“Erdogan Lives - And Secular Turkey Dies”

 

Let me alert you to an exceptional piece by Chris Trotter on the events of the weekend on the streets of Turkey, and how Turkish strongman Erdogan has used them since to his advantage. His argument is summarised in the title: Erdogan Lives - And Secular Turkey Dies.

The collapse of this attempted coup d’état has been met with many sighs of relief in Western capitals. Had it succeeded, President Barack Obama, in particular, would have faced an extremely difficult choice. To condemn the overthrow of the democratically-elected government of a Nato ally; or, to endorse the constitutionally sanctioned role of the Turkish military as the secular Turkish Republic’s ultimate protectors. Because it was precisely in this guise that the soldiers who rose against Erdogan presented themselves. As the last, desperate hope of all those Turks who still cling to the legacy of Mustapha Kemal – the father of the modern Turkish state.
    That it was colonels, and not generals, who ordered their men on to the streets, says much about the state of Turkey. Those who might have struck a more telling blow in the name of the republic, the nation’s most senior military officers, had long ago been arrested under trumped-up charges by Erdogan’s followers, dismissed from their posts and thrown into prison. A similar fate befell the nation’s senior judges and police officers. In the slow-motion coup Erdogan and his Islamist political allies have been carrying out since coming to power 2003, they have been careful to ensure that the secular state they were striking down would never again rise to its feet.
    Those who have been issuing congratulatory statements to the Erdogan regime, should ponder the meaning of its first acts upon reclaiming the levers of power. Yes, thousands of rebel troops and their officers have been detained. That is to be expected. But so, too, have upwards of twenty thousand judges, prosecutors and policemen. Is that the response of a democratic government? No. It is the response of a tyrant who described the failed coup attempt as “A gift from God.”

And what was the nature of “the ‘democratic’ crowds who, at Erdogan’s bidding, poured on to the streets of Ankara and Istanbul to confront the rebel troops”?

Did they shout: “Long live the Turkish Republic!” Or, “Long live Turkey’s secular democracy!” No. The moustachioed men (there were no women in evidence) shouted “Allahu ekber!” – “God is great!”, and declaimed the shahadah: “There is no god but God – and Muhammad is his prophet!”
    Secular Turks disdain the facial hair of Erdogan’s followers – although, with the backbone of their judiciary broken, and the last of their military protectors in detention, it might be wise for secular Turkish men to put away their razors, and for secular Turkish women to cover their heads.
    Is this the true import of Erdogan’s jubilant description of the failed coup as a gift from God? Does he now feel justified in speeding-up his party’s progress towards the creation of a Sunni Islamic Republic in Turkey? A fanatical religious regime to rival the Shia Islamic Republic of Iran? And how much in common would such a republic have with the theocratic extremism of the Sunni Saudi Kingdom? Between these two powerhouses of radical Islam would stand only Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan – and Israel. Of those five states, only Israel possesses the military strength to defend its borders.

Dangerous times.

Read and reflect: Erdogan Lives - And Secular Turkey Dies – Chris Trotter, BOWALLEY ROAD BLOG

.

Turkey, where the lines are now drawn [updated]

 

[UPDATE: Let me alert you to an exceptional piece by Chris Trotter on the events of the weekend, and how Erdogan has used them since: Erdogan Lives - And Secular Turkey Dies.]

In Turkey over the weekend there was a military coup against the democratically-elected leader. Naturally, there was a knee-jerk reaction around the west to oppose the coup, and uphold the democratically-elected leader.

But in a country where the majority votes Islamist, this would be a mistake.  In country likes this, democracy can beome almost wholly the lethal description of it: like three wolves and a sheep voting for dinner – with the Islamists ready to tuck in. Just another reason to support the checks and balances of a constitutional republic over the lack of real checks in an unlimited democracy. [See: Why the United States was Designed as a Republic: to prevent the tyranny of the majority]

In Turkey, in Egypt and right across the faith-based Middle-East, the military is often the last vestige of any secular check on rising Islamism. There is some evidence from the weekend that was the major motivation for the military rising against Erdogan.

