The Destruction Order: The Story of a Censorship That Made a Book Immortal

There is a comfortable version of history; the one that is easily accepted, the one with an official seal. The DarkMarket legend, told by master wordsmiths like Misha Glenny and Kevin Poulsen in cult books like "Kingpin," is one of these versions: The heroic FBI agent "Master Splyntr" takes down the mysterious Turkish administrator "ChaO," and the empire falls. It is a clean narrative that states love to hear.

And then there is the uncomfortable truth.

The architectural plan for that truth began to leak out of a cell in Ümraniye in 2021, in the form of a 114-page draft. The text I sent to my mother was not a simple letter. It was the distilled, initial essence of a book, "Chao: Code, Conspiracy and Penance," that would fundamentally shake that comfortable version. Those pages contained not only the chess game played with the FBI but also the poisonous ink of national conspiracies, betrayals, underground republics, and the forgotten victims of those republics.

Bureaucracy's Three-Course Tasting

The danger of a narrative is first discovered by those tasked with reading it.

Act 1: The Commission

The story's first tasters were the Letter Reading Commission, headed by the Prison Prosecutor. The flavor of the narrative was too harsh for their palate. It was dangerous.

Act 2: The Judiciary

When the file reached the Istanbul Anatolian 1st Enforcement Judiciary, what I encountered was not a simple rejection; it was a manifesto hidden within a pages-long legal labyrinth. With the decision dated 30/07/2021 and numbered 2021/12129, an epic was practically written.

According to this epic, my 114-page memory was not just disturbing the "public order." It was much more. In that text, my memories were threatening the "democratic societal order," acting against the spirit of the European Convention on Human Rights, and containing "threatening statements against the Judicial and Administrative authorities, boards, and institutions of the Republic of Turkey."

Harry's death or Hacı's existence were mere footnotes in this legal epic. The real issue was how these memories were interpreted. The story of a man who died years ago in a demolished prison was, apparently, a matter of national security. A testimony about the past was branded as a threat to the future. This was beyond declaring an ocean "poisonous" because of two drops of water within it; it was questioning the very existence of the ocean itself.

Act 3: The High Criminal Court

I appealed this legal manifesto. The file went to the final fortress, the High Criminal Court. The response from there was bureaucracy in its purest, most cynical form; a one-paragraph, copy-paste masterpiece:

"...upon detailed review; as nothing contrary to procedure and law was found in the enforcement judiciary's decision, it is approved..."

Their "detailed" review of that pages-long epic probably took less than a minute. The fate of a story was sealed with just that much "detail."

The System's Paradox: "Write, But Don't Send"

The logic that emerged from this whole process was a paradox in itself. The implicit message of the decision was this: "What you have written does not constitute a crime; if it did, we would have opened another case against you. However, in our opinion, it is dangerous. Therefore, we are not confiscating your freedom to write, but your freedom to send what you have written outside these walls. If you want to make it a book when you get out, that's no longer our problem."

A word is a whisper; it vanishes. A text is a deed; it is undeniable. What they wanted to destroy was not the experiences, but the potential for those experiences to escape their control and transform into indelible proof.

Censorship as a Confirmation Mechanism

The decision was executed. 114 pages were destroyed. The skeleton of a book was confiscated.

But this was not a defeat. This was the greatest confirmation of all. To ban an idea is the clearest admission of the fear it inspires. That destruction order was the official confirmation of how dangerous and how necessary the story being written truly was. Such a violent desire to destroy something only proves that the thing possesses immense power.

In that cell, I began to reconstruct the story. This time, sharper, more complete, and further honed by the cynicism of that "detailed review."

The 114-page draft → transformed into a 336-page, unsealable narrative.

Today: The Unappealable Narrative

The book on the shelf today, "Chao: Code, Conspiracy and Penance," is the child born of that three-stage destruction process.

It contains everything the system found objectionable:

• The backstory to the official history told in "Kingpin" and "DarkMarket" ✓
• The unrecorded moves of the chess game played with the FBI ✓
• The inside story of national conspiracies, betrayals, and dirty offers refused ✓
• And the entirety of a book that a court was afraid to let exist ✓

This is more than a book. This is the story of a narrative whose skeleton was confiscated, only to be resurrected by its creator, stronger, more complete, and immortal.

I learned the language of systems by dismantling code. I learned about life by writing against those who tried to delete my own. 114 pages were destroyed, but a 336-page truth was born. Because trying to destroy a story only makes it immortal.

Note: To those whose signatures are on those decisions... I am grateful. Without your "dangerous" stamp, this story might never have become so complete and so unbreakable.