Is Antichrist Turkey's Erdogan The Sick Man of Europe?

👉 Courtesy: Kathimerini

For decades, beginning in the 19th century, Europeans referred to the Ottoman Empire as “the sick man of Europe.” First sultans and then so-called reformers acting in their names sought autocratic power. The Porte covered for a crumbling economy with grandiose projects and compensated for lack of popularity with disastrous foreign adventures. In its final decades, Turkish authorities played ethnic and sectarian communities off each other in order to consolidate power and ethnically cleanse Anatolia. Ultimately, the question diplomats asked during and after World War I was not if the Ottoman Empire would fall but when.

Turks like to embrace the glories of the Ottoman Empire at its peak, but shirk responsibility for its twilight years by arguing that Turkey was merely a successor state that emerged from a fractured empire, no different from Greece, Hungary or Syria. It is a useful formula to claim historical legitimacy but eschew responsibility for the Greek, Armenian and Assyrian genocides.

Today, history is repeating albeit on a smaller scale. Turkey may not be the sick man of Europe, but its dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan is. Erdogan is literally sick, whether it is an epileptic fit in a locked armored car, a bout of colon cancer, or an apparent on-air heart attack. At 70 years old, Erdogan is still relatively young, but his vigor lags; he has repeatedly fallen asleep during televised speeches and state meetings. Erdogan’s aides may cover for him and his troll armies declare his bodily waste smells like roses but there is no hiding that, as with President Joe Biden in the United States, age has won over ambition. There is a reason why Erdogan increasingly promotes his son and son-in-law as each auditions to succeed him.

The sick man repeats history in other ways. Erdogan revives and relishes the Ottoman policy of genocide in both Turkey and Azerbaijan. As Erdogan continues to deny Armenian genocide from more than a century ago, he and his partner in crime Ilham Aliyev revive the Young Turks’ playbook. The opening salvo of the original Armenian genocide, for example, was the arrest of Armenian statesmen and intellectuals. This is why the imprisonment of Artsakh leaders following the Turkish-backed Azerbaijani invasion of the Armenian populated territory has been so chilling. Turkey’s continued blockade of Armenia proper violates the 1921 Treaty of Moscow.

Erdogan’s conversion of churches to mosques and his interference with Greek Orthodox property and seminaries inside Turkey is bad enough, but by interfering in the Greek community’s schooling inside Turkey, he gets in the way of the new generation maintaining their traditions and lifelong relationships that form the fabric of the community.

His targeting of Kurds and Yezidis replicates the strategy of Talaat Pasha against ethnic and sectarian minorities at the height of the genocide. During the original World War I-era genocide, Kurds stood largely immune because their identity at the time revolved more around religion than ethnicity. No longer. Today, Turkish security imprisons elected Kurdish leaders while the Turkish military’s drones and F-16s bomb Kurdish farmers and villages in Syria and Iraq. Most of the 2,000 Yezidis sold by the Islamic State who remain in captivity today reside as slaves inside Turkey.

Had Erdogan not failed academically as a student, he might understand that the “sick man” strategy he pursues today could destroy Turkey. Rather than preserve the Ottoman Empire, playing ethnicities off each other while holding Turks up as a privileged class exacerbated fault lines and led to the Ottoman Empire’s collapse.

As Ottoman authorities sought to cover their own financial incompetence, so too does Erdogan. Turkey today is insolvent. Reform was too little, too late. Erdogan can distract with Islamist rhetoric, anti-Semitism and ethnic hatred, but this does not save Turks from losing their savings to inflation.

As much as Erdogan embraces neo-Ottomanism, Turkey has permanently lost Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Bulgaria and Greece. Playing the ethnic and religious card inside Turkey, then, will only lead Turkey itself to fracture. Kurds react to repression not by forfeiting their identity, but by doubling down upon it. With every attack on Kurds, Erdogan ensures that Kurdistan will arise in eastern Anatolia. Just as dictatorships set Ethiopia and Sudan down the path to division, so too does Erdogan make Turkey’s collapse inevitable.

As Turks recognize Erdogan himself is the problem, he may find himself facing a Talaat Pasha precedent in another way, especially if his victims grow too impatient to outwait his current decline. Either way, Turks face an irony. As Erdogan talks about a two-state solution in Cyprus, his own legacy could very well be a two-state solution in Turkey.

Bill Gates on the No. 1 thing that keeps him up at night: ‘If we avoid a big war...there will be another pandemic’

Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates has spent the past couple decades warning the general public about ominous issues, from upcoming “climate disasters” to devastating cyberattacks.

Two potential catastrophes evoke the most concern from Gates. “A lot of unrest” in today’s world could spark “a major war,” he tells CNBC Make It. And even “if we avoid a big war ... then, yes, there will be another pandemic, most likely in the next 25 years.”

Scientists typically view pandemics as likely, even inevitable, occurrences over time. They are indeed becoming more common, due to factors like climate change and population growth, research shows.

For Gates and other global health advocates, the question isn’t whether another pandemic will occur soon — it’s whether nations will be more prepared than they were for the outbreak of Covid-19. “The country that the world expected to lead and be the model fell short of those expectations,” Gates says, referring to the United States.

Gates wrote a book called “How to Prevent the Next Pandemic” in 2022, in which he called out various governments, including the U.S., for not being adequately prepared in 2020. In the book, he laid out several recommendations for countries worldwide, including stronger quarantining policies, investing in disease monitoring and boosting vaccine research and development.

While some progress has been made, with increased spending on pandemic preparedness in the U.S. and elsewhere, Gates says the global response hasn’t yet been enough. “Although some of the lessons from [the coronavirus] pandemic have been learned, [it’s been] way less than I would expect, sadly,” he says.

The political divisions many believe hampered the world’s response to Covid-19 are still standing in the way of preparing appropriately for the next outbreak, Gates adds: “Getting our thoughts together about what [we did] well, what we didn’t do well, is still not happening .... Perhaps, in the next five years, that’ll get better. But, so far, it’s quite surprising.”

Preventing widespread disease is the focus of an episode in the upcoming Netflix docuseries “What’s Next? The Future with Bill Gates,” set to premiere September 18.

In an advance screening of the Netflix series provided to Make It, Gates sits down with Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. In that conversation, Fauci is adamant that the wealthiest nations, like the U.S., have a “moral responsibility” to share their abundant resources to lead the way on preventing the spread of disease around the world.

Fauci published a memoir this summer called “On Call,” in which he expressed his concerns over how the world is facing a “crisis of truth” over rampant misinformation, such as the kind that shook the public’s faith in public health initiatives.

The scientist struck a more optimistic tone in a July interview with People, in which he said he believes that public trust of scientific facts will eventually be restored.

“I still feel as somewhat of a cautious optimist that there are the better angels in everybody that will come out,” Fauci said.