i come home after a great night with dear HD friends, simon and kelly. spending time with them is always very intellectually fulfilling and more importantly fun.
near the end of the night i somehow brought up the topic -as always- to my desire to be a conscientious objector and to not do my mandatory military service. it is always grim, and since i am not doing anything for it i always feel like a poser.
and as i come home to listen to a bit of black steel in the hour chaos:
i saw the news in the sourtimes that
a) 25000 people attended a memorial of a pkk militant in hakkari.
b) also people were discussing that mothers of pkk militias met the mothers of the soldiers who died to call for peace. (the article in turkish is here)
some (actually two but they are enough) wanted the people who attended the funeral to simply be killed by the government.
after discussing a similar issue with my friends just tonight about a funeral service about a canadian soldier, and how they unknowingly interrupted the memorial as they jogged through the crowd, these stories and the responses to them really agitated me.
basically the father of the dead pkk militant asked for the guns to stop and the pseudo strike in the city hakkari to end, while the statists in sourtimes asked for -basically- more blood in the name of the martyrs and the sovereignty of the holy turkish nation.
my HD friends felt bad interrupting the funeral and on top of they felt guilty of feeling bad because the soldier died in afganistan as a volunteer officer, i.e simply he died in an unjust war. imagine my situation, to be pushed to support and participate in an unjust war, and before doing that living beside the people which support blood and death. glorification of death for the country is one thing that i can and may empathize but glorification of killing is unacceptable.
dear comrade,
ReplyDeletelet me remind you what seems to be the biggest obstacle to the prospective spread of our antimilitarist struggle: TCK 318, being the infamous law forbidding any expression of opinion against military service. this is the keystone sustaining the apparent silence of many on the subject, and no open debate could be even possible without dismantling -or rendering useless- this piece. [and yeah, i'm conspiring in a blog comment, so what?!]
in a much lighter tone; please also listen to the late King's most politically explicit work, "They Don't Care About Us". considering the clintonite years of postmodern-hypertolerant-multuculturalism, it was definitely a subversive act, not to mention both videoclips for the song, one shot in a prison, the other in Rio's favelas --was Michael that aware of the warehousing of the Excluded, well before our beloved contemporary radical thinkers?
i'd also like to thank tricky for including black steel in the setlist for his concert at santralistanbul this summer. t'was fun.