Coup attempt in Turkey

[frunk]

Hasn't there been a public reconciliation with Russia? Erdogan and Putin seem birds of a feather so I'm sure they'd find a way to align their countries.

They want the same things, power over their country and respect/fear on the international stage.  I'm not sure it's inevitable for them to be friends or enemies, too many personal relationship issues when single individuals control as much of their country as these two want to.

[Liep]

How did he piss off the Russians?

Shot down one of their planes entering Turkish airspace.

All in the past.  BTW, it was one of the coup guys who shot down the Russian plane, in a conspiracy to drive a wedge between Turkey and Russia.

It's so 1930ish it's amazing.

[Valmy]

It's so 1930ish it's amazing.

Everything old really is new again.

[Malthus]

Hasn't there been a public reconciliation with Russia? Erdogan and Putin seem birds of a feather so I'm sure they'd find a way to align their countries.

They are very similar, but that doesn't necessarily make them friends. Putin is among other things a Russian populist nationalist; and Russia has historic ambitions that conflict with those of Turkey.

It is true that Erdogan has been attempting to mend fences with Putin; they are supposed to meet in August. But then, Erdogan's been mending fences with other prior victims of his anger recently - he's even reached a rapport with Israel, as of last month.

http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.727369

My guess is that he was starting to feel a trifle friendless - he can't be feuding with everyone at the same time, so if he wants to start some new feuds, he has to end some old ones.

[Crazy_Ivan80]

I actually suspect something real bad is going to happen when Turkey finishes preparing its formal extradition request for Fethullah Gülen; now unless I'm mistaken, since Gülen is a permanent resident with a green card, there is no mechanism for the State Department or the President to just "extradite him" on special request from Turkey. We would have to hold an extradition hearing in courts, which are not politically answerable to U.S. foreign policy concerns. Unless the Turkish request actually contains legitimate evidence that would withstand court scrutiny, it's likely the request will be rejected by a court--and even if Obama was inclined to do something about it, he couldn't.

I've heard some people suggest Erdogan might basically close up Incirlik and not allow anyone to come or go, essentially holding some ~5000 American servicemen hostage, until Gülen is extradited.

and I will once again point to the significant amount of Turkish Erdogan-voters (lets just call these islamofascists instead though) in many european countries willing to take to streets and engage in violence on the Turkish Führer's behalf.

What's the connection between that and Erdogan's request for us to extradite Gulen?  Are you suggesting that US courts take into account the potential for pro-Erdogan elements to riot in Europe?

that's not why I propose. What I am saying is that the Turkish fascist state has a lot of 5th columnists in other countries willing to use violence to make sure these countries do what Turkey demands. And that these states would do well to impress on these 5th columnists that they'll be deported without recourse if they do engage in activities that go against the interests of the countries where they live. On cannot, after all, have two masters and be loyal to both.

[Crazy_Ivan80]

Never waste a good crisis.

The coup in Turkey probably would have been much more successful if all the people currently being arrested for it actually were involved.

Yeah those 15,000 teachers could have proven to be a formidable force on the battlefield. 

Education is one of the biggest battlefields imagineable when talking about the soul of a nation.

[alfred russel]

Hasn't there been a public reconciliation with Russia? Erdogan and Putin seem birds of a feather so I'm sure they'd find a way to align their countries.

They are very similar, but that doesn't necessarily make them friends. Putin is among other things a Russian populist nationalist; and Russia has historic ambitions that conflict with those of Turkey.

It is true that Erdogan has been attempting to mend fences with Putin; they are supposed to meet in August. But then, Erdogan's been mending fences with other prior victims of his anger recently - he's even reached a rapport with Israel, as of last month.

http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.727369

My guess is that he was starting to feel a trifle friendless - he can't be feuding with everyone at the same time, so if he wants to start some new feuds, he has to end some old ones.

