I find the whole idea of banning parties for attempting to legalize head scarves vastly more damaging to the justice system and the rule of law than random mutterings by the state prosecutor, but clearly YMMV.

I am not bringing up stuff about secret religious orders. The STATE PROSECUTOR who is prosecuting these Ergenekon people is bringing it up in his OFFICIAL CHARGES versus these people. And I am saying above that I dont buy his story and this bullshit is damaging the justice system and the rule of law.

Please read carefully before commenting.

I find that it funny that “Baris” brings us this old, tired Nazi myth as well as a lot of conspiracy theories about secret religious orders

The secularist elite is worried about losing power. Some of them are corrupt and some of them are genuinely worried about Islamism, but regardless, they aren’t willing to tolerate the AKP in power, regardless of whether the people vote them in democratically.

So they are using the head scarf issue as a fig leaf to put the AKP out of business and prevent its leadership from being involved in politics for five years. Depending on your viewpoint, this is either a judicial coup d’etat and crime against democracy or a regrettable overreaching to prevent an Islamist takeover.

The AKP leadership has seen this movie before and isn’t willing to roll over this time, like it did for previous coups, party banning (see Welfare party), and email coups. So it is striking back using its control over the police forces. Does this sort of conspiracy exist? Absolutely. The components of the deep state still exist and are almost certainly planning a military coup if necessary. Are the people arrested guilty of plotting a coup? Hard to tell - some of them are almost surely involved, but the list is long and includes people like journalists, etc.

The big wild card is Europe and the US. If both of them condemn the (assumed to be forthcoming) banning of the AKP, then it might not happen. If they weasel out or worse, support authoritarian secularists, then things could degenerate quickly.

The AKP has a very broad amount of support, more so than the secularists, as shown in voting results. It also controls or has the sympathy of more of the power centers: poltical, social, and economic, than it did in previous military coups. If the secularists go too far in trying to overthrow the efforts of the majority, it could lead to armed conflict.

Turkey was until recently only semi-democratic - military coups and authoritarian governments tend to do that. In many ways Turkey is becoming more deomcratic, not less, under the current government.

The problem with Turkey seems to be that many people who claim to be Western secularists don’t actually believe in democracy and the rule of law. As soon as their guys lose and keep losing, they reach for their guns.