Turkish Tyrant Erdogan Creating Another Islamic Theocracy, In Turkey

To the list of states taken over by Islam, it's time to add Turkey.

Also add it to the list of repressive theocracies backed and armed to the teeth by the U.S., along with Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf sheikdoms in the orbit of Saudi Arabia. And then there's Pakistan. And Indonesia too, increasingly Islamist.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the incessantly power-grabbing ruler of that increasingly repressive land, has unilaterally changed the curriculum in Turkish schools to create "a pious generation." A generation of religious zealots, like in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Indonesia, and other lands.

The new curriculum eliminates natural selection (aka "Darwinism"), the science of the biological evolution of life on earth, for starters. It also teaches Jihad as a righteous defense of the nation, a "love of the homeland." (The obvious corollary- those who criticize Erdogan hate the homeland and thus are traitors.) No claiming that jihad means "inner struggle to be a better person" as those self-appointed Muslim spokesMEN- always men- in the West- maybe ONLY in the West, or at least mostly- insist is the "real" meaning of the term jihad, because Islam Is A Religion Of Peace, as their slogan goes. Perhaps they should trademark that so they can sue people like me who use it ironically.

To ensure "a pious generation," prayer rooms are to be installed in all schools.

Meanwhile, scholars are being tried as "terrorists," 180 journalists are in jail, part of 50,000 prisoners arrested as "coup plotters," along with another 150,000 people fired from their jobs as alleged co-conspirators in the recent failed military coup. Must be the largest conspiracy in history!

Erdogan, who fancies himself as a latter-day Sultan and dreams of recreating something like the Ottoman Empire, recently rammed through by referendum (with many irregularities and a campaign of suppression against opponents) a revision of Turkish constitutional provisions that grants greatly increased powers to himself. He has already spent several years unilaterally firing and replacing judges, police, and prosecutors, successfully squelching corruption cases against himself and his minions.

Recently some of Erdogan's bodyguards were indicted in the U.S. for assault. On a previous visit, Erdogan was offended by protesters yelling at him, so he sicced his goons on them, hospitalizing 9 protesters, as Erdogan watched. Now he complains that the American police failed to stop the protesters from yelling "insults" at him, clearly something he regards as intolerable. (What the police should have done, but didn't, was arrest Erdogan's "security" thugs.)

Turkey has only had a brief period of relative democracy and freedom. After the destruction of the Ottoman Empire in the wake of World War I (1914-1918), during which the Turks committed the Armenian Genocide, killing over a million Armenians (which emboldened Hitler to carry out the Holocaust: Hitler said "Who, after all, remembers the Armenian massacre?"), Turkey was ruled by the autocrat Ataturk, who forcibly secularized and modernized the country. Since Ataturk, torture and police abuses, and the repression of the Kurdish minority, have been near-constant feature of Turkish society. The military frequently seized overt control, with U.S. blessing.

With the successful political dominance of Erdogan's Islamist party, Turkey is back again to being a repressive place. A key NATO ally, which the U.S. has long relied on for military air bases, and during the Cold War as a spy base against the SovIet Union (including flying U-2 spy planes from Turkey), and now needs to wage its aerial campaign against ISIS in Syria, Turkey largely gets a pass from the U.S. Erdogan has leverage over the EU because Turkey is damning up the flood of Syrian refugees from trying to get to Europe, and the Europeans are desperate to continue that arrangement.

There is some friction over the fact that the U.S. is using Kurdish fighters as its army on the ground against ISIS in Syria and Iraq, while Turkey seeks to annihilate all armed Kurds. The U.S. agrees that one Kurdish resistance group, the PKK, is "terrorist," and tolerates Turkish airstrikes and artillery bombardment of the PKK in Syria. The U.S. has repeatedly used, abused, and double-crossed the Kurds, and is currently doing so again, deporting Kurds from the U.S., and opposing the creation of a Kurdish semi-state in northern Iraq. That's the gratitude the U.S. shows for the Kurds spilling their own blood to be the U.S.' army against ISIS.

Payment Extracted From Russian Government for Liquidation of Aleppo

As the murderous Assad regime snuffs out the last pockets of resistance to its evil reign in the city of Aleppo, Syria, a 22-year-old Turkish policeman took it upon himself to impose a small price on Russia for its aerial bombardment of the city, including all of the hospitals. Shouting " Don't forget Aleppo, don't forget Syria!" the off-duty cop shot dead the Russian ambassador to Turkey, Andrey Karlov, at "a posh art gallery" in the Turkish capital of Ankara. [1]

A video of the incident aired on Turkish media showed the man, a riot policeman named Mevlut Mert Altintas proclaiming in Arabic  "We are the descendants of those who supported the Prophet Muhammad, for jihad." We see once again that it often takes a zealot or fanatic to have the courage (and indifference to his personal fate) to sacrifice oneself and attack into the teeth of Power. (Some reports say Altintas was killed. If not, he's in for some savage torture. For one thing, the Erdogan regime will want him to “confess” to “the conspiracy” that Erdogan and Putin have already posited led to this killing.)

