Last weekend I briefly mentioned the post-ṣūfī Muslim holy man in Pennsylvania whose cult followers are becoming the new Deep State of Turkey. But when I dug further into the story, it exploded into something resembling my own personalized Umberto Eco novel. You know those kids' books: Choose Your Own Adventure? Well this is like if I had my own Choose Your Own Lattice of Coincidence. From my new column in Taki's Magazine:
As 2014 dawns, the world continues to keep me furnished with material. For example, the current political shakeup in Turkey turns out to be a mashup of various obsessions and hobbyhorses of mine, such as byzantine conspiracy theories, test prep, the naiveté of American education reform, immigration fraud, the deep state, and even the Chechen Bomb Brothers’ Uncle Ruslan.
This lattice of coincidence begins with Turkey’s prime minister Recip Tayyip Erdoğan, who is presently besieged by graft scandals following police raids on his inner circle.
With Turkey’s traditional ruling class—the secularist Kemalist generals—finally neutralized by the Ergenekon show trial, the Muslim civilian factions now appear to be plotting against each other. It is widely assumed among Turkish conspiracy theorists (i.e., roughly 98% of all Turks) that the prosecutorial assault on the prime minister was at the behest of Erdoğan’s former political ally, Fethullah Gülen, a powerful and mysterious Muslim cult leader holed up since 1999 in Saylorsburg in the Poconos, where he has become America's largest operator of charter schools.
Read the whole thing there. It's pretty fun, and I don't think I've gotten to the bottom of this yet.
Brilliant Steve. Simply brillant.
ReplyDeleteAnd then there's the Bill Gates connection, and no, I'm not kidding. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gave 10.5 million dollars to Gülen's Cosmos Foundation, which operates charter schools in Texas.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.jewishjournal.com/rob_eshman/article/jordan_belfort_and_the_wolf_of_wall_streets_jewish_problem
ReplyDeletePlanet Solaris and solaristics.
ReplyDeletePlanet Saileris and saileristics.
What was it Auric Goldfinger said? Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.
ReplyDeleteAnd Jerry Pournelle has said something along the lines that "We lack the stomach for a competent empire, and the wallet for an incompetent one."
"I suspect Gülenists saw this poll as their opportunity for vengeance for TIME’s late 1990s Person of the Century poll, which was hijacked by Kemalists voting en masse for Ataturk."
ReplyDeletehttp://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-nonfiction/
Wait a minute, Steve.
ReplyDeleteI thought you told me the Dönme-Sabbateans-Donmeh were the deep state in Turkey.
Where do they figure in all of this?
Steve, you say:
ReplyDeleteOne reason Mexico is Mexico is because the Counter-Reformation kept Puritanism out of Latin America, and along with it the Protestant work ethic.
and:
A major problem with America being the imperial capital of the world is that, with some obvious exceptions, Americans aren’t all that adept at imperial court maneuverings. We were raised being told that we have a republic, if we can keep it. And that means we aren’t prepared to compete with those who represent thousands of years of training in the art and craft of empire.
And yet, both of these are susceptible to selection and largely genetic, so they cannot be learned ...
Indeed, perhaps the reason that the US and certain European countries have made so much technological progress is that their people are not investing so much brain power in conspiracy theorizing.
The more you learn about public education the more it appears to be a conspiracy starting with the Puritans in Massachusetts that eventually becomes a state wide conspiracy and after the civil war national conspiracy.
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puritan#Education
In 1862 John Swett (a genuine Yankee born in New Hampshire) joins the masons. In 1863 he is head of the teachers union and the California State Superintendent of Public Instruction.
One curiosity is that charter schools are still part of the teachers pension system. What happens when the Near Eastern teaching staff retires and moves back to Anatolia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Swett
johntaylorgatto.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zachariah_Montgomery
The Messianic Character of American Education
http://www.amazon.com/The-Messianic-Character-American-Education/dp/1879998068
Perhaps his being funded and supported is part of a longer term western project to encourage the development of a less toxic strain of Islam, one that's more west-friendly, as a counterbalance and replacement for the hardline varieties being espoused elsewhere. The secular Ataturk had to drag Turkey into the modern world by force. Modernization was the only way to progress and strengthen the country . That the Kemalists seem now to be in the process of being phased out portends poorly for the future of Turkey. A greater role for Islam, even a milder form of it, would represent a step backwards, a regression to Islamic mumbo-jumbo. But who knows what the thinking is of those in government, such as the retired Fuller, who are paid to think about such things.
