I do all this in order to find out something extraordinary, something remarkable, but the problem is that everything is so banal, so ordinary.As Hannah Ardent puts it, it is the banality of evil.
Even its name is banal: Sledgehammer. There is nothing creative in this title; in 1971 there was an “operation” carrying the same name and aiming at the same result: to fill the prisons with the good people who refuse to be banal.
The perpetrators are banal, too. Their evil minds are so familiar, so ordinary to democracy-lovers. From top to bottom within their own hierarchy they have the same narrow mind; they believe that they are superior to any civilian. They think that citizens of this country, if they don’t have a uniform on their bodies and minds, deserve oppression and extermination.
This banality is not only in the hierarchy -- their representatives are everywhere including in the apartment buildings; they oppose everything without reason. It is enough for them if the building is run by a civilian. They are in the schools to oppress the creative ideas of students; they are on the streets to lynch people if they are collecting signatures for a cause or speaking any language other than Turkish. They are next to you to complain about the women wearing headscarves; they are there to discriminate against people according to their gender or sexual orientation.
Eventually commentators who labeled voters as the man scratching his belly started to ask, “Can it be true?” They are as banal as those Germans who after World War II claimed: “Oh, these camps were not work camps but extermination camps for our neighbors? We did not know that.”
By the way, I was never able to understand those films that portray Nazi officials as extraordinary psychos, because they were not, they just thought that they were serving the benefit and the interests of their republic; they were cleansing the German culture of external cultures.
Well, according to the Sledgehammer plan, our military was also planning to cleanse Turkish culture of its Kurdish and Arabic influences. To this end, they were planning to make the adhan (call to prayer) in Turkish. It was not clear what they would do to reverse the Kurdish influence on Turkish culture, maybe forbid kebab, maybe prohibit speaking in Kurdish. Perhaps they were even planning to make the Kurds wear yellow stars. Why not? Weren’t they banal enough to make people disappear in death wells?
The statement from the General Staff acknowledging the existence of Sledgehammer was very banal, too. Not only its content but also its language was very snobbish, and its way of ordering the people what to think is something very ordinary, very familiar for the citizens of this country. We have been instructed by this tone for many years.
Everything is disgustingly banal, but the most banal part is to claim that everything was done for the sake of the country and within the knowledge of the hierarchy and the laws that give the military the power to intervene in domestic matters without the prior approval of the civil authorities.
There should be only one target for everyone in this country who really wishes to live in accordance with democracy and the rule of law: to transfer this banality into something so extraordinary that we forget about writing 5,000 pages of the Sledgehammer plan. For even one single word of a similar plan to cross the mind should be subject to heavy punishment.
Those kinds of sledgehammers should be so extraordinary that there should be no room for punishment because whoever thinks about it should be so ashamed of what they think that they should bash their own heads in with sledgehammers.
To create such an atmosphere is the only way to defeat the banality of evil.
