When witch hunters become the hunted
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Oluşturulma Tarihi: Temmuz 02, 2009 00:00
The problem with witch hunts is not that witches do not exist. In a metaphorical sense, they do. Herein lies Turkey’s dilemma in the face of looming crises in civilian-military relations.
Amid the most famous contemporary case of a witch hunt Ñ the search for communists in 1950s America Ñ there indeed were covert Soviet agents who had infiltrated the government.
A half century later, there indeed were Islamist terrorists intent on mass murder when the United States created the notorious Guantanamo prison and a batch of new legal concepts like "enemy combatant" or "extraordinary rendition" to chase would-be evildoers outside of legal norms.
Closer to home, when the Madrid train bombing in March 2004 killed more than 50 innocents, the government’s instinct to blame Basque separatists was driven Ğ at least in part Ğ by the real trail of terror which the group ETA has inflicted on Spain.
But in all these cases, legal processes were set in motion that were driven by the political context, with the law and court systems coming in as essentially stage props: action "under the color of law" to use the jargon of jurisprudence. These witch hunts all backfired.
As we know now, hundreds if not thousands of innocent lives and careers were destroyed in the anti-communist American witch hunts of the 1950s. The architect of it all, Joseph McCarthy, followed his witches into political oblivion. We know that yes, some really bad people have been locked up in Guantanamo, but far more innocent bystanders have been the victims in a poorly conceived "war on terror." George W. Bush became the most discredited president in U.S. history. In the Spanish case, ETA had nothing to do with the bombing; the true culprits were Islamist extremists. But the knee-jerk hunt for the ETA connection backfired, swinging a national election from the leading conservative Partido Popular to a socialist-led coalition.
So what is our point? Our point is the political context. Today, Turkey’s intellectual and administrative castes are deeply divided against themselves. The belief in a military conspiracy to subvert civilian institutions is widely held. Counter to this are another set of beliefs, holding in general that religious zealots with ties to the ruling party harbor designs to overturn the secular order.
Do we believe that, metaphorically speaking again, some of the imagined "witches" may be real? We do. But we do not believe in witch hunts.
As our analysis leading today’s paper makes clear, the political context is rife with tactics but little vision and little strategy. This is a witch’s cauldron of diverse witch hunts. We see tactical legal moves by all sides in support of supposition, but little in pursuit of simple truth. We see an environment of witch hunts.
History is our witness: witch hunts backfire.
Amid the most famous contemporary case of a witch hunt Ñ the search for communists in 1950s America Ñ there indeed were covert Soviet agents who had infiltrated the government.
A half century later, there indeed were Islamist terrorists intent on mass murder when the United States created the notorious Guantanamo prison and a batch of new legal concepts like "enemy combatant" or "extraordinary rendition" to chase would-be evildoers outside of legal norms.
Closer to home, when the Madrid train bombing in March 2004 killed more than 50 innocents, the government’s instinct to blame Basque separatists was driven Ğ at least in part Ğ by the real trail of terror which the group ETA has inflicted on Spain.
But in all these cases, legal processes were set in motion that were driven by the political context, with the law and court systems coming in as essentially stage props: action "under the color of law" to use the jargon of jurisprudence. These witch hunts all backfired.
As we know now, hundreds if not thousands of innocent lives and careers were destroyed in the anti-communist American witch hunts of the 1950s. The architect of it all, Joseph McCarthy, followed his witches into political oblivion. We know that yes, some really bad people have been locked up in Guantanamo, but far more innocent bystanders have been the victims in a poorly conceived "war on terror." George W. Bush became the most discredited president in U.S. history. In the Spanish case, ETA had nothing to do with the bombing; the true culprits were Islamist extremists. But the knee-jerk hunt for the ETA connection backfired, swinging a national election from the leading conservative Partido Popular to a socialist-led coalition.
So what is our point? Our point is the political context. Today, Turkey’s intellectual and administrative castes are deeply divided against themselves. The belief in a military conspiracy to subvert civilian institutions is widely held. Counter to this are another set of beliefs, holding in general that religious zealots with ties to the ruling party harbor designs to overturn the secular order.
Do we believe that, metaphorically speaking again, some of the imagined "witches" may be real? We do. But we do not believe in witch hunts.
As our analysis leading today’s paper makes clear, the political context is rife with tactics but little vision and little strategy. This is a witch’s cauldron of diverse witch hunts. We see tactical legal moves by all sides in support of supposition, but little in pursuit of simple truth. We see an environment of witch hunts.
History is our witness: witch hunts backfire.