No Delight

Turkey is already a member of NATO, and is on course to join the EU. Marxist terrorists, Kurdish and otherwise, will soon be our legislators, too. Along with the Kemalist secular ultranationalists of Dönmeh extraction ideologically and otherwise. And along with the ruling Islamists, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab and King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud having also been of probable Dönmeh descent. What a thing is unfulfilled Messianic hope and expectation, of which no example could be sharper than that which gave rise to the Dönmeh.

For Turkey is a land, by no means the only one, of two Far Rights, which fight it out between themselves as the nearest approximation to a meaningful political choice. That did not used to be the case: the Kemalists used to be barely assailable in practice, and of course they retain control of the Deep State, ever-ready to stage an American-backed military coup if the Islamists start to go too far. Or is it, any longer? Apparently not, it would seem.

The self-styled Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, to which Unionists from Northern Ireland seem oddly attached or at least have done in the past, is a thoroughly Kemalist affair. It seeks to be an outpost, ideally an integral part, of a mainland country which arguably never really existed, and which certainly does not exist now. The Ulster Unionist fondness does then begin to make sense, although such a forlorn condition might just as easily endear the place to Republicans from the Six Counties. But what if Turkey as she is now sought to conform her little offshore hobby to herself?