October 20, 2008 Blogspot, the popular blog-hosting service, has been banned in Turkey. This is one of more than 1000 websites which cannot be accessed in Turkey, including YouTube. People accessing these sites get a message telling them that access to the site has been blocked by the Telecommunications Ministry. Most of the sites are blocked because they contain content which has been deemed insulting to Atatürk or to 'Turkishness.' There are ways around the bans—anyone who is the slightest bit web savvy seems to know about the numerous proxies which can be used to access the sites. Surely the Turkish government knows about these proxies as well, yet the blocking of websites continues unabated. For the state, it's of course a hopeless struggle to stop these websites, but I think it is felt that appearance need to be kept up. The Turkish state—the permanent establishment which exists no matter which political party is in charge—is simply unable to climb down from its Kemalist and statist worldview. Allowing YouTube, which includes postings that are meant to be insulting to Atatürk, to be accessed without proxy would constitute an admission that the state cannot, and has no right to, control people's access to information in Turkey. And the prospect of the state no longer being able to demand this control, more than the websites themselves, is what is seen as truly threatening. Banned in Turkey In many ways, the proxy server can be seen as analagous to the way in which many taboo issues are brought up in Turkey. In the 1980s, for example, Prime Minister Turgut Özal did a lot to get people talking about issues like the Kurds, the place of Islam in Turkey, and the role of the military in society by indirect means. He talked, for example, about how is mother was a Kurd at a time when many people in Turkey denied the very existence of Kurds as a separate ethnic group. He took the Prime Minister's limousine to Friday prayers when such a public display of piety had previously been unthinkable for a Turkish Prime Minister. He played an important role in the political rehabilitation of Adnan Menderes, which contributed to the emergence of debates relating to the proper role of the military in Turkish politics. A lot of people dislike Özal, and the many was certainly corrupt, but I think that he also did a lot to open up conversations that needed to—and still need to—be had. But rather than take on these subjects directly—and invite repurcussions from those who would feel threatened by their discussion—Özal's method was to provoke discussion through symbolic gestures. In so doing, he contributed to the emergence of a limited freedom to discuss certain taboo issues which had been largely absent in the 1970s and completely non-existent in the wake of the military takeover of September 12, 1980. And so today people access prohibited websites by proxy. Nobody really seems interested in doing much to forcefully challenge the state's right to control the internet, yet people find a way around such restrictions anyway. On the one hand, I find this representative of a spirit of compromise—or at least of avoiding direct confrontation—which is in many ways admirable. On the other hand, as was the case with the Özal years, one of the results of this state of affairs is the emergence of a political culture in which new ways of viewing the world exist side-by-side with institutions and practices whose very premises they seem to undermine. Such is the situation in Turkey today, where lively political debate unfolds alongside a statist determination to control the web, where women wear baseball caps in university classrooms because they can't cover their heads Islamically, and where countless other rules which seem impractical are routinely flouted. These are all proxies, and are all means through which the country continues to change despite the efforts of many people to prevent change. But the tendency for change to come through proxies in Turkey is also an important reason why some institutions in this country appear to have hardly changed at all since the 1920s.