Edward Snowden in a way fits the description of a self-sacrificing zealot, but of course his action was non-violent and very beneficial, if ultimately as futile as the assassination of the ambassador. But in both cases, at least some cost is imposed on the oppressors of humanity. That is worthwhile.

The day before the assassination, the Russian, Turkish, and Iranian foreign and war ministers met in Moscow to conspire on the ongoing crushing of the rebellion of the Syrian people against the despotic and ultra-cruel regime of Bashar al-Assad, an absolute dictator who inherited the dictatorship from his mass murderer father Hafez. (No slouch in the killing department himself. Like father, like son, apparently.)

With utter predictability, the state terrorist Russian president Vladimir Putin, Karlov's boss, immediately branded the killing terrorism, and vowed revenge. “The only answer to the murder of the Russian ambassador to Turkey must be the intensification of the struggle against terrorism,” Putin said darkly on Russian national television. “And the bandits will feel it,” he added menacingly. (No doubt to the approval of Donald Trump, who admires "strength." That makes Trump an authoritarian, of course, since fetishizing power is a key aspect of authoritarianism. But then Trump's authoritarianism has been on display for years, in his role as a Business Boss.) the Kremlin foreign ministry also weighed in with the"T" word, calling it “a terrorist attack,” I'd call it retribution for Russian crimes against humanity.

Showing he understands nothing, Putin also misunderstood the avenging gunman's motive entirely, even though the assassin said quite clearly what his motive was. Putin framed the killing in conspiratorial terms, seeing a “provocation aimed at rupturing ties between Russia and Turkey” in the act. "The crime that has been committed is undoubtedly a provocation aimed at derailing the ties between Russia and Turkey, as well as the peace process in Syria," Oh, undoubtedly. and I just love your "peace process" in Syria! Nothing like bombing people into submission to achieve "peace."

Yes yes I know, there are jihadists in Syria. But the 80% of the Syrian population that oppose Assad are not "jihadists" and "terrorists." This uprising began with street protests inspired by the Arab Spring, which started in Tunisia. The Assad regime responded by murdering protesters in the streets, and kidnapping and torturing people. THEN people took up arms, when they had no choice to defend themselves. Obama and his minions intoned "Assad Must Go," but Obama didn't want to support the rebellion with the necessary arms, especially anti-aircraft small arms, in part out of fear they'd end up in jihadists' hands. After a year or two, jihadists did appear in Syria, so Obama could rationalize, See? I was right.

The mayor of Ankara, Melih Gokcek, hopped on the conspiracy theory bandwagon, opining that the killer's intent was to disrupt Turkish-Russian relations. Why not take the gunman at his word? He said, shouted why he did it!

I guess politicians, being cold, callous beings, cannot imagine that there are people motivated by the suffering of others. That is just beyond their ken. So they must fabricate imaginary conspiracies and convoluted political conjectures. (The U.S. media and other elite sectors do that all the time too. For example, J. Edgar Hoover, the now-deceased longtime FBI secret police chief, thought that the movement for black civil rights was a "communist conspiracy." And president Lyndon Johnson thought that the massive popular movement against his war on Vietnam was being created in Moscow! He ordered the CIA to uncover this "plot" that somehow turned millions of Americans into zombie puppets of the Kremlin. I kid you not. That is how blind our rulers are to their own criminality- that they have to deny any possibility of fault by themselves that is provoking opposition from normal humans. Positing malign conspiracies is one way rulers evade facing up to their own responsibility for the reactions provoked by their crimes and oppression.)

The destruction of Aleppo, which has included the systematic bombardment of every hospital in the city and targeting of schools, among other atrocities, is characterized as a "liberation" from "terrorists" by the cynical Russian and Syrian governments, rhetoric adopted by knee-jerk anti-Americans in Western countries whose human rights principles are apparently lower in priority than their need to assume that whatever side the U.S. opposes are Good Guys. This stems from their simple-minded, lazy habit of seeing the world in binary terms. (Readers of this blog will have no trouble discerning that I am unsparing in my criticism of the U.S. for its crimes. Those who cannot see other sources of evil in the world have a most peculiar blind spot) Even though the U.S. has been largely AWOL in Syria, these ideologues blame the U.S. for the Syrian tragedy. They also consider Hillary Clinton a "warmonger" for wanting to intervene. Had the U.S. supported the rebellion in the first year, the Syrian people would have had a fighting chance to free themselves of the gothically cruel Assad regime. A bombing campaign to destroy Assad's air force would have stopped the dropping of barrel bombs and chemical agents, for example. Russia only sent in its air force to assist Assad in his slaughter a year ago. (The uprising is now five years old.)

