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Comment by ozgune | Hacker News Reader

This has nothing to do with the secular military. In fact, the current pro-Islamic administration has imprisoned more than 10% of the generals in the military (trial ongoing for four years); and recently started "cracking down" on liberal journalists, NGOs, artists, professors, and so forth. This trial seems to be a continuum of those crack downs.

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This. The ongoing "Ergenekon" case is the poster child of jail without prosecution.

We think you're guilty, so we'll toss you in jail. But we can't come up with your charge right now because we're in the process of writing it. But you're a flight risk so it's okay.

I'm fine with people being punished for crimes but a lot of people were kept in for years before they were even charged. Some of them barely maintained their health and sanity. This is the sort of fascist-style suppression AK and Erdogan regularly engage in to make an example of people.

This is not very comprehensive but okay: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergenekon_(organization)#Debat... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_suspects_in_the_Ergene...

Meanwhile, I get extremely angry when Erdogan and his gang enjoy hero status in the Western press because they have taken steps to allow headscarves in government institutions. They did this not because of human rights, they did it to appeal to their heavily anti-secular constituency. Never mind the Ergenekon case and other horrors that AK is part of!

For a long time, he's vocally sought to increase tax on or ban alcohol, he's also suggested that everyone have multiple children, and recently his administration has spoken out against abortions, saying that he shall ban them. Whether this will happen is doubtful but I hope it sheds some light into what sort of people we're dealing with.

First, I don't see Erdogan et al. being styled as heros in the Western media (except for the self-hating, more left-leaning ones). We know very clear that their politics isn't about human rights but re-islamization.

Second, they run a pretty Nazi-like agenda: pure Turkish blood ideology (when it comes to marriages), supporting demographic pressure, strict top-down government, militarization, ideological intolerance, brutal assimilation of Kurds and other minorities, one can even count their recent anti-Israel doctrine and their attempts to establish themselves as the protector of Muslim interests and their volkisch politics to protect the Turkish immigrants in Western Europe (where they clearly influence politicians of Turkish origin and use their network of mosques and religious institutions to steer "their" population). It's a neo-Osmanic power game similar to what the Nazis did in the 1930s.

To expand on that, the new (now 10 years long) party in control of Turkey's government has been fining and jailing media companies, journalists, and prominent businessmen who don't toe the party line. A common technique is to charge "unpaid taxes" that exceed the value of the person or company's assets.

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europe/09/16/turkey.press....

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41935210/ns/world_news-europe/t/...

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/16/business/turkey-seizes-219...

http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/06/26/idUSL2690587920070...

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/default.aspx?pageid=438&...

http://www.economist.com/node/17155758

They have popular support for this. They have been re-elected twice, gaining millions of votes each time.

The crackdown on dissent in the military is important because under the 20th-century regime, the military had the duty of maintaining the secular character of the state and would regularly overthrow governments that seemed to become Islamic. The charge that people in the military are planning to overthrow the government is immediately believable, but so many people have been arrested and the evidence against them is so thin that it appears like a partisan purge. Here is some commentary:

http://www.opendemocracy.net/burhan-gurdogan/turkey’s-ergene...

http://rodrik.typepad.com/dani_rodriks_weblog/2011/12/güleni...

Soner Cagaptay has been the most prolific writer on the subject:

https://duckduckgo.com/html/?q=soner+cagaptay+ergenekon

Turkey has recently begun also arresting officers involved in the 1997 coup against the same Islamic party. They waited ten years to collect the power to do this.

http://www.b92.net/eng/news/world-article.php?yyyy=2012&...

http://www.todayszaman.com/news-279788-saner-the-impaler-amo...

Turkey's military has since surrendered its command.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/turkey/8671...

Meanwhile in Parliament, a member of the ruling party can assault an opposition member and the legislature will vote to approve of the attack.

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/turkish-parliament-sees-fre...

Turkey is currently the base of operations for the rebel forces of Syria who are largely Islamic fascists. I do not believe this to be a coincidence.

http://content.usatoday.com/dist/custom/gci/InsidePage.aspx?...

http://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/news/11762/wjc_analysi...

http://pjmedia.com/barryrubin/2011/10/22/scoop-obama-adminis...

http://araborthodoxy.blogspot.com/2012/03/christians-expelle...

http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2012/06/save-syria-demand-...

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