Do not leave your work to history

There is something I always say: do not leave your cause to history, to the conscience of history, to the justice of history and the like. Certainly try to establish justice "today." Try to bring out the facts today. If you have documents, lay them out with full clarity today, tell the story, fight for it and influence public opinion on the matter. If that is not enough, and you have a case or a claim, keep following it up constantly. Otherwise there is no such thing as an eye called history that will reveal everything in the future, no separate knowledge or conscience called history.

Just look, even an event that is happening today gets fifty different accounts on the evening television programs. What guarantee could there be that in the future that event will manifest as it really was, in accordance with the facts? There can be none. If human knowledge is conjectural, that is, subjective, today, then the part of it reflected in historical knowledge cannot be, and is not, any more absolute, definitive or objective.

An event that you live through today in plain view, with everyone as witness, for better or worse, also has its witnessing and its telling to other people. One must not leave a gap in this telling either, or you may suddenly turn into a completely different actor in an event you yourself lived through. You may find yourself seen as wrong when you are right, as the wrongdoer when you are the wronged.

Especially if facing you is a special, organized, deliberate formation devoted to distorting the facts.

To take the simplest example, we all lived through the July 15 coup attempt together. July 15 was a day on which the lines in Turkish history were drawn most clearly, on which white and black came out in plain view, on which right appeared as right and falsehood as falsehood. That clarity manifested itself in the disgrace, the guilt and the repulsiveness that showed on the faces of the surrendering coup plotters, and, in contrast, in the rightfulness that showed in every bearing of the forces defending the homeland. It was such an alignment that for a long time no one could say a single word against the truths that July 15 revealed, and no one could raise the slightest objection to the victory proclaimed by that day and to the owner of the victory.

However, as time passed, the criminals of July 15 began to write different stories, and they repeated these stories so much that, like the whisper of Satan, like the insinuation of the khannas, they began to influence people. Those who stood on the side of right on July 15 were not so quick in telling their own cause, while the criminals showed incredible alacrity in writing a completely different history.

Perhaps inside Turkey, in the face of such vivid witnesses of the event, the historiography they fabricated was not that effective, but abroad they are almost about to get the story that the coup was a setup by Erdoğan swallowed. Of course, with a market ready and eager to swallow this story, to love such a lie even more, and to put a price on it and buy it, they can hardly be said to have had much difficulty. Nobody has any concern for something called truth. Everyone is after a lie that will do their job.

The FETÖ claim that İlker Başbuğ put forward out of the blue, and the claims that Kılıçdaroğlu yesterday clung to with both hands and expanded, are an effort to reheat the well-known history by turning it inside out once again. When they pronounce again and again, as if they sincerely believed it, a history in which everyone was an actor on one side or another, it can gain a value of reality in the marketplace. They evidently know that discourse has such an effect. As they repeat it like a dhikr, they do not care that what they do injures the truth and infuriates honest people; what they have lost in the field they aim to lose shamelessly in language.

Yet we all lived through this history together; let us remind them.

FETÖ is not an organization that emerged together with the AK Parti. It is a Masonic organization whose roots go back to the early sixties and which has been influential under all of Turkey's governments for more than 50 years.

It had a parasitic structure on all governments and knew how to benefit from all the governments before the AK Parti. Because FETÖ did not consist of FETÖ alone; there was a superstructure that protected it, used it, and used it as a tool in the governance of the country.

All previous governments "served" FETÖ. The concept of "service" that FETÖ chose as the name of its movement was actually a code: it signified that everyone would serve this movement. Since the sixties all governments have served it. Perhaps with the exception of Erbakan, though even from him this structure did not refrain from taking what it was due.

In fact the saying is no joke: FETÖ had itself become the state, and the AK Parti infiltrated that structure and brought it down. The only government that identified FETÖ and dared to fight it was the AK Parti government and Erdoğan. That struggle required great courage and independence from it, and the only party that had this courage and maximum independence was the AK Parti.

Başbuğ, who is now writing a new history on the fight against FETÖ, need only open his eyes once more and see that the entire command echelon of the soldiers who carried out the July 15 coup had infiltrated the army long before the AK Parti, even during the military administrations of March 12 and September 12.

Kılıçdaroğlu's problem, on the other hand, is not really one of seeing or not seeing.

The FETÖ fairy tale he is now telling us is not nearly enough to hide his link with FETÖ. Let us skip the period before the AK Parti pulled off FETÖ's mask; the fact that, precisely when that mask had come off, he went and began cooperating with FETÖ against the AK Parti is a reality that no historiography can erase.

It appears that this cooperation with FETÖ is still continuing, and that they have now tied their hopes to writing history with tongues that lie.