The Washington Post claims that "Russian authorities vowed to reveal a larger plot — and some [UNNAMED] in Moscow suggested that the West was to blame for its support of moderate rebel factions in Syria." Unlike how it treats with ridicule discussion of actual conspiracies by the U.S. Deep State, this fanciful conspiracy theorizing is reported respectfully by U.S. media like the Post.

"Putin stopped short of that, [i.e. of blaming the West] saying only, 'We need to know who guided the hand of the murderer.” That is, who to take out our rage on. [3]

There he goes again, with a conspiracy theory. As if passionate (or obsessive, if you want to put a negative spin on it) individuals need to be someone else's puppet to act. Not everyone on earth is a puppet or a puppet-master, Putin.

Turkish autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdogan, already "knew" it was a conspiracy, and what it was about: “We know [sic] that this is a provocation aiming to destroy the normalization process of Turkey-Russia relations,” Erdogan said immediately in a speech he rushed to give. “But the Russian government and the Turkish republic have the will to not fall into that provocation.” It must be nice to be able to "know" things without having to investigate or discover actual facts. Makes life so much easier to just assume that whatever you want to believe is true. [4] 

Note Erdogan's repeated use of the word "provocation," a favorite word of Russian conspiracy-mongers that traces back to Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, and probably earlier. Do I detect pandering to the Russians?

Erdogan called Putin to offer condolences, and the two reportedly pledged cooperation against "terrorism." "Terrorism" being code for opposition to state power, including non-violent opposition or even just protest. That's also the U.S. function definition, by the way, as the FBI, DHS, et al routinely brand protesters considered "left wing," such as the Occupy Movement, "terrrorists." So see? Even enemies can agree on something!

Here's a bet, Turkish autocrat Erdogan will blame Gulen for the assassination, or else the Kurds.

One more thing. A single man, motivated by conviction, has imposed more of a cost on Russia for its crimes in Syria than the Mighty Superpower Tough Talking U.S. The U.S. has only jawboned and condemned Russia over Syria. It hasn't even imposed economic sanctions, as it did to punish Russia for interfering with the U.S. takeover of Ukraine. That speaks volumes about actual U.S. "values" and goals. It doesn't care one whit about human rights, self-determination, or freedom.

Unwanted politics intrudes at "a posh art gallery."

A minion of autocracy bites the dust. He won't be dining on caviar tonight.

1]  "Russian ambassador Andrey Karlov shot dead in Ankara," Aljazeera, December 20, 2016. Aljazeera quotes the gunman thusly:

"'Don't forget Aleppo, don't forget Syria,' the attacker said in Turkish after gunning down the ambassador, as seen on a video shared by Turkish media from the scene.

"'Whoever took part in this cruelty will pay the price, one by one... Only death will take me from here,' the man said while holding a pistol.

"He then continued in Arabic, saying: 'We are the descendants of those who supported the Prophet Muhammad, for jihad.'"

2] "Turkish police officer, invoking Aleppo, guns down Russian ambassador in Ankara," Washington Post, December 19, 2016. The New York Times quoted Putin in almost the same words,  but claims he made the remarks "in an emergency meeting with Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov and other top officials." The Times version of the quote is  “There can be only one answer to this — stepping up the fight against terrorism, and the bandits will feel this.” "Russian Ambassador to Turkey Is Assassinated in Ankara," NY Times, December 19. The Times quoted the gunman as declaiming,  “God is great! Those who pledged allegiance to Muhammad for jihad. God is great!” The Post has him yelling, “We are those who pledged jihad to Muhammad!” Referring to Syria, he added, “Every single person who has a share in this atrocity will pay for it!”

3]  Washington Post, ibid.

4] New York Times, op cit. Funny thing, the guy who messed up Turkish-Russian relations was Erdogan himself. About a year ago, he had his jets shoot down a Russian fighter-bomber over Syria next to the Turkish border (the Turks and U.S. media falsely claimed or implied it was shot down overflying Turkey- it had strayed for a few seconds over the border but was shot down over Syria) because Erdogan was unhappy that the Russians were bombing ethnic Turkmen Syrian rebels. The Russians responded by cutting off the lucrative traffic of Russian vacationers to Turkey. This changed Erdogan's attitude, so he mended fences with Russia. 