Yeah, there are some big hurdles to Turkey and Russia being allies. In addition to what you mention, and other things, anti Muslim sentiment is quite high in Russia, and support for Azerbaijan is very high in Turkey (with Russia strongly supporting Armenia). Russia strongly supports Assad, Turkey is strongly against the guy.

[Admiral Yi]

The moves against teachers and professors doesn't quite jibe with the story that the coup was Islamist.

[Liep]

The moves against teachers and professors doesn't quite jibe with the story that the coup was Islamist.

That is if there's any hold to the accusations or if it's merely an excuse to get rid of the troublesome intelligentsia.

[Crazy_Ivan80]

http://www.turkeyanalyst.org/publications/turkey-analyst-articles/item/374-the-akp-and-turkey%E2%80%99s-long-tradition-of-islamo-fascism.html

-> a text from 2015 about where the AKP (in this case) is (seems to be) heading. For what it's worth

By Toni Alaranta (vol. 8, no. 3 of the Turkey Analyst)

Those who claim that democracy in Turkey has been handicapped because of the repressive "Kemalist" regime overlook that the conservative right has totally dominated Turkish politics. It is the traditions of the Turkish right that need to be scrutinized in the search for the matrix of current undemocratic practices. The Turkish Islamist poet and political ideologue Necip Fazıl Kısakürek is a key figure in this context. He propagated for a totalitarian Islamist-fascist regime in Turkey, to be ruled by an Islamic version of a Führer. And today representatives of the AKP point out that understanding Kısakürek is a precondition to understand the great "cause" ("dava") that the AKP represents.

 



BACKGROUND: To make the claim that Turkey's governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) would have anything to do with "Islamic fascism" at first appears astonishing. This is, after all, a party that was for many years defined – by itself and by sympathetic observers in the West – as the Turkish equivalent to Western conservative-democratic parties. The dominant scholarship on modern Turkey has for several decades produced an image of an authoritarian and even fascist Kemalist regime that was ended by the "democratic" Muslims of the AKP. Two fundamental mistakes have thus been committed: one concerns the nature of the regime that the AKP replaced and the second is about the nature of the Islamists.

The narrative peddled by the AKP and its supporters is that the party has ushered in democracy by putting an end to what is portrayed as a regime run by elitist Kemalists, Westernizers who were alien to the culture of their own country, and who for eighty years supposedly suppressed the Anatolian conservative Muslims; and these latter are taken to be the sole and legitimate expression of the popular will.




That there was such a wide expectation that the AKP would indeed usher in pluralist, liberal values and democratization in Turkey was to a considerable degree based on the Turkish liberals' role in legitimating the party as the "voice of the oppressed." From their chairs in prestigious universities, for nearly two decades, liberal Turkish academics drummed in the message of how the awful "Kemalist state" was repressing and harassing pious Muslims. In doing this, they uncritically – and certainly very usefully – reproduced and transmitted the most emotionally powerful narrative trope used by the Turkish Islamist movement.

In reality, a "Kemalist state" has not existed in Turkey since the end of the Republican

People's Party's (CHP) one-party regime in 1950. With the coming to power of the conservative Democrat Party at that date, the Turkish regime ceased to be based on the idea of radical and utopian modernization; from then on, it has effectively been a nationalist-conservative regime that has made considerable use of religious symbols and themes. In this sense the "normalization" process attached to the AKP was consummated already during the 1950s, when, in the words of British scholar David McDowall, the Democrat Party government "assisted the revival of traditional Islamic values at the heart of the state."

Secondly, the notion of conservative Anatolian Muslims as a "natural" force that would compel the authoritarian Turkish state to democratize represents an enormous misrepresentation of the Turkish socio-political reality. The tradition of Turkish conservative and Islamist parties is fundamentally undemocratic. If one scratches the surface of the AKP's ideological background, it becomes clear that the party's agenda is deeply undemocratic. The only major difference between the current AKP and the previous Islamist parties is that the AKP has learned to adjust its economic policies to the global free market regime. Through economic liberalization, inaugurated by Turgut Özal, prime minister and later president, during the 1980s the Anatolian conservative middle class was integrated to the global economy.

