15 July: the nation's magnificent return to history

Exactly one year ago today, Turkey lived through one of the most interesting days in its history. On one side, Turkey faced the most senseless, most treacherous coup attempt. But on the other, there took place an event in which the most meaningful answer a vile coup could meet was given by the people in the most meaningful way.

A coup is an action that contains within it all crimes. Those who undertake this action usurp an authority that does not belong to them and commit treason by pointing back at the people the weapons the people entrusted to them. In the coup action there are a thousand and one kinds of lies and deceit, there is slander, there is the distortion and murder of truth, there is the killing of people who resist or have the potential to oppose. Unfortunately, the coups that contain all these crimes have been the founding will of the last 55 years of Turkey. These criminals shaped Turkey's constitution, its existing social and political institutions and the country's system of government.

As Turkey's democracy became functional after these coups, attempts were made in one way or another to repair the devastation these coups caused.

Even so, compared with the previous coups, the 15 July coup attempt had an aspect that exceeded itself. This time the coup evidently did not have enough time to legitimize itself. That is why it calculated that it could silence and control, relying only on the weapon in its hand, by the force of that weapon through pressure, a society whose sociology had changed to a great extent, which had urbanized and become middle class. That is why, unlike the coups so far, it shed a great deal of blood from the very first hours. By opening fire on the resisting people, it thought it could frighten and control them. When events slipped out of its control within a few hours, it furiously bombed the TBMM, the seat of democracy and of the people's will.

"THOSE OPPRESSORS WILL SEE BY WHAT KIND OF A COUP THEY WILL BE OVERTHROWN"

That it seems strange that FETÖ poured all the power it had accumulated for 50 years into such a frenzied coup attempt in a single night stems only from the coup's having failed. Truly, if the coup had succeeded, today we would be listening only to praises of a perfectly executed plan. With its military operation, its martial law organization, its insidious and yet equally skillful cadre-building that has been going on for fifty years, its ByLock, its media, its PR, its international reach and alliances, the plan showed the highest performance a human being could put forward. The plan was not bad; only toward the end there was some haste, some hurry in it. There was an amateurishness incompatible with the coolness this organized structure had displayed up to now.

A small mishap can render a perfect plan inoperative, and in the end people begin to talk not about the perfect sides of the plan but about its foolish sides. We of course believe that this mishap was a requirement of another great plan, the plan of Almighty God.

But those who prepared and carried out this plan, because they are bewildered at what hit them, and because they were always the ones setting up plots, are right to think that they have fallen for another game. However, the game they have fallen for is not a human being's game. Yet there is God's clear promise: "Those oppressors will see by what kind of a coup they will be overthrown." "They plot, and God plots against them."

Truly, there is no other power in Turkey that could lead such an insidious, such a treacherous, such a hypocritical life and carry out such a perfect plan.

The AK Parti and its leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan never drew their strength from taqiyya, from intrigue, from hidden agendas. On the contrary, they did politics by sharing everything with the public in the most transparent way, by opening their own plans and intentions to the public in the most transparent way, by offering their programs to the public in the most open way. In this state they established a throne in the heart of the nation.

THE RESISTANCE THAT BROKE SOCIOLOGY'S ROTE

On the night of 15 July this country witnessed a great treason, but in the face of this great treason it also witnessed the awakening, the resurrection of a nation. This nation, which was torn to pieces as a result of the First World War and bound with various chains of tutelage never to rise again, completed that night, with the spirit breathed into it, the revival it had been pursuing for quite some time. That day was a night in which an unprecedented unity of nation and state was realized. On 15 July, Turkey was not only subjected to a coup; with the epic resurrection it displayed against that coup, it was born anew.

Nowhere in the world do social movements take place as pro-government. This is a situation contrary to the sociology of social movements. It is not something that has been seen, people who have come down to the streets protecting their states and governments against a coup or an uprising. That is why the international media that first received those images interpreted the event with their ready-made rote formulas and reported that these crowds were marching against Erdoğan.

Yet 15 July presented an event that also overturned all the balances of sociology. We were facing an event that required setting aside entirely the existing rote formulas of sociology. These crowds who had taken to the streets to protect a government, a President, a state that had been governing them for 14 years did not fit the book of sociology either. According to the rote formula at hand, such movements had to be of an oppositional character.

The coup attempt was an act of occupation. Very clear. Given the developments in Syria, the general situations in the Middle East and the situation the country is in, and in the conjuncture of the fight against terror in the southeast, this coup attempt did not express a simple demand for a change of administration but the intent to occupy the country and drag it into a full civil war.

That day this nation saw this danger too and defended itself, defended its leader who expresses its integrity, defended its state, and thus proved that it is a nation.

That day a spirit was breathed into the body of a nation, and a nation that has a word to say in the course of the world re-entered the stage of history in all its splendor.

May it be blessed...