Political readings through literature

Our dear friend Merdan Yanardağ is in prison (for the umpteenth time) unlawfully; we have lost count. He is experiencing something that those who wish to change the world have risked throughout history, with honor and without resentment. This is not an exaltation, not a glorification of prison, but a necessity, an acceptance as a result of a love for the country and humanity. Of course, those who consider this ancient duty a debt, those who have carried this burden on their shoulders from the moment they became revolutionaries, consider it a duty to serve their cause even when they are behind four walls.

Dear Merdan Yanardağ began a series of articles in recent months on the importance of literary readings. I will not belabor the point; he is doing important work. I wrote an article on Merdan Yanardağ’s book The Dialectics of Rebellion and Philosophy, and in the final sentence, I said the following:

“With this book, Merdan Yanardağ is both targeting the new reader and providing this with an understandable and fundamental perspective, while also creating new areas of discussion for the intellectual reader. I must confess that I find this very important.

The other important idea I drew from the book is this: For progressives and Enlightenment thinkers, everywhere is now a battlefield. Philosophy, art, literature, cinema, sociology, history... Progressives must be ready for this war and determine their trenches accordingly. The prerequisite for war preparation is that everywhere must become a school.

In this sense, the book’s contribution is extremely important.

Our revolutionary duty is to declare everywhere a battlefield. This is a duty, and these tasks must be carried out with the responsibility of an intellectual and a revolutionary in areas that no one else is addressing.”

After making this introduction, and based on the necessity of accepting literature as a battlefield, I will attempt to conduct political readings through literature. And of course, it is inevitable to make small touches on what literature is and its function; I would like to start this point with Fethi Naci’s important statement: “Good literature is already revolutionary.”

Two of my favorite quotes from Marx: “If there were no difference between the appearance and the essence, there would be no science...” and “To be able to find the abstract in the richness of the concrete...” The difference between the writer and the scientist is the ability to perceive the invisible with their feelings. It is the ability to grasp the abstract within the richness of the concrete. The writer does this through the characters they create. When we look carefully, we can see that art and science serve the same purpose. Both are an endeavor to seek the truth. Both have their beginnings based on observation. The truth being sought is beyond observation, that is, beyond the visible. Observation is only one of the steps, and the first one, to be taken while going towards the result, that is, the abstract. At this point, neither the artist nor the scientist can remain stuck in observation; they must dig deeper and try to see the invisible.

Literature serves as an important school because it possesses an intuition that creates the new human and paves the way for science.

In the capitalist and competitive world, however, it is of great importance not to aestheticize the ordinary person through art and literature, but to keep them ignorant. Today, many literary works no longer serve enlightenment, but ignorance.

As in every field, the flight from class continues in the novel. Ünsal Oskay provides the answer as to why escape novels are popular today:

“Escape novels, which aim not to end the mystification that covers the reality of human relations in real society, but to make it more colorful and provide a way of perception that makes reality easier to bear, have become increasingly widespread in society as alienation in modern societies intensifies; as the class that established today’s modern society by changing the previous form of society loses its revolutionary character; as this class becomes barren and a class restricted in practical and cognitive terms.”– Ünsal Oskay, Novel and Ethics

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Our topic this week will be how desperate people create heroes for themselves, and how and why people are dragged into desperation. The most fundamental reason for this, as I have mentioned in my previous articles, is the neoliberal economic understanding that started in 1973 and continues to this day. We are talking about a period that peaked with the collapse of the Soviets in 1991, resulting in the rich becoming richer and the working class (and in addition, the middle class) becoming even poorer. Desperation did not only occur in an economic sense, of course; the destruction of reason, everything becoming an object of consumption, the extreme individualization of people, and their having no trust in anything other than themselves also constitute the other side of the matter. Humans build their lives on trust; the new society of fear has destroyed this trust between people. The isolated individual has also lost the characteristic of being an individual who takes action. Partial explosions, the waves of action that have recently surrounded Europe, are not a coming together, but a form of action that emerges spontaneously and with the participation of individuals one by one. That is, we cannot speak of an organizational resistance, and an unorganized resistance does not instill this trust in people.

The Wind from the Plain (Yer Demir Gök Bakır)

Not every work of every author has to be good. Some works, perhaps even a single work, are enough to make that author important. The “Mountain’s Other Side” trilogy is my favorite, most striking, and in my opinion, without a doubt, the most beautiful novel series by Yaşar Kemal. The Wind from the Plain (Yer Demir Gök Bakır) is the more prominent novel of this series. For example, within the “Memed, My Hawk” (İnce Memed) series, only the first volume is a work that I can place somewhere in terms of literary value.

The novel The Wind from the Plain deals with how people, in times of greatest desperation, create their own legends and myths in order to hold onto life, and how they take refuge in them with desperate and absolute faith, with tremendous sociological and psychological depth.

In the words of Engels, you witness with pain how need is the mother of discovery, how hopelessness makes a person miserable, and how fear pushes a person into the unconscious and drives them mad.

Therefore, we can easily say that it is not an ordinary lament for feudalism or a mediocre village novel unique to Yaşar Kemal.

The story takes place in the village of Yalak in the Taurus Mountains. Because the people of Yalak village could not obtain the income they expected from cotton that year, they cannot pay their debts to the merchant Adil Efendi, to whom they are indebted in exchange for the cotton harvest. The villagers think that Adil Efendi will come to the village with the gendarmerie to collect his debts and seize all their belongings and houses, and they are overcome by great fear. In those days and in those regions, the gendarmerie meant God. This fear drags the whole village into a panic that almost paralyzes it, a depression as heavy as lead. The winter in the Taurus Mountains is harsh, and in very difficult winter conditions, the people, who cannot find a way out amidst the spiral of debt and desperation, even begin to bury their household goods in the ground.

