Reading Deniz Göktaş's Defense with Young Comrades, Point by Point
Four Sentences, Eighty-Eight Days, One Class Question
Reading Deniz Göktaş's Defense with Young Comrades, Point by Point
Between the Lines of the Defense
Dear Young Comrades,
On 28 September, in a hearing moved to the courtroom of the 4th High Criminal Court because the Istanbul 14th Criminal Court of First Instance did not have the room, comedian Deniz Göktaş stood up after 88 days in detention and made a long defense. That same evening he was released. He was not acquitted. The court sentenced him to 11 months and 20 days for "insulting the President" and to 7 months and 15 days for "degrading religious values," 1 year, 7 months, and 5 days in prison in all. An acquittal came only on the charge of "praising a crime and a criminal."
In "The Deniz Göktaş Case and the Class of Humor," which we published that evening, we set out the main lines of the defense, the chronology, and the division of labor among the apparatuses. This piece is built on that one, and it does a different job. We open the defense point by point, sentence by sentence, and we ask each of them the same question:
From whose world is this said? What does it see, and what does it fail to see? And what do we learn from it?
Let us make one thing plain at the start. Deniz Göktaş is not a politician. His defense is not a class defense either. It is a liberal-democratic defense, made by an artist through constitutional rights and through the nature of his profession. We do not say this as a fault. We say it as a finding. Our job is not to turn him into something other than what he is. The principle we used in the Ruhi Su and Yılmaz Güney pieces holds here too: neither saint nor villain. We defend him without conditions in law. We read him with care in politics. These two do not block each other. Each is the condition of the other.
Let us begin.
The first sentence of the defense: "22 days per sentence"
What did he say?
Göktaş began with the cell. According to the full text relayed by Halk TV, from 3 July until the day of the hearing he was held at Çorlu Karatepe High-Security Penal Institution, in a cell that gets no sun and in which he could communicate with no other detainee or convict. He could speak with his family for 10 minutes a week on the phone, and see them for one hour a week from behind glass. For these visits his family had to come 12 times from Ankara to Çorlu. And he made this calculation:
"I have been detained for 88 days because of 4 sentences. I was held in a high-security cell for 22 days per sentence."
Class reading
This sentence may be the strongest in the defense, because it turns an abstract violation of a right into a cost that can be measured. Young comrades, we should see three things here.
First: the punishment was given by the process, not by the verdict. In the end the court gave 1 year and 7 months, and released him. But the real punishment had already been served before the verdict, in 88 days of isolation. In the language of law, detention is a "measure." In practice, especially in political cases, it is the sentence served in advance. We have seen this method in the Osman Kavala file, and in the trustee cases too: the trial itself becomes an instrument of punishment. Whatever the result, the aim of "making them pay the price" has been carried out.
Second: isolation is a language of intimidation. A "high-security," "pit-type" cell for four sentences… This has to do not with the weight of the crime, but with whom the message is addressed to. The real addressee is not Göktaş. It is the next comedian who will go on stage, the next journalist who will write, the next young person who will share something. The weight of the punishment is proportioned not to the crime, but to the size of the public one wants to deter.
Third, and the point we should dwell on most: the cost is loaded onto the family too. Twelve times, Ankara–Çorlu. Do not pass over this as a number. Every round trip means the fare, a day of leave, lodging, a lost day of work. Göktaş's family could meet this. What about the family of someone on the minimum wage, of a construction worker, of a courier? The real weight of the "exile transfer," which we read every year in the reports of the Human Rights Association (İHD), is here: the distance of the prison is a second storey of the punishment for a poor family. Distance from the prison is not a question of geography. It is a class question. When Göktaş says "12 times," whether he is aware of it or not, he makes visible the silent accounting of thousands of poor families of detainees.
What we learn: In a political prosecution the real judgment is usually given not at the verdict hearing, but on the night of the arrest. The struggle should begin there too: detention as the exception, prisons close to the family home, an end to isolation. These are the demands not of "the famous," but of the detainees whose voices are heard least.
"198 times, 100,000 spectators, zero complaints"
What did he say?
Göktaş said that between October 2023 and June 2026 he performed the sentences he is charged with 198 times, before an audience of more than 100,000 in different cities of Turkey, and that he met not a single complaint. He described his profession like this:
"Musicians first record the album and then release it. Comedians first do it for years in front of an audience, and then they record it on video."
In the form relayed by Diken: "I played the four sentences at issue in the case to more than a hundred thousand spectators, and hundreds of thousands of people saw no ground for complaint in them."
