Murat Altuglu

Imagine, you wake up one morning, turn on the TV and realize that CNN is gone. The TV is black. No CNN. Just a black screen. There is no CNN, because all cable and satellite providers in the United States have – somehow simultaneously – decided to remove CNN from their service.

Then, you switch to FOX, and you see the programming, the logo of FOX, but you realize that there is something different. There are new anchors, and instead of the news you were used to, they new anchors are spouting propaganda just as on MSNBC. All this, because the day before the government seized, just like that, News Corp. and declared Rupert Murdoch being the head of an armed terrorist organization.

Imagine, George Will, Ann Coulter, Megyn Kelly, Bill O’Reilly, and many more journalists fired from their jobs and thrown into jail, where they remain for years. Imagine Obama picking up the phone and calling the head of CBS to intervene in live programming that he does not like.

Imagine the IRS raiding the offices of the Washington Post and its owner Jeff Bezos to fire journalists that Obama does not like. Imagine the FBI storming the Wall Street Journal and replacing its entire editorial staff. Imagine Glenn Beck being questioned for being a member of a terrorist organization by a United States attorney due to his support of Mitt Romney.

Imagine there being a Democratic Party commissar at ABC, preclearing news stories and interview guests. Imagine Comcast being pressured to sell NBC to the sycophants of Obama. Imagine all this happening, day after day, year after year, and not a word, not a peep in the New York Times.

Imagine that the New York Times building in Manhattan is stormed and vandalized by a horde of Obama supporters, who are lead by a Congressman. Imagine that Anderson Cooper is attacked by several thugs – who were instructed to do so and received money for this – in front of his house.

For an American, this will appear surreal, dystopian, like a sci-fi plot from Hollywood. A good analogy would be from Back to the Future II, where Marty McFly returns from the year 2015 to his own Hill Valley, which is now run by the kleptocratic Biff Tannen. What a bleak and unrealistic scenery.

Only in such a fictional world can an American imagine such things as described above to happen. Not even one such instance could happen in the States, or any country where democracy and the rule of law exists. There is no point in speculating about it. That political system, and that society would have to be in the grips of fascism – using this loaded term half polemically, half equitably. 

Well, there is no need to look for a parallel universe. In Turkey, all that described above (and so much more) is reality. Each and every example given above happened in Turkey. Just switch the names used, and you have the reality of Turkey in front you.

And all that is listed above is what happened just this year, 2015. All this, just till New Year’s. Adding the past year, adding the past decade would result in a magnum opus of several volumes. 

If you are a Westerner, you have to imagine the things mentioned above, and then you have to digest it, reflect on it. Since a Western mind is not acquainted with the events mentioned above, he or she cannot grasp the monstrosity, the absurdity, and the ridiculousness of such behavior in one’s own time. 

If it wouldn’t be so tragic for the people involved in it, the spectacle that is going on in Turkey is probably the most entertaining reality show of our times. Only learn some Turkish (which is quite easy to do), and you can experience (no pun intended) a TV-drama that is offered only once in a life-time.

Yet what is listed above, events that took place in the past eleven months of this year, is a warning to people in democracies, since it evidences how easily a political system can regress. Furthermore, what is shown above is a reminder to those who live in the free world for how precious that freedom is, why it has to be protected. And if you happen to be an American, how lucky and proud one can be to say: “Am I glad to be a citizen of the United States of America.” And watch this.