Dictator or whatever

The president has coined yet another gem. He was addressing the honorary doctorate ceremony at the Health Sciences University. I do not think we have witnessed a president before who participates in honorary doctorate ceremonies and, rather than speaking of health and science, sets out his views at great length on virtually all Turkey’s problems, if not those of the Middle East. Seemingly, unable

Yayınlanma: 08.11.2016 - 14:02
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As to me?

No sooner had the lazy days of arrest ended than I found myself caught up in the industrious hustle and bustle of the paper’s editorial office. They had warm greetings for me but no pity and rushed on with their work. Add to this the steady stream of heart-warming phone calls wishing me all the best after my ordeal. For this reason, I am unable just now to address the entire speech by the head of my republic, each line of which courts attention interminably long as it was. But, I cannot let his reply to the growing criticism coming out of Europe pass without comment. He said, “They call me a dictator or whatever. I don’t care. It goes in one ear and out the other!”
It went in through one ear for sure. If only the other ear were blocked and that criticism didn’t exit. After all, this criticism emanated from the very soil on which democracy first flourished. I am not a blind fan of the West. I witnessed indirectly how, in the days when 12 September fascism was at large in our country, they seemingly adopted no serious position over “their large business market” of Turkey. But Europe does not conjure up for me the image of political wizards prioritising the interests of “supranational companies”. Europe for me means the child of that soil Karl Marx, Bertold Brecht with his thrusting wit, and that master of political humour, never lost for a sharp rejoinder, defender of freedom and democracy Kurt Tucholsky.


Were I to list them all, I could recall enough resisters against fascism and staunch defenders of freedom, more thinkers and political masters who have augmented and enriched democracy to stretch the capacity of tens of volumes of encyclopedias, let alone this column or this newspaper.
 
If what they say goes in one ear and out the other, that is the loss of the one using those ears.  Those with shallow minds who reduce democracy to votes coming out of the ballot box and regard those who vote for them as the entire nation may consider themselves to be in charge today but this is not how history remembers them.


***
Caught up in the turmoil of a daily paper in these very special and demanding days I may have been unable to pen the Sharp Claw column. However, I could not pass without commenting on the remark of one who, when it would behove him to pause and think deeply (or even melancholically) as to why they are calling him a dictator and what he has done to deserve this, resorts to local coffee shop patter in uttering “Dictator or whatever” and then speaks of ears through which things leave in the manner they enter.
Granted, a weighty analysis was called for on Turkey’s most abrupt change of axis that is reversing the course it has charted for a century, rather than these off-the-cuff comments. But conditions are not conducive to this. Let me just get those editors with their merciless demands for more copy off my back and maybe I will try to turn my hand to such an article. Let this suffice for today.


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