Turkey’s own world war

Turkey’s “rise and rise” must have made the country stronger than the United States, the European Union, China and Russia combined that the now glittering Crescent and Star has been at war with a bizarre alliance of named and unnamed people, places, countries and aliens.

Before the Gezi Park protests last summer, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his comrades were fighting coup-plotting generals, academics, writers and journalists at home; and the “wrong world order,” the EU, Israel, Iraq, Cyprus, Syria and (silently) Iran abroad, along with every injustice on earth.

With Gezi, they felt compelled to fight the interest rate lobby, financiers, the Jewish diaspora, the BBC, the Economist, CNN, Lufthansa, looters, marginals, dark forces, intergalactic powers and global assassins who kill by telekinesis; and Egypt, in addition to the wrong world order, the EU, Israel, Cyprus, Syria, (silently) Iran and every injustice on earth.

The Turkish Islamists’ (or jihadists,’ in their fans’ own wording) existential war has become quite enlarged since December when prosecutors indicted an alleged network of cabinet ministers, their sons, prominent businessmen and senior bureaucrats in a corruption investigations which claim illicit gains at the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, until thousands of prosecutors and police officers in charge of the investigations have been reassigned or suspended by the government.

Since the beginning of the investigation, new enemies have come into the battle zone: In addition to half a dozen coup attempts daily, Mr. Erdoğan and his men must now fight “the plotters of a grand trap and ugly games,” a parallel state structure, traitors (who account for about half of Turkey’s 76 million population), a “fake Islamic scholar” who is also a “fake prophet” and a “disguised Christian” and a “secret agent of the Jewish lobby” as well as a massive network of foreign spies and their local agents.

To sum it up, at the end of January 2014, Mr. Erdoğan and the House of the Justice and Development Party must fight back the interest rate lobby, financiers, the Jewish diaspora, BBC, the Economist, CNN, Lufthansa, looters, marginals, dark forces, intergalactic powers and global assassins who kill by telekinesis; the wrong world order, the EU, Israel, Cyprus, Syria, (silently) Iran, Egypt; “the plotters of a grand trap and ugly games,” a parallel state structure, nearly 40 million Turkish traitors, a “fake Islamic scholar” who is also a “fake prophet” and a “disguised Christian” and a “secret agent of the Jewish lobby,” a massive network of foreign spies and their local agents and half a dozen coup attempts every day. That list, of course, excludes a potentially bigger list of countries who envy Turkey’s “rise and rise,” conspirators who wish to stop Turkey’s massive development projects including a third airport for Istanbul, and, most recently, as Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu put it, “domestic and foreign elements warring Turkey.”

Such a narrative, besides being generously amusing on the one hand, carries the incredibly metaphysical elements of childish naivety and the wonders of finding clients, on the other. Anyone who may be inclined to buy all that may also be tempted to believe that Superman, Batman and Spiderman are also part of real life and one may bump into one of them at any moment.

The rhetorical case about daily coup attempts is particularly curious. Under Mr. Erdoğan’s governance, hundreds of alleged coup-plotters have been put behind bars, based on evidence now looking embarrassingly fabricated. Why, really, not a single coup plotter is being indicted in these days of half a dozen coup attempts per day? Who are the suspects? Why are they not being implicated? Why are they not being brought to justice? And who are they? Who are “those circles” and “those centers?”
This must be Turkey’s world war without the name world war, quite reminiscent of Germany’s, during 1939-1945 which went by the name world war. Fortunately, the Turkish war goes without weapons, casualties, or holocaust.

All the same, both would easily remind one of a two-volume Spanish canonical novel from the early 17th century which is themed around the protagonists’ distortion of perception and the wavering of their mental faculties.