Turkish Forum English

Tag: Ergenekon

AMERICAN BOYZ N THE HOOD

Turkish Soldiers Hooded by America
Sulaymaniyah, Iraq. 4 July 2003

Istanbul: 13 November 2014

Yesterday, three sailors from the uncontrollably violent neighborhood called America met the true face of Turkey. Poor boys, they don’t even know what they represent. They don’t even know that their so-called leaders have made them punching bags for its criminal enterprise called American imperialism. They don’t even know how America and its treasonous internal agents, in particular the Turkish government, are attempting to destroy the future of the Turkish youth.

Perhaps these American boys got a quick lesson in the true nature of Turkish-American relations yesterday? But, sadly, probably not. The American boys ran back to the false safety of their warship, re-entering their “safe” world of imperialist propaganda, economic excess and hypocrisy. But there is no safety anywhere any longer. That is the gift of America to Turkey, and to the world. As usual, America authorities and its treacherous collaborating Turkish puppets screamed in outrage. And, as usual, the youth of Turkey, the true defenders of the Republic of Turkey, went to jail for exercising their patriotic duty. Nothing has changed, except one thing. Turkish young people, the nation’s true patriotic voice, will not take American crap anymore. And America should understand that. Listen and learn, America. You owe it to your own youth. Think of it this way, think of it as a symbol.

That’s the way the resident American-imposed agent of destruction, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, thought about his hooding of Turkish women into a grotesque series of Middle Age costumes that squeeze feminine brains into numb submission. So what, declared the then prime minister, if the head scarf is a political symbol? So what, indeed! Erdoğan used his compliant covered women to destroy democracy in his own country. He and his collaborators hid behind their women’s headscarves to do America’s dirty work. And now they cannot safely visit any neighborhood in their own land. No “hood” is safe for the hoodlums. And now the new president hides in a billion-dollar illegal palace, his inadvertent monument to treason. So what if he and his ilk cannot appear in public! So what!

So what if in 1980 the American president celebrated the success of his CIA-engineered military coup by proclaiming “Our boys did it!” Yes, then his gangster BOYZ did it. And yesterday, today’s Turkish youth remembered. And yesterday, our Turkish boys did it to America, symbolically, of course, because Turkish youth is civilized. They can be no other way; they are the current-day “soldiers of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.” This is something that the treacherous opposition political polities can neither say nor understand. Yes, Turkish young people are civilized and enlightened by the patriotic principles of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. That’s why, yesterday, no one, neither American boy nor Turkish boy was hurt. No one was tortured. No one was hung. No one was shot, exploded, beaten, gassed, or otherwise maimed. And that’s a lot more than America can ever say about their overt and covert interventions in Turkey’s affairs.

So what if America and its craven ambassador, Francis Ricciardone, aided and abetted the Turkish government in its beating, gassing, maiming and murdering of democratically assembled Gezi Park protestors. “The Turkish government is having a conversation with its people,” said the deceitful ambassador, as he arranged to have more poisonous gas sold to Erdoğan and his hoodlum police. A “conversation?” So what!

So what if the same ambassador conspired with the main opposition party leader to assure the election of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to the presidency!

So what if yesterday the American boys’ heads momentarily felt the experience of being symbolically hooded! Symbolically hooded, not actually hung like so many patriotic Turkish young people have been. And by their own government! The Turkish people have been strangled and hooded by America, by its CIA meddlers and by its corrupt politicians for decades. And in the past decade of Erdoğan’s treacherous rule, America’s CIA “boys” have done it again. Or tried to.

So what if America has used its youth to kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in its deceitful, illegal war of aggression!

So what if America has humiliated the Turkish military by hooding its soldiers in Iraq in July 2003!

So what if America has conspired with Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Jordan to kill hundreds of thousands of Syrians in its deceitful pretext of bringing democracy!

So what if America has supported the treasonous, under-educated, Islamic zealot, CIA-asset, Fethullah Gulen for decades in the Pennsylvania countryside!

So what if Gulen and Erdoğan have collaborated for decades in treacherous union to do America’s bidding in the subversion of the Turkish Republic! So what if the Turkish Army has been destroyed! So what if the independence of the Turkish judiciary has collapsed! So what if rivers have been stopped, farmers’ fields uprooted, forests felled, eternal olive trees murdered, lakes polluted, mountains plundered, the air made poisonous, all in pursuit of private profit, all indicative of massive governmental corruption! So what if the government has looted public funds! So what if the Turkish mass media slithers like a reptile on its overstuffed belly doing the bidding of its governmental master! So what if Turkey stinks from America’s subversion like a rotting corpse in the noonday sun!