Turkey's role in Syria is a mass of contradictions, and shows what a treacherous sea of boiling cross-currents "the conflict" there is. Turkey mainly wants to destroy the Kurds, which the U.S. supports in the Kurds resistance to Assad. But the U.S. makes distinctions between "terrorist" Kurds and "moderate" (i.e. "Good Guy") Kurds, which the Turks don't. Turkey for a long time supported jihadists in an underhanded fashion, allowing them to cross the Turkish border and obtain supplies through Turkey. Jihadists are U.S. enemy Number 1, or maybe Number 2, after Russia, these days, depending on which American ideologue/polemicist/apparatchik/or general you ask, and the day of the week.

Assad has shelled and bombed Turkish border villages several times, and Turkey semi-wants to see Assad gone. Russia is backing Assad in a major way, along with Iran, which has sent troops to help Assad crush the Syrian people, and the Lebanese "terrorist" (to the West) militia Hezbollah is also fighting on Assad's behalf. (Or rather it's the militia arm of Hezbollah, which is a religious/political organization and movement.) So U.S. ally Turkey, where the U.S. has air bases, is bombing U.S.-backed Kurds in Syria, and Assad foe Turkey is getting friendly and cooperative with main Assad backer Russia, whose air force is pulverizing rebel-held cities and towns. 

To make things more interesting, various Arabian peninsula Sunni autocracies- and the U.S. is good buddies with all those repressive monarchies, and supplies them with weapons and munitions and training- are funneling weapons and supplies to the jihadists in Syria-  the jihadists the U.S. wants to exterminate.. Saudi Arabia and Qatar are known to be doing this. 

But no hard feelings: the U.S. is currently helping the Saudis and other associated oil monarchies wage an aerial bombardment campaign of terror against Yemen. They've bombed 58 hospitals so far, with the jets the U.S. sold them, dropping the bombs the U.S. sold them, and flying to and from their targets with the aid of U.S. tanker planes refueling the jets dropping the bombs. And U.S. officers are in the Saudi command posts helping pick targets.

Is that all clear now?

Turkish Strongman Erdoğan Easily Crushes Inept Military Coup: Last Gasp of Secularism in Turkey?

Autocratic Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has quickly crushed a badly organized military coup, apparently instigated below the general staff level. The rebellious army units neglected the first rule of any successful coup- immediately neutralize the ruler you're trying to overthrow. That's Job One. Erdoğan was vacationing in southern Turkey, and it should have been easy to seize him as he was far from the capital, Ankara, or Istanbul.

Instead the coupists fired on the Parliament with tanks- not sure what the point of that was. They managed to kill about a hundred civilians, and it's reported by the regime that 105 coup troops were killed, and 1,500 taken into captivity. It's claimed that police units were able to defeat units of the coup attempt. A coup helicopter was shot down, and one flew to Greece with officers of the coup seeking asylum. (Greece and Turkey have a hostile relationship, for historical and contemporary reasons, the contemporary ones centering around the Turkish invasion of Cyprus. Both are members of the U.S.-bossed military alliance, NATO, making them uncomfortable bedfellows at the same time.)

Erdoğan called on his followers to turn out in the streets and confront the coup elements, requiring them to defy coupist instructions to the population to stay indoors. Apparently thousands heeded Erdoğan's call, complicating matters for the coup side.

Erdoğan, true to his temperament, vowed that the "traitors" would "pay a heavy price." (Mass executions, anyone?)

Torture of prisoners has long been routine in Turkey, both in political and non-political cases.

Military coups have been common in Turkey since World War II. They are generally done in the name of protecting the secular nature of the Turkish Republic. [1]

Erdoğan, an Islamist who leads an Islamist party, and whose base is the religiously-oriented segment of the populace, a segment that has been growing both in numbers and in religious conservatism in Turkey, has been gradually eroding that secular aspect of the Turkish state. His rise to power represented in part the liberation of the religious from the suppression they suffered under the Ataturk legacy.

So the handy defeat of this coup may well spell the end of secular power in Turkey.

The so-called "Western democracies" all rushed to back Erdoğan, predictably, since they want to stay in his good graces for their own reasons (and they have sensitive power-sensing antennae, so they could detect which way the wind was blowing on his coup attempt). The Europeans have a deal with the regime for Turkey to act as a garbage bag for unwanted refugees from Syria and elsewhere. The U.S. is running military air operations out of Incirlik air base in Turkey. [2]

Which brings me to a second big mistake of the coup plotters. They didn't clear their plot with the U.S. first.


1]  The contemporary state of  Turkey was founded on secularist principles by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, a revolutionary army officer, and first president of the new nation he is credited with founding, the Republic of Turkey, (the core of the Turkish Ottoman Empire). After the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I (1914-18, during which time the Turks conducted the Armenian genocide under cover of war), Ataturk led a successful war against the Allies from 1919-22 to create the new Turkish nation.  The name "Ataturk" was bestowed on him by Parliament in 1934 and means "Father of the Turks." By law no other Turk may use the name.