As far ago as 2007 it was becoming clear Turkish secularism would need support. "Turkish secularism is gravely threatened,” said Robert Spencer, “and millions of Turks are deeply concerned that their country could become an Islamic state."

The only response that has ever gained traction in the Islamic world has been not just a de-facto laying-aside of Islam's political and social character, but a self-conscious elimination of that character – and [Kemal] Ataturk's Turkey has been the site of the greatest success of this approach. Ataturk realized that there would be a recrudescence and reassertion of political Islam whenever there was a revival of religious fervour. Thus Kemalism presented itself not as "moderate Islam," nor as an Islamic construct at all, but as an explicit rejection of political Islam in favor of secularism. That is, it was never presented as an Islamic construct or justified by Islamic teachings, but was an explicit rejection of certain traditional aspects of Islam.

As historian Scott Powell noted just a few years ago, the tension  was already simmering. “The AKP party, led by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, though democratically elected, has a platform that contradicts the secularist tenets of Turkey’s constitution. If it isn’t stopped by the court, another military coup is likely to occur.” A military coup because “the Turkish military have long been defenders of the secular Kemalist tradition.” Which is the reason, in reverse, that

Late on Saturday night, just 24 hours after the attempted coup, hundreds of supporters of President Erdogan swarmed into Taksim Square – the pulsating heart of secular, modern Turkey – to celebrate their victory with shouts of Takbir – ‘Allahu Akbar’, meaning ‘God is Great.’

How has the country of Ataturk become the country of Erdogan? Because “Turkey reflects a Middle East in cultural regress.”

Turkey once seemed to be moving towards liberal democracy. It enabled a secular culture to flourish. It joined NATO. It was an ally of the West in a Soviet-dominated region.
    But today Turkey is moving towards Islamism and nationalism. Its president suppresses protest and press freedom while increasing his own power. It has been ambivalent over the crisis in Syria unfolding on its borders.
    Turkey's retreat into illiberalism is sad. It's also alarming. Another Islamist power in the Middle East won't just make that region even less safe, but ours too.

So it you found yourself over the weekend on the side of someone who has suppressed free speech, where they still selectively enforce the jizya tax, where they murder people for apostasy and are still beheading people in the name of Islam -- and to protect their "honour" – where “Erdogan has unleashed the Islamist mobs,” then just consider it possible you may be mistaken.

.

Don’t Egyptian protestors know what they want? [updated]

Last year after protests against Hosni Mubarak’s military rule, President Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood was installed as leader.  And everyone went home. Now, a year later, anti-Morsi protestors  have stormed and ransacked the Cairo headquarters of Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood group (while police and army stood around and watched), they have collected over 22 million signatures asking for his departure, and they are asking the Egyptian head of state to resign by 5 p.m. tomorrow.

And the military are ready to take over again.

What’s going on? Don’t Egyptian protestors know what they want?

They do. The anti-Morsi coalition seems to be an unstable mixture of those who abhor the authoritarianism of military rule but who want a secular Egypt (the military being the most powerful institution standing for secular rule), and those who want the increasing Islamicisation of the country, and even the full imposition of Sharia, but who don’t think Morsi was going fast enough.

So, somewhat like Syria, really.

And nothing like anything than can end well.

UPDATE: Robert Tracinski is more optimistic:

When Egypt had its first revolution to overthrow Hosni Mubarak, some people saw Egypt's young, educated, secular liberals marching side-by-side with the Muslim Brotherhood and thought that this was normal and natural and heartening and showed how a pious Muslim religious party could embrace democracy.
    The rest of thought this couldn't possibly last.
    Since Tahrir Square, it has become pretty clear what the Muslim Brotherhood thought: thanks, liberals, for making this revolution for us—but now we're taking over.
    Brotherhood leader Mohammed Morsi's rule has become increasingly authoritarian, and at the same time he has done nothing no revive the nation's collapsing economy, to establish public order and the rule of law, or to rein in rampant corruption. Egyptians have begun to fear they're getting the same old regime, but in an even more restrictive, Islamist version.
    Resistance to the Brotherhood's rule has been building up and exploded over the weekend with the "Tamarod" or "rebel" protests that brought millions into the streets.

