* Erdogan seems pretty competent in putting it into practice. And he seems to be taking the country in the direction that a small majority or plurality of Turks want it to go.
He seems to be a majority of the way into a ten-year plan to achieve what Iranian revolutionaries did with their country overnight, with the added benefits of keeping the economy in pretty good shape, keeping the U.S.’s support, and achieving his end without everyone understanding what he was up to it until it was too late. Really a masterstroke.
* Erdogan’s big mistake was taking sides in Syria, trying to overthrow Assad, perhaps more out of ego and desire for acclaim than hard-headed strategy. That re-activated the Kurdish nightmare within Turkey (Assad and the Syrian Kurds worked out a live and let live relationship), and now Erdogan’s shelling Kurdish villages in Turkey.
* What’s the difference between a Gulenist and an Erdoganite in practical political terms (cult beliefs aside)?
* The idea being floated is that Gulen is an American puppet and that the coup was an American inspired one, which makes the US part of the conspiracy. This seems to be a rather serious claim since it accuses the US of being in the business of overthrowing it’s NATO partners when displeased with them, hardly a friendly thing to do to a ‘partner’. It’s possible some within Turkey may have wanted to get rid of Erdogan simply because he’s an incompetent wrecker who is taking the country down.
* Last week Steve linked to the FT article showing about a third of Turks thought Erdogan more or less staged the coup, presumably corresponding directly with the number of Kemalists/CHP supporters (with perhaps some Gulenists in there too, who are small in number).
Curiously, the number of Kemalists who think that Erdogan was behind the whole spectacle seems to have gone waayyy down over the last few days. Not over new evidence over the events, however. It now looks as if the ostensibly principled Kemalists take the fact (and I do believe it’s a fact) that Erdogan has been purging Gulenists this past week as their “evidence” that it was indeed the Gulenists. Since Kemalists also want the Gulenists dismantled, they’re quite happy to look the other way.
* It seems that Syria is not sending their best…
* The notion that Muslims only commit terrorism because they’re angry about people believing that Muslims are terrorists always reminded me of that Christmas movie (one of the Miracle on 34th St. remakes maybe? or some TV movie from my childhood) where Santa is dying in the street because nobody believes in him, and people have to declare their belief to bring him back to life. (The difference is that in one case, belief keeps someone alive, and in the other, it gets people killed.)
Of course, if Santa was real, and parents don’t believe in him, there’s no explanation as to where parents think their kids’ Christmas presents come from. In fact, I think the movie also featured Hillary Clinton tweeting, “Santa Claus has nothing whatsoever to do with presents.”
* June 12: Orlando – 49 dead, 53 injured
July 14: Nice – 84 dead, 308 injured
July 18: Wurzburg – 5 injured
July 22: Munich – 9 dead, 35 injured
July 24: Reutlingen – 2 dead (incl. unborn child), 2 injured
July 24: Ansbach – 12 injured
It’s been an impressive six weeks for the Religion Of Peace ™. This may be a fluke, but it’s hard to argue that the pace of attacks isn’t picking up substantially.
* Maybe the Merkel Youth can get little uniforms with kerchiefs like certain previous German youth movements. Certainly both are in the service of a kind of death cult.
* What is interesting about the Munich massacre is that the killer was apparently bullied by Turkish and Arab kids in school. He was supposedly targeting victims that looked “Islamic”. This massacre goes to a deeper point – beyond the superficial threat of Islamic terrorism, immigration is profoundly distorting German society and adding a whole new layer of bitter ethnic grievances to a continent that had plenty of ethnic grievances before all the Muslims immigrants began showing up. Whether this kid was a “terrorist” or not, sensible people should see this as evidence that immigration is not working.
* If the Muslim immigrants were all nice people who didn’t kill anyone, you would let them take over the country then? Terrorism is really not that big a deal, and should not be first focal point for nationalists. Ethnic homogeneity is. This means that the Muslim bomber is not merely a criminal for bombing a concert, he is first and foremost a criminal for existing in someone else’s ethnostate.
* Not only is there nothing INTRINSIC in the democratic system that requires respect for minority rights, but the majoritarian nature of the system actually creates an INTRINSIC risk that the majority will vote to deprive despised minorities of their right, property, etc. – he has it exactly backward. The deprivation of black civil rights in the South was the result of popular will and was overturned by NON-democratic means (Federal power).
The reason why leftists are suddenly salivating about democracy is that they see an endgame in sight where whites will no longer be a majority and non-whites will.
