Even if coups are heaped upon coups, revolution cannot be avoided

Nine years have passed since the most recent coup in our recent history, the one that led to a revolution. The revolution it brought about, that is, July 16, was a day on which Turkey managed to prove its own existence on the road to becoming a nation that possesses a state. Until July 15 we can in fact say that this nation had no state; rather, the state had a populace, a society, but that populace lacked the quality of being a nation.

On July 15, for the first time in the history of our coups, the nation took ownership of its own will against the coups. By mounting a fierce, hard-fought defense against the overthrow, against its own wishes, of the government it had itself elected, it did not so much rescue a state it already possessed as demonstrate its worthiness to possess a state.

Until then, while the centers of power that ruled Turkey had institutionalized this through military, bureaucratic or oligarchic strata, coups had been adopted on the stage of democracy as a routine of applying a "balance adjustment" to a populace that might spin out of control.

This routine did not, as is supposed, begin on May 27 either. In fact, from 1909 onward this routine was the means of sustaining a normal order of power operating in Turkey.

IN TURKEY THERE IS A STATE STOLEN FROM THE NATION

In Turkey, coups did not arise as the result of a power struggle within the country itself. Coups were at the same time the instrument of intervention, the method of balance adjustment, of the imperialism that had beset Turkey after the First World War. In Turkey there is a state stolen from the nation. A state that implemented policies utterly incompatible with the nation's spirit, faith and identity never had any agenda of being loyal to the nation. On the contrary, it worked like a warden trying to force the nation into a particular mold in line with imperialist interests. It is impossible to understand and situate, without an analysis of imperialism, a body politics that alienated Turkey from its identity, culture, history and essence, that forcibly imposed on it another identity, culture and way of life, indeed the identity and culture of the very enemies it had fought.

For a full 30 years of the single-party period, all the policies were implemented without any election, "in spite of the people." The claim that these policies were "for the people" was a simple and cunning deceptive argument of power on the part of those who implemented them. Nowhere in these policies was the slightest kindness, compassion or understanding shown to the people. On the contrary, the people were humiliated, crushed, wounded and, when the occasion arose, severely punished. Because none of these policies was designed and implemented by people from within the people, none was done out of genuine consideration of some "good" for the people. The logic of belittling the people in the eyes of the nations it had fought for centuries, and of trying to make it resemble those enemies, cannot be situated anywhere other than occupation and imperialism.

THE COLONIAL NATURE OF COUPS

In fact, from May 27 onward, nearly all the coups in Turkey were connected to the same imperialist interests and addresses. The relations of all the officers of the May 27 junta with the United States, the direct aid they received from the US after the coup, and their taking on the governing of the country virtually as a colony of the US were hardly a political habitus alien to them. That the CIA had for a long time even paid the salaries of Turkey's National Intelligence Organization was noticed by Bülent Ecevit, himself a Prime Minister of the period, and was later to be exposed by him. The coup plotters' saluting NATO and the US in particular immediately after the coup is not merely a matter of a simple foreign policy gesture. Those coup officers never had any concern about being accountable to the nation or proving anything to it.

After the coups of March 12 and September 12, the address of the February 28 postmodern coup was also plainly "the West." Its command center was the "Western Working Group." When forcibly imposing the identity and lifestyle of Western imperialism on the people of this country, they had not the slightest concern for courtesy toward the people, toward this nation. Because they did not belong to this nation, to this country. The open war they declared on all the values of this nation turned them into agents of occupying enemies against this nation.

That the cadres who carried out July 15 were, ostensibly, members of a religious community merely showed the weathervane capacity of coup plotters who were anti-national in essence. The ultimate loyalty of these coup plotters would never be to this nation. Even the name of the coup communiqués, "Peace at Home, Peace in the World," was the password of a message of loyalty given to imperialism. Was not Turkey kept for years within the borders drawn for it by the very imperialism that destroyed the Ottomans, by reciting this password?

COUPS AGAINST THE ARAB SPRING AND JULY 15

In the events of the past 9 years in our world, we have also seen what kind of an opening Turkey has as a nation that possesses a state. Turkey is a country that does not fit within the borders drawn for it or into which it has been squeezed. But as it reaches toward its own natural borders, it meets the resistance of the forces at home that try to suppress, frighten and intimidate it.

The July 15 coup attempt was a move undertaken to narrow again Turkey's geography of the heart, which had re-emerged with the Arab Spring. In the Arab Spring process, the revolutions that took place in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria were again suppressed by coups. The country that inspired and emboldened them merely by its existence and its openings was Turkey. This meant the shaking of an imperialist order established after the First World War and running smoothly ever since, and the shifting of its stones. Each of those countries was, within a short time, put back on its rails by coups. In the same days in Turkey, they tried to dry up the source of inspiration with the Gezi operation and then the judicial coup of December 17-25. When these produced no result, they tried a direct military coup on July 15. But thanks to Erdoğan's exceptional leadership, they saw before them the awakening, even the resurrection, of the nation.

In the 9 years that have passed since that day, Turkey's rise as the one independent country continues. The distance Turkey has covered over 9 years in the fields of defense industry, security and foreign policy is no simple development; it is largely the story of its wresting its independence away and becoming a state that belongs to the nation. The prospect of a terror-free Turkey reached today has been possible thanks to this vision.

Last December the revolution in Syria was completed and was joined to the July 16 revolution.

It is fitting to write the struggle of the heroes in Gaza, who stand in the position of the Kuva-yı Milliye, into the July 16 revolution as well. That place too will, sooner or later, be integrated into the same spirit, the same spirit of awakening and resistance. What was intended on July 15 turned out to be the exact opposite. Just as, in Syria, in Afghanistan, in Gaza today, the exact opposite of what is intended

is happening. They plot a scheme, and God plots a scheme, and God is the best of schemers.