“They do not understand,” he said, shaking his head over a coffee. “Who are they and what do they not understand?”
“Foreigners. No matter how much I tell them about Turkey, I feel I don't make any sense.”
“Well, Turkey does often not make sense. We sometimes do not understand it, either. It is far too complex to explain to a stranger. It is normal.”
“Yes. But I would at least expect they realize how much is at stake. We still face the threat of a disruption of democracy; I feel I have no way of telling them about how non-secularly the secular system is structured. I feel cold when I realize they have no idea about the achievements of the economy and its impact on a different, more pro-active foreign policy.”
“You miss a point.”
“What point?”
“People still tend to simplify things. Even in the most learned circles abroad, there is a mixture of clichés, prejudice, wishful thinking and worse.”
“Worse?”
“Misinformation. Turkey is a state which is structured on the old system of privilege, to the extent that it has consistently been able to create servants who run to its defense by creating confusion. Their weapon is primitive but efficient: They act upon the black and white perception of the seemingly sophisticated foreign elite, and play on their fears.”
“Fears…”
“Fears of what they believe Turkey is facing. If your privileges are under threat, it is easy. Once you feel it from an elected government, you paint a picture of what the improbable extremes of this government would do. That helps you kill two birds with one stone. You create a fear for the unreal and endorse methods that would topple this government by any means necessary. People tend to buy that, because most of them have neither the time nor the patience to dig deeper. I know what you have in mind.”
“What?”
“The Ergenekon case. And the distorted myth of the army as guardian of the system. And the credibility of what they call the mainstream media of Turkey.”
“True.”
“None of these are placed correctly in observers' minds. But I blame them, because it takes some focus to understand.”
“How?”
“The founders of the republic based their principles on what they inherited from the destroyers of the Ottoman Empire. It is the fact that the army is the only power that will ever have the final say on where the country is going, because it is the one that sacrificed. When a new actor comes in and challenges that principle, it is put in its place or, if it resists, be stripped of all power. This is the fight of the Ergenekon case. It is a huge fight, and its hugeness produces all this misinformation, which confuses foreigners. Its substance is therefore shifted to other issues, often to the domain of religion and secularism. This creates a fog around its very essence, its existential nature. That is the fight for democracy, for freedom. Few understand that it is a Pandora's box opened now: It is impossible to close, and it must be a full scale struggle to find a resolution. For good or for bad. A struggle with no mercy, if the winners are the forces of the old order.”
“The army…”
“Wrongly, there are still those who overvalue its role as the guardians of secularism. There are those who have no idea, for example, that the current, deeply flawed secular model exclusively favors Sunnis: only they enjoy privileges, because only they are represented in the Directorate of Religious Affairs. They have no idea that without a serious overhaul, or abolishment of the body, there can be no talk about true secularism in Turkey. All the rest is illusion, a collective joke.”
“What about the media?”
“It is the main misleader. Deeply polarized, it only feeds suspicion. When a puzzle appears and you hear opposite explanations, you only become confused and suspect both. Then the thought often escapes you that this very situation might have been the result of the old reality resisting the pressure to leave its place to the new one. The old is represented by the dirty players, the big media groups and their employed servants, puppet journalists of the old order who have been fed by the system. The rest is a strange mixture of decency and new loyalties, gathered around a new cause of cleansing the privileged and corrupt. The winner on that battlefield will be the carrier of change or keeper of the dark.”
“Who can we believe?”
“It is a matter of conscience. Those who know Turkey's torments, demons and ghosts know also where the solution is. Not much wisdom is needed: Seek the evil and find its associates.”