ReplyDeleteYour article on the Gulenists/Hizmet brought to mind the Baha'i. I don't know that much about either, but the Hizmet seem in the Baha'i mold. (The wikipedia pages might be subject to contention.):
ReplyDelete"...the religion spread from its Persian and Ottoman roots, and gained a footing in Europe and America...
Humanity is understood to be in a process of collective evolution...
(The Baha'i seem to be pretty active in California. The religion seems attractive to upper-class Unitarian types. A lot more acceptable than New Age, apparently.)
"The World Christian Encyclopedia... state: "The Baha'i Faith is the only religion to have grown faster in every United Nations region over the past 100 years than the general population; Baha’i was thus the fastest-growing religion between 1910 and 2010, growing at least twice as fast as the population of almost every UN region.""
I read somewhere years ago that Baha'i was designed to subvert the British and Ottoman empires, essentially through a modern liberal PC message of global-one-worldism and single-race-of-man. Conversely, many of it's enemies have claimed it is a front for various imperialist intelligence services...
"...Bahá'u'lláh taught that humanity is one single race and that the age has come for its unification in a global society..."
"There have also been claims that the Bábí movement was started by the British, and that the Bahá'í Faith has ties to British imperialism; the connection to the British, however, has also been supported by false evidence."
Gulen's lawyers have filed over a hundred anti-defamation cases. One is for claiming that he leads the Baha'i:
ReplyDeleteBeyoğlu 2. Civil Court (Case No. 2005/353, Decision No. 2007/209, July 5, 2007).
Judge: Ayla Akdüzen. Plaintiff: Fethullah Gülen.
Lawyer: Orhan Erdemli.
Defendants: İleri Publication, Tourism, Transportation, Construction, Food & Trade Company and Semih Tufan Gülaltay.
Lawyer: Erkut Şahin.
Case: Compensation. Trial date: Oct. 28, 2005.
Book by Semih Gülaltay "Is Fethullah Muslim", published by İleri Publication, that “Fethullah Gülen is the leader of the Baha’i. In fact, he is not a Muslim. He is a Trojan horse in Islam,” and so on.
Based on expert’s report, 5000YTL monetary compensation (plus interest from Oct. 28, 2005), 281.20YTL in court expenses, and 600YTL in attorney expenses charged to defendant).
[The writer and many of his fellows were arrested for allegedly being members of the Ergenekon terrorist organization and planning the death of the Prime Minister of Turkey.]
This story was Christmas Day for Steve Sailer.
ReplyDeleteWow, I didn't know they still issued Chose Your Own Adventure books. Ah, the 80s!
ReplyDeleteIt's surely no coincidence that Gulen chose "Saylorsburg" - by Steve's own account a common misspelling of "sailer". It's as if he was trying to hint something!
ReplyDeleteFethullah Gülen
ReplyDeleteGülen movement
"...The movement has no official name, but it is usually called simply Hizmet ("the Service") by its followers and is known euphemistically as Cemaat ("the Community/Assembly") to the broader public in Turkey...
...Estimates of the number of schools... over 1,000 schools worldwide. ...
Dutch government investigated... "...at odds with the objectives of integration."...
...a former member of the movement..:
"After years living in the boarding school it is psychologically impossible to pull yourself away; you get guilt feelings. Furthermore, it forces the students to live, think and do as the Big Brothers [the abis] instruct them to..."
The United States is the only country in the world where the Gülen movement has been able to establish schools funded to a great extent by the host country's taxpayers, mostly by establishing charter schools."
Well, this part is all too believable:
ReplyDelete"...The FBI has investigated Concept Schools, which operate 16 Horizon Science Academies across Ohio, on the suspicion that they illegally used taxpayer money to pay immigration and legal fees for people they never even employed...
The FBI's suspicion was confirmed by state auditors. ...
Utah's Beehive Science and Technology Academy was $337,000 in debt, according to a financial probe by the Utah Schools Charter Board... tried to figure out where all this taxpayer money had gone. "In a time of teacher layoffs, Beehive has recruited a high percentage of teachers from overseas, mainly Turkey," ... "Many of these teachers had little or no teaching experience before they came to the United States. Some of them are still not certified to teach in Utah. The school spent more than $53,000 on immigration fees for foreigners in five years. During the same time, administrators spent less than $100,000 on textbooks...
...Chicago Math and Science Academy ... strikingly similar to Beehive..."
Seems like one reason this all works in the US is they set up charter schools for "minority" students.
The boarding schools(?) are called "houses of light".