        "The scale of the demonstrations, coming just one year after crowds in Tahrir Square cheered Mr.
    Morsi's inauguration, appeared to exceed even the massive street protests in the heady final days of
    the uprising that overthrew President Hosni Mubarak in 2011....
        "Demonstrators said they were angry about the near total absence of public security, the desperate
    state of the Egyptian economy and an increase in sectarian tensions. But the common denominator
    across the country was the conviction that Mr. Morsi had failed to transcend his roots in the Brotherhood,
     an insular Islamist group officially outlawed under Mr. Mubarak that is now considered Egypt's most
     formidable political force. The scale of the protests across the country delivered a sharp rebuke to
    the group's claim that its victories in Egypt's newly open parliamentary and presidential elections gave
    it a mandate to speak for most Egyptians."

In effect, Egyptians are asking for a do-over on their revolution: this time, can we do it without the Brotherhood? And the answer is clearly: yes, they can.
    Tom Friedman puzzles over the purpose of street protests in a democracy, where the people presumably have recourse to the ballot box. Part of the answer is that folks in Egypt (and Turkey) aren't so sure they are going to have recourse to the ballot box. They are demonstrating because they think the Islamists are going to take away their political freedom. But there is another purpose massive protests serve even in societies where the right to vote isn't in doubt: they are an opportunity for the people to make their numbers known in an unmistakable way, as a kind of shot across the bow between elections.
    The massive street protests brought out such a significant portion of Egypt's population—some have calculated that it is the equivalent of 30 or 40 million people in the US—that they have undermined any claim Morsi and the Brotherhood have to claim the consent of the governed.
    As a result, the Egyptian military has stepped in—with it own ulterior motives, no doubt—to issue an ultimatum for Morsi and the protesters to come to an agreement within 48 hours…. That sounds to me like the military intervening to basically push Morsi into resigning, or at least into calling a new election.
    At any rate—and I am happy to say that I managed to be a little ahead of the curve on this—the Tamarod movement, along with the recent protests against Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, constitute a new phase in the Arab Spring, a new revolution against religious authoritarians rather than secular ones.

People power? [update 2]

I’m struggling to understand why everyone’s so happy about the outcome in Egypt.

For nearly sixty years—ever since Lieutenant-Colonel Nasser’s nationalist “Association of Free Officers” overthrew the monarchy promising to establish a parliamentary democracy—Egypt has been ruled by military strongmen in Nasser’s nationalist anti-Islamist image.

For three weeks Egyptians protested in Tahrir Square, demanding a change in that succession. They called for the dictator of the last twenty years to step down. And after three weeks of getting his money out of the country, he complied.

To be replaced by another military strongmen aping the long line already preceding him: to whit, Field Marshal Mohammed Hussein Tantawi, the former Minister of Defense, Military Production, Deputy Prime Minister, Commander of the Presidential Guard, and chief of the Operations Authority of the Armed Forces. A man who is “aged and change resistant,” and “committed to the status quo.”

Is this really the “new-found freedom” people died for?

Now they’ve begin to disperse, courageous protestors still mopping up after their victory might still insist they

will not give up on Egypt as a civilian state, not a military state. If things move away from our demands, we will go into the street again, even if we have to die as martyrs.

But they have just cheered the coming to power of a military ruler who will have quite specific ideas about how to use that desire for martyrdom.

And I’ll wager good money it won’t be to set up a constitutional republic and then resign—any more than his predecessor some dictators ago did.

So this is not a victory for individual freedom—more’s the pity.

And neither is it a victory for democracy.  And thank goodness for that. Because by contrast to a constitutional republic, a democracy (i.e., majority rule; i.e., a counting of head regardless of content) would not have delivered freedom and individual rights to Egyptians, but instead a government responding to the the one-out-of-every-five Egyptians who thinks suicide bombing can be justified; and the four-out-of-every-five Egyptians who would stone people who commit adultery, cut limbs off people who steal, and put to death those who leave the Muslim religion. [See Pew survey here.]

