Wall is a very meaningful word. We assume, we hope, that the walls of our house protect us from cold, rain, snow, attacks, thieves. When the city of Ur was burned and destroyed, as it is written in the Sumerian tablets, “Lamentations were made along the walls surrounding Ur”, we also lament when our home and bark are destroyed. A home with four walls is a homeless dream. This is the desire of university students who have not been able to find a place to live in recent days. They want a place to sleep, study, and enjoy being with their friends.
But there are other walls as well.
The history of the walls has to do with property, especially land ownership. Let us quote from Hodja Fikret Başkaya; “Enclosure, or enclosure in English, is the name of a social process that emerged in the XVI, XVII and XVIII centuries. It meant the taking away of small farmers by ‘fencing’ land that had been made available to small families by large landowners. The communally owned, cultivated lands, pastures, grasslands, heathlands, etc. usurped by large property owners. It was customized in today’s terms.”
Taking their property from the small owners was a sine qua non of capitalism. In his Utopia, Thomas Morus describes this atrocity as follows, quoting again from Başkaya: “They empty large agricultural lands and make pasture. They are turning the most populated and processed places into deserts.
One of such insatiable miser surrounds thousands of acres. He drives the honest farmers out of their homes: by deceiving some, by force, by disturbing others by various means, forcing them to sell their land. These villagers, who have more than enough money to feed, hit the road with their children, widows, orphans, parents and grandchildren. There may also be those who want to perpetuate their poverty by begging: they catch them and call them vagrants and throw them in prison. However, what is the crime of these people? Not being able to find anyone to give them a job even though they are eager to work.” Such are the walls that the unemployed turn from.
But there are other walls as well.
History is the history of war with walls and walls
Walls have always been important in history. Homer tells us that the walls of Troy were overcome by the Wooden Horse trick, in which the warriors were hidden. Isn’t the Great Wall of China the longest wall in history that the country of China, which seems to be great and unlimited, built to protect itself from attacks from the west and north? Let’s take an earlier example. Remnants of Hadrian’s wall still stand. It was a stone wall dividing England in an east-west direction; It was built to protect Britain under the Roman Empire from the “barbarian” incursions of the northern Scottish tribes. Tourists now visit the ruins.
Aren’t the remains of the walls that Fatih destroyed still standing?
What about the Berlin Wall? It is the work of the days when the US, British and French armies were catching up at full speed to prevent the Red Army from clearing all of Berlin from the Nazis, thus becoming the dominant, decisive force of victory, as the Second World War ended. The German Democratic Republic was established in the Soviet-dominated document against the Federal German state, which was established in the areas under the control of the Americans without seeking an agreement.
Berlin, which was in the middle of democratic Germany, was also divided into two. The wall that the DDR administration built overnight was destroyed after the Socialist world was destroyed and dissolved by attacks from the inside and outside, and after the DDR joined the Federal Germany. A part of it was left for tourists, it is in Kreuzberg, where our compatriots who have gone from here live heavily.
Even if the countries that managed to heal the wounds of the war did not want to, or even wanted to forget, there were monumental walls that tell the traces of that brutality. I saw some of them with my embarrassed eyes. They surrounded a large square with walls. “Arbeits macht frei – work liberates” was written on its door. However, behind that wall was death, not freedom. Hundreds of thousands of Jews, communists, disabled, Gypsies, unreliable foreigners were exterminated in those death camps. I also saw the memorial wall of those added to the old cemetery of the murdered Jews after the Hitler massacre, in Judengasse in Frankfurt.
But there are other walls as well.
There used to be, but in recent years, mass migration from south to north, east to west, from poverty to wealth, has accelerated. States, too, have been troubled to fortify their borders against this relentless, disregarding immigrants and refugees. Because they don’t want to share the wealth. Then what should they do; they erect walls of steel, barbed wire, concrete, and place armed guards in the guard posts. Yet they cross the seas, cross the deserts, rest on the fortified walls of rich countries.
Walls are like that. Therefore, pulling a brick does not destroy the wall. Because there’s blood on every single brick in that wall. People need a world without walls, without secrets, without borders, and clean. Our anger dissipates in the fog, disappears, don’t let it go. Let’s close this article, which is very weak and incapable of describing the deaths and the deep sorrow of the deaths, with Nâzım’s verses so that hopes are not lost and the future does not darken.
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