Bureaucratic Bread

To earn your life as a bureaucrat means to find Turkey an unlivable place and turn it into an unlivable place

Cemil Meriç

It is unconceivable that in modern Turkey the order of state, which has been established with tremendous effort, will take its energy permanently from a group of an elite, political pedagogue sort of people.

We must remember that intellectuals, who laid the foundation of the republic and modern Turkey in particular, portray an exceptionally intellectual profile. Our revolutionists are not the type of intellectuals who have raised deep social motives in the country.

The more the democratic administration type is improved and its influence on large masses is increased, the more its measurements of values that are applied in the country today will just be confined to the country community, but will display itself especially in the legislative body.

Therefore, in the upcoming years, it"s quite likely that more disputes will be stirred up between the old and new elite, the urban intellectuals and the representatives of the large masses who will attempt to apply the truly adopted measurements in the country.

These were the perfect words of an analysis that described our today. They were written by Prof. Serif Mardin during the days of 1954, when it was well understood that it was impossible to overthrow a victorious Democrat Party through the ballot box after collecting 57 percent of the votes.

We are experiencing a process that was manifested 60 years ago, even though it was interrupted with four intermittent coups.

Thus said, at that time Mardin"s description of "the people"s revolution" was just at the crawling period. Over time, it has become a situation where hijabi, or headscarved, women were oppressed under a kind of apartheid regime. BDP voters were treated as terrorists, and those who were talking about 1915 events could have been readily lynched in the open public. His argument "neighborhood pressure" provided political pedagogues quite a functional tool, but this much "class deformation" can even be seen in the best scholar.

Today, hijab-sporting ladies are destroying the walls that isolated them. Now, they study, work and make their statements in the "protected areas" of the old elites.

The Kurdish political party today is nominating a candidate to rise to Çankaya; the existence of which was questioned in the parliament five years ago, and today it demands to govern the country from Ankara rather than Diyarbakir.

The minority societies are being returned to their non-Muslim claimers one by one, which were confiscated before. With a humanitarian approach, the highest state organ publishes a condolence in the official gazette for the grandsons of victims in 1915.

On the other hand, the problem of the old elites does not concern being unable to keep pace with the new elites. Conversely, it is about not having the mindset to anticipate these developments, or, even so, not giving up on sharing the mindset of the "old" Turkey"s architects. That"s why they don"t have a consistent perspective and a genuine political reality.

Instead of that, they have a mixed description such as "I am a bit Turkish, Kurdish, Kemalist, religious, secular, socialist, nationalist, democrat, a bit mon cher, people"s man". It"s such an amorphous, sort of mixed soup thing! (Or shall I use the Turkish word "ekmek" (bread) to refer to Mr. Ekmel"s candidacy?) With all this, of course they are not convincing at all.

However, what is quite annoying for the old elites is not that the AK Party is in power. The unpleasant situation is the people of this country who brought the AK Party into power.

It"s about a kind of people who couldn"t have been domesticated, subverted, assimilated through revolutions, several coups, air strikes or maritime attacks. To be a constantly complaining person or defiant with the "authoritarian-dictator" cry is just a cover. AK Party is just a reason that leads them to look in the mirror.

The story has not changed since 1950. When the Democrat Party had come into power, it was underestimated with the slur "feudal lord-capitalist-town merchant-authority" or the "ballot box democracy". Today the government faces the same kind of treatment.

With only a unique difference, the current Prime Minister has the capacity of slapping this reality back onto their face, instead of being crashed with such insult. That"s the reason why he is at the center of their hate and increasing rage. He is still successful in transforming the grudge against the people into legitimate politics by pulling it onto himself like a lightning rod.

Since the last era of the Ottoman Empire, many things have changed in our life and many terms have come and gone.

However, the bureaucratic mentality"s sovereignty lasted. Today, this mentality"s reign is ending, and the paradigm at the center is irreversibly being broken. This is the reason causing the storm.

So, in order to understand the story, there is no need to connect the "majesty"s man" to the story which brings TUSIAD with grocery expropriation or the y generation with "1923 dynamism" or the nationalist wolves with the "78 generation, because this is our story.