Muslim Egypt is not secular Turkey—where they understand the dangers of Islam playing a large part in politics, and have at least begun to put some rights beyond the vote. It’s a place where nineteen-out-of-every-twenty people think it would be a good thing for Islam to play a much larger role in politics, with everything that implies for individual freedom—or lack thereof.

No wonder the Muslim Brotherhood are coming round to the idea of democracy. For one election, anyway.

And the Brotherhood’s own statement about the “historic victory” gives a clue to where exactly they would like an Egyptian democracy to go, were such a thing ever to be allowed:

The victory scored by this revolution is in the first place directed against the United States, which so far sponsored the toppled regime, and wanted it as a strong ally and defender of the Zionist entity, and an enemy of the Arab jihad and resistance movements.

So should they ever get near the seats of power (something both Egyptian monarchists and nationalists have been trying for over eighty years to avoid) that would mean big ticks by the Brotherhood to Egypt being a strong enemy both of Israel and the U.S. (and presumably pretty much everywhere else in the west who trades, supports or visits these places), and a strong ally and defender of jihad.

So much then for the cry for freedom.

UPDATE 1: Quoting Olivier Roy, Matthew Iglesias argues that people in Tahrir Square were marching for real freedom,

“This new generation isn’t interested in ideology, their slogans are all pragmatic and
concrete; they don’t speak of Islam the way their predecessors did in Algeria in the late
    1980s. Above all they reject corrupt dictators and demand democracy. That’s not to say
    that the demonstrators are secular, but simply that they don’t see Islam as a political
    ideology to be used to create a better order, they’re well inside a secular political space.”
    This [says Yglesias] is a continuation of Roy’s work over the past several years on “the failure of political Islam.”
    The basic idea here is that in part thanks to the example of Iran, you just don’t have a mass constituency that’s prepared to believe that Islam or Islamic rule offers answers to the concrete problems of poverty, corruption, and slow economic growth.
    People may be religiously observant or culturally conservative in ways that western liberals (or even western cultural conservatives) would find alarming, but the Egyptian people are asking “where are the jobs?” and don’t think the answer is going to be found in the Koran.

Hat tip Dim Post, who points out that “revolutions do have a tendency to get derailed…”

UPDATE 2: Historian Niall Ferguson explains some uncomfortable truths about the outcome of the Egyptian revolution—and of the Obama Administration’s handling of it. [Hat tip reader Michael]

What if?

ONE OF THE FASCINATING things to do when studying history is to speculate about "What if?" questions.

Studying history with Scott Powell offers ample opportunity to speculate.  Scott's current course on the Middle East alone (which you can still join in) offers ample opportunity for speculation.

• What if Britain hadn't nearly bankrupted itself in two centuries of Middle Eastern military adventures in a bid to protect its Indian colony?  What shape would the Middle East's maps be in today if Britain's flawed mercantilist thinking hadn't entangled it in so many misadventures in which it had no need to participate?
• What if Harry Truman hadn't entangled America in the Middle East in a flawed bid to restrain communism?  What use would the bankrupt Soviet Union have been able to make of the Mid-East even if Truman had left the sphere alone? (And what threat would it have been if Franklin Roosevelt and Klaus Fuchs hadn't both in their own way helped to arm the Soviets?)
• What if Dwight Eisenhower hadn't pulled the pin on Britain, France and Israel's recovery of the Suez Canal after Nasser's nationalisation of it?  Would Eisenhower's support for the already successful recovery have helped to nip the incipient Mid-Eastern nationalism in the bud?
• What if Britain and the US hadn't stood back when the oil fields and refineries owned, established and built up by British and American investors were nationalised by tribal leaders and would be nationalist heroes?  Would this have sent a signal to all potential plundererers of American and British property that property rights would always be upheld by American and British governments, and given a valuable lesson in the importance of property rights?

Perhaps the greatest tragedy thrown up by these 'what-ifs' is a real failure of ideas. I've already mentioned the flawed mercantilist thinking that empowered Britain's military misadventures -- an entanglement that cost Britain in both wealth and manpower, without any real gain. 

