identifies how leftists’ response to an ostensibly novel event—the visiting of the US Sixth Fleet as part of NATO arrangements in 1968—was interpreted by protestors through an analogy generated from the official history of the founding of the Republic, a temporally backgrounded aspect of activists’ education deployed to orientate action in a changed situation. Similarly, Ertuğrul (Biliș Trade Union) critically analyses how in the 1970s certain tenets of Kemalism—we might call them horizons of the past that entered into activists’ perceptions both as history of one’s body and as recollections, habits and moods—were taken up by many activists to constitute a political program:
At the 1920 Baku congress, in an act of political desperation, the Comintern declared eastern people were oppressed peoples of the world—oppressed by imperialism. It was a declaration of the right of nations to self-determination. We [the left] began to confuse nationalism with anti-imperialism, which is an aspect of capitalism. Kemalism was nationalist, statist, and populist, never Marxist or working class. It was a national independence movement. If you are not essentially an anti-capitalist movement, then you gravitate to the nation-state, especially when it has the rhetoric of anti-imperialism. You support local elements [bourgeoisie, state, progressive peasants] against foreign imperialism. And there you have the lineage from YÖN [leftist Kemalist journal 1961–67] through Devrim Dergisi [Revolution, a journal in late 1960s] to the fascism of today’s Türk Solu [Turkish Left, journal and name of an ultranationalist, socialist group active in the present]. This is a leftist sickness in Turkey.
Both Serdar’s and Ertuğrul’s comments express a fundamental modification in their present perception of their own faction’s political practice in the 1970s. Many of the ex-activists I interviewed were now acutely critical of Kemalism, its ambiguous history, and its ongoing political influence. Similarly, nearly all had disengaged from contemporary attempts of leftist Kemalists (such as Türk Solu) to mobilize support around a laic-Islamist polarization in their attempt to reinvigorate a Kemalist program, including a continuation of its historic Turkification project directed at Kurds.
A third account of transformed awareness is given by leftist journalist and writer Hasan Cemal, who in 1969 started writing in the left-Kemalist journal Devrim (Revolution), mentioned by Ertuğrul above. In a foreword written in 2008 for ex-Akıncı militant Mehmet Metiner’s book Yemyeşil şeriat, bembeyaz demokrasi (Green shariah, white democracy), Cemal reflects upon his own recently published book: “It is never easy to come to terms with the past nor to confront yourself. I, too, could no longer escape my past. Indeed, this is what I tried to explain in my book Let no one be angry, I wrote myself. In it I endeavored to explain how my political identity developed, where my political ideas derived from and which mistakes I made” (in Metiner 2008: 16). Cemal also references his journey away from the certainties of what he calls “Jacobin” Kemalism. In his book, Metiner, too, describes a parallel political evolution, from his militant years in the late 1970s as a member of an Islamist youth organization, to his rejection in the mid-1990s of the foundational tenets or paradigm of “Jacobin” Islam, including abandonment of his 1970s fantasy of forcing sharia law on the population through establishment of an Islamic state.
A second and equally powerful event identified by activists as crucial in radically modifying the meaning of their 1970s activism, in particular for revolutionaries and parties identified with the communism of the Soviet Union, was the collapse of that regime in 1989. For many activists (especially those affiliated to, or members of the TKP), the demise of Soviet communism as an alternative modernity caused a painful reorientation of perceptions of their acts and ideals pursued in that intense and formative period. T. S. Eliot’s lines from the play Murder in the Cathedral capture something of TKP activists’ discomfited position in the shift to a post–Cold War world: “The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason.” Akın’s more prosaic words express the same sentiment: “We learned that for all those years we had pursued not an empty [boş] politics, but worse, a wrong one. This was a bigger trauma for us than 12 Eylül.” Testifying to the intrinsically temporal and affective character of consciousness, and to how memory both retains and reinterprets past experience in each new moment of meaning, Filiz (TKP) describes a similarly shattering perceptual modification in 1988 and its reconstituting of other entities and relationships:
My father was a Democrat Party parliamentarian. He was arrested in the coup [1960] and stayed in prison for two years; I remember visiting him in Kayseri when I was six. I was always interested in politics, and realized later that I got my feelings of justice [adalet duygusu] from him. I never knew that my father paid for roads, etcetera from his own pocket. We owned land, were very rich, but I was uncomfortable with our wealth. I first began getting interested in politics through reading novels, and felt uncomfortable at injustice. Sometime in the 1970s my father gave me a Solzhenitsyn novel, but I refused to read “bourgeois” lies/literature. When I went to Moscow for three months in 1988, I was criticizing the perestroika politics, and a party historian gave me the same novel. “This is true,” he said, and I began to cry. I was changed.
Softly, almost in passing, she added, “What a pity I was never able to talk about this with my father before he died.”
Both accounts reveal the weighty loss of an esteemed political ethic, so that activists’ past cause of revolution is felt to have lost its footing in any legitimate continuing struggle. Militants’ feelings of shock and sadness were connected to the great sacrifices they had made—in some cases involving a rift with family—for principles that they no longer perceived to be true.
Importantly, it was not just TKP members and sympathizers who in interviews reflected on acts and practices performed for reasons now perceived as wrong. Activists from virtually all factions expressed an intense ambivalence about those years of sound and fury. Thus Nuriye (THKP-C) (Turkish People’s Liberation Party-Front) noted that, “We [the left] also did wrong things that we haven’t come to terms with. How could we have entered into the killing of a seventeen-year-old ülkücü so easily?” Ömer (MHP) felt that “there was no time to think, we were drowning in events/action. There was no balance. Our movement started in love and ended in a lake of blood.” Mehmet Metiner (see above) remembered slapping someone for eating during Ramazan, and confessed that then “everyone sought to gain control before someone else, with the aim of restricting the world of those others. Perhaps the government would change but the logic of authority and nature of it would have been exactly the same. The hand that held the stick would have been different but the stick would still have worked” (2008: 83). Ümit (Dev-Sol) said something similar, that in those years “normal things were abnormal; abnormal things became normal. We saw ourselves as heroes [kahramanlar]. The junta killed hundreds of people, but if we came to power, we would have killed thousands.” And Erdoğan (Kurtuluş) noted pensively that “if we hadn’t been so ambitious or impatient, and just tried to provide services to the poor, we would have been more successful. And if we weren’t so fragmented among ourselves. . . .” Finally, Özlem (THKP-C) diagnosed the reason for the unhappy and asymmetrical relationship between political factions and local people in the shantytowns (see chapter 4): “We wanted to replace the existing order. But gecekondu people wanted to create an order. They didn’t care that someone lived in a köşk (mansion), like we cared; they wanted food, work, and a house. We were valuable to them because we gave: importantly, we looked like we were strong and capable. But they were also scared of us: I raised a finger to a man who hit his wife, and we put them in danger as the fighting spread.”
2.4 COMMEMORATING ACTIVISM
Most significantly, ex-militants’ chastened perspective on the spatial politics of the period before the military coup reveals a profound ambiguity over whether, or how, to commemorate their project of revolution, whose rationale or romance has been modified in the light of disillusionment with Kemalism, socialism, and anti-communism.15 For many activists there has been no easy acceptance of vindication or vice, victimhood or virtue that might modulate or temper the profusion of affective memories
