Ella George wrote a book called “Purges and Paranoia” which solely criticizes Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In fact, the word “criticism” sounds too soft since her aim, understood in every word, is to attack and demonize Mr. Erdogan. Besides, the book makes one feel that it was written on the order of someone (probably FETO) who are at war with Turkish president. If my prediction is true, this will mean that readers are cheated by a paid a author; a quite shameful situation for her.
The data that Miss Ella provides is exaggerated for sure. However, what did the people she mentioned do and they were exposed to these? This is the most important point of the issue and it is seen as particularly avoided from mentioning it. Let’s look at what she wrote and compare it with truths.
“The elections due to be held on 24 June, brought forward abruptly from the end of 2019 by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, come after a period of repression and fear that represents the most serious rupture in the history of the Turkish republic. In the last two years more than 100,000 people have been detained, and tens of thousands are waiting for their lives to be upended by a knock on the door, or the publication of a new emergency decree. Tens of billions of assets have been seized and 150,000 people have been purged, losing not only their jobs but their passports (and those of their spouses); they are branded national security threats and become unemployable. Often, they lose their housing (tied to government employment) and their pensions. Turkey has experienced more than its share of state violence directed at civil society, but when military juntas imposed martial law at least there was always the hope that a return to civilian rule would bring a reprieve. Turkey today is a deeply traumatised society. The purges and detentions are a lottery: one signatory of a petition calling for peace with the Kurds is purged from higher education, another remains precariously employed; someone is detained for getting a mortgage from a now expropriated bank, someone else who held an account with the same bank is unaffected. Turks today confront the capriciousness of arbitrary power with no recourse to anything that resembles the rule of law.”
These are the criminals who made the plan to seize the state by acting in a silent and deep movement. If the coup they had planned occurred, would Miss Ella applaud the people she counted today?
“Even those whose relatives and friends haven’t been designated national security threats have been affected by the repression. The newspapers they read have been shut down, the columnists they followed have been detained, the local medical clinic has had its assets seized, the school round the corner has been closed, the dozens of voluntary associations that formed the fabric of their community have gone, and the politicians they voted for – from municipal officials to provincial governors – have been forcibly replaced or fear they are about to be. The purges of prosecution lawyers and judges have reached such proportions that among the new appointees are recent graduates who do not know the rules of their own courtrooms. All judges are aware that any decision deemed adverse to the government may end their careers. The scale of the social transformation being wrought by these measures exceeds even the founding convulsions of the republic. To appreciate what has happened in Turkey requires historical perspective, not least because the government is bent on reinventing the republic in its image, and rewriting its history.”
I wonder what those closed newspapers did. Why are they closed?. Again, a beautiful perception operation was carried out, trying to hide it carefully. Can these media organs, for instance, could they have praised terrorism openly? Could they have supported the coup? If these things we count happen in another country, for example, In the United States, in the United Kingdom, are these media organs allowed to operate?
“The story of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of the Turkish republic has been ably told in these pages by Perry Anderson.＊ The founding of the republic in 1923 was a largely authoritarian affair, even if the declaration of popular sovereignty represented a break with the imperial past. Tightly controlled elections gave Mustafa Kemal the presidency of what by 1925 had become a one-party state. From that office, Kemal – who was given the surname Atatürk, or ‘father of the Turks’, by the Turkish parliament in 1934 – presided over a cultural revolution of astonishing proportions, transforming religious institutions, the language and alphabet, dress codes, the calendar and the legal system in less than a decade. There was little resistance, in part because this transformation was accomplished in the wake of imperial collapse and affected a population that had experienced decades of dislocation and traumatic violence, from the Balkan wars to the Armenian genocide and the First World War. The most serious opposition was from Turkey’s Kurdish population, who objected to the ethnic and linguistic homogenising imperative behind Kemal’s Kulturkampf. But resistance was brutally repressed. Indeed, any opposition to the one-party state – whether from Kurds, communists or religious groups – led to detention, assassination or exile. Given the scale and speed of the measures employed to transform religion, tradition and custom, less repression was required than might have been expected, but there was no broad-based backing for the revolution. Kemalism, as the secularising, Turkifying, state-centric ideology of the founding vanguard came to be known, was supported by the urban elites of the country’s western cities, but elsewhere – in the Anatolian provinces and the south-east, the area closest to the Middle East – the reforms achieved at best a superficial penetration.”
Miss Ella continues the perception operation without showing any evidence here as well. The views defending the exact opposite were not given, and the reader was tried to be directed. Turkey’s sensitive issues have been chosen especially and they are included at the beginning of the article.
Let’s see when she will touch on the subject of Alevism.
“Nearly a century later, a new cultural revolution is underway, targeting what its leaders dismissively describe as the ‘old Turkey’. What they mean by that is members of the socioeconomic elites identified with Kemalism. To some extent, like Atatürk’s revolution, this counter-revolution borrows from and builds on what it seeks to replace. The republic’s spectacular break with the language and traditions of the Ottoman Empire – with Arabic script replaced by Latin and loan words from Arabic and Persian replaced by Turkish equivalents – masked what were in some ways far more profound structural continuities. The state bureaucracy, the military corps and the basic social order were left intact, preserving status and property for those ready to serve the new republic. Even the official commitment to secularism coexisted with the selective use of religion in the service of the state.”
