Tag: CIA

TURKEY: NOW THE STORY ENDS

“Now it is done. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it.The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again.”

Red Smith

New York Herald Tribune, October 4, 1951

I wish I had written those above words, now so perfect these days for Turkey, poor, suffering, betrayed Turkey.

Eleven-years-old, I leapt from the sofa screaming. The New York Giants, my New York baseball Giants, had just won the National League championship. A miraculous second ago, the Giants had done the unimaginable. If only you had been there! Bobby Thomson hit a homerun and the Giants were champs. And Red Smith wrote about it. And I, screaming-happy, punched the hell out of the air. And I loved everyone and everything and no one that I knew had ever died.

Enter my mother: “Jesus, Mary and Joseph! What happened?” she screamed back to me, “And your hand! What happened to your hand?”

It seems I had punched more than just air. I had shattered the glass lampshade and was bleeding, spraying the carpet like a garden hose. And so off to the hospital with my mother I went. No more Bobby Thomson and New York Giants. Reality had strangled euphoria.

Today, in Turkey, seventy-six years since Atatürk’s death, reality strangled hope. And today I feel like punching a hell of a lot more than air and lampshades.

A religious nonentity with a nearly unpronounceable religious name was selected as an election candidate by the so-called secular, so-called political opposition parties. He will try to lead them (and us) to victory in the coming presidential election. Laboring like a constipated elephant for weeks, interviews, meetings and discussions, yesterday they again sat and strained and sat and strained and finally…Eureka! Out came the candidate. Finally, they eked out someone named Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu, another “pious” Muslim. May Allah please save Turkey from “pious” Muslims!

In any other country, the toxic reputation of Turkey’s ruling religious party scoundrels would rule out any candidate even admitting to being a Muslim. Even atheism would be a winner. But not in Turkey. Corruption, stealing, murder and any and all destruction done in the name of religious piety sells well here. I always wonder if their all-knowing Allah knows this.

Ekmeleddin’s opponent? None other than the “pious” war-mongering, war criminal, man-of-43%-of-the-people, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. His “piety” is well-known. He is “beloved” among the Turkish young people for his Gezi Park gassings, blindings, beatings and other “pious” brutalities including murder. He also excels in defiling his dead victims, all young. Provoking his adoringly ignorant crowds to demean the grieving mothers of his victims is another of his sicker stunts. A real sweetheart of a guy, wouldn’t you agree? And when hundreds of coal miners died because of his government’s corruption he and his brutal police beat the mourners after the funerals. His piety is well-known internationally. He and his friend in Washington, the one with the rancid Nobel Prize, entertain their fellow believers by funding Sunni terrorist killers in Syria, and now Iraq.

What, you might ask, is the matter with the Turkish opposition parties? How can they be so stupid? Well, stupidity seems to come easy for them. In fact, they have been collaborating for years to bring these religious nitwits into power. The former head of CHP, Deniz Baykal, himself a fully disgraced adulterer but still a member of parliament, approved a parliamentary deal that allowed a legally ineligible Erdoğan to come to office. Baykal never said he was sorry, even though his party has been trounced in every election since. His successor party head, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, has been similarly inept. The MHP, the other opposition party, headed by a fossil named Devlet Bahçeli, is equally treacherous, having voted for the AKP religious fascist Abdullah Gül to serve as president. Sold-out to America is the best describer of the political opposition.

But it seems weirdly natural for these so-called secular parties to betray their followers and pander for religious votes. A few elections ago Baykal and his CHP had a brilliant idea about gaining the votes of covered women. These geniuses decided that women who wear the oppressively black, total-body drapery called a charshaf would look good with a CHP rosette pinned there upon. They pinned a few to no avail. In another election, the size of wristwatches prevailed. And in another the debate raged about villas. Losers all. Killing hope is their speciality.

