money are circulated among a handful of the wealthy. You can earn money from money without doing anything. Moreover, you can do this with a single click, or even have someone else perform these transactions on your behalf. From this perspective, what are banks if not temples for the wealthy! For example, while the public in Turkey is spending their days in great poverty and distress, and has reached a point where they cannot even pay their rent, let alone save money, banks grew by 39 percent in 2024 compared to 2023, reaching a size of 32.7 trillion. When we look at this data on a global scale, we encounter massive figures. For instance, the size of the world's top twenty banks reaches 50 trillion dollars. Amidst all this misery, it is as if we are living in a reality like a horror movie.

Speaking of movies, let's continue with the famous series La Casa De Papel. In the series, a striking reference is made to this monstrous and distorted situation that emerges in the context of banks. In one episode, the professor character there speaks as follows: “In 2011, the European Central Bank created 171 billion euros out of thin air for no reason... 185 billion euros in 2012, 145 billion euros in 2013... Do you know where all that money went? To the banks, straight from the mint into the pockets of the rich. They call it 'liquidity injection'.”

Let the professor's words stay in our minds; I want to move from here to the speech President Erdoğan gave at the Islamic Finance Summit last year. Erdoğan was saying there that “the capitalist system rewards earning money from money.” As we said above, if the issue is earning money from money, banks are also the qibla of this business.

In a speech he gave recently, Erdoğan said that the slogan “There is no salvation alone, either all together or none of us” belongs to bank robbers. He said, “The slogan of those who rob banks has turned into the slogan of those who rob municipalities.” Yes, there is an acceptance and history of this phrase within the Turkish socialist movement; in the past, those who carried out bank robberies using this slogan in the name of “revolution” also accepted it through a political discourse. However, they are not the owners of the slogan. The words belong to the famous German poet Bertolt Brecht, whose works were burned by the Nazis. Those lines appear in one of his poems as follows:

“Either all together or none of us.

There is no salvation alone

from the fist and the chain.

Either all together or none of us.”

We cannot call it a coincidence, of course, it is the result of a worldview, but it is significant that in the final scene of the play “The Threepenny Opera,” Brecht has his character say, “Founding a bank is a greater crime than robbing a bank.” If the subject is to look into crimes and pull criminal records, one must go to the root of the problems, the source of wealth, bank accounts, mansions, and palaces. What did Balzac say? “Behind every great fortune lies a crime.”

The great writer Eduardo Galeano also offers us striking information at this point, that is, regarding the situation between crime and the system. He says that since 1886, large corporations in the United States have had human rights as if they were individuals. “Moreover,” says Galeano, “the Supreme Court gave them this decision.” They used to say “the biggest radish,” right; let's open these bags a little bit. Returning to Galeano, he ultimately concludes his words as follows: “If nature were a bank, they would have bailed it out long ago.”

Having talked about so much in the context of banks and robbery, it would not be right not to mention a bank robbery that took place within the Turkish socialist movement. Hikmet Çiçek and his friends robbed a bank vehicle carrying money from İzmir to Denizli in 1971. Days passed, and Çiçek and his friends were caught. Meanwhile, Çiçek's father was a right-wing tradesman, and days later, he spoke about this incident as follows: “The son of a donkey had that much money in his pocket, but he took his shoe money from me.”

Meanwhile, Çiçek went to prison, and when he was released years later, he encountered a payment order at his door. Those who participated in the bank robbery would pay back the money they took in installments. Subsequently, Hikmet Çiçek began paying the installments, and in 1990, when he went to pay the last installment, the bank's lawyer ordered them a coffee each and said to Hikmet Çiçek: “A robber as honest as you will never come to this world again.”