How does a coup next door look to the neighbour?

The operation carried out on the grounds that they were planning a coup against a group organized to re-establish the Germany of the 1800s is one of the largest-scale anti-terror operations in German history. As a result of such a large-scale operation, many people have been arrested on the grounds that they were preparing for a coup.

What is striking in this operation is that there is not yet even an attempt at a coup. There are suspicions that they would attempt a coup and that they organized for this purpose, and a formation that has been under surveillance since 2011 on the basis of this suspicion, perhaps at the stage of intention, perhaps at a stage of intention read by the creative imagination of intelligence, has been accused of coup-making and taken from their homes at night and arrested, without even having made an attempt.

German intelligence and security units have surely not become suspicious for nothing; they must have had strong intelligence that led them to this concern. But compared with Germany's indifference toward coup attempts in other countries, for instance in Turkey, and indeed toward the attempt of a coup group that had actually been put into action, that with its planes, tanks and rifles had held the country's bridges, seized its barracks, and come within a hair's breadth of seizing the government, does this not seem a bit of an excessive sensitivity? So a country sees coups in other countries as a game. The neighbor's coup sounds to the neighbor like drum and zurna.

Of course we are not ignoring the possibility of a coup in Germany, nor, of course, regarding it as a game. But I think we may regard as excessive sensitivity the German state's perception of a coup threat, almost as if it were already done and over, from a desire for a change of government at the stage of thought, expressed merely as discontent with the country's present course, in its own country where it is not even yet clear whether it would develop toward a coup.

German authorities never agreed to see the structure that emerged in Turkey on 17-25 December as the operation of a coup-plotting structure. They saw fit to read the event exactly as the coup plotters presented it. They preferred to see the coup scenario as a defense argument displayed by the government in the face of corruption charges. For years it displayed the same attitude otherwise in Turkey's struggle against the PKK. Although it had to accept in its official discourse that the PKK was engaged in destructive, divisive activity against Turkey, in practice it did not refrain from the sympathy and protection it showed to PKK elements. Here too it cited as an excuse for its own behavior the faults and deficiencies it attributed to democracy in Turkey, and persistently identified the PKK with the Kurds, precisely along the lines of the PKK's own discourse.

Before the government, it was the people of Turkey themselves, with all their components, who rose up against the coup plotters who on 15 July bombed the Turkish Grand National Assembly, closed the bridge connecting two continents and martyred dozens there, 252 of our people in all, and wounded 2,100. But even there Germany preferred to display more empathy with the coup plotters against the government and the Turkish people. It always made light of Turkey's struggle against coup plotters and terrorists. It found the sensitivity Turkey showed both against the coup and against terror exaggerated, saw the claims as identical with conspiracy, and saw the measures taken as pretexts clung to on the road to authoritarianism.

Yet now, against the organization it accuses in its own country of a coup attempt, there is no act other than a thought attributable to them and a formation that may quite well be interpreted as a political organization. Set against Turkey's actual coup plotters, whose terrors, actions and capacities are proven, these would not even be mentioned. Among the captured members of the organization there is said to be, all told, one serving "first lieutenant" and a large number of "former" army and police members. We hope that an operation of this scale against a group that makes you say, with all your irony, "these are going to stage a coup?" will be a cautionary lesson for Germany against coup and terror threats in other countries.

But still, let us not pass without mentioning other factors behind Germany's contradictory sensitivity toward this event.

The event is in fact entirely a manifestation of a never-ending indigestion, a discontent in society, against the situation into which Germany was cast after the Second World War.

As war reparations Germany was deprived of all its national claims, its greatness and many of its rights. In fact it was taken captive, and that submission has not ended even today despite all the economic performance it displays within the EU. It is still paying war reparations to Israel, and the country's foreign policy is almost held hostage by the USA and Israel.

In Germany's foreign policy there is no room to act independently of Israel or the USA. There are also tutelage mechanisms established within the country to secure this control. That is, neither the USA nor Israel feels even the need to exercise this control directly. German rulers manage to keep the country on the line of Israel and the USA through domestic laws, tutelage institutions, and the interventions of economic and financial circles. Everyone knows and sees this situation, and it causes serious discomfort among German nationalists.

An important part of the rising far right today also feeds on this discomfort. There is a longing for imperial-era Germany, but in Germany this longing has the capacity neither to carry out a coup nor to seize the government. In contrast, the German tutelary institutions that control the country are very sensitive to the slightest tendency in this direction and do not hesitate to take the harshest measures against it.

What this will cost in terms of Germany's image is not even a concern to them. When they perceive this threat, they do not have a moment to spend on worrying about acting consistently with the stances they display in other situations.

The long absence of coups in some places is the result of a power and order that was actually established by a coup continuing as tightly as possible there. Perhaps in countries where coups occur frequently, because coups cannot achieve total control, they lose control in a short time to other coups, and this, repeating in that way, creates a different appearance.