So it was and so it will ever be. The secular, democratic idealism that defined the founding of Turkey has been defiled and cheapened through the generations. Imagine a so-called Muslim nation that slaughters its fellow Muslims, the sin of sins in the Koran? Imagine a secular, democratic nation with no functioning democratic institutions ruled by Islamo-fascist gangsters? Imagine a supposedly sovereign nation whose police and military forces are under the control of a foreign power? Imagine an Islamic nation who continually votes its approval of one of the most corrupt, violent regimes in history? Imagine an election campaign between and among religious ignoramuses, fossils and artifacts that determines the fate of tens of millions of young, secular, intelligent, energetic young people? Imagine a government and a prime minister that defames the founder of Turkey, a man, Atatürk, widely considered to be one of the geniuses of any country in any age?

Today’s Turkey is a den of thieves and liars and worse. Today’s Turkey is a mockery of sovereignty, inextricably linked to America, its war criminal government and its morally degenerate CIA.

So what matters? Recep Tayyip Erdoğan? Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu? Elections? Disloyal opposition parties? Obama? The CIA? The answer? None of them! The nation that was Turkey is dead. The Turkish people have strangled it. They should have burned their identification cards with their Islam religious designation years ago. Turkish people, America has strangled you with your Islamic identification ID cards. They brought the traitors to power in your country and now it is too late. The fiction of religion has murdered your country.

So now what is possible? Truth? Virtue? Independence? Trust? Peace at home? Peace in the world? Not a chance! Idealism? The open-faced smiling optimism of youth? Don’t be naïve. Don’t be stupid. Now it is done! Finished!

For Turkey, only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again. Now the story ends.

James (Cem) Ryan

Istanbul

17 June 2014

June 20, 2014
THE BEAST

Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common power to keep all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and as such a war, against every man. (13/8)

To this war of every man against every man […] nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law: where no law, no justice. (13/13)

The Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes (1651)

Defined by its own horror, The Beast defiles the living and the dead. Lies! Cheating! Stealing! Killing! Its toxic mouth spews division, hate and felonious encouragement. It has no interests except its own and those are all-consuming. It rules in a Hobbesian world, where every person is at war with every person and The Beast is at war with all. Consumption, greed, violence and wealth are the supreme virtues. The Beast’s police are everywhere with its deadly violence. The streets are bloody with death. The Beast has strangled justice. It rules by rules, not laws. The Beast has many backs. Media, corporations, opposition politicians, the brain-washed, the brain-dead, the needy greedy, the destructive tycoons that assassinate mountains, rivers, streams, valleys, virgin forests, farmland, the air, the sea. The Beast divides all, rages against all, slaughters all opposed to its rules. It reigns supreme in triumphant arrogance. If it pleases, even the corpses of its enemies are consumed, not by some purifying fire, but as a vengeful hate-weapon to threaten and increase its power. War is perpetual. Fear of violent death rages like a plague. The arts are destroyed. All representations, and imagination itself, are threats to The Beast. All nature, all living and inert things are raped to satisfy its brutish appetites. Bigger, better, taller, deeper, faster, more, more, more… Society has become a vast wasted land. There is no political community. Public gatherings are attacked. Life is poor, fear-filled, nasty and brutish. Death always comes suddenly in this land called Shame. And The Beast is always pleased with its beastly work.

301 coalminers died suddenly and violently in Soma while feeding The Beast. The Beast was not embarrassed, not at all. No one believes The Beast’s death toll. But there is another number, a horrific number that can indeed be trusted. The Beast’s mass murder left 432 children fatherless. And then The Beast came to the grieving town. It beat and gassed the mourning families. It defiled their children. It proclaimed that its own violent mass murder was really quite comfortingly beautiful and, in beastly “truth”, inevitable and, in beastly “fact,” irrelevant. It’s to be expected, said The Beast. For what is life but death? And having finished The Beast hid from its grieving subjects in a supermarket, looking quite pleased with its beastly self.

