Boys and Girls
The other night when I was walking around I passed by several Stolpersteine. These are brass cobblestones carrying the imprint of the stigmatized people, mostly Jewish, who were torn out of their homes, deported and killed by the Nazi regime and its collaborators.
Why is this important to me? Besides commemorating the victims they help me to imagine how it might have been to have no shelter even at our most intimate place – our home. And, it reminds of what kind of things usually happen before crimes against humanity are conducted. It tells which ingredients the offspring of fascism and whatever sort of fundamentalism is throwing up.
Incendiary talk is one of them, followed by the menace of action, and then the action itself. The talk provokes, propagandises and polarises. A typical attribute is the lie.
During the Gezi protests the Turkish prime minister himself as well as his compliant followers systematically applied that. Foreign forces are maliciously undermining our society and economy, protesters are members of terroristic entities, protesters despise our religion by drinking alcohol in mosques. None of these claims were proved, on the contrary, they were proved to be invented. People who proved these to be lies where removed from their positions such as the imam who stated in television that no one drank alcohol in his mosques but instead used the mosques to take care of injured protesters.
Currently, after the physical protests calmed down, the agitation is focussing on students, in particular on the gender mixed student houses: The so-called “Boys and Girls” issue. Media reports on house searches in students homes in Istanbul, and also people are posting privately on facebook about such incidents. The official propaganda is using the typical means: allegedly people themselves, worried parents of students and in particular landlords are complaining about immoral behaviour in their houses. So it says.
Now, civilian protests under the tag “Boys and Girls” are taking on again. Like the Gezi movement symbolic actions such as couples are dancing on the street in Ankara, three students denounced themselves to the public attorney’s office due to sharing an apartment, landlords are putting announcements in house entrances announcing that mixed genders are living in their apartments.
On the 6th of October I wrote about my personal experience after the military coup in the early 80ies when two soldiers brought us back to my aunts home denouncing that my cousin was kissing a guy on the beach. http://www.fuenfnullzwei.de/60pages/underneath-the-hype/
So I ask myself what has changed in 30 years? Not much, police replaced military. Today, it’s all about how strong and persistent civilian resistance will be.
This is a post in a house entrance in Istanbul. The translation is below.
Post in House Entrance in Istanbul
Dear Prime Minister,
Boys and Girls may live in our house.
Excuse us, they may be Greek, Armenian or Alevi.
They may be gay or lesbian.
May be atheist, agnostic.
Also, they may worship cows.
They may make noise on pans and pots.
Women wearing scarves or not are not your sisters, they are all our siblings.
Meaning here is no way to carry out the fight you are looking for.
Regards