IMPLICATIONS:  Those who claim that democracy in Turkey has been handicapped because of the repressive "Kemalist" regime somehow manage to overlook that the conservative right has totally dominated Turkish politics; it is the traditions of the Turkish right that need to be scrutinized in the search for the matrix of current undemocratic practices.

The AKP is in fact a large ideological coalition that has absorbed both the nationalist-conservative tradition – represented by conservatives like Adnan Menderes, Süleyman Demirel and Turgut Özal – and the Islamist tradition that was led by Necmettin Erbakan from the early 1970s to the 1990s. In addition, the AKP until recently collaborated with the movement of Fethullah Gülen, the leading "civil society" component of the Turkish Islamist movement.

Ali Bulaç, who is one of the leading intellectuals within the Gülenist camp, has pointed out that the "political" (AKP and previously the Islamist "National Outlook" parties) and the "cultural" (in particular the Gülen movement) components of Turkey's Islamist movement share a common ideological background. This common background is the İttihad-i Muhammedi Fırkası (Islamic Union Party) established in 1909, during the Second Constitutional Era of the Ottoman Empire. According to Bulaç, it was within the ranks of this party that Turkish first modern Islamic intellectuals emerged, and they have provided the intellectual basis for both the "political" and the "cultural" manifestations of the Islamic movement.   

When one takes a thorough view on the dominant articulation of the religious and conservative constituency from the 1950s to the contemporary AKP, there is nothing that points towards genuine pluralism.   The Islamist-conservative poet and political ideologue Necip Fazıl Kısakürek (1904-1983) is in many ways a key figure in this context, and his writings are revealing. Kısakürek is the esteemed partisan of both Turkish nationalist-conservative and Islamist circles. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan especially admires Kısakürek, often reciting his poems in public. Indeed, several representatives of the AKP have stated that understanding Kısakürek is a precondition to understand the great "cause" ("dava") that the AKP represents. However, the admiration expressed for Kısakürek is ill-boding: he never hid that he hated parliamentary democracy.

Political scientist Taner Timur has recently noted that Kısakürek was not only a poet but an ideologue who propagated for the introduction of a totalitarian Islamist-fascist regime in Turkey, to be ruled by an Islamic version of a Führer, that is, a "supreme leader" (called "Başyüce").

Erdoğan is yet to implement Kısakürek's program in detail; but his attempt to establish presidential rule and the way the majority's Sunni Islamic faith is increasingly presented as the only legitimate expression of the national will is worryingly well in line with Kısakürek's blueprint for an Islamic-fascist regime.

During the 1950s, Kısakürek published his articles in the magazine Büyük Doğu (Great East), in which he called for the banning of CHP, the Republican People's Party. It is thus noteworthy that Erdoğan, who has made such an enormous issue about the "Kemalists" always supporting party closures, himself admires a man who called for the banning the political organization of his opponents.

Kısakürek's writings offer keen insights into the way the Turkish Islamists relate to a notion such as freedom. According to Kısakürek, freedom is not a goal, but a tool, because a human being is not free in that sense: a dog and a donkey are free, but a human being is made by his Creator and thus above a mere nature and its meaningless "freedom." The Turkish Islamists have not in any way abandoned the basic idea according to which a human being is not "free": according to the ideological worldview of Islamists, the kind of freedom espoused by European Enlightenment – within which man measures all things by solely depending on his rational mind – is a perversion. Also those who are deemed "moderate" share this worldview.

When key AKP figures speak about their mission, to build a "New Turkey" and to "close a hundred year old parenthesis" – as Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu has recently said – they refer not only to the Young Turk and Kemalist Westernization project, but to the whole of the modernization project that started in the Ottoman Empire in the latter part of the 18th century. There is a telling statement in this respect in Kısakürek's key work İdeolocya Örgüsü, ("Plait of Ideology," published in 1977): "Ever since the Tanzimat [the "Reorganization" reforms of the beginning of the 19th century], the ongoing artificial reforms, and the artificial heroes produced by these reforms, have been the main problem obstructing our cause."

