I just gotta bring Georgiaboy61’s most excellent comment out front here, for anybody who might have missed it.
The convoluted logic by which Turkey was admitted to NATO was that Kemal Ataturk was a secular modernist ruler, and that by admitting the Turks, we could bottle up the Soviet Black Sea fleet while having the ability to station intermediate range nuclear missiles on their border.
The provocation of stationing missiles right hard up against the Soviet border was lost on the foreign-policy hawks, who did not realize that they had set the stage for the Cuban Missile Crisis by their action. Ataturk may or may not have been what he represented himself to be – a secular moderate (there is considerable evidence that he was not who he claimed to be) – but the fact remains that Turkey has been an explicitly Islamic nation for almost all of her long history, and perhaps the oldest and most-determined of the Islamic enemies of western (Christian) civilization.
We see this today under the neo-Ottoman ruler Recep Erdogan, an unreconstructed Islamic supremacist and Sunni Muslim who longs to return his nation to its glorious “golden age” as a new 21st-century caliph. Under Erdogan, Turkey is reverting to its historical mean and what it has heretofore always been – an explicitly Islamic nation.
Erdogan has done more than talk. He is one of the founders of ISIS/Islamic State, the Sunni Muslim direct-action jihad-terror group which has caused so much trouble across the Middle East and elsewhere in the world. In the recent past, Erdogan has been the biggest supporter of the group, and his son, Bilal, was caught red-handed smuggling oil to market in Turkish-flagged ships, the revenue from which had been funding the group’s operations.
Erdogan is also part of the cabal of globalists and other mischief-makers attempting to infiltrate millions of Muslims into old Europe, would-be conquerors for the new caliphate. His latest stunt along the Greek border is just his latest gambit. One in a long line of them.
The U.S. should remove its equipment, personnel and weapons from Turkey, as soon as possible, and then inform Ankara that they are no longer members of the NATO alliance. And if the other NATO members complain, then the U.S. should threaten to dissolve the alliance entirely. Once done, Turkey can then be treated as precisely what it is – an enemy of western civilization and of the alliance. Whereupon, if requested by Athens, NATO assets can be moved to Greece, should the need arise, to reinforce their borders.
Endorsed, to the last syllable, with all my heart and soul. Well done, G.
Again and again, the West has attempted to rehabilitate its Moslem enemy without Moslem consent or cooperation, recasting them as “moderates,” as “peaceful,” as civilized people who are “just like us” at bottom, who “love their children as much as we do,” without a single shred of evidence supporting any of it. The West perpetuates this pathetic self-delusion exclusively for its own near-term comfort and convenience, but the only thing such puerile folly has ever achieved is to convince the enemy of our weakness, our decadence, and our cowardice.
We crave safety so desperately that we’re willing to try nearly anything to get it, excepting of course the one and only thing that ever will: an honest, clear-eyed acceptance of certain unpleasant realities, along with the flinty resolution to act in accord with them.
- Entries
The strategic considerations of 1945 still obtain. The loss of Turkey to Russia would mean that our position in Central and Eastern Europe (especially) would be impossible to sustain. NATO’s southern flank in Hungary, Romania, and Poland would be fully exposed, and NATO forces in the east would be subject to envelopment. Perhaps you’ve heard of Army Group Center.
We should also bear in mind that large numbers of Turks (albeit likely a minority) are full Westernized and European in attitude and behavior. I had two as graduates students, and you would have thought they came from Switzerland. They are our natural allies in our dispute with Erdogan.
Erdogan is a loose cannon. He has successfully alienated every one of his neighbors: Russia, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon (Hezbollah), Israel, Egypt, Greece, EU, and not the least the US. His proxies are now fighting Egypt’s proxies in Libya. He is flip-flopping on the S-400 deal, and now wants Patriots.
He and his party are also losing support in Turkey, although they are still a majority party. His opponents won control in Istanbul, once his home stamping grounds. Erdogan seems destined for removal, either by ballot or coup. We should just wait him out.
@ Bob Sykes
With due respects, sir, you’re all wet. Holding up two westernized graduate students as exemplars of Turkey is known as cherry-picking the data. As it happens, I too have known Turkish students – post-doctoral scientific/medical researchers in my case – but that event has precisely zero bearing on the problem, which is that the oldest enemy of the non-Muslim world, i.e., the soldiers of Allah, are storming the wire along the Greek border.
Like so many others who argue that the Turks aren’t really “all that bad,” a few exceptions to the rule that Muslims are bloody-thirsty seventh-century throwbacks, are put forward as “proof” that we ought not to believe our lying eyes. Bull feathers.
You see, the real problem is that I know history, including the long 1,400 year old war between Islam and the West, which is now being waged with renewed vigor after a roughly two century-long period of dormancy.
The Muslims hold a number of dubious distinctions where violence, chaos and mayhem are concerned.
They are the biggest mass killers in the history of humanity, with the blood of some 280 million mostly-non-Muslim souls on their hands over last fourteen centuries, and the single largest act of genocide in history, the slaying of fifty million Hindus and other non-Muslims during the 1500s in what is now the Indian subcontinent, also lies at their feet.
Nor are Islamic acts of mass death confined to the distant past. Most historical scholars date the first modern act of genocide to have occurred during the 1915-1921 mass-murder of some 1.5 million Armenian, Greek and other Christians in the old Ottoman Empire. The culprits were the Ottoman Turks, Sunni Muslims of the caliphate.
Moreover, Muslims are the most-prolific takers, buyers and sellers of slaves in history. Not only millions upon millions of black Africans (many of whom were castrated and later died), but many millions of Europeans from as far north as Iceland and Scotland, were taken in slave raids. Slavery was only outlawed in the Islamic world within the last half century or so, and it is still widely practiced in there, albeit less-openly than before.
Your concerns about “securing NATO’s southern flank” amount to a weak rationalization. As long as Turkey remains a member of NATO, the southern flank of Europe can’t – and will not – be secure. The proverbial fox is inside the hen house now, but needn’t always be.
While it is true that Erdogan will eventually be replaced by someone else, there is no guarantee that whoever that is will be an improvement. Indeed, the replacement could be worse. The solution is not to remove the leader; it is to remove the entire nation from the alliance. And it goes without saying that Turkey should not be admitted to the EU.
Once the Turks are out, the southern flank of Europe can then be properly protected. By force of arms, if necessary. The Greeks are entirely within their rights to defend themselves, their homeland, their communities and their citizens. By all accounts, they should have started doing so years ago. The Greeks are not responsible for the latest incidents along the border; the Turks are. Erdogan is responsible for any blood that is spilled. It is on his hands, and those of his coreligionists.
I was stationed at Incirlik AB Turkey, 89-92. It’s located adjacent to Adana, the largest city in the eastern Turkey and roughly 168km from the Iraq border. When we first got there, all US assets were being removed from Greece. The drawn down continued through 90. We now need to do the same with Turkey. All US assets out and kick them out of NATO. And we need to stay out of this growing conflict because it’s not a new one, just a century’s long simmering hatred flaring up. No different than the Bosnia conflict back in 99. Malosovic (?) knew what he was talking but good old Billy Bob and that fuck Wesley Clark just had to jump in and save the “poor mooslim’s”. We STILL have troops there. Erdogan is a serious threat and needs stopping. Unfortunately the euro weenies dance to his tune and are literally giving him their countries on a silver platter. The Dutch are going down hard which for me personally is hard to stomach considering the sacrifices my grandparents and their generation made during WWII. The Germans aren’t far behind but they deserve everything Frau Merkel is doing to their stupid asses.