Everything is cheap in this country. Words are cheap, anger is cheap, revolution is cheap. You become a leftist in a day, an enlightenmentist in a sentence, a revolutionary in a slogan. Then the next day everyone goes about their business. Because the most expensive thing here is consistency.
Every May 6th we commemorate the same names: Deniz Gezmiş, Hüseyin İnan, Yusuf Aslan. Three young people, three executions, three lives. But the real tragedy is not their deaths; it is the fact that this country kills them every year, again and more deeply.
Because we have substituted remembrance for reckoning.
We chant slogans. We share. We get angry. Then we continue to live in the same order, as part of the same rotten relationships. This is a memory that salutes those it called “murderers” yesterday. A comfort that today can forget those it called “comrade” yesterday.
And then we shamelessly say “we have not forgotten”.
You forgot. We all forgot.
Forgetting is not just erasing names. To forget is to stop living what those names stand for. It is to acquiesce to the order they opposed, even to compromise with that order, even to become part of that order.
The biggest lie in this country today is “taking sides”. Because taking sides requires a price. But here, everyone is after heroism without a price. Revolutionary when the microphone is on, silent when life begins.
So it's not about the past anymore. It is about us.
If the same order continues today, if justice is still just a word, if people still live in fear, it is not only the decision-makers of yesterday who are responsible for this. It is today's silents, those who turn a blind eye, those who do not give up their comfort.
So it is us.
“It is not enough to say ”we apologize". Because an apology is just an ornament of conscience for those who do not change.
This country will change not with slogans, but with confrontation. But confrontation hurts. That's why everyone chooses to shout, no one chooses to change.
Maybe that's why this is the most honest sentence:
We could not reject the legacy of those who hanged them.
We have only learned to commemorate.
And this is the heaviest defeat.