The other day a handful of people protested the Soma tragedy in an Istanbul section called Okmeydanı. The 15-year-old Gezi murder victim, Berkin Elvan, was memorialized. It’s an Alevite neighborhood and the Alevites are open-minded and sensible people. Of course, The Beast despises Alevites. The Beast tries to do in Turkey what it failed to do in Syria—exterminate them. So The Beast’s Police developed yet another diversionary incident. They opened fire in the street, both gas and bullets. The cops heaved a few Molotov cocktails to make it look like an attack on themselves, pure self-provocation. But it’s now an old trick—they did the same provocative deadly nonsense during Gezi Park. Predictably, chaos ensued. Gunfire filled the air. Two innocent men attending a funeral died, one in the street, one in the Cemevi, the Alevite worship house. The Beast called the protesters “ruthless.” As for the dead boy from Gezi? “He died and it’s over,” said The Beast, adding that these “terrorists see themselves as the saviors of the world.” Such biting, irreverent sarcasm. Such malice. And again The Beast seemed pleased with itself. The Beast feeds on slander, violence and provocation.

Such name-calling! Looters, plunderers, terrorists, atheists, anarchists, Marxist-Leninist communists, screams The Beast. They may be even Maoists! The Beast does not care how stupid it sounds. We, the opposed, are all of these and more, and proudly so. Its snarling face, its hard, black stares, its hooded eyes baggy and black… what made such a…thing? “You are the sperm of Israel,” shouts The Beast. What fuels The Beast’s incomparable fury? Could it be hell itself? Or something even worse?

The Beasts’s mind rages with conspiracies. When caught in a deceit, it spews hate to create war. Its so-called police and its so-called civil police and its so-called bodyguards are just deputized street thugs, some tricked out in uniforms, all of them goons on the order of Hitler’s brownshirt street gangs. All of them praised by The Beast as heroes, saving the nation from…what? Democracy? Life itself?

War, war, war…it’s always war with The Beast. It has many backs but The Beast rides on the backs of even bigger, master beasts. These are the master killers from beyond the sea, George W. Bush, Barack H. Obama, killers and displacers of millions. Obama even won the Nobel Peace Prize! Such beastly, hypocritically evil behavior. It’s their nature. So get used to it.

James (Cem) Ryan
Istanbul
29 May 2014

http://www.brighteningglance.org/

Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security. [….] In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit therefore is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. (13/9)

Reference: Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), Oxford University Press, 2008.

May 29, 2014
MEN IN MASQUERADE

Photo taken in the northern Syria town of Raqqa. (Courtesy: Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently)

In case you are one of the millions of Turks still celebrating the fact that Fenerbahçe, to no one’s great surprise, won the league football championship, well, you need to get a grip on reality, painful as that might be. The so-called “news”-papers still regurgitate this gloriously boring “news.” Tapes of the melodramatic fan and player antics after Sunday’s no-score game still runs on the sports channels. And thus all seems right with the world. Except it’s not. The world is horrible.

One really must wonder about the mentality of the Turkish people. Their government is causing a slaughter, if not a genocide, of the Syrian people. And I mean, specifically, that the Syrian Alevites are being directly targeted by Sunni Jihad proxies financed by Turkey. It’s a political “thing” dealing with pipedreams of a neo-Ottoman Sunni empire. By definition, that targeting constitutes a genocide. But the terror spread throughout Syria by Turkey and America affects all the Syrian people, Islamic, Christian, Jewish, atheist, all of them. These bankrolled gangsters are cutthroat killers. Killers kill. But cutthroat killers mutilate. All this should make one wonder. So I do.

Mostly I wonder why the allegedly good-hearted, the self-proclaimed “hospitable” Turks show such little interest and concern about the bloody massacre just next-door caused by their bloody-handed government. It’s no secret. It’s been no secret for years. After all, Seymour Hersh’s article was more affirmation than news. But in Turkey, the approved story on Syria is mostly simple-minded propaganda. Suddenly two years ago, Bashar al–Assad became a bad guy. And Erdoğan was hired by America to do what he does best. But now the truth is out. And things have moved from horrible to catastrophic.

