FETÖ's anxieties, like the thief who shouts "stop thief"

Five years have passed since the 15 July coup attempt. It is one of the most exceptional events in Turkish history. This event, which has mind-shaping and order-founding consequences once more, cannot fail to have traumatic effects as well. After all, it is not something one encounters often that tens of thousands of people, who the day before were living in an ordinary appearance of life together with all segments of society, should, on an instruction they received, embark on a treacherous action against the rest of society.

Perhaps it is like the moments of separation in the Balkans and Anatolia when people who the day before were living within normal neighborly relations and law suddenly turned into enemies of one another. The story is famous of the Serbs who, in the Bosnian war, turned all at once one night into enemies of the Bosniaks with whom they had been living merrily, the day before, in precisely this neighborly relationship, who did not shrink from killing them and who raped their women. This story was frequently applied against Muslims in Cyprus and during the Balkan Wars as well. The situation of the Armenians, incited in 1915 against the Muslims of Anatolia who were left defenseless because their men were at war, and what happened afterwards, is another similar example. These are events with traumatic effects in history, and they build borders between certain peoples that are not easily removed.

In fact, there was a huge community, spread across Turkey, affiliated with FETÖ, and this community, it turned out, harbored altogether different feelings toward the rest of society, feelings that were not reciprocal at all. In return for all the good faith and kind feelings that large segments of society held toward them, this community's own feelings and calculations were entirely different.

The structure's extremely closed and hierarchical organization made it possible for this community's internal discourse to be reflected outward in whatever way was desired. That is why Şerif Mardin had identified, long before, the difficulty of conducting sociological work on such a structure. Sociological analysis is difficult because this structure did not open itself to sociologists. It distorted the data, reflecting itself to sociologists in the way it wished, that is, in a way it was not. Of course, no body analysis could be done on deliberately distorted blood values.

Precisely for this reason, when on 15 July, and in fact before that on 17-25 December, this structure revealed in a shocking manner what kind of feelings it harbored toward the rest of society, Turkey experienced a kind of trauma akin to those of the Balkans, perhaps of Cyprus, Bosnia or the Armenian question. It found itself facing a situation in which the ominous plans about itself of a segment with which it had lived in very good neighborly relations were being put into practice, something it had never expected. That is why one must not reduce the event simply to the level of a coup attempt, nor leave it at that level while trying to understand it. The event is much deeper, much more complicated than that.

Granted, we would very much have liked to be able to see the event as a failed coup attempt by FETÖ and move past it. Frankly, I think the five years that have passed are enough to take up what we have lived through more coolly and evaluate it, even to think about a social restoration. Unfortunately, the mind steering the process is not a mind that attends, in a concerned and comprehensive manner, to the sociology and social psychology of the matter, to the integrity and health of the social body. When a war breaks out, the lords of that war also emerge, and they look for ways to profit from this war, and this makes it all the more difficult to re-establish the integrity and health of the social body. The angers swelling in the heat of the event turn into a politics, whereas we must go beyond this and think, bringing expert knowledge and wisdom into play, about how we can emerge from this trauma in the healthiest way.

Undoubtedly, the hub that ran the 15 July operation, before and after it, is also trying to prevent precisely this mind, this wisdom, from coming into play, and a politics of social restoration of the kind the country needs.

The time that has passed shows that expecting remorse, or even self-criticism, from the perpetrators of a coup and treason attempt carried out red-handed is in vain. The defenses, which at first could not come into play much in the heat of the event, have gradually turned, let alone into a defense, into a brazen and immoderately shameless aggression.

Just look: on the fifth anniversary of the 15 July treachery, instead of an agenda that commemorates and works through the epic struggle for deliverance the nation displayed, the air has been filled with the drone of the whisperings of those treacherous putschists, who brazenly water down this struggle, try to throw all the responsibility for 15 July onto the government, and try to turn all truths upside down. Every kind of whispering that could be produced about every detail and every person of that night was produced and an attempt was made to blow it in intensively.

Whispering (vesvese) is a form of propaganda. Today's propaganda techniques and social media and communication tools allow whispering to work most effectively and to turn the truth upside down.

The perpetrators of the ominous attacks that we all lived through live on that day, in which 251 martyrs fell to the ground and 2,200 people became veterans, are there red-handed, and how they were all bound to FETÖ within a hierarchical order is clear. But the cunning of hiding the real perpetrators by loading the responsibility for the event onto those who did not obtain enough intelligence about it, who for that reason did not take precautions, onto the victims who were nearly killed because of the precautions they did not take, would be understandable even if FETÖ itself did it alone. Indeed this is all they have been doing. They were going to play for time; as time passed, by repeating their whisperings more often and more brazenly, they were going to create an entirely different perception of history.

But there is not only the matter of listening to the history they wrote with their whisperings: the main opposition leader Kılıçdaroğlu serves as their spokesman and, at every opportunity, declares Erdoğan and the AK Parti to be responsible for FETÖ's growing strong.

The only guest apart from themselves in the shameless documentary, brazen like a thief who steals the loot, that they broadcast on 15 July in order to turn history upside down is Kılıçdaroğlu. Doesn't this alone lay bare FETÖ's political arm as plain as day?

Five years have passed since 15 July, and I would really have loved to say that it is now time for social restoration, but unfortunately this scene is enough to corrupt every kind of well-intentioned initiative.