This is Turkey

While we were closely watching the fight against the unhinged terrorists in Turkey's Southeast, the largest-scale, most savage, most unhinged and most shameless terrorist onslaught we could have witnessed targeted Turkey from within the General Staff itself. As if mocking our minds each time we spoke for years of the possibility of coups or of the coup-like character of certain stirrings.

Those who replied with scorn, "A coup in this day and age?", have, at a time when by their calculations we should have drifted even further from the times of coups, seen the most audacious, most senseless, most savage coup attempt. Not only they saw it, of course; all of us saw and lived it.

I am not counting, of course, those who say that there are no coups in this age, that there is at most the use of the threat of a coup as a discourse and converting it into votes. They were openly trying to blunt and kill the sensitivity against coups, while quietly preparing the ground for the coup. But as for those who truly think that in this age a coup has no chance of succeeding because it would find no response or support from the world, I can say that there is only naivety. We said back then: To say that the world would not buy a coup in Turkey means not knowing the world. One has to be too well-intentioned to say that today's world is against coups. We have only just seen how silent even the countries that sell the loftiest democratic values fell in the face of the coup in Egypt. For any coup in Turkey to receive support in that world you consider civilized, it only needs to be "successful." How much blood it sheds, how many people it arrests unlawfully, how many human rights it violates will matter not a bit to them. Such values are merely material for governing the societies they take for fools, under the conditions they want. Whenever they wish, they wipe these values out with one stroke.

Second, the idea that there are no coups in this age is merely the good intentions that those who did not consider this coup likely attribute to this age. Those who are eager for a coup are under no obligation to take into account either this age or the good intentions of the people living in it. We can say that they calculated that when they seized power with the weapons in their hands the country would go back fifty years anyway, and that people would quickly move away from the expectations and thoughts that being "in this age" requires.

Had the coup dared in this country on July 15 succeeded, God forbid, those coup plotters would of course have started producing a discourse that regards themselves as heroes and the segments they struck as traitors.

However, whatever they did, however hypocritical today's world is, they might have somehow explained firing on the people resisting the coup, but I must admit that, looking at it from every angle, I cannot see how they could explain raining bombs from the air on parliament. All that comes to my mind is the possibility that, a short time after they started the coup, the coup plotters saw the gravity of the matter and the possibility of failure and panicked, and that at some point everything went off plan and they began to act on their emotions and rage. Indeed, it can be thought that the gathering of deputies in the Parliament building, which even enemy soldiers did not bomb in wartime, and their beginning to send messages to the world from there, drove them psychologically mad, and that with this madness they acted senselessly. Still, we have no chance of putting ourselves in their place, and thank God we do not.

July 15 was undoubtedly a calamity that befell this nation, or rather, in its outcome, a deliverance from a great calamity. This calamity has many aspects better for Turkey than a thousand pieces of advice. FETÖ, when it did not obtain what it wanted from its unconventional coups tried earlier on February 7, in the Gezi uprising and on December 17-25, and even with the covert support it gave to the recent uprising of the PKK terrorist organization, tried to finish the job directly with a conventional coup. The fact that the earlier ones were also coup attempts has thus become clear and certain as of July 15. In one, for the one who understood "Oslo and the statements there were not the issue," for the one who knew "the issue was not the trees," in the other, for the one who reasoned that the issue "was not corruption." After all these attempts, its actually attempting a coup also seems to have arisen from a kind of necessity. Though, just as in the others, it embarked on these things regarding its success as certain. Let us give credit: it was a very well prepared and very finely designed piece of work. But just as in the others, there was again an adverse reality that had not been taken into account. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Now the whole of the people of Turkey have joined this adverse reality.

Sociality is a field of disagreement, separation, otherness. If there are values that unite a society toward a common purpose, goal, ideal, that society becomes a nation. To be able to become a nation, there must be a value, an ideal commonly shared by all citizens, and for quite some time we had been complaining that such a common value had been lost.

December 15 gave this society a tremendous common value, through a great epic event.

The defense that the people of Turkey displayed in its entirety against this shameless onslaught targeting Turkey has given this society an invaluable opportunity on the path to making it a nation.

The common-denominator alliance that all parties displayed in parliament, and the resolute stance that almost all kinds of media displayed, are important components of July 15, which forms a very important milestone in Turkey's history of becoming a nation.

The July 15 event is an important day on which Turkey introduced itself to the whole world in its most beautiful and strongest aspect, in a way never to be forgotten again. It has also been a strong warning to those who might harbor other ambitions for Turkey. How well this day fits Turkey's history, how well this nation, which shielded the shameless onslaught with its chest, fits this homeland, this state and this leader.

May July 15 be blessed as Turkey's festival of democracy and freedom.