So what consumes their interest, these Turkish people? Why do they now fixate ad nauseam, on television and in the press, on the Ottoman slaughter, if not genocide (the words all mean “mass murder”) of the Armenians in 1915? 1915! Then, a war was on. The Russians were enemies. Turkey’s eastern Armenians collaborated. War is murder. Blah-blah-blah. 100 years ago! 100 years ago! Yet today, the Turkish government openly exports death and destruction and Jihadist terrorism to their neighbor, Syria. And nothing happens. Football. Family. Life is busy. What’s for dinner?

Turkish people! What kind of a social conscience do you have? To silently sit while events of Nazi proportions are being done to the Syrian people by your government? It seems inconceivable that you can fill the streets for Fenerbahçe football but not even mumble a care about what your tax money is doing to the Syrian people. You know the story of the people who watched the freight trains come and go through the tiny town of Oświęcim (Auschwitz). They also said they didn’t “know.” But the camps were only a kilometer away. “We didn’t know.” Will that also be your alibi? Denial.

Turkish people, get real! Wake up from your football-slumber! You allowed the prime minister to appear on the Charlie Rose Show and lie, misrepresent, and double-talk to the world. He does to the world what he does at home. It is ridiculous.

He said that during legal protests every other country beats and gasses and kills its citizens. So what’s the problem? And neither you nor Charlie said anything.

He said, how can a country be corrupt when it has had such dramatic economic growth? And neither you nor Charlie mentioned that he (the prime minister) sold ALL the assets of the nation to finance the destruction of the cities and nature itself. And that everyone in favor politically has a piece of the action. That this growth “miracle” is based on plunder and crony-capitalism. And that’s the economic truth.

He said, how can he be a dictator when 45.5% of the people vote for him. And neither you nor Charlie asked about the majority of the people—54.5%—that voted against him. And why!

He said that he didn’t know Fethullah Gülen was such a threat until 17 December 2013 when he made a “coup.” And neither you nor Charlie Rose said, “Nonsense!”

Nonsense, it is. As everyone knows, Gülen disclosed his own treacherous plan 15 years ago. That’s why he escaped from his country into the warm embrace of the CIA and the Green-Card Land called Pennsylvania. Surely everyone knows that Gülen, a master of disguise, was recorded advising his treasonous followers that:

“You must move in the arteries of the system without anyone noticing your existence until you reach all the power centers…. 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.”

And fifteen years ago Erdoğan was one of his adherents. Without Gülen and the CIA, Erdoğan would never have left the Kasımpaşa neighborhood of Istanbul. And even an ordinary journalist, let alone Charlie Rose, should have known this. Does Charlie know the real reason why Gülen, no angel himself, is now Erdoğan’s sworn enemy? If Charlie only knew a few journalistic facts he would have quickly figured it all out. We all have, and we’re not respected journalists at all. We’re not even respected. So here’s the truth (and now I’m whispering): On 17 December 2013, a Gülenian wind blew the roof off the massive corruption enterprise called the government of Turkey.

Actually Charlie Rose only masquerades as a journalist, as elementary-school educated Gülen masquerades as an Islamic scholar, as Erdoğan masquerades as a statesman, as Abdullah Gül masquerades as a head of state and as the CIA masquerades as a patriotic, law abiding part of the American government. In Turkey, everyone is someone else and everyone plays dress-up. Welcome to the Mardi Gras a la Turka. It’s a political-social condition called Deceit.

