Turkey’s government has seized over 950 companies since failed coup last year | Hacker News Reader

Turkey’s government has seized over 950 companies since failed coup last year

nytimes.com

45 pointsdiego_moita30 comments

Corruption, authoritarianism, expropriation of companies, ... this plot sounds a lot like Zimbabwe and Venezuela.

the difference is that this is a country ally to the west, with a strategic geographic location and with one of the largest armies in the world.

And a large nuclear arsenal stationed within its borders as part of the NATO nuclear arms sharing treaty.

Turkey is also in a much more important strategic location than either of those two.

A baklava chain, seriously? Did they give free baklavas to the alleged plotters? This is clearely a witch hunt.

At this point, it is a command economy.

Not that we aren't fought with our own problems, but does NATO have standards of conduct?

We rent some very strategic air bases there. It's a shame we couldn't have them elsewhere.

Isn't it the general consensus that the coup was staged?

Even if it wasn't staged (which it probably was), the big story here is that Erdogan is consolidating power by purging his enemies and expropriating whatever he can.

I wonder if this will be the final straw to torpedo Turkey's EU bid, and to some extent, if Erdogan even cares.

I have never heard that but they definitely had lists of people to arrest ready. It may be a situation like 9/11. I don't think it was staged but Bush and Cheney had the Iraq plans ready to go.

The US has invasion plans for every country on the planet. Iraq was invaded on March 20th 2003 not the following Tuesday.

If not staged but it's likely the government knew about it in advance, e.g had an insider and let it happen in order to use it in its advantage.

General consensus of the west on the internet? Yeah , probably (https://www.reddit.com/search?q=turkey+coup)- because thats what they want to believe.

Remember when the general consensus among the same group was that Turkey was secretly funding ISIL and it was all about getting their hands on the measly dozen or so barrels that was being smuggled across the border? It was certainly the narrative the Russians were pushing and the Internet happily swallowed it.. Then suddenly Turkey became the only actual foreign country apart from Iran and Russia with boots on the ground actually fighting ISIL (although how much an effort Iranians and Russians actually put to fighting ISIL is arguable).. And the internet including you promptly forgot their conensus and moved.

Then the coup happened and we got to hear the tired rationalisations - "the military coup is to uphold democracy not to usurp it" (what absurd logic), "Democracy is not really that important, secularism is what matters", "Turkey is a special exception wrt to coups" and so on. Then the coup failed And now the west has latched on to a new conspiracy theory, with all the facts gone out the window.

There were likely elements within Turkey that either funded ISIS directly or provided indirect assistance to them as they've seen ISIS as a useful tool in the fight against the Kurds.

ISIS basically tied the hands of Syrian and Iraqi Kurds and prevented them from being able to exert any political or military pressure on Turkey and other contested territories.

For Tureky it's a win win, either ISIS crushes the Kurds or creates enough mess for Turkey to get involved and hen it can bomb the Kurds just as much as they bomb ISIS if not more.

People don't have visibility into that conflict as much as they do in others since Turkey seems to be able to keep a much better lid on the media and there seem to be far fewer Kurdish lobbies in the west than for some other groups.

The same and possibly much more could be said about Syria and Russia. Remember in the early days of the civil war when ISIL had just entered the Syrian theatre and was capturing territory? Back then ISIL seemed to target anti-Assad areas more than Assad.. Rebels would complain that the Syrian air force would soften rebel targets prior to ISIL assaults. In fact, look at who has benefited the most from the rise of ISIL, i would argue it is Assad. The west and Turkey have almost completely abandoned their mission of deposing him because of ISIL. Also Russia has hardly done much against ISIL (much less than Turkey it could be argued). But nobody talks about Syria (and by extension Russia) supporting ISIL.

I see where you're coming from and i admit there seems to have been murky dealings on some level between the two, but I think whatever connection may have existed between Turkey and ISIL is overstated. Undoubtedly Turkey's past open border policy had been used by ISIL, buts it had also been used by the other rebels and even the Kurds and western govts like the Americans. Also Turkey has other better client groups to do their bidding; in fact groups like Nusra front and Ahrar al sham have long been giving the Kurds a hard time. And unlike ISIL, none of these other groups have ever attacked Turkey.

Why is this on HN?

Decently sized economy, in the same region as Israel which has a big startup community. Also the way turkey goes in the next few years is going to affect US politics since they are in a region that the US is heavily involved in. You can ignore politics if you want but they affect everything including startups

Good for them. 950 companies = 950 foreign intelligent agencies.... Independent finally!

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