The main subject of the book was expressed in the first paragraph. In order to support the topic, referring to the history of Republic of Turkey that has no relevance to the subject, proves that it is a custom-made article.
Let’s see how the emphasis of Nazi will be done.
“Today’s cultural revolution borrows heavily from Kemalist strategy: it too is about consolidating one-party rule, dictating new traditions, purging and jailing opponents. Like Kemal, Erdoğan seeks to boost the power of the state while simultaneously transforming its institutions. But where Kemalism preserved much of the Ottoman social order, the ‘new’ Turkey, whose birth Erdoğan announced in a speech on 28 August 2014, represents a more fundamental break. One elite is being displaced by another: property is changing hands, new cadres are being groomed for the civil service, the universities are being emptied of one class of intellectuals to be replaced by more loyal alternatives, and regime-friendly capital is gaining access to state largesse, including the bounty resulting from asset seizures. The ‘new’ Turkey project is seen by its proponents as setting the clock back not to the moment of the republic’s founding but a century earlier, before the modernising and Westernising reforms of the 19th century. It is an outright rejection not only of Kemalist elites but of their reformist Ottoman forebears. Where the Kemalist revolution lacked a social base, this project has support from pious and conservative constituencies among the urban lower middle classes, provincial businesspeople and the rural poor: they have been beneficiaries of Erdoğan’s rule, thanks to improvements in their standard of living and the removal of restrictions on religious practices such as the wearing of headscarves. But if recent elections are any indication, this amounts at most to half of the country’s population.”
After the transition from Ottoman to new Turkey was accepted correctly with a weak assessment, of course, what we expected would continue to emphasise the points that Erdoğan disagreed with this regime. The perception method requires it.
Let’s see how the political figures accused of terrorism will be included in the article.
“Turkey isn’t yet a one-party state, and the leaders of its political parties are well known to the public. They make headlines and give speeches, offer political programmes and cultivate relationships. Their parties have existed in some form or other for decades: the republicans of the CHP (Republican People’s Party), the ultra-nationalists of the MHP (the Nationalist Action Party) and the pro-Kurdish politicians of the HDP (Peoples’ Democratic Party), which has a progressive platform. The wrangles within these parties are still the stuff of newspaper stories and public discussion: the creation of a new centre-right party, the İYİ (or ‘Good’) Party, which splintered from the MHP, has generated breathless headlines for months. Speculation about the parties’ strategies in next month’s elections dominates the news as it might have done before Erdoğan came into power. It’s true that in ordinary times party leaders and MPs are not imprisoned by the dozen, as is currently happening to the HDP (at least one MP from the CHP is also in jail). But what is most jarring is that beneath the veneer of a multi-party system the truth is that not even the Justice and Development Party (the AKP), in government since 2002, has any power. The political life of the country has been reduced to the person of its leader, Erdoğan, and his entourage of relatives and cronies.”
The reason for the mentioned members of the parliament being in the prison is a proven terror crime. Regardless of the identity, the terror criminals are punished in every country of the world. Memorialising this is to create polemics and perception.
“Erdoğan’s son-in-law Berat Albayrak became an MP in 2015, by which time Erdoğan had complete control of the party lists. Albayrak is minister of energy but is widely understood to be part of the small group that governs the country along with Erdoğan’s son Bilal and his daughter Sümeyye. The AKP provides the means for Erdoğan to manage parliament, mobilise voters and dispense favours in election campaigns, and develop cadres to fill the increasing number of vacancies in the state bureaucracy. But while he uses the party to achieve some of his goals, he isn’t bound by it or dependent on it. Rather the reverse: the party depends on Erdoğan. He has long since sidelined or ousted the earlier generation of AKP leaders – some of them, like Abdullah Gül and Bülent Arınç, among the party’s founding members. In the place of government controlled by a party that spanned the centre right of the political spectrum, Erdoğan has developed a system of personal rule legitimated by increasingly choreographed elections.”
Trying to criticize a politician with family members, not with his ideas, is an unfair situation.
“Some liberals in Turkey and elsewhere worry that it was a mistake to support the AKP when it appeared on the political scene at the beginning of the new millennium. Their initial hope – that the party would be a vehicle for reforming the constitution, reducing the influence of the military and introducing a more pluralist conception of national belonging – has given way to self-flagellation. But the democratising potential of the AKP was uncertain from the start, and many who count themselves on the left never embraced it. The AKP shared with parties across the Turkish political spectrum, from Kemalists to right-wing ethnonationalists, a superficial commitment to democracy, yet like most political parties in Turkey, with the notable exception of the HDP, it was never internally democratic – a fact which later facilitated the sidelining of more pluralist voices within the party. Erdoğan joked in an interview while he was mayor of Istanbul as a member of the earlier pro-Islamist Welfare (Refah) Party in 1996 that ‘democracy is like a tram; you get off when you have reached your destination.’”
Starting with ” some liberals “is one of Milton Ericson’s hypnosis methods. In an objective article, what the meaning of applying for hypnosis could be.
What does it mean that Miss Ella George’s article which contains purely subjective, pre-accepted, hypnotic messages includes a lot of mistakes in the beginning of the topic?
“It comes to mind that it has been planned for a certain purpose in advance.”
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