Yes, SO WHAT?

Yesterday, clearly, directly, in a street-theater performance, Turkish “boyz” encountered American “boyz” in the Turkish “hood.” The US embassy in Turkey called the incident “appalling.” What is appalling is the embassy’s ignorance and arrogance. What is appalling is the criminal behavior of its criminal boss, the president of the United States. It is he and Erdoğan and all their co-conspirators, all the ones who need protection by regiments of armed-to-the-teeth goons, who deserve to be hooded. And now they can never step foot in our hood, ever again. Not ever! That’s the message from yesterday. Take your warships and your political puppets and go!

James C. Ryan

Istanbul

13 November 2014

November 13, 2014
KEYSTONE KOPISTAN

A Grim Non-Fairytale

Everything is unbelievable in the kingdom of Keystone Kopistan, located between Bulgaristan, Greekistan, Syrianistan, Irakistan, Iranistan, Devilistan and the deep blue sea. In fact, the most popular exclamation of astonishment in Keystone Kopistan, always used about the never-ending fraud called “Turkish Democracy,” is “Inanılmaz!” meaning “Unbelievable!” In reality, the unbelievable is always completely believable in K.K. This has been the case since 10 November 1938. Things always worsen and unbelievably so. For example, this is now one more unbelievable thing going from bad to worse: the police in Keystone Kopistan are now arresting the police, that is, each other. There is neither law or order nor order or law in the “advanced” democracy of Keystone Kopistan. Things there are always unbelievably true.

But a far more serious condition prevails. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, widely thought to have been the all-powerful prime minister of Keystone Kopistan never was. It seems that Erdoğan, the bad-boy, tough guy prime minister (and now president-in-waiting) discovered upon awakening on the morning of 17 December 2013 that he had only imagined he was prime minister, police chief, head of the Supreme Court, chief prosecuting attorney, chief destroyer of all military forces, chief economist, chief architect, chief paymaster, chief collector of receivables, chief subcontractor, and chief Chief. In fact, Erdoğan had been deep in a twelve-year dream about Yavuz Sultan Selim (1470-1520), known as Selim the Grim for his bloody-handed cruelty. These two sure make strange, grim bedfellows, don’t they?

On 17 December, the police came knocking on Erdoğan’s door looking for shoeboxes. Oh how they ran, these cops of Kopistan. And oh how Tayyip and the kids ran, ran, ran. And how all the ministers ran. And how all their children ran. And how the words flew. And how Erdoğan, thinking he was prime minister, fired all the cops and prosecutors and judges. And how four of the more corrupt ministers resigned and ran away to do house cleaning chores, so helpful did they become to their wives that day. Everyone was chasing everyone that day—fathers chased children, husbands chased wives, police chased thieves, helicopters flew, curses flew, shoeboxes and candy boxes flew and everyone and everything chased money, vast, countless amounts of money. So what should be done?

Well that was easy. Since everything is both believable and unbelievable in Keystone Kopistan, Erdoğan blamed the police, the newspapers, the Israelis, the American ambassador and the entire country’s population of stray cats. He even blamed Pennsylvania. Unbelievable, wouldn’t you agree? Yes, but…and “but” is a very important word in Keystone Kopistan. But… it is also believable. And since the media bosses are all corrupt, and most journalists are scribblers for Erdoğan’s interests, and since bribes and lies are the common means of discourse, all are made to believe that a “parallel” state did it. No one asks very much about what happened to all the money. No one asks very much where Erdoğan got all the good cops to replace the bad cops. No one asks much in Keystone Kopistan. And since half the voters are paid by the ruling party, they will also surely die for him and thus surely vote for him. And so these unquestioning incompetents made him president, with a lot of help from the equally incompetent political opposition. And Erdoğan laughingly tallied his winning votes and now, knowingly and safely, counts his unbelievably extraordinary assets.

Speaking of counting, Selim the Grim was also interested in counting. He specialized in the murderous mathematics of religion. So much so that he slaughtered 40,000 “heretical” Anatolian Alevites, having concluding that killing even one of these despicable heretics was functionally equivalent to the heavenly reward receivable for killing 70 detestable Christians. Obviously he couldn’t find such a concentration of Christians in those days so he invented the Alevite multiplier effect. Selim the Grim was pleased with his genius and continued with his math studies, adding other variables to his original deadly equation: 1A = 70C. Selim the Grim, soul brother for Tayyip the Grimmer…and the grim tale of Keystone Kopistan continues.

