{"id":229113,"date":"2016-03-05T02:34:13","date_gmt":"2016-03-05T02:34:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=229113"},"modified":"2016-10-18T13:47:33","modified_gmt":"2016-10-18T13:47:33","slug":"democracy-ends-in-turkey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/latest-news\/democracy-ends-in-turkey\/","title":{"rendered":"Democracy Ends in Turkey"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse<\/span><\/p>\n

On Saturday March 5th, Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten (German Economic News) headlined \u201cTurkish Police Storm Newspaper Office Zaman\u201d<\/span><\/a> and reported that, \u201cTurkish police entered the editorial offices of critical newspaper Zaman<\/i> on Friday night.\u201d Accompanying videos there showed a police-state in which \u2018security\u2019 forces stormed through a crowd of protesters (readers of the newspaper) outside, into Turkey\u2019s leading opposition newspaper, which is also Turkey\u2019s leading English-language newspaper, Zaman<\/i>, and arrested staffers there, taking them away, to who-knows-what fates.<\/span><\/p>\n

There\u2019s nothing like\u00a0Zaman<\/i><\/span><\/a>\u00a0 in just about any country: for examples, the New York Times<\/i>, Washington Post<\/i>, London Times<\/i>, and Guardian<\/i>, aren\u2019t \u201copposition newspapers,\u201d though they used to cover the opposition in a moderately fair way, prior to the George W.\u00a0 <\/span>Bush Administration, 9\/11, and \u201cregime change in Iraq.\u201d By contrast, Zaman<\/i>\u00a0 <\/span>has constantly been very bold in exposing truths that the regime doesn\u2019t want the public to know. But that\u2019s all past history now \u2014 it\u2019s at least as radical a change for Turkey as occurred in America with the Bush regime, which controlled the media as effectively as its successor-regime, Obama\u2019s, has done, and which never needed to employ such blatantly police-state methods as Turkey now is clearly doing.<\/span><\/p>\n

On Thursday March 4th, Tayyip\u00a0Erdo\u011fan, the Islamist President of U.S. ally and NATO member-nation Turkey, took over Zaman<\/i>\u00a0 or Today\u2019s Zaman<\/i>, where the headline on Friday was:\u00a0“Court appoints trustees to take over management of Zaman, Today\u2019s Zaman.\u201d<\/span><\/a> Until after that report was filed, this was only a court matter, not a blatantly police-state one \u2014 using physical forms of force, including armed \u2018security\u2019 forces inside, and water-cannons against demonstrators outside.<\/span><\/p>\n

Here was that Zaman<\/i>\u00a0 <\/span>news-report\u2019s opening:<\/span><\/p>\n

An \u0130stanbul court has appointed trustees to take over the management of the Feza Media Group, which includes Turkey\u2019s biggest-selling newspaper, the\u00a0<\/i>Zaman\u00a0daily<\/i><\/span><\/a>, as well as the Today\u2019s Zaman daily and the Cihan news agency, dealing a fresh blow to the already\u00a0battered\u00a0<\/i>media freedom<\/i><\/span><\/a>\u00a0in Turkey.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

The decision was issued by the \u0130stanbul 6th Criminal Court of Peace at the request of the \u0130stanbul Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office, which claimed that the media group acted upon orders from what it called the \u201cFethullahist Terrorist Organization\/Parallel State Structure (FET\u00d6\/PDY),\u201d\u00a0praising the group and helping it achieve its goals in its publications.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

The prosecutor also claimed that the alleged terrorist group is cooperating with the Kurdistan Workers\u2019 Party (PKK) terrorist organization to topple the Turkish government and that high-level officials of the two groups have had meetings abroad.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

The court decision means that the entire management and the editorial board of Feza Media Group companies will be replaced by the three-member board named by the court.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

Turkey\u2019s existing conservative regime is typical of conservative governments in using \u2018national security\u2019 rationalizations as excuses for clamping down against the public, supposedly in order to \u2018protect\u2019 the public. However, the \u2018democratic\u2019 gloss over the transition of a democratic government into a dictatorial one can do nothing to maintain as being true the supposition that the nation is a democracy instead of (now) a dictatorship.<\/span><\/p>\n

