For those of you who have been
living in a cave in Cappadocia for the past few weeks, comedian Russell Brand
has caused a ruckus again. Not in the form of a stage prank or satirical jibe,
rather, he has announced a rather taboo recipe for social change; echoing
legendary Scottish comic Billy Connelly he stipulates that we should not vote, “it
only encourages them”.
As a Briton who has never voted
either, this has given me a unique opportunity to come out of the proverbial
closet. My long-held view is now a public discussion. However, as an alien
living in Istanbul in the current climate, it has given me cause to reconsider
my perceptions of Turkey where, given the right, I actually would be inclined
to exercise my right to vote. Ironically, given all its obvious flaws, in
regard to the vote, Turkey’s democratic institutions looks far more appealing
than that of my home country. Yet as shown by the Gezi protests, it is an
abstention with the system, if not the ballot choices, that has captured the imagination
of this generation.
First a bit of background on the
debate as it took place in Britain.
The setting of Brand’s outburst was
an interview with Britain’s journalistic heavy-weight Jeremy Paxman, who threw
back with the cliché, that as someone who hasn’t voted at a general election, “how
do you have any authority to talk about politics, then?” For me, this aphorism
has gone blatantly against the laws of logic needed to frame good debate. I have
never voted on Britain’s Got Talent either, so am I to go out and burn all my
Adele records? Okay, that may be far-fetched as a metaphor, given I haven’t
legally purchased a record for around two years, but saying that, I still know
the difference between good and bad music, and politically, we are living in
the musical equivalent of 1975, with only the choice being between
self-obsessed Glam Rock and boring hippy ballads. Is it any wonder that the
foundations of a punk revolution are not in the making?
To let Brand speak for himself on
the subject; “I know, I know, my grandparents fought two world wards (and one
world cup) so that I’d have the right to vote. Well, they were conned. As far
as I’m concerned there is nothing to vote for”
The reaction to his outburst got me
thinking about what Sasha Grey famously said, that ‘Comedians are the new
philosophers’. I’m not sure how far I would agree, but they are certainly the
last people on Earth who can speak their mind – they are indeed the fortunate
few whose job it is to do so. Duly then, the cybersphere became clogged with open letters and youtube
comments of support and derision.
Even Brand’s interviewer confessed
that he himself didn’t vote at the last elections – not as a protest against
the system as such, but simply as a coming-to-terms with the futility of the
choices on offer. Contrarily, fellow comedian Robert Webb argued in an open
letter that voting was indeed a revolutionary act in itself. The problem with
the later point, however, is that literally no-one in the British Isles, at
least in my life time, will have left the polling booth with the same
satisfaction in their exercise of democracy as the Turkish youths I was amongst
in Taksim this summer. Anyone who thinks otherwise has been conned.
Gezi Park as Abstention
As one piece of Graffiti on Istiklal
Caddesi wryly put it, “the revolution will not be televised, it will be
tweeted” and the Turkish example, no doubt influenced in its execution by
Egypt, Tunisia and, in turn, Iran’s earlier attempt, cannot be ignored in terms
of the power it has evoked in the imaginations of Europe’s millenials. Sat here
in Turkey, geographically located between two worlds in generational conflict,
the reversal of trends has been striking. Whereas in the twentieth century, the
planet was lead by the narratives and ideological discourse of the West, it is
now the East which is providing the blueprints for the kind of cultural, if not
political, upheavals which will now form an affront to the more subtly
entrenched political classes of the West.
Don’t get me wrong. The vote is
still an important institution, and its day is not done. Tellingly, Turkey has
the highest participation in voting of all OECD countries. But it is simply not enough on its own. Marcuse’s
ominous truism that “Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or
the slaves” applies in England as much as it does here – where, as opposed to
two parties vying for a middle ground that gives one no genuine alternative
choice, it has been the army and its agents who have traditionally decided
where the middle ground lies.
The fact is, that Britain’s political
spectrum has entered a slump due to the death of the ‘Grand Idea’. Utopian
ideologies are more often than not, an insult to peoples’ intelligence, no
doubt, but at least in Turkey there are radically different viewpoints
represented in parliament; conservative-minded, liberal capitalists go
head-to-head with statists, nationalists and federalists. Although this makes
Turkish politics extremely unstable, and often ill-informed thanks to a sabre-rattling
press and various curtailments to freedom of expression, it has kept debate
alive where it has slipt into a ‘Grand Sleep’ in the West.
If Turks still voting for now, there
was one piece of news which showed how the mood was shifting this summer, when
main opposition leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu announced in the first days of the
protest, that he would hold a great rally on the Asian side of city, at four o’
clock, from where he would lead the crowds over the bridge to march to Taksim
on the European side. By 2 o’ clock forty-thousand people had already marched
across the bridge. Like the fabled French intellectual who, upon seeing a mob
marching down the street declared “There go my people, I must find out where
they are going in order to lead them”, even the long-established main
opposition has been forced to recognize that the spectrum is extending in a
completely new direction, and they must engage with that change if people are
still to continue participating, or colluding, in Turkey’s democratic
institutions.
The time of the ballot box is
certainly not over, but with all main parties in Turkey looking back on
autocratic pasts in order to provide answers for the problems of
democratic-minded, liberal populaces, it is only a matter of time before they
will all have to step up or be effaced by the challenge of the
extra-parliamentary opposition of their people. As for Britain, I will continue
to wait for a viable alternative to the current system to occur.
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