Class reading
The argument is legally sound. If the same sentences were not counted as a "crime" 198 times, the crime is not in the sentences. It is somewhere else. Where?
The crime was not on the stage. It was in the spread. A word spoken in the hall stays in the hall. When the same word lands on YouTube and reaches 15 million views, it is a mass fact. For the ruling bloc the problem is not what a comedian said. It is how many people laughed at the same time. In Gramsci's language: hegemony is about whose control "common sense" is under. A hall total of 100,000 can be managed. A shared laughter of 15 million means "the thing everyone secretly thinks is said in front of everyone," and that is dangerous.
There is a point here where we have to be honest. What is the class composition of those 100,000 spectators? Tickets at the Harbiye Open-Air Theatre, tour halls, an urban audience… Stand-up in Turkey is, in the main, the art of urban, educated, salaried middle layers. This is not an accusation. It is a finding. The "zero complaints" in the hall has partly to do with the spectators there already coming from the same world. YouTube broke that wall: the joke left the class setting in which it was written and reached the whole of society. What the ruling bloc did was to turn this passage into a story of "social outrage." Power used the distance between the middle-class hall and the working-class neighborhood as a weapon.
What we learn: When art closes itself into a narrow class setting, it is left undefended. If there is no bridge between the artist and the working-class neighborhood, the trolls build that bridge, with their own distorted versions.
Trolls, CİMER, and the simulation of "the people"
What did he say?
This was perhaps the best-documented part of the defense. According to Göktaş, after the show landed on YouTube a troll account with a large following first shared the joke; the next day another clip was pushed forward; on the third day the same material spread simultaneously from hundreds of accounts under the heading "the Comedian Who Degrades Religious Values." In the first three days there was only one complaint to CİMER, the Presidency's public-complaint system. The 185 CİMER complaints the prosecution relied on came after this campaign. In two of them, according to what Göktaş read, the complainants wanted him executed. In one there was a charge of "insulting the Seljuks" that does not even appear in the indictment.
"This is definitely not an organic reaction."
"If these complaints are pointed to as a reference, on the grounds that the public was disturbed by Deniz, that is legally grave."
Class reading
Young comrades, read this section with care. There is a naked diagram here of the political technology of our time.
The digital form of Bonapartism. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx describes the regime in which the executive presents itself as standing above all classes, as "the people itself." This regime does not organize the people. It produces a crowd that claims to represent the people. The 185 CİMER complaints are exactly this: an artificial majority produced by an organized minority, then inserted into the law as "the voice of the people." The real public (15 million views, 20,000 positive comments) is made invisible. The manufactured public (185 complaints) becomes evidence.
The transformation of CİMER. On paper, CİMER is a channel through which the citizen petitions the state. In this case it turned into a line for denunciation. A petition instrument turning into an instrument of denunciation is the digital edition of the "society of political filing" we described in the 12 September dossier: making the citizen a watchman against the citizen. The mechanism that works today against a comedian will work tomorrow against the worker who is unionizing in the workplace. It is not hard to imagine an organized complaint campaign that begins "the employee who speaks ill of our company."
The ownership of the platform. There is a question no one asks here: where did these "hundreds of accounts, simultaneously" speak? On platforms whose algorithms reward anger, that make money from engagement, whose owners bargain with those in power. A troll campaign is not a "Turkish oddity." It is a local application of the economy of anger. Until the ownership of digital platforms is asked about, the debate on freedom of expression always stays half-finished.
The demand for execution. That two complainants asked for the execution of a comedian should not be brushed aside as an "extreme." It is the natural product of a political climate that feeds the masses on a constant image of an enemy. The footsteps of fascism are heard first in ordinary sentences that say "let that one die too."
What we learn: Whenever someone says "the sensitivities of the people," always ask: Which people? Who counted them? Who organized them? The voice of the real people is heard only when they are organized. In the place of an unorganized people, others always speak.
"Dictator is a political characterization"
What did he say?
The sentence at issue in the charge of insulting the President was this: "The passage from a shy dictator to a dictator at peace with his own identity is, if we do not think of what happened to us, a positive progress for a human being." Göktaş's answer was plain:
"The word dictator is not an insult. It is a political characterization."
And the most quoted sentence of the defense:
"Political humor in which Erdoğan's name does not appear has no meaning."
Class reading
Where he is right. "Dictator" is a description of a regime in political science, a concept in use since Rome. Turning it into an insult pulls political criticism into the field of personal honor. This pull is no accident. Once criticism is counted as an "attack on honor," the debate leaves the question "what is the regime?" and sinks into the courtesy of "let no one speak rudely to anyone." The political content is emptied out.
