These lines are not written from a desk. That desk is already at Taksim, in an apartment in the eye of the storm. The gas that makes my eyes run, the smell of gas that burns my throat, the whine of the helicopters, slogans, banging of pots and pans, explosions, protesting car horns, police sirens, the lot of it immediately reach the desk where these lines are written. Every time I get up from my desk it is as if touring the eye of the storm.

Let’s start then. The rebellion that started at Istanbul’s Taksim Square on May 31, and from there spread to an important segment of the country, must be described as a "social explosion."

An “explosion,” that is, the bursting of a colossal energy … for a social explosion to come about, one needs to squeeze and turn the screws on a society incessantly, without letup. This is exactly what Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been doing for a long while.

This social explosion is the personal creation of Erdogan. The rebellion is not targeting the AKP rule but the person at the top of it. A significant segment of the society, no longer able to tolerate systematic denigration, insults and marginalization by a leader suffering from hubris syndrome, a leader who is uncomfortable with their secular life styles and culture, and who actually saw them as “’cluster of mistakes that have to be corrected” went out into the streets.