So the present Turkish regime has it and so it wants us to believe. Thus it must indeed be the most wide-spread plot ever in the history of humankind. Honestly, never heard of any time before.
Meanwhile, most of us are quietly wondering how thousands of teachers, lawyers, judges, medical doctors, civil servants of every order and level, military people, policemen etc. can be sacked, and hundreds of schools, universities, hospitals etc. could be closed, without civil society virtually collapsing.
As for the Gülen Movement, accused of being the brain behind the coup incident as well as everything else that is evil in the eyes of the Erdoğan regime, what that movement is, and what it is not, has indeed not been very much clarified by Mr. Erdoğan’s yelled-out invectives.
Personally, I cannot avoid the impression that Fetullah Gülen and his movement is playing the proxy part of an enemy who ought to be considered much stronger and much more dangerous to the ambitions of an islamic-fundamentalist regime like that of Erdoğan – but who nobody so far dares to mention by name in such terms:
Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, and the legacy he left to his country. The politician who – more or less successfully – would lead Turkey from the era of Ottoman absolutism into the modern democratic era; who endorsed religious liberty but also resolutely drew a clear line of demarcation between religion and life-view on the one hand, and state and civil society on the other hand; who wanted to see Turkey as a true member of the international community of free and intellectually, scientifically, educationally, culturally and socially competitive nations.
Because precisely that is the kind of Turkey which the Erdoğan regime is now dismantling, piece by piece. It seemingly has public support, boasting of being democratically elected – albeit in a country where all free media have virtually been annihilated and no free opinion can any longer be expressed in public without ensuing harassment and prosecution.
So – not today, but some time sooner or later: Do not be surprised if in Turkey Atatürk portraits and statues will start getting removed from public spaces and replaced by the new ones – those of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.