One can easily understand Tayyip the Grimmer’s fascination with this earlier Sultanic killing machine. After all, after his own interests everyone and everything else comes last. So in homage, Tayyip the Grimmer decided to build a third bridge over the Bosporus, naming it the Yavuz Sultan Selim Bridge. In perfect historical harmony, this bridge will slaughter millions of trees, plants, wildlife, rivers, streams and the Istanbul air, in short, the entire ecological system of Bosporus and Istanbul will enter a long, torturous death cycle. It is the mathematical, real world equivalent to billions of dollars of real estate speculation and undercover deals. Allah is indeed generous to pious believers. Selim the Grim proved that. And Tayyip the Grimmer reinforces Selim the Grim’s mathematical speculations proving that one shoebox packed with U.S. dollars equals $1 million. Unbelievable! Who needs shoes! Yes, unbelievable. So believe it! And be pious!

Last December 17, Tayyip the Grimmer awoke from his dream. What? he shouted, You mean I’m not the man in charge? It seems that the major arrest programs of the government’s plan to destroy the military—Ergenekon and Balyoz—happened, but the government didn’t do it. Huh? Yes, the army was destroyed, but not by Tayyip the Grimmer. Huh? Journalists and military officers had their careers and, in a few cases, their lives destroyed, but not by the government. Huh?

Then who did it? That’s easy, said Tayyip the Grimmer. It was all a sneaky trick done by that unspeakable, terrorist imam in Pennsylvania. He did it! Feto of Pennsylvania did it! My archenemy, my old friend and, until now, my co-conspirator and accomplice. He did it! Huh?

So while Feto the Unspeakable was doing all the secret dirty business under the blind eyes of a sleeping government, who raped environment? Who plundered the nation’s assets? Whose police maimed and murdered the nation’s youth during the Gezi Park Movement. Who insulted the mothers of dead children? Who continues to defame the dead children? Who arms and finances the ISID killers? Who supports these terrorist demons who consume the inner organs of their dying victims? Who fails to speak out when these sub-human insults to the animal world behead men, women, children and infants in the name of Allah? Who?

Why it’s the grim, soon-to-be-president of the Republic of Turkey. He and his truly unspeakable, unbelievable, fully believable supporters have brought hell to Keystone Kopistan. Believe it!

James (Cem) Ryan

Istanbul

19 August 2014

August 19, 2014
NO LAUGHS FOR TURKEY’S CRYBABY

Bülent Arınç weeping at a microphone

While violence consumes its neighbors, it’s holiday time in once secular Turkey, now under occupation by a religious fascist government, all praise to Allah and America. Celebratory candy and sweet pastry abound. And naturally Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç is worried about decay. No, not tooth decay, moral decay. And so he spoke out about moral decay, ignoring the fact that he and his American-puppet partners have destroyed any aspect of secular democracy in Turkey and in its neighbor countries. And that they sponsor one of the most brutal, barbaric gangs ever assembled to slaughter, rape, behead and crucify innocent people…well, it must have slipped the deputy prime minister’s mind. What also slipped his mind was the fact that his party members in general, and the prime minister and his cronies in particular, have surely set unofficial Guinness world records in immorality. But our intrepid deputy prime minister dropped neither tear nor syllable about these inconveniently immoral truths.

Instead he spoke of the moral decay caused by women laughing in front of anyone, that is, in public. What is indeed decadent is how this sanctimonious religion-mongering ruling party uses any excuse to give stupid advice. Not only shouldn’t women laugh in public, they should not display their attractiveness. “Their” women have certainly achieved the latter. As far as their laughter, who noticed? But laughing in public as being an offense? This is hilariously pathetic. Who writes the speeches for these people?

This deputy prime minister is famous for spewing crocodile tears at the hint that moisture might be required. He is also famous for his melodramatics in the hoax that was Ergenekon. His histrionics regarding imagined assassination attempts were epic. Adding further moral disgrace to his ill-repute, he had also given his moral judgment that in Ergenekon “Turkey is cleaning its intestines.” That the whole Ergenekon-Balyoz affair that destroyed the Turkish military and the nation’s security system was a phony also escaped his moral decay concerns. That his own party has admitted it, also eluded him. His no-laughing-in-public agenda item is the sickest joke of all. Except for the following.

That he lied…that he cooperated with the Gulen movement…that he was complicit in treason…that he collaborated with the CIA…all this has escaped his moral compass. And all this has escaped the moral compass of his “pious” followers who pride themselves on their religious piety. Such weirdness! To have a piety with so little to do with morality and so much to do with decay.

