Late last month the editor of Meydan anarchist newspaper in Istanbul was sentenced to a
year and three months in prison for “supporting terror,” the latest in a string of
attempts by the Turkish State to shut down dissenting voices against Erdogan’s government.
Today we are proud to publish a translation of Meydan’s uncompromising response, from
their latest edition. ---- We are being cornered ---- With the fear and shock that
constantly oppresses our lives, with the agendas that change by the day, by the hour, with
the constant repetition we see in news articles, debates, newspapers and radios, with the
shares and retweets, the media that takes us for idiots and is fed by manipulation, with
the gentrification and demolition policies that erase our past, our identity and our
memory, with the “illusion of democracy” that weakens and imprisons our freedom, and with
the reality that becomes more and more incomprehensible everyday, we are being cornered.
We are being cornered because the rulers require it in order to declare their authority
and assert their dominance over our stolen willpower. We are being cornered because the
rulers require it to keep their power and to create new objects to use in their own wars.
We are being cornered because this is the only way the government is able to create space
for itself and exist.
We are being cornered by misery
The days that have to keep going through the exhaustion, the bodies that fall powerless,
the minds that become unhappy as they weaken…
The rulers submerge the streets that we use to walk to school in the mornings, to go to
work and to catch a bus in darkness. They comer us with unhappiness by squeezing us into
minibuses and metrobuses that are full to the brim and sending us to work at the crack of
dawn. As the government comers us with unhappiness, they drag us towards hopelessness and
despair.
We must resist the government that decides when we may sleep and when we must wake, that
snatches our morning sun and pushes us towards darkness and despair in order to win back
our bodies and minds. We must find the courage to defy those who would turn us into blind
and deaf, unknowing and unfeeling individuals and break out of this complacency and
cornered-ness.
We are being cornered by panic
The broadcasting prohibitions that follow exploding bombs, the unfounded accusations after
suspicious packages are found and bomb threats are made, the people who choose or are
forced to choose to stay away from crowded places, the dollars that are exchanged in order
to “prevent a crisis,” the people who dream of running away from the land that is
oppressed by war, death and economic crises…
In the land we live in, the government dominates the individual with fear and panic, it
incapacitates, comers and in time, annihilates. As the government enforces this state of
fear and panic in all public areas, the individual loses control, becomes vulnerable and
is cornered into the annihilation imposed by the rulers.
Our lives are cornered into the grip of crises or death, and our days are spent looking
for a way out of fear and panic, out of this cornered-ness.
The only way out of this fear and paranoia that wear down our bodies and minds, and that
allow the socio-economic circumstances to slowly consume us, is through creating spaces
for ourselves outside of this panic-culture. The way to create a world where we wont be
cornered and imprisoned by fear and panic is to expand the spaces where the rulers impose
fear on us and eliminate the culture that makes paranoiacs of us all.
We are being cornered by agendas
The attempted coup and the OHAL (regional state of emergency) that was declared in the
aftermath, the operations that are conducted against the Kurdish movement and
revolutionaries almost everyday with the excuse of FETÖ (Fethullah Terrorist Organisation,
which Erdogan claims is linked to Fetullah Gulen and behind the abortive July coup last
year), the surveillance and arrests, the people dismissed from their jobs because of new
KHK’s (rulings by decree) that are announced everyday, the judges that are put under
surveillance during trials, the bills that are put forward, amended and passed as we all
sleep, the bombs that explode in two different locations in the same week, the
assassinations occurring before the effects of the bombs have passed, the images of
soldiers burned alive by ISIS…
In the geography we live in, we’ve greeted each new day of the past six months with
“last-minute news.” When one day is clouded by news of bombs, the next is greeted by
Turkish military tanks entering Syria. Just as the friendship between Russia and the
Republic of Turkey starts to settle, the assassination of a Russian ambassador sends us
into a panic of “we’re going to war with Russia.”
We can no longer keep up with news that drops like bombs and headlines that can change
multiple times a day. Far from keeping up with the ever, and increasingly swiftly,
changing agendas of our ruler, we are flung from one agenda to the next, we are cornered
by them.
In order to escape this current in which we have been swept up and cornered, we must break
free of this “agenda traffic” and find a way to create our own agendas to countermand
those of the government. Against the government that locks us in our homes for fear of
bombs one day, and calls us to “democracy meetings” the next day, against the government
that denies the existence of an economic crisis one day and urges us to exchange our
dollars as a “preventative” measure the next day, we must come up with our own agendas,
discuss and debate them, circulate them.
We are being cornered by repetition
The news that is presents all day long as “breaking news” with the same subtitles, the
news programs that broadcast the same reporter, repeating the same deaths with the same
expression every hour, the headlines that are debated for hours with no resolution, the
repetition that knows no end on TV and other communication channels…
The government uses media, and the unending reiteration of news and debates, to pull us
into relentless repetition. The same news of death, in the same sorrowful tone, the same
news of rising costs, with the same commentary, the same news of war, with the same
dismissal, are transmitted on our TV’s every hour of every day. Through this excessive
repetition, we become accustomed to poverty, to starvation, to death and and soon find
ourselves desensitized and cornered by the onslaught.