The class history of the article on "insulting the President." TCK 299 is the continuation of an old legal tradition, called lèse-majesté in Europe, that grants untouchability to the body of the sovereign. When the bourgeois revolutions broke the sanctity of the king, these articles were in most places either repealed or left as a dead letter. In Turkey, the investigations opened under this article over the last twelve years are counted in the tens of thousands. The meaning is this: as the power of the executive gathers in a single person, that person's body is sanctified again. If criticizing the head of state is a crime in a republic, the content of the republic has been emptied there, and the form remains.
Where he does not see. Now a comradely criticism. The sentence "political humor in which Erdoğan's name does not appear has no meaning" is both right and incomplete. It is right, because so long as humor does not touch the very top of power, it is entertainment, not courage. It is incomplete, because reducing the regime to a person is the oldest error of the liberal opposition. The passage "from a shy dictator to a dictator at peace with himself" is not one person's psychological journey. It is the story of which fractions of capital, through which tenders, privatizations, and construction rents, and with which class alliance, have built this regime since the crisis of 2001. Humor that focuses on the person, without meaning to, sends this message: "If he goes, everything will be put right." If he goes, the same order of capital can continue with another face.
Traces of this question can be seen on Göktaş's stage. In his defense, as one would expect, they have no place. It would be unfair to expect political economy from a defendant in a courtroom. But we have to go one step beyond his defense: A dictator is not the character of a person. It is the political form of a class alliance.
What we learn: Criticizing the person is our right. If the criticism stops at the person, the system gets away.
"He definitely goes to therapy," and the comedian who graduated in psychology
What did he say?
In the show it was said of the President, "he definitely goes to therapy; the last video in which he laughed was in a cemetery." This was an allusion to the cemetery video known as "Dear Musa." Göktaş reminded the court that he is a psychology graduate, and said:
"As a psychology graduate, it is out of the question that I would use the act of going to therapy in a negative sense."
He defined therapy as "a psychological support service that everyone should benefit from."
Class reading
A section that looks small and says a great deal. The indictment read the phrase "going to therapy" as an element of an insult. That is, from the prosecution's point of view, to say that someone goes to therapy is to degrade them. This reading is the reflection, into the law, of a reactionary mentality that still sees mental health as a matter of shame.
There is a class dimension here too. In Turkey, access to therapy is extremely limited in the public health system. The fees for private sessions come to a significant part of the minimum wage. Therapy is, in practice, a service that the middle and upper classes can reach. The worker's mental health is still governed by the culture of "bear it," "be grateful," "a man who works a heavy job does not cry." When Göktaş says "a service everyone should benefit from," he is stating a right demand. We add this to it: mental health should not be a class privilege. It should be a public and free right. Burnout, workload, insecurity, rent… These are not individual "problems." They are the traces that working conditions leave on the mind.
What we learn: What an indictment counts as an "insult" shows what the ruling ideology sees as "base." A state that counts therapy as an insult does not take the worker's mental health seriously either.
The diver joke: the mirror of prejudice
What did he say?
This was the longest part of the defense. The setup of the joke is this. An oppositional, secular character who has gone on holiday after an election defeat describes people coming out of the sea, "their hair not visible, in a black garment covering their whole bodies." The audience thinks of women in haşema, the full-body swimwear, and grows tense, or laughs. The character calls them "divers." Göktaş's explanation:
"After making them wait for me to say haşema instead of divers, I pass over to the diver and wrong-foot the audience. I make everyone confront their own prejudice."
Then he turned to the hall and said "Harbiye, you failed the test," and, in another account, "Do not applaud for nothing, you failed the test."
Class reading
Young comrades, this section is the knot of the whole case. Because the court read the joke in exact reverse: it convicted, as a joke that degrades religious people, a joke that exposes a secular prejudice.
Who was the target of the joke? The target was not women in haşema. It was the reflex of the secular middle class, which grows tense on seeing them. Göktaş put the prejudice of his own audience (the urban, secular spectators at Harbiye) on stage and held a mirror up to them. This is one of the most valuable functions of humor: to be able to criticize one's own side too.