Speaking of which, now the terrorists gangsters, financed, fed and armed by Turkey, are performing a new trick, crucifixion. They apparently grew tired of eating the pulsating hearts of their victims and mutilating their corpses. This is what happens when nitwits make foreign policy. False-flag Turkey supplies thugs with sarin gas. America supplies them with TOW missiles. The inmates run the asylum. Everything is out of control. Crucifixions! The mind cannot grasp the horror. Turkey no longer has borders. Turkey no longer has a viable military chain-of-command. Nor has it a viable judiciary. All of this has been brought about by the man who would now be president. Do the Turkish people know his credentials for the job? Is this the ultimate masquerade?

Turkish people, Get real! Wake up! The day will come when this Turkish government will be in the dock at The Hague for war crimes. Turkish people! By your silence, by your media’s collaboration in this criminal enterprise, by everyone passively accepting the commission of these war crimes, so too will your consciences be on trial. You and the country may never recover from these awful deeds done in your name.

Oh, what have you allowed your ballot boxes to do to your Syrian friends and neighbors and even families! How needy you must be to sell out for bribes of coal and rice, and some of you for so much more.

Oh, what have you allowed your passive, inept political opposition parties to do…and not do!

All the plunder, all the gold, all the dollars, all the shoeboxes, the airports, the money-counting machines, the tunnels, the bridges, the million-dollar wristwatches, the power plants, the shopping centers, the football frenzies and their obscenely expensive stadiums, all of this stuff that masquerades as democracy and capitalism and social value will not buy one second of relief from the coming guilt and shame. Murder, destruction, sickness, starvation, complete barbarism has been unleashed from Turkey. Turkey has raped and murdered Syria. And this is happening now, not a century ago. Crucifixion, a final act of savagery, killed a man named Christ and created Christianity. From evil came good. But in Turkey’s case…one wonders.

Would you not agree?

James (Cem) Ryan
Istanbul
1 May 2014

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May 1, 2014
UNITED WE WEEP, DIVIDED WE SLEEP

DUMBBELLS (English slang for stupid fools)

DÜMBELEKLER (Turkish slang for stupid fools)

I sing what was lost and dread what was won,
I walk in a battle fought over again,
My king a lost king, and lost soldiers my men;
Feet to the Rising and Setting may run,
They always beat on the same small stone.

Willam Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

I read the news today, oh boy. Here’s what Reuters said:
“Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan has applied to Turkey’s constitutional court on Friday to challenge the alleged violation of his and his family’s rights by social media, a senior official in his office told Reuters.”

Isn’t it grand, this so-called rule of law. The prime minister is correct in his action. Long ago his family’s rights were well-established as were his. When the fox owns the chicken coop every day the menu-du-jour is chicken. We and the world know the quality of those who rule this sad country.

But who’s to argue? Not the sheep…if they whimper, they’re next. And besides, they’re well-bribed with food and coal and things magical from the bountiful Ankara sky. They have indeed learned to deeply love their Big Brother. They repay with their pathetic ballots. So, who? Perhaps young people who, like all young people everywhere, thought they had a future? Sorry. Enough of them have died and been maimed. Maimed by the prime minister who now frets about his and his family’s rights. Hah! So surely it will be the political opposition who once thought they had a patriotic responsibility, even a cause? No cause. No thought. No brains. No nothing. The military? The ones with the soundest, strongest emotional and ethical legacy? Nope. Folded up like a cheap suit. Hardly a whimper. Generals now bow their heads to thieving politicians. Cowardly submissive stuff like that makes one wonder if they ever received an education (and at taxpayer expense). Atatürk? Huh? Please, we must not speak aloud of such things. So who’s left to argue? Media? Ha! Sold-out. Universities? Ha! Ha! Expounding on pet obscurities, historical quirks, dead poets and deader laws and what once was and now will never be. There is no time left for history and literature and law and medicine and philosophy and too many more words. Speaking of which, what about writers? Well, who reads? The world is too much with all of us, and we are all too late.

So who will care? Care enough to act, to really act? To stand up and say that this is enough. That the people will no longer be governed by a corrupt political process. Nor by numbskull, repetitive political opposition parties nor by America’s CIA gangsters? Is that too much to ask?

