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We've read about this.

In our history books.

We've drawn fake mustaches and tattoos on Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin, amazed at how cruel they were. At what they had done. 

We've read the novels. 

We've analyzed passages from 1984. 

We've watched the movies. 

We've quoted lines from V for Vendetta. We've looked for its DVD under the "Sci-Fi" and "Action" sections in the bookstore.

Now, all of these are most easily accessible. 

Just turn on the TV in Turkey, and voila! You can see the live broadcast of 1984, Hitler's war speeches, and V for Vendetta all in one place. 

One second, Twitter gets banned. 

The next, Youtube is blocked. 

A petition to ban Facebook is now in court. 

Why, you ask?

Because records of people working (at least who are supposed to be working) for the government have surfaced and diffused through these social media platforms; records revealing every bribe they have taken, every threat they have made, every "lira" they have stolen. Apparently, "revealing" these records are unethical, but what the people in the records are claimed to have done is nowhere near that.

And with the word of the PM, soon to be sultan, I fear, the people's access to some major social media platforms gets banned. They have silenced the people as if they are turning down the volume of their TV. 

Democracy in Turkey is rapidly failing. 

There is an election on Sunday for the people to show themselves; unless a war starts between Syria and Turkey until then. Unfortunately, this isn't just speculation: today, new records have revealed ******. I had to remove this part of my post because the government has just issued a law stating that revealing the contents of this recording puts our "national security" in danger and thus is a crime. 

So, just hold on, Turkey, hold on just until Sunday. Until people can talk without having to change their DNS settings. Until we get a say in something. Until we get to make the change in our country, not our future-sultan. 

Lessons from Fiction

What do we do in our free time?

We watch TV shows.

We watch movies.

We listen to music.

We read books. 

 

But actually, when we listen to music, or watch a movie, we may just be feasting on one of the extensions of a work of literature, with out even knowing it. To all those people who regard studying literature as being useless: try living with out it and see how your life turns into a gray, disgusting bowl of mush.

Literature is everywhere, and what a man poured out onto ink and paper 300 years ago can always be studied and explored further, diving into the wells of the author's state of mind and emotions, newly discovering the lands the author has already conquered. There is always something to learn when you read someone else's writing, whether it's The Republic or a blog post.

Last week, the Turkish government issued a new law stating that the government now has the right to view any of our private chats and listen to our conversations over the phone. One of the newspapers which still, despite the horrendously oppressive government, can actually deliver true and "un-politicized" news, printed the heading "Big Brother Left Innocent". Whether it is the reference a minority newspaper in Turkey makes to a classic work of dystopic fiction to reflect what takes place in the real world, or that George Orwell, way back in 1948 predicted what would happen to the world and wrote a work of "fiction" on it which turns out to be eerily accurate, goes to show what fiction -and literature- are capable of.

Personally, I don't care much about a research being done on how reading literary fiction improves one's ability to detect the state of mind of a person from only their eyes. What I'm interested in is, how literary fiction, or any type of fiction, can help us get along in life and broaden our horizons. When we study these works, we get to know about the time period these books were written in, or about the years they take place in. We get to learn about different cultures and traditions, facts we would otherwise regard as unimportant and facts which we wouldn't search on Google about in our free time.

But these are just the tip of the iceberg.

The most important thing we gain by reading and studying works of fiction is getting to know people and how they react to certain events. We get to know different types of people, and by the end of the book, if the author was skillful enough, we get connected to the characters so tightly that we do not want to let go. We get to know what a grieving father thinks when he acts, we get to know what an assassin feels like when he completes his kill or gets his training, we  know what drives a man looking for vengeance, we know how a poet caught in the webs of a conspiracy against him and trapped inside the strict views and rules of a society feels like.

So reading and studying literary fiction-or any type of fiction, at that- is not a total waste of time as some people may assume it to be. Along with learning about the time periods and circumstances the novels were written/take place in, we also get to know people. And there's nothing wrong with getting to know more about the dominant -and supposedly the most intelligent- species on earth which we live among, compete with, and fall in love with.