The ruling in Turkey is very close to being a rogue state. Turkey should be proud to be the leader of the world only when it comes to the number of jailed journalists. You are considered guilty unless proven innocent in Turkey. Many things operate in reverse order in Turkey. The majority of Turkish people is still voting for the Islamist government of Erdogan. Perhaps, there is no true secularism in the US, and perhaps it is not in the norm that would affect the daily life of its citizens and no-one really bothers if that is so to that end but Turkey is not even on the same comparison scale. Turkey is probably the fastest down-sloping country in the world where the pressure of religion is being felt at every social institution, the most dramatic being in the judicial system. When the rape cases involving minors slip through with minimal sentencing due to religious practices, when liberal minded journalists were attacked brutally, the instigators get minimal jail term if not none at all, all that is left from a once pseudo-secular republic is a dream of the past. What we discuss in the US is the insurance premiums and how it will be decided among pro-choice and pro-abortion proponents and thats the most it comes down to when the religion is affecting politics.
It is not to say that the US is advanced enough having founded on Jeffersonian principles more than two hundred years ago, to consider a self declared atheist to be a presidential candidate. The trend is there but it is still too far for the US to be anywhere close to that mind set. But comparing US with Turkey for how the religion is affecting the social life of its citizens is like correlating the number of rats living in NY's underground with the number of stars in the universe.
Turkey is founded by Ataturk, a genius on many fronts and a combination of Washington and Jefferson in one body and mind. He was able to stop the destruction of Islam on his millet, and tried to put the Turkish nation in a western minded secular mold. It did succeed as much as the vertical revolutions go by in the history of social reforms and revolutions. It is an incredible accomplishment by all accounts particularly when the perspective of the dire situation of Europe’s ”sick man” is considered back in 1920s. The literacy rate was in thousandths in females, in ten thousands in medical personnel, yet alone finding an able body to put as a minister was like finding a needle in the hay stack. The political history of Turkey is too big to fit into a few sentences here and we digressed enough from our main point of discussion which is Turkey, secularism and the US, and maybe Trump.
The last of these, Trump is a shrewd business-man who likes to see the world thru his profit-hungry window and believes in power to dictate, and hence he is not a bit interested in the ideology. He thinks implicitly all that is secular and all that is religious already omni-present and just mere words as best could be used as tools to maximize ever present profits. He is neither religious nor secular, he is too simple to think about the true meanings of these words. He really does not care even to know or say anything ideologically profound. There is also a supporting pop-culture to this, somewhere between complete ignorance and cockiness, but also a reaction to the other side’s lack of competence. Dynasties in modern democracies should be oxymorons but yet they were not; Bushes and Clintons were just as real as the axe of Jack in the middle ages. And the resentment to this was ever more present in the last election cycle.
However, we can not draw parallels between Trump and the Turkish politics. Turkish people has a lot of growing up to do and it may not just be possible to make that leap unless the religion is openly discussed and attacked by a determined leader. The reality is that the sleep-walking society is too large to make that leap in short amount of time to win the majority in politics, however, it is not completely lost either. For any lack of hope, there is at least half of the country that would never vote for Erdogan. The main opposition party is proven to be ineffective and submissive to the massacre of democratic institutions in Turkey. They could not lead the people’s resentment into the street and due to this lack of challenge, the police and prosecution force became the foot soldiers of Erdogan’s government. Individual attempts by journalists and political opponents were swiftly pressed and punished. This is the era of witch hunting and closely resembles the times of Sultan Abdulhamit where there were secret police behind every public figure.
Erdogan’s ideal is to topple Ataturk’s so-called secular Republic. The last coup attempt was conveniently put into work to that purpose, sweeping any political opposition with a thick brush of state terrorism and treason. The inevitable outcome of this down-sloping is fast approaching, and with lira losing its value at a rate faster than the descent of Saddam’s statue, I am afraid the end result is still unpredictable, and undoubtedly it will have huge consequences for the Middle East and the general world affairs and politics.
