Kurdish people listen to Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announce his reform package on TV on September 30, 2013, in Diyarbakır. (MEHMET ENGIN/AFP/Getty Images)[/caption]In Humboldt’s Gift, a novel by Saul Bellow, there’s a fantastic extended tirade about boredom and power. “What could be more boring than the long dinners Stalin gave?” Bellow asks. “The guests drank and ate, and ate and drank, and then at 2 a.m. they had to sit down to watch an American Western. Their bottoms ached. . . . Everyone was perishing of staleness and fear, afraid to go to the toilet.” “Power,” he concludes, “is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish.”
All good stuff. But what if the world has changed in the last fifty years? We know now that Communism was a bad thing. Capitalism has triumphed. Today’s autocrats cannot get away with the “[d]owdiness shabbiness dullness dull goods boring buildings” of Stalin’s Russia. It is not enough to go through the brief euphoria of a revolution only to bore people for decades. You have to titillate them every day.
Peter Pomerantsev has shown how it is done in Vladimir Putin’s Russia in a series of excellent articles in the London Review of Books, with deputies making burlesque proposals to introduce “anti-gay propaganda” and ban “‘untraditional’ sex” not because they believe the laws will actually be passed but to “fill up the conversation.”
To see how it is done in Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey, you only have to look at the ‘democratisation packet’ he announced on Monday, September 30. (The Turkish word paket—like its English equivalent—is usually used to describe consumer items: chips, cigarettes, spaghetti, that sort of thing.)
So what did this one contain? Well, there was a sensible end to the ban on female public sector workers wearing headscarves. There was a fine-sounding phrase about “bringing respect for lifestyles under the protection of the Turkish Criminal Code” which, given the current slant of Turkey’s sycophantic judiciary, could easily be turned into a further obstacle against any form of critical discussion of the place of religion in society. Turkey’s Roma were promised their own state institute—intimations of Stalinism there. Alevis—syncretistic Shi'ites unnerved by Erdoğan’s unabashed Sunni stance—were fobbed off with a promise to rename a provincial university after a popular saint. Kurdish children will now be able to study Kurdish, as long as their parents can afford to send them to private schools (most of which are run by pro-government religious groups). Their parents will be able to use the letters q, w and x, used in Kurdish but not in Turkish, and refer to their villages by their original Kurdish names. (They already do.) There was also a promise to look into alternatives to the current electoral system, which prevents parties with less than 10 percent of the vote from sitting in parliament.
All in all, it was pretty thin stuff, not that you would get that impression reading the pro-government press. “The Erdoğan Revolution” headlined Akşam. “Welcome Freedom”, roared Türkiye. For Sabah, it was “20 Steps to a New Turkey.”
But it was what came before that was really interesting. The government has kept the country on tenterhooks about this ‘packet’ for months. At first, they said they would announce it in August. Then the date was put back to the start of September. “You will be surprised, believe me—surprised and pleased,” Erdoğan told TV audiences repeatedly, his eyes twinkling like a parent in the run up to Christmas. And all the while, there was the constant thrum of media anticipation, building up to a great fortissimo climax on the eve of the announcement itself. “Today, history will be written in Ankara,” Sabah proclaimed on the morning of September 30. “Today will be a turning point in the history of democratization.” On the same day, Yeni Şafak called the still-undisclosed reforms “a Master’s packet,” a reference to Erdoğan’s fondness for characterizing his three terms in power as a Jedi-like ascension from apprentice to master. “The government will crown 11 years of reform with the ‘Democratic Packet’ it announces today.”
This deliberate orchestration of suspense has attracted quite a lot of comment in Turkey. One commentator compared Erdoğan to the CEO of a multi-national announcing the launch of a new product after a long marketing campaign.
But the government didn’t have look to Steve Jobs for inspiration: all it needed to do was turn on the nearest TV. Since private television started around 1990, Turkish TV channels have become experts at inflammatory demagogy. In the West, generally, news is news. You get told the facts, or something approximating them. In Turkey, TV news is almost always delivered with a soundtrack. If there has been fighting in Kurdish areas, you get footage of helicopters flying over a mountain and a menacing military drum beat. If some poor kid has drowned in an irrigation channel, you get an Anatolian dirge. Newspaper portals also fall over themselves to pull the reader in. Every new agency story, no matter how banal, comes complete with a big red flashing banner above it: “Flash! Flash! Flash!” or “Hot News!” or “Hot Development.” At times the naivety is almost touching, as in the common headline, “This story is bound to be talked about.”
As Hakan Aksay wrote on the online news portal T24, the government has simply adopted standard media practice. “Coming soon! A packet full of surprises! Stay with us! Coming straight after the adverts!” Politics is no different from a soap opera. If you didn’t like this week’s democracy packet, don’t worry: we’ll be opening another one soon.
So Saul Bellow is out of date. Power is no longer the power to force people to attend boring congresses and endless military parades. Power today has no interest in forcing people out of their homes to prove their love of the nation. It is quite happy for them to sit glued to their boxes and feed their incipient attention deficit disorder. The real measure of power has become the power to impose a simulacrum of excitement.
All views expressed in this blog post are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, The Majalla magazine.