Why was it read in reverse? Let us repeat what we said in our previous piece. The secular–religious polarization is the curtain drawn, for thirty years, over the class contradiction. The more the debates over the headscarf, haşema, and coeducation grow, the less the minimum wage, rent, and the pension are spoken of. A joke that tears this curtain, and that makes the prejudice of both sides look ridiculous, is dangerous for a politics that feeds on this polarization. Power wants to keep the secular–religious tension standing, because that tension sets two workers in the same factory, on the same building site, against each other. Convicting the joke that breaks the polarization, on the charge that it is "polarizing," is for that reason not a mistake. It is a need.
The class of the sea. One more detail. The setting of the joke is the sea, a holiday. In Turkey, whose the shore is is also a class question: private beaches, five-star "conservative" hotels, coves closed to the public, sands one pays an entrance fee to enter. The woman in haşema and the woman in a bikini both pay money to go into the sea, in a country where the shore is being sold off to capital. The real common problem is not the clothing. It is whom the shore belongs to. The secular–religious fight covers that question too.
What we learn: Culture wars hide the class war. A humor that can face the prejudice of its own side can carry the workers of both sides to the same question. That is exactly what those in power are afraid of.
"The fourth book" and fasting: in whose hands are religious values?
What did he say?
One of the jokes at issue in the charge of degrading religious values was about the "fourth book": phrases such as "by a clear margin the best of the four books," "the fourth book is my favorite," and a single negative sentence: "The first three books were good; the translation of the fourth is weak." Göktaş:
"I am in no way aiming to belittle the sacred book or the people who believe in it."
"This is an artistic production. It is not a religious production."
He relayed that a religious official who met with him in prison said "Using 'author' may be wrong from the point of view of religious terminology," and he said that this "in no way contains a negative, mocking, or degrading meaning." The indictment also counted the sentence "What I fear most are suicide bombers who are fasting" as evidence of a crime, on the grounds that it presented people who fast as "more apt to be suicide bombers."
Class reading
The distinction between artistic production and religious production. This distinction of Göktaş's matters a great deal, because it recalls the most basic principle of secularism: the measure of art, of science, of philosophy is not the measure of religion. A stage show cannot be judged like a text of Islamic jurisprudence. The same principle holds for science. Removing the theory of evolution from the school curriculum, and counting a joke as "degrading religious values," are two faces of the same mentality. The real issue is the imposition of a religious measure on art, on science, and on education.
The religious official's view on "terminology." It looks like a small detail. It is not. That a religious official in the prison assesses a comedy text from the point of view of "religious terminology" shows that the Directorate of Religious Affairs has begun to work, in practice, as an expert witness, and even as a censorship board. Today the Directorate is a giant ideological apparatus, with a budget larger than that of many ministries, and with a say from education to family policy. In Althusser's concept: an ideological apparatus of the state. When this apparatus issues an "opinion" on a work of art, it means that the autonomy of art has in practice been liquidated.
Reading Marx's sentence correctly. Here we want to say something very important to the young comrades. Marx's sentence "Religion is the opium of the people" is always quoted in half. The whole of it is this:
"Religious suffering is at once the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."
The Marxist attitude, then, is not to degrade the worker who believes. The believer's faith is, most of the time, a branch to hold on to in a heartless world. What we oppose is the turning of this faith, by capital and by power, into an instrument of rule. The boss who does not give the fasting worker a reduction in hours during Ramadan, and the politician who said "fate" at Soma, both use the believing worker's faith for their own interest. The charge of "degrading religious values" is the legal cover of this use. It does not protect the real honor of the religious worker (the wage, safety at work, a life fit for a human being). It protects only power's monopoly over religious language.
A comradely note on the fasting sentence. Let us look critically at Göktaş here too. Even if the image of the "fasting suicide bomber" does not carry the meaning the prosecution claims, it calls up a racist-Orientalist image that has for decades identified Muslims with terror in the West. A stage sentence playing with this image, whatever the intention, carries the risk of flattering some prejudices of the secular middle class. The diver joke was exposing that prejudice. This sentence may not stand on the same line. Making this criticism does not justify putting him in prison. Discussing a joke is one thing. Punishing it with prison is another. The criticism of art is made in the field of art, in public debate. Not at the prosecutor's office.
What we learn: We do not degrade the religious worker. We expose the one who makes religion an instrument of power. The article on "degrading religious values" protects not the believer, but power's monopoly over the language of religion.
From Nasreddin Hodja to Ferhan Şensoy: the tradition of humor
What did he say?
Göktaş said that satire and humor are "values of this geography spread across centuries":
"The works and legends of dozens of satirists, from Nasreddin Hodja to the Republican period, are still remembered; even the names of the office-holders they criticized are recalled thanks to these critical works."
