Sociology must not be neglected, even if the event exceeds sociological knowledge…

What happened on and after July 15 is not something that happens to a country every day. It is also inevitable that such extremely exceptional events trigger a change that penetrates a country to its marrow. Indeed, to say that nothing can ever be as it was after July 15 is not merely a prophecy, but an appraisal of the unavoidable sociological consequences that this event, by its nature, has produced or will produce.

One thing that those who planned a coup attempt like that of July 15 should never have neglected was the sociology of the society in which they were carrying out the coup and whose administration they aspired to.

We actually knew that the know-it-alls tied to FETÖ had a very poor record in this regard. With the analyses and predictions they made in advance about the Local Elections held after December 17, they both badly pumped themselves up and badly misled the domestic and foreign circles that believed them and invested in the "post-AK Parti" era.

Looking at the polls they conducted in places where their own disciples were concentrated, they kept producing the expectation that the AK Parti's vote could not exceed 25 percent, and we understood that they were not engaging in mere manipulation.

They had really believed it themselves. Although the movement was so selfish and so closed in on itself, it regarded itself as a priceless blessing for Turkey, and always believed that the people saw this too.

They evidently inherited this kind of outlook from socialist revolutionary movements.

The socialist movement, too, unilaterally conceives its relationship with the people, from whose world of cultural meaning it is utterly remote, as that of a "savior."

It is, as it were, a platonic populism: the people have no knowledge of it, the people never know, understand or appreciate that these folks truly want to save them.

That is why, when revolutionaries come to save their peoples, they can characterize the lack of support they meet from the people as ingratitude and failure to appreciate. Yet they have given the people nothing. The people have seen nothing from them but harm. From what they do in the name of "saving the people," the people's share is only more unrest, more anarchy, more instability. The people do not expect "salvation" from them.

Today, aren't the Kurds also telling the PKK, "edi bese (enough), don't die for me, don't kill for me. Everything you say you do for me makes my life even more unbearable. My children are dying, my home is being destroyed"? Don't the Kurds also see that what the PKK today calls saving the Kurds is now only protecting its own organizational existence and power?

Perhaps, unlike the socialist movement, FETÖ had established its relationship with the people in a different way, through the himmets (donations) it collected from the people by wheeling and dealing.

While seizing the people's himmet, it seems to have badly misread the level of voluntariness it saw in the people.

It had seen that the people appreciated what was presented as service, but it did not sufficiently see that the people had also seen the abuse of it and had become fed up with it.

In short, the sentences that best express the level and dimensions of the sociological knowledge that FETÖ coup-making needed in order to embark on such an action came from Kerim Balcı, who on the night of the coup was connected to their own channels and pouring out analyses about the people of Turkey. In response to the people being called by the President to oppose the coup, Balcı poured out the whole of his sociological horizon about Turkey as follows:

"Let alone how to defend against a bomb or the bullet of a G3 rifle, how to take cover, our people do not even know how to lie on the ground. We are the children of a society that has largely done its military training during the AK Parti administration as paid service; society cannot be put up against the military.."

Evidently, the coup plotters did not take into account at all the heart ties of the Turkish people with their leaders.

Evidently, they had no realistic, sociological foresight about what the Turkish people could do, what kind of awareness and will they had developed against coups over the last twenty years, or what kind of organic bond they had developed with the services and organizations of the AK Parti.

The price of neglecting this sociological reality was of course very heavy for them.

In fact, what is worse, the coup plotters, with their 50 years of accumulated "service," with a structure made up of the cadres they had planted, closed in on itself, selfish and promising nothing to the rest of society, calculated on seizing the power of the whole country through a coup to be carried out with the minority society they had formed.

This outlook was no different from trying to dress Turkey in a new kind of Baathism.

Looking at FETÖ's understanding of religion, it is evident that it thought it could install in Turkey, in this age, a dense dictatorship that could even surpass Baathism, which shows that it had reached a frightening peak of being deprived of sociology.

Of course, even if, God forbid, things had developed differently that night, Turkey's existing sociological conditions would in the end have rejected such a development. But the price of this madness could have been much heavier. God protected us.

In essence, July 15 is an exceptional event not only for Turkish society, but even in terms of the social developments we are accustomed to in general. Social movements, which generally set in motion with an instinct of opposition, this time displayed an extraordinary will to protect an existing government, and moreover a leader who for years had been portrayed here and there as a "dictator."

With July 15, Turkey has by its own will held on to, preserved and embraced a political regime that previously stood only by being presumed to be an obligation imposed on it. It created a tremendous ground for the exceptional integration of the society within itself, and moreover displayed an exceptional example of the integration of state and nation.

As we have said before, thus the process that began as a coup turned into a real revolution through the people's counter-move.

We are now at the stage of watching what will make a revolutionary process differ from other historical examples.