The penalty for taking the nation for fools

In the operation launched against the parallel structure within the police, some of those taken into custody were arrested on charges of espionage. This is the first reckoning brought against the flagrant crime exposed earlier, in which the telephones of thousands of people were tapped. There are undoubtedly many more interlinked crimes that will later be added to this account.

Putting one's ear to the telephones of people without justification is in itself a great crime. When you do this against the prime minister, the highest officials of the state or the executives of certain companies, many other crimes are included in the account, from corruption, bid-rigging and violation of privacy to espionage and treason.

Of course, on top of the sum of all these crimes there is also, as a bonus, the act of establishing an organized crime network in order to carry out a full-fledged attempt to overthrow the legitimate government.

But there is one more, greater crime that must be added to all these crimes, and that is taking the people for fools, which is in fact one of the indispensable elements of all coups.

At first glance, looking at the files, arguments and justifications that the coup-makers prepare as pretexts for their coups, you might think how stupid the coup-makers are. A coup for these reasons? A whole great state mind convinced by these simple arguments?

Remember 28 February, if you like. The organizations said to threaten the state turned out to be entirely figments of the imagination, and most of the threat analyses presented to the state turned out to consist of paranoid delusions. This of course gave the impression of how simple and how stupidly the coup-makers were acting, but the truth of the matter was far more complicated. Whether the coup-makers were stupid or were taking the people for fools was not so clearly understood at first glance.

When it comes to 12 September, perhaps people could decide much more easily. Going back a little further, what can anyone say about the intelligence of the junta members who believed and set out on the strength of the baby, dog and students-put-through-a-meat-grinder cases of the 27 May coup?

It is understood that one of the justifications of the 17 December coup attempt will also be the case concerning the Selam-Tevhid organization. It cannot be brushed off with "the organization is a pretext; when the aim is to listen in on people, you establish contact with this organization, you listen in." They have really made the existence of this organization the subject of an indictment. Judging by the insistence in the manner these reports are run in the parallel media, being caught red-handed in a raid has not the slightest effect. They continue to tell stories that an organization called Tevhid and Selam really exists, and that through this organization, and with the operational contribution of the Mutaşas, members of the government have surrendered to Iranian intelligence.

One cannot really be sure whether they truly believe this story. If they are under Iran's influence, where does the message they try to deliver from there, by stopping the trucks going to Syria, that "the government supports ISIS or al-Qaeda," go? Is Turkey under the influence of Iran, of Saudi Arabia, of the Salafis, of the Shiites? Is it so hard to accept that Turkey and the government will follow their own politics and their own mind on their own?

Among the profiling files that emerged in the Ergenekon case, in the study carried out specifically on Selçuk University, I had the opportunity to see the profiling file on myself. In a profiling file that came from the same pen, I personally was accused of being at once pro-Shiite and Salafist-Wahhabi, pro-PKK and pro-Hizbullah, both a Kurdish and an Arab nationalist, both a radical Islamist and a Fethullahist. Later I also learned who the person who kept the file was. That person actually knew very well what I was and was not, and that all these attributes could not possibly come together. Even so, solely in order to create the heaviest possible impression about me on the junta members who were the addressees of the profiling report, he had poured out all these labels. When I read the file, I only wondered how the addressee of the report had taken this insult made to him.

The Selam and Tevhid organization case is a complete nonsense case, absurd beyond any interpretation. If they believe this much nonsense, the situation is even graver; it means that for years they played the role of very intelligent people to us. In my view, in this case they should also be tried for having usurped the place of people of sound mind. Of course, this judgment would be made by psychiatrists.

But still, this kind of mental breakdown has an innocent side. Yet in this affair there is not a crumb of innocence. Indeed, these ways of reasoning are one of the indispensable components of all coups. It begins by taking the nation for fools, but then this way of reasoning turns back and makes its producers foolish. In the end, the revenge of those who were taken for fools comes very dreadfully: they make those who took them for fools thoroughly foolish.

The inevitable result awaiting all coup-makers who take the people for fools: becoming foolish. Because all the justifications produced to legitimize the coup require taking people for fools, in order to prove their credibility they are forced to appear to believe those foolish justifications.

And this is a punishment from God, in His own wisdom.