We all commit our crimes. The thing is to not lie about them–
to try to understand what you have done, why you have done it.
That way, you can begin to forgive yourself. That’s very important.
If you don’t forgive yourself you’ll never be able to forgive anybody else
and you’ll go on committing the same crimes forever.
ANOTHER COUNTRY, James Baldwin
He also has a genius for making money, tons of it.
You must move in the arteries of the system without anyone noticing your existence until you reach all the power centers…. Until the conditions are ripe, they [the followers] must continue like this. If they do something prematurely, the world will crush our heads, and Muslims will suffer everywhere, like in the tragedies in Algeria, like in 1982 [in] Syria, like in the yearly disasters and tragedies in Egypt…The time is not yet right. You must wait for the time when you are complete and conditions are ripe, until we can shoulder the entire world and carry it…You must wait until such time as you have gotten all the state power, until you have brought to your side all the power of the constitutional institutions in Turkey…Now, I have expressed my feelings and thoughts to you all—in confidence…trusting your loyalty and secrecy. I know that when you leave here, [just] as you discard your empty juice boxes, you must discard the thoughts and the feelings that I expressed here. **
Of course then, Gülen was talking treason. Today, he is acting treasonously. His infiltration of the Turkish state is everywhere. In the judiciary, the media, the military, the state police, the parliament and in the ruling party. It is well known that the Gülen movement’s heavy hand is instrumental in the legal fiasco that has destroyed the credibility of the Turkish legal system. The same hand was instrumental in the astonishing and ongoing police violence from the Gezi Park Movement.
Only a fool would fail to notice the common ground that Erdoğan and Gülen stand upon, united by their allegiance to the aims of the United States, fueled by cold, hard American dollars, ever encouraged by the cold, sneaky hand of the CIA. Erdogan controls everything in Turkey with his hands of stone. Thanks to their collaboration, the army’s professional leadership is in jail. The judicial system is rancid. There is neither justice nor democracy in Turkey but the police clubs, tear gas, water cannons, bullets (rubber and real) are everywhere. The police destroy all democratically demonstrating groups with the violence of Hitler’s Brownshirts. It is widely known that the Gulen movement played a major role in the legal fiasco called Ergenekon of which the prime minister dubbed himself chief prosecutor. The jail system is a penal industry by itself on the order of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s, The Gulag Archipelago. Telephone conversations, e-mail messages, are monitored. There is no privacy in Turkey. The prime minister encourages so-called “neighbors” to report all fellow neighbors if they dare bang on pots protesting the government. He claims such banging violates people’s privacy. There is no freedom of banging in Turkey either. The cleansing of leftist patriots continues, in the army and in all institutions controlled by the government. The brutal crackdown on Gezi Park demonstrators continues in all its Erdoğanian fury. Call what’s happening in Turkey a post-modern extermination campaign. And the astonishingly unreliable political opposition acts as the ruling party’s best friend and may even be an active collaborator in the destruction of secular Turkey.
And Erdoğan? Outside Turkey he has ruined himself. His near delirious rants, preposterous claims, the insults flying, the ignorance of his advisors all fully displayed on the world stage. His rage, greed, and arrogance have brought him to comic levels. But his money and his bad-actor friends and advisors remain. And so does he prime minister. In any other country he would have long been rejected by the electorate forthwith. But as long as America says, yes, Erdoğan remains. So sad for Turkey to be the lapdog of the likes of Erdoğan, Fethullah Gulen and America. So sad for Islam to be linked with these two masters of deceit. So sad for the Turkish people to be harnessed to the moral corruption that is Turkish politicized Islam.
Judas betrayed Jesus for thirty pieces of silver. Erdogan betrayed a lot more for a lot more. Treachery has always been a good business, indeed an American specialty in their CIA-driven foreign policy. And it perfectly suits Erdoğan’s two-faced description of “his” Turkey as an “advanced democracy.” But now he stands alone, babbling nonsense, rich, naked to the world and disgraced. One wonders if he even knows this much. What price this glory? What price this treason?
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
MACBETH, William Shakespeare
Cem Ryan, Ph.D.
25 August 2013
Istanbul
NOTES:
* According to the Merriman-Webster Dictionary, a “bad actor” is an unruly,
turbulent, or contentious individual.
** See Claire Berlinski’s excellent article, Who Is Fethullah Gülen? in City Journal, Autumn 2012.
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