Wednesday September 2nd 2020, Paris. French newspapers lead on the day the trial opens of alleged accomplices to the 2015 Charlie Hebdo killers. But Conservative leaning broadsheet Le Figaro headlines the latest and far larger threat to European and Middle East peace. Turkish incursions in the eastern Mediterranean.
Or perhaps I should more accurately say the pretensions of would-be Sultan Recep Tayyip Erdogan, President of Turkey. [He has had an opulent palace built complete with Praetorian Guard …]
You would have thought that this world had enough problems already, especially in the Middle East with meltdown in places like Lebanon. But that is precisely when and why ideological dictators like Erdogan make their move. He is a proven master at setting the agenda, exploiting events, and thereby getting his way. Le Figaro likens his modus operandi to that of Vladimir Putin.
Erdogan has invaded Greek territorial waters with Turkish warships to prospect for gas reserves lying under the eastern Mediterranean. This is but the latest in a series of initiatives Erdogan has taken to pursue his restoration of a Golden Age of Ottoman Rule.
In response, the Greek military has been on a war footing since August 10th. But Erdogan is defiant. Just last weekend, Le Figaro cites him stating [my translation]:
If its a question of armed conflict, we are fully prepared to die for our cause. The question is therefore: Are those who resist us in the Mediterranean prepared to make the same sacrifice?
And that is the calculation Erdogan is making. That the Greeks and the Europeans will ultimately back off because they lack the backbone to go to war over gas reserves in waters disputed by Turkey. A very penetrating analysis. It is how such men succeed in their immoral and unlawful ways. They read human nature and the dominant forces at work for what they actually are – then they exploit their position ruthlessly to one overwhelming purpose: the aggrandizement of themselves and their cause.
He, of course, won’t be sacrificing his own life. Young Turks will do that for him. Even so, he portrays himself as the Saviour of his people from foreign aggression. History is raided for events which either prove or can be spun to prove the validity of his neo imperialist line. Detractors and opponents are falsely accused of the very tactics and attitudes he himself is exercising: provocation and aggression against innocent, peaceable Turks.
Many innocent and peaceable Turks, however, have been rounded up and sent to prison for political reasons presented as crimes. The police, judiciary and civil service have been purged of dissenters; the press and television have becomes conduits of official propaganda; the constitution was amended to give the President dictatorial powers. The Kurds indigenous to eastern Turkey are characterised as terrorists and treated accordingly.
This reminds me of 1930s Hitler.
It is deeply disturbing to consider that his tactics and pretensions are not so different from his Chinese counterpart, similarly engaged in militaristic incursions in the South China Seas. Xi Jinping also arranged to change China’s Constitution to make himself pre-eminent.
The purpose of constitutions however is to constrain individuals or groups from acting in their own interests, thus undermining the interests of the common welfare of the people at large as defined by the constitution.
Under Xi Jinping, we hear of appalling human rights abuses against the Uighur muslims. Christians of course have been seriously persecuted in China for decades. The slaughter at Tiananmen Square spoke volumes, as does today’s illegal absorption of Hong Kong. Note well China’s Social Credit System. But this should not surprise us from a regime founded by revolution on atheism and the ideology of Karl Marx.
Whether it’s militant radical Islamism or the evangelistic Materialism of Marx, such ideologues expressly aim to dominate the world to impose their version of “good”. They always play on feelings of patriotism and nationalism; they harness a normal sense of belief in one’s own national identity and culture but exploit it to an internationalist, totalitarian end.
The paradox is no paradox at all. Such ruthlessly ideological internationalists know the power of patriotic identity. They systematically deploy it to destroy its true meaning while channelling its energy to achieve their ends.
The track record of the governments of China and Turkey this century show them to be
- dictatorial
- totalitarian
- expansionist
- militarist
- illiberal
- authoritarian
- oppressive
But what, pray, preoccupies the metropolitan Liberal Left elites of the western world today ?
China or Turkey ?
No. They are perversely still fighting the battles of previous centuries. They are still in the outdated and pernicious worldview of Karl Marx: religious Materialism and social engineering by a utopianly benign State staffed by zealous acolytes of the Enlightenment.
Instead of seeing the world for what it is – and always will be – they are still trying to further a Utopian Vision born 2 centuries ago: they treat the present as if it is still the past. Thus they fixate on Trump or Brexit as threats to world peace. Meanwhile the real threats operate with impunity. The Erdogans and the Xi Jinpings are the reality of the fascist bogeyman these people force us to believe about any manifestation of right wing worries in western democracies.
They refuse to identify today’s true enemies. They fail to see that they are actively assisting those enemies. They fail to see that their continual denigration of traditional western values is destroying western identity and morale. That cultivating eternal self reproach about the atrocities of a bygone colonial era is delusory and self defeating.
Just what is their purpose in this obsessive exposure of past sins ?
Answer:
- To establish Materialist Socialism’s virtue
- To prove the bankruptcy of Conservatism and sentence it to oblivion
Meanwhile today’s Stalins, Hitlers and Maos exploit western distraction, deception and turpitude with virtual impunity.
It is time for the PC Left to wake up before the threat they dread comes upon us all and destroys the very tradition of freedom which allows them to exercise their ideological delusion.
Ray Catlin
Conservatism Institute 