As I write this on Monday afternoon, Michele Bachmann has been quite the sensation these days. So, there has been a little discussion about uproar going on a bit further away, whose crucial implications we should be soaking in.
Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) announced May 29 that she will not seek re-election to Congress for a fifth term. Since then, the 2012 Republican presidential nomination candidate has been a central subject in news and social media. Now, some attention on her could be justified ― after all, she did found the House Tea Party Caucus. But the commentary has gone beyond that. Liberal and progressive news sources have got a grand opportunity to mock her and the far right; The Daily Beast, for example, wrote a story titled “Who’ll Take Over Crazytown?”
This may actually be a valid question. I think that Bachmann has proven herself to be deludedly misinformed about the government, history, the environment, homosexuality, etc. and I contend that she and her far-right compatriots could fairly be described as comprising “Crazytown.” But that does not mean it is a question worth discussing, especially when events are transpiring around the world of far more seriousness than Tea Party lunacy.
In the last few days, massive uprisings and violent state repression of them have been underway in Turkey. The unrest began as a peaceful demonstration by about 50 environmentalists in Gezi Park, one of the last remaining green spaces in the European side of Istanbul, to prevent its destruction and replacement by a mall and luxury apartments. After three days of occupations, the protesters were met with water cannons, pepper spray and tear gas. As this news spread through the country, protests also erupted throughout the country against state misconduct. As similar police brutality was used against these protests, Turkey was in a riotous state.
Between Saturday and Monday, tens of thousands of people took to public spaces and streets, most notably Taksim Square in Istanbul, and stood up ― with stones, fire, spray paint and immense numbers ― to helicopters spraying tear gas, riot police and their vehicles driving through crowds of civilians. What had started as a small environmental protest had turned into a nation-wide uprising against a general trend of the government’s increasing authoritarian tendencies, and as demonstrated by the banks and multinational companies that were attacked by civilians, neo-liberal capitalism as well. As of Monday afternoon, Turkey’s public sector workers union’s members have planned a two-day strike, beginning tomorrow (Tuesday), to protest “state terror.” More than 1,700 people have been taken into custody, more than a thousand protesters have been injured and, according to Amnesty International, two have been killed.
The events in Turkey are momentous for us because Turkey, unlike the countries involved in the Arab Spring, is a democratic country with a rising, capitalist economy ― it is lauded as a model of “Islamic moderatism.” However, looking at the grounds on which the protests escalated and the response to these uprisings, as the philosopher Slavoj Zizek said, “the protests are a living proof that the free market does not imply social freedom but can well co-exist with authoritarian politics.” We in America should think about that. Both for the sake of vigilance toward what could happen in our future, near or far, and to put in perspective civil liberty offenses that are already occurring today, even if we don’t get appropriately angry about them.
To return home to Bachmann, my point isn’t just that liberal democratic governments shouldn’t be outside of the purview of public skepticism and outraged popular opposition. It is also that the media here should expose its audience to critical events that inform it about its position and potential in the world. If the media’s purpose is to educate the populace, rather than entertain it, we should hardly hear about Michele Bachmann and other nutcases of her ilk. An effective response to their ignorance and the fundamentalism it engenders is to not give them attention ― they just aren’t worth taking seriously.
But people rising up against governments that work, necessarily so in a neo-liberal economy, to appease commercial interests, and the state brutality that subsequently takes place ― be it in the United States with the Occupy Movement or in Turkey ― should be taken seriously. And they should be taken seriously in exactly that manner of analysis ― as a systemic interplay of people, governments and capitalism, not as freak incidents that just couldn’t happen in democracies like ours. As long as we remain under that impression, we’re not much less delusional than Bachmann.
