On the sidelines of Turkish celebration of victory against the Byzantine Empire in 1071, former Turkish MP Metin Külünk of the ruling party posted, a map of the Seljuq Empire of what was known as Greater Turkey. The map stretches across vast past parts of Greece, Aegean islands, half of Bulgaria, Cyprus, the whole of Armenia and large swathes of Georgia, Iraq and Syria.
Neither was sheer coincidence or pure fate behind this Seljuq Empire map being published in conjunction with the Turkish army and its Defense Minister Hulusi Akar’s promotion of the idea of the Blue Homeland; that is, a plan for unjust Turkish domination over the waters of the three seas, the Black, Aegean and Mediterranean Seas, an ambition reiterated by Erdogan in his speech during the occasion.
What does the view ahead look like?
In truth, an in-depth study is required to provide the answer. Still, a sober unredacted attempt at providing it would demonstrate that the employment of Turkish maps in this way reflects the delusional sultan’s ambitions and reveals the treachery of his eyes and the inflation of his chest. He had had these inclinations and concealed them for a very long time, until they exploded during the crooked “Arab Spring” when Ankara removed all of the burqas and showed the Ottoman Empire’s shadowy face. It took armed paths, and Erdogan left behind him a policy of zeroing in the number of internal problems in the regional context, confirming that we are facing a dexterously hypocritical figure.
The most ingenious insights into maps and their importance were provided by the President of France and its commandos, General Charles de Gaulle. He believed that one could not read politics without inspecting maps, as battles occur in their locations, and strategic lines and tactical strings are woven and extended on their positions. Planning them is linked to demography, while the terrain leaves its mark on geography. When we speak of De Gaulle, we speak of a first-tier statesman who organized and ran the resistance to the Nazis and oversaw its battles by observing the paths being taken around him in the region and the global courses that underpin them.
Here lies the vast difference between a leader who reads maps with the eyes of an aggiornamento, that is, a modern-day leader who keeps pace with contemporary developments, and another with delusions of a past that will never return rooted in his brain. But why did Külünk publish this map at a time like this?
It is demagoguery, which Erdogan and his comrades have been employing to manipulate the Turks and toy with their fate after the state sank into what comes out to around 200 billion dollars of debt when accounting for its servicing costs, not to mention the global finance houses exposing the lies about oil and gas in the Black Sea that not many Turks had fallen for.
Erdogan is courting the Turks with nationalist dreams concealed in Islamist garments. They do not realize that he is manipulating them in the same way that the exiled Sultan Abdul Hamid used to manipulate his rosary beads. To this end, he brings them together from the earth’s east and west to serve his terroristic visions of transforming the world’s security and peace into anxiety during the day and insomnia at night.
Külünk was not, in any way, honest in his presentation of Greater Turkey’s map. He chose to stop at the Battle of Manzikert in specific, deliberately overlooking, in his assessment that evoked the Turkish victories of the past, the 1571 Battle of Lepanto that broke out on the seventh of October of that year and in which the Europeans destroyed about 200 Ottoman military vessels, killed over 40,000 of the Turks’ soldiers and wounded 10,000.
Erdogan has no clue how to read history, and he lacks the wisdom needed to investigate the stories of time and solve the puzzles of humanity. For the mistakes that would initiate the real collapse of the obsolete Ottoman Empire began to be made at the end of the 17th century. With the emergence of the Westphalia Treaty in 1648, which brought to an end the religious disputes and wars among Europeans, everyone was free to devote themselves to fighting and defeating the Ottomans.
What is Erdogan seeking to achieve by mobilizing a Turanian spirit and provoking neighboring countries, especially Greece and Cyprus?
The intelligent reader realizes that he is facing Erdogan’s inevitable exit from the scene because of his domestic and foreign failures and his attempt to hide behind the thick black smoke still in the air left by his Don Quichottic battles. Europeans and Middle Easterners are making very serious preparation for a repeat, more ruthlessly, of Lepanto, turning the maps of Great Turkey and the “Blue Homeland” into nothing more than traces of the past.
Erdogan’s bets will inevitably lose, and he realizes that the man in the White House is merely moving him on the international chessboard until his turn is over. This, from the West, while the Tsar of the east stands behind Armenia, Georgia, Greece and Cyprus dogmatically. And when things become critical, the Ottomans will not dare fire a single bullet at any of them. Erdogan’s demise seems very near; the sound of the coming European economic sanctions is terrifying the Agha’s entourage. Thus, attention should be paid to the cry of the slaughtered bird.
