How does lying turn into a common ethical code? The truth that emerged in the FETÖ trials

The 15 July coup attempt and the FETÖ trials are being heard at full speed in all our provinces. In the courts set up to bring to light in all its dimensions the most insidious and most comprehensive network of treason in Turkish history, prosecutors are presenting their indictments to the court, and in return the putschists are putting on their own show with all their skill. In fact, on the coup-attempt side of the matter, the situation of flagrante delicto is so clear that at first consideration the room for the defense seems very narrow, and there seems to be no way left other than to admit the crime.

It is like the joke of the man who kills someone in the middle of a crowd, before everyone's eyes, and says "I want my lawyer" to the police who seize him while the smoke of the gun in his hand is still rising. The police, naively, ask: "Everything is out in the open, the victim is in front of you, the gun is in your hand, everyone is a witness, what will a lawyer do for you?" And the killer answers with the same naivety: "I'm wondering that too, how will a lawyer defend me in my present state?"

Our putschist traitors are, of course, not naive like the one in the joke. At the first trials in Ankara and Silivri, it was stressed a great deal that the attitude the defendants displayed was a complete theatrical performance. At later stages, things have gone far beyond even that. There are tons of footage of flagrante delicto situations. Persons seen during the act of the coup in hundreds of frames of the recordings can say with great ease that the persons in the footage are not themselves. They say that obvious phone messages have nothing to do with the coup. They say they have no connection at all with FETÖ, that they never knew FETÖ, that their being there that night for the coup action and coming together with the putschists was entirely a coincidence.

"If you bring footage showing that I fired, I will both accept all the charges against me and put a bullet in my head," one challenges. When footage showing the moment of firing is shown, he says: "I held my weapon purely out of a reflex of self-defense. I shouted 'go away from here.' At no moment that night did I use a weapon; my having a weapon in my hand does not mean I fired." The pilot who bombed the Parliament says he did this "for the purpose of fighting terror." One caught at Akıncı says he came there "to love his grandchild," another that he came "to shoot a wildlife documentary."

They are openly mocking people's reason and intelligence. They are distorting reality in the most radical way possible. They put texts through a complete deconstruction and ruin the meaning of language.

In this respect the coup trials reveal, beyond being sheer theater, unparalleled cases, which cannot be matched, that psychologists, social psychologists and sociologists need to study carefully. These cases need to be studied thoroughly while they are taking place. There are examples rich enough to produce very interesting theories from them. Where does the motivation that turns lying, the distortion of reality, into a common behavioral pattern come from?

That such a crowded group can knowingly adopt lying, looking people in the eye, as a mode of expression is not an ordinary event.

Besides, we are faced with a mentality organized for 50 years as a formidable secret society, which deems every kind of lie, trickery, murder and frame-up permissible for itself for the sake of its aim. They do not shrink from telling a lie that may be exposed one step later one step earlier, and when it is exposed they can immediately plaster it over with another lie.

Those who set out to form a criminal organization cannot in any case be expected to bind themselves with any ethical rule. In mafias there is not ethics but the code, and care is taken not to run contrary to the code. Yet however much of a criminal organization FETÖ is at the top, at the base it holds people together with a religious discourse, and this discourse is expected to have an ethical code that it normally cannot give up. What could push a movement motivated by religion to adopt so easily lying, which is a great crime and offense in all ethical understandings? An ethical code resting on a religious foundation can be suspended only by a justification that again rests on a religious foundation.

One of the ten commandments of Judaism says "you shall not lie." But those who run the world media empire, which is built on lies, are Jews. Likewise, one of the ten commandments says "you shall not kill," but most of those who run the arms industry as machines of killing are Jews, and they also continue to kill plenty of Palestinians in their own region. Likewise the ten commandments say "you shall not take interest," but those at the head of world finance capitalism are Jews. What makes some Jews suspend these basic religious commandments, the ten commandments, is that they operate "another ethical code" toward non-Jews. They suspend all ethical codes toward them by saying "We have no responsibility toward gentile (non-Jewish, ummi) people." And they do this in a perfectly devout feeling. Today they do not have the slightest compassion toward any of the millions of people in the world who die in the most savage and merciless way through the weapons they themselves make, the wars they incite, the intrigues they weave. Because they are not of their own religion, they bear no sense of responsibility toward them.

For FETÖ members too, lying is probably not an ethically right behavior, but that they do it so coolly stems from their being able to legitimize it in a religious sense. With a perfectly easy conscience they can lie to non-FETÖ people, steal their property and violate their every right. Because ordinary people have no share in their book. That is why they have no responsibility toward them.

This double-ethics approach is in fact humanity's greatest problem and also one of the most important subjects in the debate between the message of Islam and other religions. This subject also has much more to say.