But take heart. The deputy prime minister also feels that teenage sex addiction is caused by certain TV programs. And that this causes violence to women. And therefore, women should never laugh in public and should look as ugly as possible in public. A brilliant policy indeed. In short, the deputy prime minister wants all of us to look like them…

Gentlemen! Ladies! Children of all ages! On the count of three, let us together give the deputy prime minister a great big public laugh. One…Two… THREE!

HA!

James (Cem) Ryan

Istanbul

29 July 2014

July 31, 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
RECEP DECEIT ERDOĞAN

RECEP DECEIT ERDOĞAN

15 March 2014

The ides of March, beware the ides of March!

Whence is that knocking?
How is’t with me, when every noise appalls me?
What hands are here? ha! they pluck out mine eyes.
Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,

Making the green one red.

MACBETH, William Shakespeare

In your repetition, in your ranting, you bore me immensely and to tears.
Yet in your supernatural excess, you never fail to astonish.
Now a hunted man, who curses stars for giving light to darkness,
you cannot control your rotting tongue.
There must surely be some divine disgust coming.
You should be pitied, such an inhuman piece of wreckage.
But in your deceit you transcend pity.
The condition of your end surpasses words, except perhaps one–
UNSPEAKABLE

Nine months ago you murdered a fifteen year-old boy.
It took Berkin Elvan nine months to be born.
And nine months to die by your hand.
Nine months in a coma, tubed and hosed, draining away in a hospital.
A hospital where, the day he died, you gassed and beat his mourners.
And that night, you gassed and beat his mourners all over the nation.
And that night I wrote about rage and outrage.
“HEY YOU!” I shouted… “HEY ERDOĞAN!”

That night I asked you, “Tomorrow, will you attack the boy’s corpse?”
I felt so strange asking that question. Who would do such blasphemy?
But true to your deceitful form, you would.
And did.
And without qualms, so cool, so cold, so devastating your style.
Every religion, one way or another says, never speak ill of the dead.
But you…unspeakable you…What in hell is your religion?
And the next day you continued to defile the boy’s corpse.
You went to Siirt.

Your wife’s hometown.
And how courageous you were imitating the home-grown liar and thief Jet Fadil whose parliamentary seat you occupy in historically perfect irony.

Imposter! Charlatan! Infidel!

The boy was a “terrorist, you yelled to your mob of bootlickers in the plaza at Siirt.
Clap-clap-clap went your mob.
He was carrying a slingshot, steel marbles and wearing a scarf, you lied.
Clap-clap-clap went your mob.

Yes,true to your form, you lied.
The picture was photoshopped by one of your corrupt cops.
Everyone knows this.
Everyone except your Allah-dazzled mobs.
Clap-clappity-clap went your bedazzled bootlickers.
Clap-clappity-clap…

Then you insulted the boy’s mother.
“I couldn’t understand why you threw steel marbles and carnations into your son’s grave,” you yelled.
Booooooooo! yelled your mob in avid, oblivious agreement. Booooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

Who? What? When? Where? Why? …..
I mean words fail…a head of state talking such abominable trash, such profanity…
Booing a dead child’s mother?
Your mob, your perverted followers.
Your mobs in plazas where no light ever shines. YOUR “people.”
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
YUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUH!

What idiot advises you to say and do such things?
The guy with the pig-greased hair?
That peddler of slime and subterfuge?
The one who is ready to die for you?
Hadi!
Go!
Die!
Lead by example!
Do the right thing!

Or do you advise yourself?

Or was it Egemen Bağış, your thieving ex-minister?
The pervert who called Berkin’s mourners “necrophiles.”

Or was it Mehmet Ali Şahin, Turkey’s greatest verbal defecator.
In Ergenekon, as he had so vividly explained,
“Turkey is defecating. Turkey will continue cleansing its intestines.”
About Berkin, he was even less sensitive.
If Berkin had died after the election, he blathered, the funeral crowd would not have been so large.

And for all this, and for so much more, you will all soon go forever.

The door is knocking.
Can you hear it?
Your advisors won’t tell.
Only the knock tells.
The knock that appalls.
A knock, and you disappear.
Somewhere, beyond the sun, beyond the touch of humanity,
Beyond the light. Beyond thought.
And all that remains, all those “things” of yours,
will be razed, destroyed, plowed over.
And the land will be calm.
And your hands?
Your bloody, thieving, deceiving, murderous hands?
They too will be food for worms.

Listen well, for it has already been written:

Your worm is your only emperor for diet.
We fat all creatures else to fat us, and
we fat ourselves for maggots.

HAMLET, William Shakespeare

James (Cem) Ryan
Istanbul
15 March 2014

March 16, 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