We must have our guards up against this repetition and desensitiation, and especially, we
must keep the senses that they are trying to usurp alert and vigilant. We must not become
accustomed to that which they want us to accept, and we must not let our will to be
usurped in order not to be cornered by these repetitions.
We are being cornered by media
Especially after (the coup of) July 15th, the sole purpose of the media became
manipulation. From news to debate programs, from sports to TV shows, everything we see, be
it on the government’s official channel or not, is used as a means of propaganda. Far from
relaying information or showing reality, the media becomes a platform where reality is
warped and propaganda is delivered through provocation. Social media, for its part,
carries the same function in the even more easily controlled medium of the internet.
Media corners us through the ever present manipulation imposed on us in every bit of news,
every TV show, every TV program. This manipulation aside, all we can do to protect
ourselves against incomplete or regulated information is to create our own platforms on
which to communicate and share information.
We are being cornered by gentrification and demolitions. While the rulers use every
instrument in their hands as a means of oppressing the individual, they resort to attacks
from every angle to sustain their tyranny. Gentrification and demolition are examples of
this type of attack.
The government, in an effort to control the individual, firstly controls the spaces in
which the individual lives. In areas where the government’s own dominant culture does not
exist and cannot take root, the use of gentrification and demolition is a way of
dislodging and uprooting the individuals living there, but even more so, it is a way of
displacing the yesterdays, the todays, the identity and the cultures of those people.
The rulers that redevelop areas for the purpose of their own existence, of course, wish
their identity and presence to take hold in the new spaces they create. Especially in the
aftermath of July 15th, the renaming of so many streets, squares, parks and intersections
to “democracy” is telling of a government dismantling existing truths and imposing its own
culture.
They intend not only to demolish our living spaces through gentrification, but also to
recondition our history, our culture, our identity and our memory.
In defence against this assault on our space and “selves” and this attempt by the rulers
to comer us into their areas of command we must create new, collectively operated places
and communal, unrestricted living-spaces. Against the transformation of these public areas
by the government we must create new spaces without government, without capitalism, where
the individual cannot be oppressed politically or economically.
We are being cornered by democracy
The term “democracy’”that we keep hearing, especially since July 15th, is imposed on us by
the current rulers as a means of ascertaining their longevity. In this era where
everything is done in the name of “democracy,” where all practices are theorised as
benefiting democratization, we experience day to day what is really meant.
Every day they place media organisations under surveillance and arrest, they push people
to unlawfulness in the name of their own “democratic” purposes and interests, and it is in
this unlawfulness that the people are cornered. The “democracy” they speak of means that
all individuals will have their willpower usurped and all will be cornered into place
where the rulers are accountable to no one.
Of course it is possible to fight against the “democracy” being forced on us. We must
construct politics outside of the politics of the government, we must build a
self-organizing, center- less, unrepresented political process, we must create a culture
where our lives aren’t cornered, where our will is not usurped by the rulers.
We are being cornered by truth being rendered meaningless. In order to destroy the current
reality and create one of their own, the rulers comer us in a construct of their own
politics. The most essential tool they have as a means of realising this construct is to
“create an illusion that can render the truth meaningless.” Since the dawn of time, rulers
have used a series of constructs to disconnect people from their realities. But the rulers
of our time, who have become highly adept at using such tools, with their social media,
mainstream media and their crazy politicians, are launching the biggest ever war on
reality, specifically, on the reality of the downtrodden.
The easiest way to enslave a person, to seize their sense of self, to comer them into a
constructed illusion, is to remove that person’s existing reality. Those who lose touch
with reality, in time also lose their ability to think correctly and be productive. They
lose their sense of self and are cornered into the illusions produced by the rulers.
The rulers comer the individual with fear and panic, with ever-changing agendas, with
unending repetition, with media that only serves to manipulate, with gentrification and
demolition, with the illusion of democracy, and with the meaninglessness of truth. Because
the more they comer the individual, the more space they have to roam free.
It is when the individual becomes aware that they have been condemned into a comer in
every facet of their lives that they begin to struggle against it.
They begin to create a new reality first in a self-organising way, and then through the
perspective of organizations and community, and then to experience this collectively
created reality, collectively.
The buses, metros and metrobusses of dawn, the hopeless unhappiness, the impotent
helplessness, the minimum wage squabbles over tea and simit, morning marriage programs,
the evening news programs and the nighttime debate programs, the workplace deaths filed
under ‘accident’, that people are uprooted from the neighbourhoods they built with their
own hands and placed into 60 metre squared flats, that those without dollars or gold coins
to exchange are falling into an economic crisis, that people are destroyed by male
dominance and slaughtered by hate policies, the cement walls and iron bars, that people
are burned alive and beaten with chains for the sake of our governments engaging in a war
of interest, the unreal reality, the loneliness, the hopelessness and the chaos. Yes, we
will escape these things.
Against those that incarcerate us, that break our will as they corner us, and that in
time, make prisoners of us, from the cornered-ness that we have been subjected to, we must
break free. We are at the threshold of a socio-economic explosion due to this very
cornered-ness that we must step over, we must mold unrestricted lives with our collective
hands, that is to say, with our organisations.
This article was published in issue 35 of Meydan Newspaper.
Follow Meydan at:
meydangazetesi.org
@MeydanGazetesi
facebook.com/meydangazetesi
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