Ataturk abolished the Caliphate and sharia courts in 1924. A failed assassination plot against him in 1926 provided him an opportunity to hang various political opponents.

2]  U.S. Secretaryt of State John "Skull and Bones" Kerry issued noises supporting Erdoğan, German Chancellor Angela "The Iron Mouse" Merkel did likewise, and newly-anointed British Foreign Secretary Boris "BoJo" Johnson called the Turkish Foreign Minister to give him a verbal pat on the back.

Birds of a Feather: Erdoğan and Obama, Two Ruthless Rulers.

 

Turkey Providing Material Support to Terrorism, And Destroying UNESCO World Heritage Sites à la ISIS

Certain more-thoughtful precincts of the U.S. elites occasionally fret over how to square the circle of glaring U.S. contradictions. This phenomenon gets manifested from time to time in New York Times articles that reveal more of reality than is standard in that publication, sometimes with sympathy for some victims, but that generally end with a throwing-up-of-hands attitude, at a loss for a solution.

Such an article was published today on the Times' website. [1]

The contradiction in question this time concerns the fact that Turkey and the U.S. have been operating at cross-purposes, to say the least, in Syria. The most effective fighting force against ISIS and the other Islamofascists (the main enemy of the U.S. in Syria, as the U.S. government sees it) are the Kurds.

But Turkey is waging war on the Kurds, both in Syria and in Turkey. Even in Iraq, in fact, where it has attacked Kurds.

And Turkey is even backing some of the Islamofascists.

But Turkey is a member of the U.S.-created-and-dominated military alliance, NATO. And has key military bases that the U.S. uses, particularly air bases, from which the U.S. is now flying sorties against ISIS in Syria and Iraq. (Turkey has been a key base for U.S. espionage and military activities since World War II. Turkey was the base from which many U-2 spyplane flights were launched over the Soviet Union. The CIA ran a fake defector program against the Soviet Union from Turkey. One of those well-prepared fake defectors was U.S. Marine Lee Harvey Oswald.)

It's as if such articles are throat-clearing exercises to get the attention of the executive managers of U.S. imperialism. Like a tap on the shoulder saying "What are you going to do about this?"

The article doesn't explicitly say what I stated in the title of this essay. That would be too disruptive. The New York Times only very rarely engages in boat-rocking. But the following excerpts show that my title is true.

All emphases that follow are mine.

"Erdogan has offered limited help in the fight against ISIS, despite years of American lobbying. That has pushed the United States to rely more and more on the P.Y.D., which it views as distinct from the P.K.K. American Special Operations troops now arm, equip and advise these Kurdish fighters, even as Turkey shells their bases farther west — and pays Islamist militias [aka 'terrorists' as designated by the U.S.] to attack them."

"Islamist militias" are what are usually called "terrorists" in the U.S. media, and by the U.S. government. The Times discreetly avoids naming the actual "militias" it is referring to.

The U.S. designates the fighting groups in Syria it thinks are okay as the "moderate" ones.The "Islamist" ones, like the al-Nusra Front, al-Qaeda, ISIS, and their ilk, are the "terrorists."

Of course, for the New York Times, it is literally unthinkable that Turkey is breaking U.S. law by "providing material support to terrorists," or that Turkey should be on the State Department list of "state sponsors of terrorism."

Or at least, they don't want anyone reading the New York Times to have such thoughts cross their minds.

Then there's the destruction of UNESCO world heritage sites- the same crimes the U.S. and European medias are so exercised about (rightly, if hypocritically) when ISIS does it.

The article makes plain that Kurdish towns and cities are being systematically leveled by Turkish army artillery and tank shelling.

"In Diyarbakir [Turkey], the capital of a largely Kurdish province, [Turkish] artillery and bombs have destroyed much of the historic district, which contains Unesco world heritage sites. Churches, mosques and khans that have stood for centuries lie in ruins. Tourism has collapsed. Images of shattered houses and dead children are stirring outrage in other countries where Kurds live: Iraq, Syria and Iran."
The author also describes the destruction of Cizre by Turkish shelling, and that a similar fate awaits the surrounded and besieged city of Nusaybin:

"...it has been an outpost and a battleground for a half-dozen empires over the past 3,000 years, from the Aramaeans to the Ottomans. It still contains Roman ruins and one of the Middle East’s oldest churches. It has been a Kurdish town since a century ago, when Christian residents fled southward from Turkish pogroms that started during the upheavals of World War I."

Again, the obvious similarity to ISIS crimes is overlooked.