"If Nasreddin Hodja, who did not hold his tongue before authority, were alive, he would make no joke but about Erdoğan."
He listed Ferhan Şensoy, Sabahattin Ali, Rıfat Ilgaz, Aziz Nesin, and magazines such as Markopaşa, Diyojen, Akbaba, Gırgır, and Leman. He gave the example of Levent Kırca and added:
"Levent Kırca did it on television, and it entered everyone's home. In those years the laws protecting freedom of expression did not change, but now a comedian is in prison. What changed is politicians who cannot take a joke, fragile politicians."
Class reading
A fine genealogy, an incomplete history. The names Göktaş lists are a genuinely honorable genealogy of humor in Turkey. But look at this list with care, young comrades: most of these names paid a price. Sabahattin Ali was prosecuted for his writings in Markopaşa, served time in prison, and in the end was killed at the border. Rıfat Ilgaz, as one of the writers of Markopaşa, was prosecuted again and again, and went to prison. Aziz Nesin spent years of his life in prisons, and came back from death at Sivas. Markopaşa was shut down again and again, and came out again under a changed name (Merhumpaşa, Malumpaşa, Yedi-Sekiz Hasan Paşa…). The tradition of humor in Turkey is at the same time a tradition of repression and resistance. To say "they could do it in the old days" is to forget half of this history.
"What changed is fragile politicians"? There is a right intuition in Göktaş's finding: even if the law stays the same, what determines how the law is applied is the balance of political forces. But tying this to a psychological notion such as "the fragile politician" is, again, reducing the matter to the person. The right question is this: Which balance of social forces allows power to turn its fragility into repression?
The answer: an unorganized society. In the 1970s, while humor magazines printed in the hundreds of thousands, there was a society behind them in which the unions, the student movement, and the professional associations were alive. The golden age of Gırgır coincides with the years when DİSK, the Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions, was a mass force. After 12 September crushed this organization, humor too scattered, broke apart, and passed into the ownership of media holdings. That Levent Kırca could "enter everyone's home" in the 1990s was the product of a period in which private television channels were fighting a ratings war in the advertising market. The media bosses of that period sat down in the end to bargain with power, and they were the first to sacrifice humor.
The freedom of humor depends not on the personal tolerance of politicians, but on the organized power of society. Only the organization of the people who laugh can protect humor.
What we learn: We should remember the tradition with its costs, not with nostalgia. Saying "how fine it was in the old days" stays half-finished if one does not ask "why could we do this then?" The answer is always the same: because there was an organized people behind it.
The indictment's own weapon: the quotations from the Constitution
What did he say?
Göktaş said that in the indictment the prosecutor made long quotations from the articles of the Constitution that protect freedom of expression, and from the article of the Turkish Penal Code that draws the limits of the crime of insult, but that even according to these quotations "a comedian saying 'dictator' in a stand-up show contains no element of a crime."
Class reading
This is an argument that skillfully exposes the law's own contradiction: the indictment itself quotes the articles that acquit the defendant, and then accuses him anyway. How is this possible?
There is a basic finding of the Marxist critique of law: bourgeois law is equal and universal on paper, and class-bound and selective in application. As Pashukanis put it, the legal form is born of commodity relations. Equal right is a "fiction of equality" between unequal powers. The article on freedom of expression is there in the Constitution. But what decides in which situation, and for whom, it will be operated is the relation of political forces. The same judge, the same article, the same day: "freedom of expression" for a commentator on the side of power, "insult" for an opposition comedian.
This does not mean that the legal struggle is meaningless. The opposite: the rights in the Constitution are the gains of past struggles, and we have to defend them. But we should know that these rights will not operate by themselves, and that without a social force behind them they stay on paper. In a country where Constitutional Court judgments are not recognized by the lower courts, and where the judgments of the European Court of Human Rights are not carried out, this finding is no longer theoretical. It is an everyday reality.
What we learn: The text of the law is a weapon. Who holds the weapon is more decisive than the text.
"I was forced to meet Kılıçdaroğlu"
What did he say?
This was one of the most surprising parts of the defense. As it was relayed, Göktaş said that although he had said three times, "firmly and clearly," that he did not want to meet, he was made to meet Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu by a commissioner's fait accompli at the courthouse:
"As if reverse handcuffs were not enough, I was also forced, before the hearing, to meet Kılıçdaroğlu."
"I did not want to meet him, so that advertising would not be done over me while I was detained. When it happened by force, I spoke firmly, clearly, and negatively."
The words relayed as what Kılıçdaroğlu said to him were these: "Why did you come back from abroad? If I had the means I would not stay here a minute."
