Displaying its larceny in a "show of strength"

Ali Bayramoğlu described the Court of Cassation's upholding of Hanefi Avcı's sentence as the "Community's Show of Force." It is a description that expresses the situation very well, but it is incomplete. A description that would complete it is that this show of force by the community is at the same time an expression of its exhaustion, its sinking. The parallel structure staged its real show of force concerning Hanefi Avcı when it charged a man who had distinguished himself all his life as a conservative, nationalist police officer with founding and leading a communist armed organization.

The show of force there was not merely the show that was put on; it was achieved by making everyone believe this absurd claim. As a test of the level of credibility, the Hanefi Avcı case is in itself an exemplary case. This event was also an indicator of what the great credit produced in the name of the struggle against the structure called Ergenekon could achieve.

Yet now we are in an entirely different phase, and the show of force displayed in this phase requires giving up all the claims made until now. It is a show of force whose price has been or will be paid heavily. Every move takes the form of a kind of confession of crimes that gives away more of its intention, its plan and its responsibility. While putting on a show of force, the parallel structure announces its theft. This is a theft that no one can ignore.

Why might the parallel structure engage in displays of audacity that reveal its theft so openly? Is there any reason left in these displays of audacity? Let us repeat the question we asked before: What has happened to the community's strategic mind?

In fact, from the very beginning, although the parallel structure took part with all its elements in the 17-25 December coup process, it never neglected to say "we have nothing to do with it." It was impossible not to feel the infuriating brazenness in this, which treats one's interlocutor as a fool.

But as the process continued, more and more things began to happen that made one feel not so much that the interlocutor was being treated as a fool as that the intelligence attributed to the community was somewhat exaggerated. It is, after all, the inevitable result of constantly treating others as fools that a person suffers the loss of his own reason and insight. The assumption that the other is a fool makes acting wisely, even being wise, unnecessary. This is how God's rod works.

The parallel structure brought all the strategic acquis it had accumulated over fifty years and staked it on one great gamble, and lost. The 17 December attempt is, in a way, the story of a greedy gambler. It lost not only for itself but made those who believed in it lose too. At the point reached, compensating for the losses does not seem possible. It is not possible to return to the former state.

Losses on this scale naturally have a very serious traumatic effect on the psyche. It appears that we are facing the typical situations that can emerge in such post-trauma states. The community, which has an extremely strong schema of rightness, clings in this situation to a far more radical, far more aggressive language in order to be able to convince itself of its own rightness.

Apart from the PR campaigns run by a few skilled rhetoricians, most of them imported, and by masses of trolls insisting on the same schema of rightness, the structure is also sowing the root of the art of rhetoric with lye. Yet all these moves, which look from the outside like a complete rhetorical massacre, serve a function for their perpetrators: that of getting through the trauma with fewer losses.

Gülen motivates his people, despite all that has happened, with a firm belief that there is hope at the end of what is happening. This is a mechanism of compensation, for there is nothing in what has been done that can be explained by reason. In fact none of them has been acting on his own reason from the beginning. The "hocaefendi," who carries the truly wise secret, knows something, and whatever he says is what it is.

From the standpoint of the Ahl al-Sunna creed, this loyalty, which can be shown only to someone who receives revelation, that is, to a prophet, and even then only within the limits of the revelation he receives, has become the most distinguishing feature of the parallel structure, which is marked by its anti-Shiism.

Because of this feature they have lost empathy and the insight into how they appear from the outside. While saying let us manage perception, they were caught in the vise of the perception formed about them.

Thus with everything they do they have come to the point of sinking further.