Also the highly emotional discourse which makes a radical distinction between the elitist, westernized so called "white Turks" and the supposedly "real" and "authentic" nation composed of so called "black Turks," which has been widely disseminated by AKP and its partisans in pro-government think tanks and media, emanates directly from Kısakürek.

CONCLUSIONS: The earlier assumptions about the AKP – that the party's political mission and ideology is to produce and disseminate a "healthy synthesis" of Western political thinking and Islamic religious-political traditions – were deeply flawed. From the İttihad-i Muhammedi Fırkası to Necip Fazil Kısakürek and the current AKP, the Turkish Islamist tradition selectively utilizes Western political concepts, but ultimately its purpose is to reject them in order to rebuild an allegedly more superior and legitimate, "authentic" Islamic socio-political order.

The AKP is a deeply anti-western political movement. It does not aim to "correct" or "normalize" past "excesses" but to annihilate the republican and Ottoman secularizing-westernizing reforms altogether. Unlike in previous decades, the Turkish Islamic movement has now made its peace with the state – by totally conquering it. President Erdoğan did not suddenly change from a genuine democrat to an authoritarian Islamist: the ideological and organizational matrix of the AKP is deeply undemocratic.

Toni Alaranta, Ph.D., is a senior research fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs. He is the author of the forthcoming book National and State Identity in Turkey: The Transformation of the Republic's Status in the International System (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015). His previous publications include Contemporary Kemalism: From Universal Secular-Humanism to Extreme Turkish Nationalism (Routledge, 2014).   

[Crazy_Ivan80]

The moves against teachers and professors doesn't quite jibe with the story that the coup was Islamist.

he now gets to replace them with people of his own brand of islamism

[mongers]

We need someone to come out and bat for Erdogan, defending this as merely within the bounds of democratic behaviour.

[alfred russel]

We need someone to come out and bat for Erdogan, defending this as merely within the bounds of democratic behaviour.

but where can such a man be found? a man who will defend erdogan with Righteousness And Zeal? 

[KRonn]

Besides major Turkish news outlets blaming the US for the coup attempt, Erdogan in a recent speech said the US needs to leave the Med. What is going on with Turkey? This bodes poorly for continued relations with US and NATO, and Europe. I didn't think his view was to move towards Iranian type thinking but now I'm not so sure and have no idea how things may turn out. It was obvious how Erdogan was neutralizing the military with the purges of generals, replacing them with Erdogan loyalists. And as noted often here Turkey has been moving away from the constitution and democracy they did have, led by the ever tightening control of Erdogan. He's gained even after big losses to his party in recent elections. Now after the coup it appears clear that the Parliament will vote in favor of what he wants, which will allow him more so to gain the powers he wants to take over and create the autocracy.

He has already pissed off the Russians, now he needs to alienate the Americans. With Europe giving him the cold shoulder on his "join the EU" push, and ISIS blowing stuff up in his country, Erdogan is well on his way to achieving splendid diplomatic isolation.

That would seem to be the result, isolationism. He's losing everyone, I don't think Turkey/Erdogan desires to ally with Iran either or to go that route of an Islamic rogue state. I think Turkey's brand of Islam embraces the notion of separation of religion and state - that's what I heard/read somewhere.

He's removing thousands of judges and others on trumped up charges that they supported the coup. No way they could have determined that in just a few days investigation. As others have also noted, this is his final push to get rid of the democratic institutions and persons that would be against his power grab. It would seem he's looking to become a pariah. So what is his overall game plan? 

[Malicious Intent]

Erdogan just declared a state of emergency for 3 months.

He's really doing this by the book, isn't he?