Class reading
There are two separate lessons in this section.
First: putting the victim in the shop window. Göktaş's stance, "let there be no advertising done over me," is a right and an honorable stance. The established opposition in Turkey, and the bourgeois opposition in particular, has a habit of using detainees and victims as shop-window material: a photograph at the prison gate, a camera in the courthouse corridor, and then silence. This is not solidarity. It is the accumulation of symbolic capital. Real solidarity begins not before the camera, but after it: in the lawyer's costs, in the family visit, in the organized struggle given for a change in the law. Putting a detainee who is handcuffed and cannot see his lawyer into a meeting he does not want, whatever the intention, is to disregard his will. That Göktaş put this on the record in court matters.
(Göktaş does not know either why this meeting was held, or at whose request. He said he is "still curious." We will not speculate here either. But that a detainee is made to meet a politician against his will is, in itself, a practice that should be investigated.)
Second: "Why did you come back?" The first thing the former leader of the main opposition said to a detainee: "Why did you come back from abroad? If I had the means I would not stay here a minute." Young comrades, keep this sentence in mind. Remember the distinction we used in the Coxon piece: exit, or voice? A person who is dissatisfied with a system has two choices: to leave, or to stay and raise one's voice, to organize, to change things. If the proposal of a leading figure of the established opposition is "exit," this is a confession that this opposition has long since given up its claim to change anything. If a country's opposition tells its own young people "get out," what will it say to the millions who have to stay?
What we learn: Solidarity begins outside the photograph. And an opposition that says "go" cannot be the opposition of those who have to stay.
"Even the police said it": the class of emigration
What did he say?
Göktaş also answered the claims about his going abroad. He said that he goes abroad every year when the tour ends, and that he was even trying to persuade his family that Turkey is not as bad as they thought. As it was relayed, he said that even the police, during the detention, told him "If I had your means I would not stay a day in Turkey."
Class reading
We touched on this point in our previous piece: from the airport police to the courthouse corridor, even the state's own workers want to leave. Let us take one more step here.
Leaving is a class privilege. There is no single thing called "leaving." For the software worker, the doctor, the engineer whose diploma is accepted in Europe, leaving is a career plan. For the worker who has no passport, no knowledge of the language, no savings, leaving is either impossible, or a journey that comes face to face with death on clandestine routes. As we said in the piece where we told our Germany story: gurbet, the life of the emigrant worker, is not the name of a place. It is the name, in another language, of having no property. Today's debate on the "brain drain" is the most educated workers of this country, the intellectual proletariat, looking for the solution in an individual exit. An understandable reaction. But the result, from the point of view of class, is this: those who remain in the country are those who cannot leave. The person on the minimum wage, the courier, the textile worker, the pensioner…
The class of the police officer who stays. The police officer who says "I would have wanted to leave" to a comedian in detention is a worker too. Low pay, heavy shifts, the psychological load… This sentence is a sign that even the order's own enforcers do not believe in the order. It is a symptom of a crisis of legitimacy. It does not turn by itself into a solution. If there is no organized alternative, a crisis of legitimacy turns only into a silent exhaustion, a mass "if only I could leave."
Göktaş's decision. In this context, that Göktaş returned, that he returned when he could have left, deserves respect as an individual choice. But we will not consecrate this as "heroism." The real question is not individual courage. It is building an organization in which those who stay can be strong together.
What we learn: Those who can leave, leave. The only chance of those who cannot is to organize. The place of socialists is beside those who cannot leave.
At the prison gate: "Sinem Dedetaş is here, Mehmet Pehlivan is here"
What did he say?
In the statement he made at the prison gate after the release, Göktaş said:
"I am very happy to be reunited with my family, my mother, my father, my friends, but at Karatepe, Sinem Dedetaş is here, Mehmet Pehlivan is here. I hoped, as a dream, that the three of us would go to Istanbul together in a single car. It did not happen that way."
"And not only here. In Silivri, in other prisons, there are thousands of people, on trial in detention like me, or convicted for their ideas. I hope a state of things comes in which we all regain our freedom together."
Class reading
This is not a moment of the defense, but it is the most mature moment of the case. The first words of the person who has been released are those who remain inside. The passage from individual salvation to collective freedom is exactly in this sentence: "I hope a state of things comes in which we regain our freedom all together."