The specific \u2018national security\u2019 context behind today\u2019s clamp-down and end of democracy in Turkey, is that the Zaman operations were owned by Erdo\u011fan’s enemy,\u00a0Fethullah G\u00fclen<\/span><\/a>, who had self-exiled to an estate in Pennsylvania after objecting to the Islamicization of Turkey\u2019s government under Erdo\u011fan.\u00a0G\u00fclen is no \u2018secularist,\u2019 but he came to insist upon a separation between church-and-state, so that there will be no favoritism by the government toward any clergy, and thus no favoritism by the clergy toward any government or political party. In other words:\u00a0G\u00fclen preaches a relatively progressive version of Islam.<\/span><\/p>\n

By contrast: Erdo\u011fan has, consistently since he first entered politics, moved Turkey more and more toward a standard Sunni dictatorship, aligned with the Saud family, who own Saudi Arabia, and who hold authority over Islam\u2019s two holiest sites: Mecca and Medina. Their Islamic sect is called Wahhabism inside Saudi Arabia, and Salafism outside Saudi Arabia. The founder was Mohammed Ibn Wahhab in 1744, when he swore a mutual oath with the gang-lord Muhammad Ibn Saud, for Saud\u2019s descendants to control the government, and for Wahhab\u2019s preachers to instruct the faithful that the Sauds have God\u2019s blessing to rule. Under this agreement, Wahhab\u2019s preachers determine the laws, based upon the strictest-possible interpretation of the Quran, which therefore functions as Saudi Arabia\u2019s Constitution, while the Wahhabist preachers constitute the legislative and judicial branches of the Saud-led government, who are the executive branch \u2014 the Saud-clan\u2019s leaders.<\/span><\/p>\n

Outside Saudi Arabia, the sect is called \u201cSalafist,\u201d meaning that they derive their authority from their ancestors. This feature authorizes royal rule, because royal dictators achieve their \u2018right\u2019 to rule on the basis of whom their ancestors were (i.e., their parents, going ultimately back to some founder who was a conquerer). For this reason, all of the Arabic royal families are Salafists. Inside Saudi Arabia, the Saud family are Wahhabists (the Saudi version of the Salafist sect).<\/span><\/p>\n

The continued membership by Turkey in NATO would mean that there is a NATO that no longer has any vestige of justification for continued existence after the end, in 1991, of communism, of the USSR, and of the Warsaw Pact. Democracy no longer survives as even a vestigial excuse for its continuation.<\/span><\/p>\n

NATO, from now on, is just a gang of nations whose aristocracies crave to conquer the world\u2019s most resource-rich nation: Russia<\/span><\/a>. (It\u2019s done by picking off, one-by-one, Russia\u2019s former allied nations and bringing them into the NATO gang.) The U.S. and Saud family, and Erdo\u011fan family, as well as the other Arabic royal families, and the controlling investors in U.S. and allied weapons-manufacturers, etc., constitute the chief beneficiaries of continuing NATO, but the conquest of Russia is not at all the primary goal of the residents<\/i>\u00a0 <\/span>in NATO-member nations. In fact, it\u2019s not a goal that\u2019s even talked about in their \u2018elections.\u2019 If those nations were democracies, they\u2019d abandon NATO, as being representative of dictatorship over them all, not of democracy, in any nation.<\/span><\/p>\n

But we\u2019re all dictatorships<\/span><\/a> now.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of\u00a0 They\u2019re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010<\/i><\/span><\/a>,<\/i> and of \u00a0<\/i>CHRIST\u2019S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity<\/i><\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse On Saturday March 5th, Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten (German Economic News) headlined \u201cTurkish Police Storm Newspaper Office Zaman\u201d and reported that, \u201cTurkish police entered the editorial offices of critical newspaper Zaman on Friday night.\u201d Accompanying videos there showed a police-state in which \u2018security\u2019 forces stormed through a crowd of protesters (readers of the newspaper) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1254,"featured_media":229114,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,461,18],"tags":[115,30,1036,27,32,96,1035,93,535,1034,59,757,753,754,92,1261,49,76,40],"class_list":{"0":"post-229113","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"category-editorials","9":"category-latest-news","10":"tag-barack-obama","11":"tag-big-brother","12":"tag-breaking-news","13":"tag-bush","14":"tag-cia","15":"tag-cover-up","16":"tag-daily-news","17":"tag-eu","18":"tag-global-news","19":"tag-independent-media","20":"tag-military","21":"tag-nato","22":"tag-police-state","23":"tag-syria","24":"tag-terrorism","25":"tag-turkey","26":"tag-usa-news","27":"tag-warfare","28":"tag-white-house"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1254"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=229113"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229113\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/229114"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=229113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=229113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=229113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}