One difference between ISIS and the Erdogan regime of Turkey is that ISIS makes a point of publicizing its crimes, as it takes a perverse pride in them. It sees its destruction and murders as making ideological points. The Turks, on the other hand, ban journalists from the cities they are laying waste to. Typical of states, they seek to hide their crimes, clumsily, from the rest of the world. (The Times reporter had to do some sneaking around to get the story. Which is fine.)

It's not just in Turkey that the U.S. has tied itself up in a ball of contradictions. The same is the case with Saudi Arabia, with Pakistan, with Afghanistan. In all these cases, its "allies" are part of the problem, indeed the root of the problem in the cases of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

On top of all its strategic incoherent, the U.S. slathers a thick layer of incredibly hypocritical, self-righteous, moralistic rhetoric about "terrorism" and "freedom," and applies draconian laws (and assassinations) in extremely selective, biased fashion. This rotten ideological crust is supposed to hide the political incoherence from public view.

Which, with the help of the loyal U.S. media, it largely does.

1] "Behind the Barricades of Turkey’s Hidden War: A simmering conflict with the Kurds threatens to consume an American ally and inflame an already-unstable region," New York Times, May 24, 2016.

Turkey Bombards America's Kurds in Syria

The wars in the Middle East are looking more and more like a free-for-all. What a Pandora's Box the Bush-Cheney regime recklessly ripped open when it invaded Iraq!

The would-be Sultan of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has dreams of Ottoman Empire glory, has been attacking armed Kurds wherever he can find them. First he restarted the war of extermination against the PKK, the Kurdish guerrilla organization that arose as a reaction to the extreme repression of Kurds in Turkey. (For decades, Turkey sought to eliminate Kurdish identity completely, which is to say, the Kurds were subjected to a genocidal assault under the legal definition of genocide. There is a popular misunderstanding that genocide necessarily means physical extermination. It actually is defined as destroying a people by whatever means, or attempting to.) Then he extended his war over the border into both Syria and Iraq. The Iraqi government has feebly protested the invasion of Iraq by Turkish troops attacking Kurdish forces. Those Kurds have been the main bulwark against the advance of the hated ISIS, the self-styled Islamic State, reviled for their Saudi-style beheadings.

The latest Turkish attacks against the Kurds is the aerial and artillery attacks on Kurdish forces in Syria. The BBC, and thus we can assume by extension the British government, supports, given today's reporting, which was sympathetic to the Turkish position. For exanple, they hauled on air a woman from the reactionary U.S. Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, to say that the PKK and the other Kurds the Turks are now attacking are birds of a feather. [1] Of course, the Kurds the Turks are now trying to destroy in Syria are also the main U.S. proxy ground forces against ISIS in Syria.

So Obama gave his vice president, Joseph Biden, an errand, to ask Erdoğan to please stop bombing the U.S.' Kurds. Erdoğan, predictably, refused to comply. Which Obama probably foresaw and sought to avoid being humiliated, thus the delegation of the task to Biden.

So where do we stand? The U.S. and whoever it can get is fighting ISIS. The U.S. is also against the Assad regime, but isn't fighting him and doesn't want its proxies to fight him. ISIS is fighting Assad. The Russians are fighting "terrorists," using the Assad regime definition of that word- namely anyone opposing Assad or even living in areas not under regime control. The U.S. is fighting "terrorists," namely ISIS, the al-Nusra front, and the always-mentioned-but-never specified "associated forces." (Being vague gives the U.S. the freedom to attack anyone they suddenly decide they don't like.)

The Iranians are fighting everyone Assad and the Russians are fighting, in Syria. So they're a U.S. Enemy in Syria, even though they're fighting ISIS.

In Iraq, the Iranians are allied with the same government the U.S. is backing, and against ISIS. But they're still an Enemy.

U.S. ally and NATO member Turkey is hosting U.S. warplanes that are bombing targets in Syria and Iraq, in support of the Kurds that Turkey is bombing and shelling.

Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf oiligarchies support Sunni extremists like al-Nusra. But they're U.S. allies, and Saudi Arabia has supposedly offered to contribute "special forces" (commandos) to fight in Syria against- well, the Sunni extremist ISIS. They've even contributed a few warplanes to bombing. (Most of their forces are tied up destroying Yemen at the moment.) Britain, France, all the usual suspects, are pitching in with bombing and/or aerial surveillance, although Canada, under a new liberal regime, will no longer drop bombs, just help look for targets. (The new prime minister Trudeau is apparently a peacenik.)

Is that all clear now?

I didn't think so.