Perhaps the most important thing demonstrated by the whole tragedy of the Middle East  -- and the Mid-East's failure to ever really lift off is certainly a tragedy -- is the failure to properly communicate the ideas that underpin the freedom and prosperity of the west.   This is the real failure of the west with respect to the non-west.

YOU SEE, ALL THE countries of the Middle East at one time or another were confronted with the need to to shake off their superstitious pasts and to modernise their bad selves (to use the words of educator Maria Montessori, they developed a 'sensitive period' for learning about what made the west great); when confronted with the obvious military and economic superiority of the west all of them looked westward for inspiration  -- but what countries like Turkey and Egypt and eventually even Afghanistan saw when they realised their own backwardness and looked westward for inspiration was not the ideas of the likes of John Locke or Thomas Jefferson or Adam Smith -- the ideas that had underpinned the west's freedom and prosperity -- but instead the intellectual pygmies who then crawled across the intellectual wastelands of the late-nineteenth century who were then doing all they could to undercut freedom and prosperity altogether.

Instead of Carl Menger, Turkey's Kemal Atatutk picked up Karl Marx.  Instead of Frederic Bastiat, Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser picked up Frederick Engels.   It's a powerful example of the necessity for good intellectual hygiene and of the power of even bad ideas -- that ideas can as easily destroy as make prosperous, depending on the particular ideas one picks up.  

Each Middle Eastern country modernised at a different time, each picking up the intellectual current of that time -- and unfortunately by the latter half of the nineteenth century when most were modernising, the intellectual current of the west was already fast dwindling to become a cesspool*.  The results in large part can still be seen today, with the secular shibboleths of collectivism and nationalism fighting the secular battle against the superstitious backwardness of Islam, and losing.

You see, the game of 'Historical What-If?'  is endlessly fascinating, and what I've said here has only just scratched the surface: I've only posed questions arising from the first few lectures of Scott Powell's Islamist Entanglement course. 

It's fascinating to speculate for example about what the whole Middle East would be like, hell, what  the whole world be like, if it had never been infected with the stinking collectivism of Marx and the nasty nationalism of the likes of Hegel and the German 'ethnic nationalists': if all the many millions slaughtered by the dictators of the twentieth century had been allowed to live, and if all the billions enslaved by totalitarian ideology had been allowed to live free.

JUST IMAGINE IF THE world hadn't been intellectually empowered to give power to those killers, "those depraved individuals who would rather kill than live, who would rather inflict pain and death than experience pleasure, whose pleasure comes from the infliction of pain and death. Unfortunately," observes George Reisman in his book Capitalism, "there is no lack of such individuals...

[and no shortage of] philosophical justification for [their] murders, such as the security of the State, the will of God, the achievement of Lebensraum,or the establishment of communism and a future classless society. Each of these alleged values supposedly justified the murder of living human beings. As the Communists were so fond of saying, “The end justifies the means.”

And with enablers like Hegel and Marx to  state the ends -- which amount to making one neck for one noose -- the killers were given power and the means by which to carry out their atrocities.  But "just imagine," as Reisman invites ...

In eras that are philosophically and culturally better than our own, [these killers] might even pass their entire lives quietly, in modest obscurity, causing harm to no one. In such a better era, Hitler might have passed his days as an obscure paperhanger, Himmler as a chicken farmer, and Eichmann as a factory worker or office clerk. Lenin would probably have been just a disgruntled intellectual,and Stalin perhaps an obscure cleric. But in the conditions of a collapse of rationality, frustrations and feelings of hatred and hostility rapidly multiply, while cool judgment, rational standards, and civilized behavior vanish. Monstrous ideologies appear and monsters in human form emerge alongside them, ready to put them into practice.

In short, the real lesson from even these few 'what-ifs' is the life-saving necessity for good intellectual hygiene.

How's yours? 
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* Thank goodness New Zealand was settled in 1840, when John Locke and Adam Smith were at least remembered, if not still admired.  The Treaty of Waitangi at least pays homage to the shadow of John Locke, which is really its chief and perhaps only boon. (And thank goodness that when Asian tigers like Hong Kong and Taiwan began to take off in the latter half of last century, they chose to ignore the then-fashionable intellectual fads of the west, and go for prosperity instead)