It seems so. Time grows short. Another crooked election is coming, this one presidential. One way or another the same small people will throw the same big stones at us. Ah Turkey, the saddest country with the saddest people with the saddest stories. Always beating on, always being beaten. Ah, dear Turkey, Atatürk’s children deserved so much more. So did Atatürk.

James (Cem) Ryan
Istanbul
19 April 2014

“A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.”

Ezra Pound (1885-1972)

April 20, 2014
PEA-BRAINS ON PARADE

Harp Okulu Öğrencisi, Mustafa Kemal. (1899-1902)

17 March 2014

Today, the Black Sea rages red.
Today, the missiles of the west tremble in anticipation.
And today, the Turkish navy sends a task force on a three-month circumnavigation around Africa.
How nice.
In the face of great strategic uncertainty and dangerous border vulnerability, such is what passes for a strategic maneuver.
Such is the condition of military thinking in the demolished Turkish military.
How sad.
The Turkish military, the true founder of modern Turkey.
It had hurled the western occupying imperialist powers into the sea.
The Turkish military, the pride of Atatürk.
But that was then. And today is today. And the general staff now bow their collective heads to the politicians. Bow their heads!

“Don’t fall into the temptation of trying to please pea-brains,” said Mustafa Kemal to his fellow officer, Ahmet Cemal, in 1910. “If you condescend to gain strength from the favor of this or that man, you may get it at present, but you’ll have a rotten future.”

Today, Turkey is already experiencing such a rotten future. And we already know the pea-brains.

Today, I learned that one of the pea-brains decreed that Turkish military cadets may no longer apply to West Point. Extremely competitive, acceptance there requires sponsorship by the government. Instead they will be applying to the Chinese and Korean academies. This is a major shift in Turkish foreign policy. This is a de-westernization of its best and brightest youth.
And then I thought of my first meeting with Mustafa Kemal.

My senior year at West Point, the winter of 1962.
I am fully absorbed in a course entitled The History of the Military Art.
We are now studying World War I. Except for its first few weeks of brilliant German maneuvers, it’s a blood-ridden, boring stalemate, a slaughterhouse in the trenches.

One day after class, I visit the Cadet Bookstore.

I see Gallipoli, by Alan Moorehead, an Australian by birth.
I purchase it, outside reading never hurts.
Moorehead introduces Kemal to me on page nine:

“There was one name, more important than all the rest, that is missing from the list of guests at Harold Nicholson’s dinner party.” (Nicholson was junior secretary in the British Embassy)

“He waited in resentful claustrophobia for the opportunity that never came.”

“Through all these chaotic years it was Kemal’s galling fate to take orders from this man.” (Enver)

“No one in his wildest dreams would have imagined that half a century later Kemal’s name would be reverenced all over Turkey, that every child at school would know by heart the gaunt lines of his face, the grim mouth and the washed eyes, while his spectacular rival would be all but forgotten.”

Who was this Kemal? My professors had never mentioned him, nor had our textbooks. We had studied Napoleon and Lee and Stonewall Jackson and Grant and Eisenhower and Guderian and Rommel and MacArthur. But about this Kemal, not a word.

I could not stop reading my new book, Page 129: “It was at this point that Mustafa Kemal arrived.” (It was at Chanuk Bair.)
“Kemal’s astonishing career as a commanding officer dates from this moment.”
And from this point, the book “belongs” to Mustafa Kemal.

His “air of inspired desperation.”

His “fanatical attack on the Anzac beachhead all afternoon.”

His reconnaissance during the cease fire: “It was even said that Kemal had disguised himself as a sergeant and had spent the whole nine hours with various burial parties close to the Anzac trenches.”

His detailed journal: “He always sees the battle from a fresh point of view.”