There is something we have to remind the young comrades of here. Among the "thousands of people" Göktaş names, those whose voices are heard least are not the famous. The worker taken into custody for going on strike, the worker dismissed and prosecuted for trying to found a union, the poor young people from the Kurdish provinces prosecuted for "membership of an organization," the thousands of detainees whose names no newspaper writes… A comedian's case drew the interest of the public. That is good. But carrying that interest over to the cases of the detainees who are not seen is our task.
What we learn: Freedom is not an individual gain. It is a collective one. One person's getting out is an opportunity to enlarge the cases of the others.
The verdict: the "sentence, and release" formula
What happened?
The prosecutor asked for both a conviction and release. The court gave 1 year, 7 months, and 5 days in prison in all, and released him. The President's lawyer said, "We repeat our written statements. Our complaint continues." The pro-government Sabah gave the news with the label "so-called comedian."
Class reading
In our previous piece we opened the "sentence, and release" formula: acquittal is not given, only release is given. The conviction stays on the record, hanging over the next stage like the sword of Damocles. This verdict, which the constitutional lawyer Tolga Şirin called "clearly contrary to the Constitution," is given exactly for this chilling effect.
Let us add two more things here:
Partial acquittal, partial legitimacy. Acquitting on the charge of "praising a crime and a criminal" gives the court an appearance of "impartiality": "Look, we did not accept every charge." But on the two charges with the real political content, the President and religion, a conviction is given. This is a form of bargaining inside the law. The system looks both flexible and harsh. In the end, the red lines are protected.
The language of the media. "So-called comedian." Refusing to recognize a person's profession is an ideological move aimed at also removing his identity as an artist, and therefore the protection of freedom of art. The "real" comedian is the one who does not touch power. The "so-called" comedian is the one who does. In a country where the ownership of media holdings is gathered in capital groups close to power, this language is no accident. It is the voice of ownership.
What we learn: Release is not a victory. It is a truce. The real message of the verdict is the conviction that remains on the record, and that message is written less to Göktaş than to every artist who is watching him.
"I stand behind my sentences"
What did he say?
The last sentences of the defense:
"I do not think I encouraged hatred and rage in the way the charge says, in any form. I stand behind my sentences. I ask for my acquittal."
"In nothing I said is there a word that contains a crime."
Class reading
To understand the value of this sentence, one has to go back to the 12 September dossier. The most destructive legacy of 12 September was not limited to torture and executions. It was the culture of repentance. The repentance laws, the petitions of "penitence," the confessions on television… A generation was forced to apologize for what it thought. That Göktaş said "I stand behind my sentences," after 88 days of isolation, is a small but meaningful stance of honor against this culture.
But let us also see the limit of this stance. "Standing behind" is an individual virtue. It is not a change of system. When individual honor does not join with collective power, it requires the next person to pay the same price. Every comedian, every journalist, every worker should not have to "stand behind it" alone. Organization is exactly this: not paying the price of honor alone.
What we learn: An honorable stance begins as an individual one. It lasts only when it becomes collective.
What the defense said, and what the class adds
Young comrades, let us gather all these headings in one table:
| What the defense said | What the class adds |
|---|---|
| "I stayed in a cell for 22 days per sentence" | In political cases the punishment is given by the detention, not by the verdict; the distance of the prison is a second storey of the punishment for a poor family |
| 198 shows, 100,000 spectators, zero complaints | The crime was not on the stage, it was in the spread; power fears a mass shared laughter; art's closing into a narrow class setting leaves it undefended |
| The 185 CİMER complaints are not organic | The simulation of "the people" is digital Bonapartism; until the ownership of the platforms and the economy of anger are asked about, freedom of expression stays half-finished |
| "Dictator" is a political characterization | Right; but a dictator is not the character of a person, it is the political form of a class alliance |
| Therapy is not a negative thing | Mental health should not be a class privilege; it should be a public and free right |
| The diver joke is a test of prejudice | The culture war covers the class war; the joke that breaks the polarization is convicted for that reason |
| Artistic production is not religious production | The article on religious values protects not the believer, but power's monopoly over the language of religion |
| The tradition of humor from Nasreddin Hodja to Şensoy | This tradition is also a tradition of repression and of cost; only an organized people can protect humor |
| The indictment contradicts its own quotations | Bourgeois law is universal on paper and selective in application; relations of power operate the rights |
| I was forced to meet Kılıçdaroğlu | The victim is not shop-window material; an opposition that says "go" cannot be the opposition of those who have to stay |
| Even the police want to leave | Leaving is a class privilege; the only chance of those who cannot leave is to organize |
| There are people who remain inside | Freedom is collective; visible cases should be a bridge to the cases of the detainees who are not seen |
| I stand behind my sentences | The stance of honor is valuable against the culture of repentance; but organization is needed so that the price of individual honor is not paid alone |
Concrete tasks for the young comrades
Reading is not enough. The practical tasks that come out of this case are these:
- Make the unseen detainees visible. In the city where you are, learn the names of the workers, the students, the journalists who are on trial in detention because of what they said or because they organized. Share the hearing calendars. Go to the hearings. Five people sitting in the courtroom of a defendant who is not famous makes a great difference for that defendant.
