Anna in Istanbul

Okay. I got a hold of myself. After a philosophical knock about the head lovingly delivered by Professor Mercer, I am back on track.

As Anne said: “No more Postmodernism for you! We’re putting you on a strict diet of the Enlightenment.”

An executive decision has been made. Instead of living in Bebek near Bogazici Universitesi for the semester, I have decided to try out living in Talimhane, just off of Taksim Square. This translates to a roughly 45 minute commute up to Bogazici every day and a bit of isolation from the campus community but I think I’m feeling good about the decision. Had I decided to live here in the dorms, I would have ended up with mostly exchange students, speaking English and generally wishing I was in Taksim.

This being said, my roommate isn’t Turkish. He is a lovely older gay man who happens to write for TimeOut Istanbul. I essentially have a private (wonderfully decorated) studio to myself with a shared kitchen. My roommate writes reviews of clubs in Istanbul and is therefore out most weekend nights. I don’t know how he does it. I can barely go out one night a week without throwing off my entire sleep/work/not-pitying-myself-for-having-had-”too-much-fun” schedule. Young people these days. I can’t keep up.

In other news: the Consulate Shootings.

Perhaps it’s my lack of regular internet or my inability to read Turkish, but it took me quite a while to learn about the shootings. I had actually been planning to go to the American consulate last week to demand a job and student visa but my laziness got in the way. Now I’m reading all over about the “implications within Turkish politics” of the attack and how it will have a ripple effect abroad. Maybe I’m just overly simplistic but when is an act of violence JUST an act of violence?

Individuals who use violence as a means to further their own cause think they can get some kind of leverage by force. The act of shooting at the US Consulate is nothing but strained symbolism. The act itself is suicide and the damage that could be caused by four guys with a few guns and no way to get past the outside walls of the heavily fortified consulate is relatively negligible. The guards who died weren’t even American so what would be the purpose of using violence if not to simply stir the pot of Turkish-American relations? These men decided to take their lives and the lives of their own countrymen in a half-assed attempt to push an ideological point. I find this completely disgusting but what am I to do?

The real danger with isolated acts of violence like this is that they get used to give political clout to anyone who can wrap themselves in the flag. Like Ulysses S. Grant’s approach of “Waving the Bloody Shirt” in his post-Civil War election campaign, any pundit can use the memory of violence to interpret, reinterpret, warn, and console their way into power. Sometimes it’s not the act of violence itself that does the most damage but the political and social recoil that comes after.

We can acknowledge the skewed ideologies that led individuals to use violence (i.e. Sept 11th hijackers) without allowing ourselves to justify more violence (i.e. 9/11 to the Iraq War). Sometimes to take the wind out of the sails of the radical ideaologues, we need to say that violence, even politically motivated, is just violence.