His prophecy of the landing at Suvla: “From the 6th August onwards the enemy’s plans turned out just as I expected. I could not imagine the feelings of those who, two months before, had insisted on not accepting my explanations….They had allowed the whole situation to become critical and the nation to be exposed to very great danger.”

Mustafa Kemal, the savior, the father, the inspiration of the Turkish people, or at least those who are able to comprehend his genius.

And so I graduated from West Point and did my duty.
And so went the years and the decades and by a quirk of fate I came to Turkey.
And then I read another book: Atatürk: The Biography of the Founder of Modern Turkey by Andrew Mango.

And after that I read more and more books about this splendid man and I read his writings too. And I realized how my earlier education at West Point had been severely flawed.
Why?
Because Atatürk was the exemplar of the soldier-statesman we all should have studied and emulated. My god, he had won and built a nation. He had defeated the dark-minded forces that had enslaved the minds of Turkish men and women for centuries. He was a liberator beyond compare. Military, political, social, economical, educational, philosophical, cultural…he had mastered and implemented all the arts of modernization. He had given to all an explosive burst of genuine freedom. Indeed, he had set the way to an incomparable secular, democratic, republic of Turkey. And we, in the greatest military academy in the world, failed to know anything about him!

How I wish now that sixty years ago I had a Turkish cadet classmate at West Point. How he could have inspired us all with the full story of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. And how enlightening it would have been for West Point and the “West.”

One night soon after I had arrived in Turkey, I went to a concert at the AKM. AKM stands for the Atatürk Cultural Center. It was a splendid concert auditorium with a vast stage for theater and ballet. It has since been left to ruin by the abominable government that now rules this fast-fading country. Outside were parked numerous buses. Inside was a contingent of cadets from a local military high school. I struck up a conversation. They all spoke perfect English.

“So what’s next for you guys?” I asked.
“I’m going to West Point next year,” one answered with a confident pride.
“Really?” I said, “I went there.”
He was as surprised as I was.
He was a solid kid, like all of them, facing an uncertain future. And I thought of myself, so unknowing, so long ago.
“You will have a great advantage at West Point, you know, with your military preparation,” I said.
He shrugged his shoulders. “I hope so, sir.”
“You will,” I said, “More than any of them there now.”
“Why is that, sir?”
“You have Atatürk,” I said. “And make sure you tell all of them all you know about him. Share him!”
And then the bell sounded softly three times. Last call. We said goodbye and scattered to our seats.

I wonder now about those splendid boys… By now they are officers. Army? Navy? Air Force? Are any in jail due to the ongoing criminal and nonsensical conspiracy of the CIA, Fethullah Gülen, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to destroy the Turkish military and Mustafa Kemal?

The decision to abandon West Point training, made by someone somewhere in the Turkish chain of command, is a particularly harmful one. It insults the wise heritage of Mustafa Kemal. It severs the alliance of American and Turkish military academy-trained officers. And it stinks of political opportunism and ignorance. But those details can be debated some other day, hopefully by the young Turkish cadets who will easily see the profoundly catastrophic effects of a military turning its back on the world’s preeminent military institution. It’s a decision that penalizes both West Point and the Turkish Military Academy. It’s a decision made by those pea-brains, domestic and foreign, who today cause such havoc in Turkey.

If we don’t wise up now, when will we?

James (Cem) Ryan
Istanbul
17 March 2014

Brightening Glance, http://www.brighteningglance.org

March 18, 2014
THE SICK JOKE

“Hegel observes somewhere that all great incidents and individuals of world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”

Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1851)

Oh fabulous farce, the art of the improbable, the exaggerated, the ludicrous, the bizarre, the brazen and often the stupid, the essence of what Turks once called democracy, a word they dare not now pronounce. Still, aren’t we all so lucky to be living in Turkey? Sure we are. Turkey, the land of politicians that plunder while they pray, ludicrously lie without blushing and murder and maim the nation’s youth. Turkey, once brimming with hope, now the land of hopelessness. Still…aren’t we happy, happy, happy? Of course we are. Therefore aren’t we stupid? Of course we…. next question, please.