- Stand with the families of prisoners. Do not forget the sentence "12 times, Ankara–Çorlu." Building solidarity networks for the travel, lodging, and lawyer's costs of families who go to distant prisons is a concrete form of solidarity.
- Document the troll campaigns. Record the timeline of targeting campaigns, the networks of accounts, the simultaneous posts. Göktaş's finding in the defense, "one complaint in the first three days," showed how much good documentation can do in court.
- Do not fall into the culture-war trap. In every debate that uses the language of the secular–religious polarization, ask this question: "Is this fight stopping us from talking about the minimum wage, rent, safety at work?" Look for common ground with the religious worker. The common ground is in the workplace.
- Carry humor and art into the neighborhood. Against art's closing into a narrow class setting, organize shows, readings, and humor workshops in working-class neighborhoods, in union halls, in student dormitories. Let us build the bridge between art and the worker before the trolls do.
- Enlarge the debate on TCK 299 and 216. The demand to repeal the articles on insulting the President and on degrading religious values is not an "artists' demand." It is the whole society's demand for freedom of expression. Start this debate in professional associations, in unions, in student collectives.
- Make the right to mental health a class demand. Carry the demand for free and accessible psychological support, in workplaces and in schools, onto the union agenda.
Dear Comrades,
If one thing from this piece is to stay in your mind, let it be this:
We defend Deniz Göktaş without conditions in law, and we read him as comrades in politics.
We defend him: because 88 days of isolation for four sentences is a warning given not to a comedian, but to a whole society that laughs.
We read him: because where his liberal defense cannot see, in property, in organization, in class, our word begins.
In court, Göktaş said that even the names of the office-holders the masters of satire criticized are remembered thanks to those works. He is right. But let us add something: history remembers not only those who mocked power, but also the crowds that protected them. What kept Nasreddin Hodja alive was the villagers who told him from ear to ear. What saved Aziz Nesin from Sivas was the networks of solidarity. What brought Markopaşa out again every time it was shut down was the people who bought it, distributed it, and read it.
Laughter is a weapon. But a weapon is only as strong as the organization of the hand that holds it.
Organize. Keep laughing. And do not leave those who laugh alone.
In comradeship, Knowledge Commons
Sources
- The Deniz Göktaş Case and the Class of Humor — Knowledge Commons, 28 September 2026
- The full text of Deniz Göktaş's defense has come out — Halk TV
- The full text of Deniz Göktaş's defense — Medyascope, 28 September 2026
- The full text of comedian Deniz Göktaş's defense — BirGün
- Deniz Göktaş's defense: political humor in which Erdoğan's name does not appear has no meaning — Diken
- A defense from Deniz Göktaş that drew notice at the first hearing: Turkey is making it very hard for me — Güneydoğu Ekspres
- Comedian Deniz Göktaş made his defense: "I was forced to meet Kılıçdaroğlu" — Veryansın TV
- Deniz Göktaş has been released: what happened at the hearing — Medyascope, 28 September 2026
- Deniz Göktaş has been released: "I hope a state of things comes in which we all regain our freedom together" — Medyascope, 29 September 2026
- Cumhuriyet reporting from Çağlayan: the 88-day detention has ended — Cumhuriyet
- 1 year and 7 months in prison for Deniz Göktaş: he was released together with the verdict — Sabah
- The indictment against Deniz Göktaş has been accepted: a demand of up to 12 years in prison — Evrensel, 4 September 2026
- Deniz Göktaş, who had been ordered released, was jailed again — Medyascope, 28 August 2026
Knowledge Commons pieces this article is built on
- The Deniz Göktaş Case and the Class of Humor
- 12 September: The History, Balance Sheet, and Present of a Class Coup
- Why Do Workers Vote for the Right?
- The Class of a Resignation: What an Anthropic Researcher's Farewell Says, and What It Cannot Say
- Elif Eralp: "We Wrote History, Comrades"
- The Melodious Heart: Telling Ruhi Su to Young Comrades
