‘The business plan’

“… [D]ictatorships… That is, you have ruling gangster families on top who use their monopoly of violence to kill/imprison anyone who question their business plan. The business plan is the following:

1) Use force to maintain power and keep unarmed humans living in fear.

2) Send kids to government-controlled schools so they can get indoctrinated with four things:

- The ruling family is great (à la Kim Jung Il),

- Their country is the greatest (Author’s note: See “Turks are everywhere!,” this column, Feb. 12, 2014),

- The Palestinian cause is something that is part of their identity,

- Force feed them Islam so it can be used as a tool to control,

3) While people are brainwashed and living in fear, negotiate a percentage of resources/construction contracts.

4) Profit.

It comes as no surprise that the outcome of such a disastrous mix can only be chaos. On one hand, you have the insane families in power who are trying to steal as much money as possible, while using violence against their own people. On the other hand, you have the byproduct of insanity – Islamists. That is, confused people who had their vision of reality completely distorted by the system they were born in.

Naturally, Freedom House describes this failed state as:

- High levels of corruption plague the business and public sectors,

- There is an array of restrictions on press freedom … most newspapers rely on the central government for printing, giving the state a high degree of influence over them. [And] the government maintains tight control over national news broadcasts… A cybercrime law gives authorities the right to block websites ‘contrary to public order or decency.’

- The police disperse peaceful assemblies, and the government generally discourages demonstrations featuring clear or implicit criticism of the authorities. [T]he government forcibly disrupts public gatherings and protests… Several people died and hundreds more were injured in clashes between the police and demonstrators.

- The judiciary is susceptible to government pressure.”

Unsurprisingly, the Sunni Muslim country ranked as low as 125th in last year’s Press Freedom Index, a credible listing of countries on liberties and restrictions published by the prestigious pro-freedom institute Reporters Without Borders.

Quite a gloomy portrayal of Turkey and its affairs, no doubt. All the same, any government-friendly prosecutor who might rush to his keyboard to indict this columnist for portraying Turkey as a dictatorship run by a gangster family, and writing about a shameful “business plan” in the opening passage could be embarrassingly wrong.

They are not my words, nor do they portray Turkey. I borrowed “the business plan” from Algerian-born blogger Abdel Bioud who describes himself as someone who was “force-fed Islam in an Algerian government school since day one.” And remember, Mr. Bioud wrote Feb. 11, “[this] is coming from someone with a Muslim name and an Arab face … who actually lived and was raised in an Arab country.”

Freedom House’s description may sound too Turkish, but it, too, portrays Algeria. And the 125th ranking on the Press Freedom Index is Algeria’s – Turkey ranked 154th in the same year (2013).

Ironically, a day after Mr. Bioud’s extremely realistic portrayal of a Sunni Arab dictatorship and “the business plan,” a Turkish court sentenced a total of 17 protesters who had chanted the slogan “Servant of the IMF; servant of the bosses,” apparently against Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, but without naming anyone.

The court ruled this was “an insult against a ‘civil servant.’” The defendants could have claimed the IMF and the bosses, too, were civil; hence, Your Honor, “we meant to say a ‘civil’ servant of both.”

Unfortunately, the Turkish language does not allow such wordplay, and three defendants got one year in prison, while 14 others got two years – without suspension. All will be deprived of a list of public/civil rights, too.

It really must be terribly painful to live in an Arab dictatorship like Mr. Bioud described. Poor Arabs.

Fortunately, they have a first-class democracy – and a Muslim one at that – which they can take as a role model.