Dimitris Chatzidimitriou; Turkey: “Necessary” ally and pampered child of the West

Turkey, every time it is confronted with decisions, announcements, and resolutions of international organizations that try to curb its aggressive behavior against Hellenism, repeats steadily and unwaveringly: “Greek blackmail and its propaganda have again passed”. Even now, as Erdogan is sending Oruc Reis to Kastellorizo, taking his friend Angela Merkel by surprise, he is accusing Greece of provocation!

In Ankara, after all, they are constantly claiming that the Greeks are “the spoiled children of the West”! Most recently Erdogan’s alter ego, spokesman Ibrahim Kalin, implying that the West’s attitude towards Greece is dictated by a latent philhellenism based on the cult of antiquity, as another Falmerayer ruled, that “today’s Greeks have nothing to do with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle!”

Obviously, this is pure evasion and propaganda, which despite its naivete finds favorable ears in the West. Both among the citizens, who are completely indifferent to what is happening in our neighborhood and see no reason to be interested in learning, and in the ranks of politicians who are sometimes unhappy, because “again Greeks are busy with petty issues, instead of talking to the Turks “.

It is clear that Turkey at the level of Public Diplomacy, as defined by the man who coined this concept, Edmund Gullion, in 1965, is doing better than Greece. But, even if we accept, for the economy of the debate, the argument that “Greeks are the spoiled children of the West”, we must highlight the reality that Turkey is the caressed child of the West, no matter what it does both inside and outside its borders.

The Turkish ruling elite “sold” the “Turkey plot” at a very good price throughout the Yalta settlement. Favored by geography, located along the soft underbelly of the USSR, Turkey and its ruling class enjoyed the warmth and practical care of the West. This was expressed, not only by the reduction of the values advocated by the Western world, in order to justify three dictatorships and two other “velvet” coups.

It was also expressed with a lot of money that contributed decisively to building and maintaining a regime of “liberal democracy”. The same thing continues now, in a world and an environment of geopolitical liquidity and multiple challenges. Turkey cultivates the impression of the necessary partner, which has the potential to intervene on three continents.

The West caresses Turkey

The West, which has unhesitatingly campaigned for “democratization” and the imposition of human rights in distant Afghanistan and Iraq and favored the partition of Yugoslavia, turned a blind eye to the massacre of Alevis in Gezi Park (2013). The West is also completely indifferent to the fate of 20 million Kurds and their justified demand for political and cultural rights.

The pampered child remains pampered even when it invades Syria and Iraq, and in various ways supports the jihadists whom it uses as death squads in Libya and Nagorno-Karabakh. It remains pampered when it buys weapon systems from Russia, a strategic rival of NATO, completely oblivious to the blow to the Alliance’s defense capabilities.

It enjoys the care of powerful Western countries, even when in its foreign policy it invents its own Law and displays the behavior of a bully, who seeks an opportunity for a quarrel at an oriental bazar. It scoffs at the threats of “measures and sanctions” chanted by rogue leaders and representatives of EU institutions. At the same time, it notes that in this way, more and more money is being disbursed, so that it can remain the favored child of the West.

Hypocrisy

What can the “carrot” do, when the “whip” is another misplaced theatrical performance of those who have reduced structural hypocrisy to high art. A few days ago, Sener Levent, a lively Turkish Cypriot journalist and publisher of the newspaper “Afrika” in the Occupied Territories, in a regular article in the Nicosia newspaper “Politis” wrote the bitter statement:

“The world powers are not putting any serious pressure on him (Erdogan). Putin is also his friend. Trump is also his friend. As is Boris Johnson. And Merkel is like his angel. The fact that he receives absolutely no serious pressure from anywhere gives him freedom of movement. And it weakens the struggle of those who fight against it.

There are some, for whom he curried favors, in the European Union, in the Council of Europe and in the European Court of Human Rights. At a time when human rights are being blatantly violated in Turkey, the president of the European Court of Human Rights, Roberto Spano, can go to Turkey and chat happily with Tayyip Erdogan.”

What they should have understood in the West is that Russia is clearer in the cynicism with which it pursues its policy. First of all, in Germany they should have understood that the spirit of militarism can not be gentrified, tamed, nor embellished. The spirit of militarism, a structural element of Turkey, can only be revealed, humiliated, defeated and made to vanish. It is the bitter and hard lesson of two wars that started in Europe before becoming global.