Fear and hopelessness are rampant; fear paralyzes people, and the villagers of Yalak have also become paralyzed and unable to think. To escape this heavy fear and hopelessness, they create a sanctuary for themselves: A story invented in those days about Taşbaşoğlu Mehmet, one of the few sensible people among the villagers, grows like an avalanche, and after a while, Taşbaşoğlu turns into a saint, a symbol of a savior whom everyone believes performs miracles.

So much so that poor Taşbaşoğlu cannot even convince his own wife that he is not a saint.

The legend of Taşbaşoğlu grows so much that the village headman Sefer Efendi (a collaborator and opportunist who acts almost as a steward for Adil Efendi), seeing that he has lost his influence over the villagers, repeatedly reports Taşbaşoğlu to the gendarmerie as a fake saint who deceives the people and a troublemaker who incites the people against the state and the laws. Although the gendarmerie raids the village, the villagers do not hand over their saint. In the end, Taşbaşoğlu is captured, but the villagers have such an unshakable belief in the fake saint Taşbaşoğlu they created that even when this invented messiah is taken away, they say that he was not actually caught, but on the contrary, he either vanished into thin air or floated up to the sky.

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Age of Anxiety, Age of Worry, New Middle Ages, Age of Fear, Age of Loneliness, Age of Alienation...

Whatever we call it, the most powerful common truth about the age we live in is that the individual is becoming lonely, alienated even from themselves, and because of this, has entered a terrible impasse.

When the broad “opposition” masses in desperation, lack of options, hopelessness, and fear cannot find any political way out, just like the people of Yalak village, they create their own “Taşbaşoğlu Mehmets,” independent of the subject’s consent or the subject’s competence. Just as Taşbaşoğlu’s cry of “I am not a saint” has no response, the need of this mass, which has been thrown into the unconscious, to believe and take refuge is more dominant than any rationality and reality.

They are constantly creating and worshipping tiny idols, or they appoint someone as their messiah every five years. Then, when they realize that those idols are actually made of mud, they smash their idols against the walls, or when the messiahs they appointed cannot save them from the merchant Adil Efendi, they attack with all their fury and lynch the saint whose miracles they believed in until yesterday, destroying them completely.

Millions of people have almost turned into the villagers of Yalak, who are dragged into the unconscious in pursuit of the fake messiahs, idols made of mud, and saints invented out of desperation that they created themselves... The bad part is that the biggest task in creating the idols has been undertaken by the opposition, who are accustomed to gathering all the winds of the dominant ideology in their bosoms. Unfortunately, this mass shows a reflex of clinging to wherever it sees a tiny light, due to a lack of belief in salvation and distrust of existing areas of organization. Deception is inevitable.

Saying “Deniz Göktaş should be the TİP’s presidential candidate after being released! Please make him a candidate, don’t force us to vote for Mansur” is the best expression of this. Deniz Göktaş realized that society wanted to turn him into Taşbaşoğlu and managed to stand in the right place, but we live in a country where those who cannot escape this are in the majority.

With neoliberalism, the nation-state and all its institutions have either been abolished or hollowed out, and have lost all their credibility in the eyes of society. The public no longer trusts any state institution, and so, who will the public trust? The mafia?

Where trust in the Red Crescent (Kızılay) is lost (which was one of the most reliable institutions of the previous period), people fall into a place of unknown origin called Ahbap, see no harm in making it a hero, and then lament, “How did this happen?”

They see no harm in making a cinema artist who makes a speech about the agenda at any awards ceremony a hero the next day, and then complaining about why they didn’t tweet about this event later...

They see no harm in first heroizing the person they call a scientist and then declaring them a traitor...

They see no harm in regretting it when it turns out that Özgür Demirtaş, whom they declared a democracy hero, is actually a neoliberal...

It is impossible not to mention the journalists who are the fake philosophers of today. Of course, it is necessary to note this here: We cannot ignore the newspaper workers who try to do journalism by risking many dangers; the greater responsibility here is that society is turning those real journalists who are trying to do their jobs into Taşbaşoğlu. After making this important side note, we can continue our criticism.

What remains are journalists who create a great deal of misinformation and chase news, and conspiracists who see everything as a great betrayal. Our intellectuals, on the other hand, have left the field to them. Our intellectuals, who already have a fragile and timid structure, cannot find the strength in themselves to fight either the journalists or the conspiracists due to the state of inaction and lack of future they are in, so they choose the easy way and pull over to the shore. When we look at the conspiracists, we see this: Conspiracists are actually like fortune tellers. They make a hundred predictions, two of them come true. Like even a broken clock showing the right time twice a day.

We live in an age where journalism is now the only determinant, whereas information only gains meaning through theory.

For this disintegration, one should look at these lines by Metin Çulhaoğlu:

“Turkey is a country of ‘journalist philosophers,’ a significant portion of whom are half-educated and willfully ignorant. There are quite interesting manifestations of this kind of philosophizing. For example, they are people who look for news within the political backstage in Ankara, who are experts in solving which message the voter is giving to whom with which vote distribution, and who write current political gossip 4-5 days a week.”

In a society of ignorance (cahiliye), people are encouraged to adopt unrealistic ideas about how they should look, how they should live, and what kind of relationships they should develop. Here, believing comes before knowing. Even if belief and knowledge exist together, because it is easier to believe, knowledge is pushed to the other side.

We are living in just such a period of ignorance, and we have to repeat, without getting tired or bored, that salvation from this state begins not by creating heroes, but on the contrary, by rejecting them, with a historical responsibility and the justification provided by the truth. In my opinion, the necessity of smashing idols has never been as important as it is today.