The political economy of investing in stupidity

The man pulls a gun from his waist, for no reason at all, in front of everyone, and shoots himself right in the middle of the forehead. Everyone is horrified. The police are there too and immediately take control of the incident, saying, "Calmly put down the gun in your hand and raise your hands." Before he has even let go of the gun, still smoking in his hand, the man says, "I want my lawyer!" The policeman, astonished, voices his reaction: "Man, you've been caught red-handed, what can a lawyer do for you in this situation?" Ours replies, "Honestly, I'm curious about that too. How could a lawyer defend me in a situation like this?"

This joke has not remained a joke. On the occasion of 15 July, it has turned into something that those caught red-handed are putting the entire nation through. They can find a way to retell, in a different manner, an event that was caught red-handed in front of the eyes of not only Turkey but the whole world, and once they have found that way, they can also find a considerable number of suckers to be convinced by it.

After 15 July, for a long time, neither did the FETÖ members have any room for a defense regarding the event, nor did those who wanted to defend them have any argument or evidence to resort to. Even if they had something to say, the heat of the event, its being clear as day, and the atmosphere it produced left no one any possibility of saying anything different.

But after some time had passed since the event, a questioning began, first of all, over who had come out ahead from it. This was in fact nothing other than the first regret of every greedy murderer after being caught. Everyone is performing inventor-with-the-penny-drop exercises, stealing roles from an Agatha Christie. Whoever it benefited is the perpetrator.

Look at these shrewd detectives. If Erdoğan's power and authority have grown even further as a result of this affair, then he must have planned it and put a scenario into place. Fine, but what kind of plan, what kind of scenario is it that used all of you as extras and made the world watch it to a sold-out house? The pilots who boarded the planes on 15 July, those who made the operation plans, organized and carried them out, and were caught red-handed, the actors, all of them were subordinates who were bound not to Erdoğan but to Pennsylvania and took their orders from there. No one has any doubt about this. It was FETÖ that placed them in all the posts they held and kept them there for years. What kind of scenario could Erdoğan, or Hakan Fidan and Hulusi Akar, have written on the night of 15 July such that all of these people, that night, became extras in Erdoğan's scenario rather than serving the structure to which they were bound hierarchically by a great secret?

While doing this, are you aware of how stupid, how foolish, how feeble-minded you are making yourselves out to be?

Frankly, I give up on this too. If the only way to pin a "scenario-theater" label on the event is to make themselves look like suckers, they can even risk that. This is the real artistry: when the occasion calls for it, playing the fool for the sake of a small perception gain. Let people call them fools, feeble-minded, idiots, whatever. After all, in the new scenario they will write, Erdoğan will be cast as a dangerously intelligent despot who planned everything. After all, he came out ahead in the end. In such a case one says: die of your spite and your envy.

All murderers commit their murders in order to seize everything, but when they are caught they lose everything. How much room can this leave them to pin the responsibility for the murder they themselves committed on the guardians of the victim, on the grounds that it benefited those guardians?

Of course, there is also the meaning of the matter in the dimension of spiritual existence: those who set a trap falling into the very trap they set. There are great lessons to be learned for those who look back at the outcome of the curse the FETÖ ringleader uttered against Erdoğan and those close to him on 17-25 December. It was quite clear whom the one who cursed had in mind, and all the curses he directed at them turned back and struck his own community. The words "May fire fall upon their homes, may their nests be destroyed, may their unity be broken, may God block their way, may they become nothing" were not only a curse, but also the instructions and plan for what they would do. But in the end, what could be more natural and just than that, from the moment these plans were put into practice, they struck, on the contrary, the one who uttered the curse and those who set about carrying out his curse as though it were an instruction?

They did it to themselves and reaped what they sowed, yet they still go on trying to make what they reaped disappear with an "abracadabra" swindle and to write other stories about the event. Their own capacity for whispering doubts (vesvese) naturally has a very large share in this. Like the whispering of Hannas, as it is repeated, as it is blown in, as it is insisted upon, it is easy for it to draw a veil before people's eyes and make falsehood accepted in the guise of truth.

Undoubtedly, the sin of those who aid and harbor them is far greater. Today, the "theater" and "scenario" talk about 15 July is meddlesomely given a boost even by those who do not appear to be directly connected with FETÖ. What makes them carry the burden of these whisperings like porters?

Is it their own addiction to political gain, their interests, their hatred of Erdoğan, or simply their being suckers? This too is a subject that would take a lot of words.