1] The Wilson center is named for a former extremely racist president of the U.S., who inaugurated the modern U.S. police state with the Espionage Act (under which people who spoke against Wilson's entry into the First World War were imprisoned, First Amendment "free speech rights" be damned), the Palmer raids, in which thousands of leftists were rounded up without any judicial involvement- carried out by one J. Edgar Hoover, heading the precursor of the FBI, which he went on to run as the top secret police chief in America- and other depredations against human rights. The actual history of Wilson's regime- which is to say, truth- has been replaced by an absurd myth of Wilson as a noble idealist and liberal who believed in self-determination for people! Thus is the power of propaganda manifested yet again.


The lady "scholar" from the Wilson Center made sure to carry out her political and ideological duties by cueing us in on which side is the Good Guys and which the Bad in the Turkish bombing of Kurds. The Kurds have been fighting "a NATO army" for a decade, she gratuitously put in. I suppose that's one (twisted) way to look at it. Or the Turkish army waged a vicious "counterinsurgency" campaign against the Kurds for a decade, "disappearing" people, torturing them, razing villages, and killing tens of thousands of people. People who would have settled for being allowed to speak their own language, publish their own newspapers, broadcast in their own tongue, and just allowed to be Kurds. But that was asking too much, various Turkish regimes decreed. The BBC forgot to mention the reality of Turkish state oppression of the Kurds. And commonly the death toll is blamed on the PKK, or on "the conflict," even though it was Turkish state forces that killed theoverwhelming majority of the now-dead.

By the way, that NATO army also invaded Cyprus and imposed its will on the Greek inhabitants there, supposedly to aid Turkish residents. Greece is in NATO too.

Erdogan's Kristallnacht

The self-aggrandizing president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has unleashed mobs to sack the offices of the legal Kurdish party, the People's Democratic Party (HDP) all across the country. 126 party buildings have been sacked. That this massive violence occurred simultaneously in numerous locations proves it was obviously organized. (For some reason Newsweek called the attackers “nationalists,” whatever that's supposed to mean.)

This comes ahead of new elections Erdogan has called, just weeks after the last parliamentary elections in which the Kurdish and other opposition won enough seats to keep Erdogan from gaining the super-majority he sought in order to give himself dictatorial powers. So the sore loser has decided to stage another election. Maybe he'll just keep staging new elections over and over until the people get it right. Burning down and otherwise destroying the opposition's offices should help him by disorganizing his opponents.

The “democratic and freedom-loving West” hasn't had much reaction to this. No surprise there. When military regimes ruled Turkey, and the fascist Grey Wolves terrorized progressives, the U.S. and Europe were fine with that too.

This comes a month or so into an aerial bombing campaign against the Kurdish guerrilla organization, the PKK, in their encampments in Iraq and Syria, ordered by Erdogan, breaking a truce with the group.

The U.S. government's national radio propaganda network, NPR, which is beamed via local affiliates into every corner of America, has bent over backwards to hide the assault of the Erdogan regime on the Kurds. Take this example from Sunday, September 13, a morning “news” broadcast on NPR, emanating from Washington, D.C., at 11 am D.C. time. The female propaganda reader sets up a brief piece by saying the conflict “boiled over,” noting the deaths of more Turkish cops along with Kurds. Then NPR “reporter” Peter Kenyon's piece is played. Kenyon says “hundreds have been killed since violence resumed.”

This is pure, disingenuous obfuscation.

“Violence” didn't happen to “boil over” or spontaneously “resume.” Using the thin cover of pretending to attack ISIS in Syria, Erdogan ordered his air force (with its U.S.-supplied warplanes and U.S.-supplied ordnance) to bomb the Kurdish PKK camps outside of Turkey, breaking a long-term truce with the group. The Kurds naturally fought back, rather than rolling over and dying, by attacking Turkish SOLDIERS and POLICE (who are primary oppressors of the civilian population), NOT civilian targets. (Which doesn't stop the U.S. and Turkey from branding the PKK “terrorists.” I submit that the actual terrorists, those who terrorize civilians, are Turkey, with its long history of persecution and killing of Kurds, and the U.S., the Arsenal of Fascism and Reaction, and the ringleader in global class warfare against poor people everywhere.)

Erdogan, by the way, is an Islamist. But apparently he's the U.S.' kind of Islamist.

Regarding the state-sanctioned mob attacks on the political opposition in Turkey, NPR and the rest of the U.S. media has pretended that it was something that just happened, without even hinting at state complicity. (Notice how very differently they play every act of violence in Russia, for example, all of which are laid at Putin's doorstep, no evidence required.)

All this raises the gravest suspicions about who the terrorists were who bombed a rally that was the pretext for Erdogan's pretending to start bombing ISIS while ordering air raids against the PKK. Those terrorists may well have been Turkish state terrorists.