Forget your troubles! Get happy! Allah, Yahweh and Jesus all love you! Why the other night the commanding general of the world’s largest, best trained and best armed terrorist group was released from jail. He was lucky. Hundreds of his fellow officers, jailed years before him, are still inside. Strange isn’t to have a nation’s army called a terrorist group? Who would dare call it so? The name, their name, is treason. Their names are the names of founders of the ruling religious fascist party. Meet Abdullah Gül, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Bülent Arınç, the three stars of that fast fading, soon to close farce called Ergenekon. And this dynamic trio, this merry band, the Harpo Marx, Groucho Marx and Chico Marx of their shameless Turkish times, they cooked up this entire treacherous deal. Really, these guys are too much, a real riot of laughs. So get this, after the general was released, all three sent him congratulations messages. So funny they are… HA-HA-HA. They couldn’t be any funnier if they had hit him in the face with cream pies. These three comics canned the general for 26 months and then they celebrate his release. HA-HA-HA! Then they sent for the real clown and in comes the major opposition party leader to join in the celebration. HA-HA-HA! Too much, wouldn’t you agree? Don’t you love farce?

Well, Ergenekon has been legally stinking for years. It’s all based on fabricated evidence and secret, false witnesses. Who wrote this joke? Well start with the CIA and assorted traitorous dopes in Turkey. Who produced it? Harpo, Groucho and Chico, with a supporting cast of sold-out journalists, police, prosecutors and judges. Who’s the evil genius? Every farce needs an evil genius. Why he’s an old friend of Harpo, Groucho, and Chico. His name? Feto. Who’s he? He’s an under-educated imam who peddles a line of religious snake-oil blather that appeals to people who are too busy to read and think. But not too busy to be sneaky, violent and suborn treason. He has a big following in Turkey. He makes loads of money so bankrolling the Ergenekon farce was not even a slight problem. And, of course, to further darken the melodrama enter the CIA. Color me green as in a green card for Feto. Color me green as in an Islamic green tie for Groucho. Color me green as in massive bribes and kickbacks and secret bank accounts in the Alps. So far, so bad. Yes, Uncle Feto has been very good to these destroyers of Turkey. And he has been true to his word. He promised to destroy democracy years ago before he escaped into the welcoming arms of the CIA in America, Pennsylvania to be precise. But now pity poor Feto. His old subversive comrades have turned on him. It seems they need a patsy, like Lee Harvey Oswald was fifty years ago. Why? Well, it seems that Groucho and his bit-player ministers and assorted cronies have been stealing everything. Hoses are everywhere sucking, sucking, sucking. Their houses are collapsing from the zillions of shoeboxes stuffed with dollars and euros and whatever else flies in. So Groucho needs a cover, something to take him from being a pious thief to a savior of the nation. Hmmm….

So what does he do? He blames Feto for the whole disaster. The new game is called Fingering Feto. And that’s why the Turkish Marx brothers, now little angels, are congratulating the general. I wonder if they will send congratulations to all the hundreds of soon-to-be-released prisoners whose lives they have stolen? Do they really think that the Turkish people will believe that they are clean, that they too have been made patsies by the patsy, Feto? Remember, farces are brazen and bizarre.

Groucho says he’s saving the nation from Feto’s horrible assault on privacy and the military and everything else. Groucho is, as usual, lying, since he said he was the lead prosecutor in all these cases. Farces are ludicrous too. And so the leading opposition has made an alliance of sorts with Feto. The result? Voters in the coming election can vote for the treasonous ruling party or the treasonous major opposition party. This is pretty funny isn’t it? HA-HA-HA.

Or is this the stupid part? HA-HA-HA!

James (Cem) Ryan
Istanbul
8 March 2014

Brightening Glance,

March 9, 2014