RUTHFULLY YOURS

Europe looks united in not allowing Erdogan to export Turkey’s sometimes even violent political polarization into the Old Continent.

Erdogan clearly rejected Merkel’s mention of “Islamist terror” on grounds that “the expression saddens Muslims because Islam and terror cannot coexist”.

Turkey increasingly looks like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. A government guide refused to discuss Iraqi politics: “In Iraq half the population are spies… spying on the other half.”

Officially, Erdogan’s Turkey has embarked on a journey toward Western democracy. Instead, its Islamist ethos is at war with Western democracy.

Turkey, officially, is a candidate for full membership in the European Union (EU). It is also negotiating with Brussels a deal which would allow millions of Turks to travel to Europe without visa. But Turkey is not like any other European country that joined or will join the EU: The Turks’ choice of a leader, in office since 2002, too visibly makes this country the odd one out.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is now campaigning to broaden his constitutional powers, which would make him head of state, head of government and head of the ruling party – all at the same time—is inherently autocratic and anti-Western. He seems to view himself as a great Muslim leader fighting armies of infidel crusaders. This image, with which he portrays himself, finds powerful echoes among millions of conservative Turks and [Sunni] Islamists across the Middle East. That, among other excesses in the Turkish style, makes Turkey totally incompatible with Europe in political culture.

Yet, there is always the lighter side of things. Take, for example, Melih Gokcek, the mayor of Ankara and a bigwig in Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP). In February Gokcek claimed that earthquakes in a western Turkish province could have been organized by dark external powers [read: Western infidels] aiming to destroy Turkey’s economy with an “artificial earthquake” near Istanbul. According to this conspiracy theory, the mayor not only claims that the earthquake in western Turkey was the work of the U.S. and Israel, but also that the U.S. created the radical army Islamic State. In fact, according to him, the U.S. and Israel colluded to trigger an earthquake in Turkey so they could capture energy from the Turkish fault line.

Matters between Turkey and Europe are far more tense today than ridiculous statements from politicians who want to look pretty to Erdogan. The president, just by willingly ignoring his own, powerful anti-semitic views, recently accused Germany of “fascist actions” reminiscent of Nazi times in a growing row over the cancellation of political rallies aimed at drumming up support for him among 1.5 million Turkish citizens in Germany.

As one of Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood’s characters said in Surfacing, “The trouble some people have being German, I have being human.” True enough. But these days the trouble many Germans have being Germans has little to do with the vices and cruelties of collective human nature and everything to do with modern German history and its Nazi legacy. It’s a curious, even paradoxical problem, since the vast majority of Germans are demonstrably anti-Nazi and ashamed of the country’s brutal, fascist and anti-Semitic past. They will do anything to disavow that horrendous patrimony and ensure that nothing like it ever happens again.

This is a major reason that the official and much of the public response to the migrant Islamic invasion, which is poised to bankrupt the country and unleash a firestorm of violence upon its citizens — as it is in process of doing — is so tentative, lame and mired in denial of the obvious. How can Germany permit itself to inflict upon the Islamic horde now tearing up the country the same punitive, oppressive, and potentially lethal measures it visited upon the Jewish community in the first half of the last century? How can it be seen to assemble another Wannsee Conference leading to a kind of “Final Solution,” the forcible incarceration and expulsion of the migratory wave of Muslims inundating the nation?

This is the German dilemma: the inability or unwillingness to distinguish between Judaism and Islam, to detect the difference between repression and survival, to remember that in the 1930s there were no terrorist synagogues preaching violence, the conquest of the state, and the enslavement of its citizens as today there are terrorist mosques advocating and promoting these very atrocities. The motive for defensive action is justified, but the clear-minded resolve is lacking.

Germans are prisoners of their own past, not in the sense that they wish to prolong it but precisely in the sense that they wish to prevent it. And this hampers their capacity to perceive or to acknowledge what is transpiring before their very eyes. It explains their helplessness before the social and economic devastation manifesting daily in the public square. They are making reparations for the nation’s past by sacrificing the nation’s future, by treating the treacherous and parasitical Muslim invaders of the 21st century as they should have treated the loyal and productive Jewish citizens of the 20th.

India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and its allies won a remarkable 80% of the assembly seats in Uttar Pradesh, the country’s most populous state, in election results announced on Saturday. This political earthquake will boost Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s chances of re-election in 2019 and give him a fresh chance to advance economic reforms.

The opposition Congress Party and its allies thought Mr. Modi crippled his party’s chances when he withdrew almost 90% of the country’s banknotes last November. The resulting chaos hit the poor hard and slowed the economy. But voters saw the move as necessary to tackle corruption, crime and tax evasion.

It is tempting to attribute the BJP’s wins in Uttar Pradesh and two other states to Mr. Modi’s promises to reinvigorate manufacturing and create jobs. But Mr. Modi said little about economic reform in his stump speeches. Instead he focused on development broadly, making government more responsive to the poor and continuing the anticorruption campaign.

As always, caste played an important role. Mr. Modi’s strategist Amit Shah handpicked the candidates for each constituency rather than using the usual party loyalists and quota-fillers. Fresh faces from backward castes drew votes from these key communities, even as the BJP delivered a message of pan-Hindu unity and rejection of the incumbent Samajwadi Party’s caste-based politics.

That shrewd coordination shows the importance of a strong national leader. By contrast, Congress is saddled with Rahul Gandhi, whose indecisiveness and lack of charisma have left the party rudderless. Congress won in Punjab only because the incumbent BJP-allied Akali Dal Party saw its support collapse after communal violence.

The question is whether Mr. Modi will use some of his political capital to jump-start reform immediately or wait until after 2019. Mr. Modi has been stymied by the BJP’s lack of a majority in Parliament’s upper house, which is largely selected by state assemblies.

Saturday’s wins will increase the government’s leverage in the upper house, but only after a delay. Uttar Pradesh is not due to replace its legislators until April 2018. By then the looming general election will put much-needed but unpopular changes to labor laws and land acquisition on hold.