Erdogan has been busy on other repression fronts. He has been rolling back the limited freedoms and rights that all too recently came to Turkey. Besides his restarting of the war against the PKK and his imitation of Kristallnacht, he had the Istanbul prosecutor target a magazine for the crimes (actual criminal violations in Turkey) of “insulting the Turkish president” and “making terrorist propaganda.” The magazine was raided, and the offensive issue banned. [1]

[Turkey, like other U.S. allies, may just be following Obama's lead here. People here have been sentenced to long terms of imprisonment for translating or passing along jihadi propaganda. And causing Obama to feel disrespected got Medea Benjamin's arm broken and shoulder dislocated. Then there is the long campaign against journalists by Obama, such as James Risen of the New York Times, the massive phone tapping against the AP, the criminal investigation of a Fox reporter, and the attempts to destroy Wikileaks and imprison Julian Assange. Oh, and the new, official Pentagon policy of murdering journalists they don't like. But Obama could be said to be following in George Bush's footsteps. Bush of course repeatedly bombed the offices of Al-Jazeera, and the U.S. Army murdered a number of journalists when it invaded Iraq in 2003. See Obama Regime Codifies Policy of Murdering Journalists U.S. Doesn't Like, August 10; Bush Created "Enemy Combatants." Now Obama Has Invented" Unprivileged Belligerents," Formerly Known as Journalists, August 11; and From The Horse's Mouth: Pentagon Lawyer Confirms Targeting of Journalists, August 16.]

There are numerous other instances of Erdogan's oppressiveness. Erdogan suppressed Twitter because it was a source of information about the corruption of him and his government. He already strangled and intimidated the regular media to knuckle under to him. He also found it necessary to ban youtube. [2]

No fish is too small for Erdogan to go after. A teenager got an eleven month suspended prison sentence for “insulting” Erdogan by calling him a thief (which he is) at a rally. The teen has to “stay out of trouble” (i.e. be quiet as a mouse) for the next 3 years or its in the slammer for him. [3] (This is a commonly-used tactic against protesters and dissidents in the U.S. also. Stop being political or go to jail. A recent example is Cecily McMillan, the Occupy Movement protester whose breasts were mauled by a cop and was then convicted for “assaulting” him, was imprisoned on Rikers Island in New York City and now has to somehow avoid being arrested again for the next five years on pain of being locked up again, even though she's a target of political persecution. Good luck Cecily.)

But Erdogan hasn't been too busy to find something to do with $615 million dollars of the Turkish people's money. He's built himself a grand palace, four times the size of Versailles, and larger than 30 White Houses put together, as befits a Man of His Historic Greatness. He had to destroy part of a forest to erect it, but trees hardly matter. Similarly, when people protested the destruction of one of the last parks in Istanbul, Erdogan's police brutalized the protesters. (I would be arrested and jailed in Turkey for writing this. So I won't go there! Problem solved! Now, I'll just have to keep my fingers crossed that Erdogan doesn't have me indicted and extradited from the U.S.!) [4]

He better not think you're a headache, or WATCH OUT!

"YOU'LL DO WHAT I SAY! OR ELSE!"

(I know what you mean about those despicable journalists and pesky protesters...)

1] “Turkish magazine Nokta raided and copies seized for mock Erdogan selfie,” Guardian (UK), Sept. 14, 2015. Erdogan has been persecuting journalists consistently in Turkey. And even overseas. See “US-based Turkish journalist faces libel investigation for book on Obama and Erdogan,” Guardian, 21 June, 2015. This is a criminal case instigated by Erdogan's lawyer and being conducted by the Istanbul prosecutor.

2] For more examples of Erdogan's totalitarian tendencies, see “Turkey blocks use of Twitter after prime minister attacks social media site: Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatens to 'root out' social media network where wiretapped recordings have been leaked,” Guardian, March 20, 2014; “Turkey's YouTube and Twitter bans show a government in serious trouble, Guardian, March 28, 2014; “Turkish police arrest 23 in raids on opposition media,” Guardian, 14 December, 2014 (gee, are you getting the impression the Guardian is on top of this issue?); and “Turkey's PM threatens theatres after actor 'humiliates' daughter [this was back when he was prime minister]:Recep Tayyip Erdogan condemns 'despotic arrogance' of intellectuals and says he will cut state funding,” Guardian, 17 May, 2012. Despotic arrogance, huh? Now who does that really describe? Ever notice how swine in power consistently project their own noxious and despicable qualities onto their foes? Just one of those things, I guess.

3] “Turkish teen gets sentenced to 11 months jail for insulting President Erdogan,” dna (India), 11 Sept, 2015.

4] “Here’s How Much Turkey’s Lavish Presidential Palace Costs,” Time, Nov. 4, 2014. The so-called “White Palace” has 1,000 rooms, in case company comes over I suppose. Erdogan also treated himself to a $185 million personal jet. Hey, wouldn't the Prophet Mohammed have done the same?