But, readers of this column know very well that the General Staff is temporarily unaccredited in this column. With the term "temporarily" I mean "until the very day the General Staff abolishes all the press accreditation practices, apologizes for the previous undemocratic practice, calls for judicial action against the initiators and perpetrators of such practice and in a symbolic act invites even the uninterested ethnic and religious minority community newspapers to meetings at the headquarters." While everybody is pondering the nonexistent deep messages of the military oration, I have promised myself that I will not even enter into an analysis of what is being said or written about the speech: The echo of the sound of army boots sounds like army boots in the end. I do understand the enthusiasm created by the shock of listening to a seemingly "more democratic" chief of general staff; but still, I do not understand why columnists/intellectuals should weigh/analyze the content of the speech as if the prospect that this speech is going to shape the future of the country was conceded to from the very beginning. Who will resist the call of authoritarianism, if not the free press? Who decided yesterday's headlines: the free newsrooms or the army headquarters?
The relationship between the press and the army is a relationship of unequals. The army generals should not -- in a democracy, I mean -- expect that they are being listened to and obeyed by the press when they speak and give advice, even on issues relating to the professions of army personnel. That is the difference between governments and civil society. Civil society is free. That is why centripetal forces, such as the army and the bureaucracy, like neither the free press nor civil society. They both like accredited journalists who write what they are "served to write" and "civil governmental organizations" which work with a centripetal, statist mentality within civilian life. They both like to label, classify and define who a good journalist is; what form of an organization counts as a civil society organization; what is civil society; what is society; what is what; what?
Civil society and the state complement each other as balancing centrifugal and centripetal forces of a social organism. No society can be only civil. That will lead to anarchy and the collapse of the social bonds that keep society together. No society can be only state based, only the center, only the rulers. There has never been a nation of pharaohs, or a nation of pariahs only. We need each other. But we also need to know our limits. We need to teach the other its limits, if the other does not know its limits.
I am civil. If the army dares to define me, I say: "Lo! Stop there, soldier! I, only define myself. And that sentence is a part of my definition: Civil is one who denies to be defined coercively."
The London School of Economics Centre for Civil Society's working definition of civil society says that the term refers to the arena of uncoerced collective action around shared interests, purposes and values. The same definition suggests that "civil societies are often populated by organizations such as registered charities, development nongovernmental organizations, community groups, women's organizations, faith-based organizations, professional associations, trade unions, self-help groups, social movements, business associations, coalitions and advocacy groups."
"Collective action" is something the army knows; if it is uncoerced, it becomes civilian. Were the articles that appeared yesterday on that oration "uncoerced"? Were they civilian responses?
By the way, the definition I quoted here would help some coercive definition-makers open their eyes on whether faith-based groups count as civil society or not.
Benzer Haberler 
