Posted by Guessedworker on Fri, 15 Jul 2016 22:07 | #

It seems to be a substantial and so far successful coup:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-36809083

... obviously with the official aim of protecting Turkey’s secular constitution, but there will be other currents feeding in to the military’s decision, including the security situation in the country, the advancing Kurdish threat (as they would see it), the success of the Russian military and Assad’s drive against Turkey’s surrogates in Syria.  Etcetera.  (Kumiko almost certainly has a much more refined and detailed understanding of these matters than I do).

For the West, there is the question of the refugees and the engagement of Turkey in the new chapters of negotiation with the EU over accession.  That negotiation will now be in the deep freeze.  But Turkey’s military have performed this political service on multiple occasions, and the likelihood is that this is another such event which is aimed primarily at normalising the country’s democratic practise.  This being so, political control will be returned to the civil power as soon as that is accomplished, ie, as soon as Erdogan’s party is neutralised.

Whether neutralisation is really an option now, in an age of such political and religious contrast between the urban and rural aspects of Turkish life, is another matter, of course.  At the very least, Islamicisation will have been dealt a heavy blow - assuming that the coup succeeds.  But that is not to say that rural Turkey will not assert its religious-political preference again.

Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 16 Jul 2016 05:52 | #

Well, it would seem that the coup is not succeeding.  The officers involved, said to rank from colonel down, have not carried a sufficient part of the army with them.  Erdogan’s government seems to be establishing control and will survive.  Assad’s supporters, who were celebrating on the streets of Damascus a few hours ago, will have to continue relying on the Russians to overcome the Erdogan-backed forces inside Syria - assuming it was the plotters’ intention to reduce Turkish involvement and get Russia out of the region.

All things considered, a pity.

Posted by Captainchaos on Sat, 16 Jul 2016 07:53 | #

GW, if you had to bet, which European nation do you believe will resist race replacement/the EU with organized, armed resistance?  As we all know, any political resistance which is not based upon that is pussified horseshit.

Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 16 Jul 2016 09:40 | #

CC,

My bet, conviction, and clear assumption is that all the European peoples in the west of the continent (not European nations - wrong framework) will identify and successfully resist the drive to obliteration.  I am not, and have never been, interested in Russia, which is eternally self-absorbed and far too geopolitical, therefore, in its adumbrations on not the peoples of the West but the Western powers.  I wish Russians well, of course, but I am not much interested in Russian nationalism (Eurasianism), which I am not at all convinced is a respecter of other peoples’ land-rights.  The nationalisms of the peoples of the Visigrad four are, however, key.  These are not Eurasian peoples but our European brothers, and their example of truth-speaking and sheer determination is a shining light.

Posted by Turkish Coup: Secularists’ Last Gasp on Mon, 18 Jul 2016 17:04 | #

TNO, “Turkish Coup: Secularists’ Last Gasp”, 17 July 2016:

The attempted coup d’état in Turkey was the last gasp of the pro-secular forces in that country against the Islamification and drive to authoritarianism under Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) party.

The Turkish army has always viewed itself as the protector of the secular state set up by modern Turkey’s founder, Kemal Atatürk, and even the statement used to announce the coup directly quoted from him.

Although Erdogan has blamed a former AKP ally Fethullah Gülen—now in exile in the US—as being behind the attempted uprising, the naming of Supreme Military Council member and four-star Turkish air force general Akin Öztürk as the coup leader attempt has definitively showed the true forces behind the weekend’s events.

According to the Turkish Hürriyet newspaper, General Ozturk has been arrested and identified as the person who ordered the attempted coup. For this purpose, he used his influence in the air force to launch the operation, calling out F-14 jets and attack helicopters to support selected ground troops.

General Ozturk.

General Ozturk and a number of other officers will now be put on trial for treason. Erdogan has also rounded up nearly 3,000 troops and issued arrest warrants for 2,745 judges, in what will clearly be a purging of the last remaining opposition elements within the Turkish civil service.

“This uprising is a gift from God to us because this will be a reason to cleanse our army,” Erdogan said after the coup had been suppressed.

The army plotters called themselves the “Peace at Home Council,” which was declared to the governing council of Turkey at the height of the coup attempt.

The “Peace at Home Council” denounced Erdogan’s increasingly non-secular style of government and said that they were taking over the country to “reinstate constitutional order, human rights and freedoms, the rule of law and the general security that was damaged.”