I don’t have a dog in the fight in Turkey, but I’ve found Turkish politics pretty informative since I enjoyed a very pleasant visit to that lovely and opaque country in 2009. I can’t afford much foreign travel, so I try to milk insights from the handful of places I’ve visited in this century.

In contemporary America, the worst thing you can call somebody is a “conspiracy theorist,” but in Turkey, “conspiracy theorist” is more a term of praise, since Turks assume everybody who is anybody is conspiring constantly against their enemies.

To balance the Italo-Turkish concept of the Deep State, I came up with the notion of the Peak State: that the ultimate puppetmaster is often not some shadowy figure behind the throne but the guy on the throne. Turkish affairs of state over the last decade have provided a pretty interesting test of Deep State v. Peak State.

To recap, in 2003 Muslim politician Recep Tayyip Erdogan became Prime Minister eventually took down the old Deep State, the secularist military, in a show trial organized by the new Deep State, the Muslim Gulenist police and business media, organized by a holy man in exile in the Poconos, Imam Gulen. The new Deep State was recruited and indoctrinated through the Gulen cult’s monopoly on test prep centers.

Then, a year ago, Gulen’s Deep State tried to take down Erdogan’s Peak State by leaking wiretaps demonstrating Erdogan’s financial corruption. Many in the West assumed Erdogan was a goner, but he won an election and has since consolidated power. Today, Erdogan’s Peak State moved against Our Man in the Poconos’ Deep State. From the BBC:

Turkey arrests: Raids target Gulen-linked critics of Erdogan Turkish police have made at least 23 arrests during raids on a newspaper and TV station with close ties to US-based Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen. Those detained are accused of forming an illegal organisation and trying to seize control of the state. Mr Gulen, the spiritual leader of the Hizmet movement, is a rival of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The raids come days after Mr Erdogan pledged a fresh campaign against Mr Gulen’s supporters. Among those arrested are journalists, producers, scriptwriters and a police chief in eastern Turkey. Police attempted to raid the offices of the Zaman newspaper, one of Turkey’s biggest, early on Sunday morning, but a crowd of protesters forced police to turn back before they could make arrests. … But they returned and arrested him in a second raid in the afternoon. Analysis by Mark Lowen, BBC News, Istanbul The timing of these arrests isn’t coincidental. It’s almost a year to the day since the biggest corruption scandal in Turkey’s modern history exploded. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, then prime minister, now president, was targeted, along with his inner circle. Four ministers were forced to resign. It was widely believed the government wouldn’t survive. Extraordinarily, Mr Erdogan managed to turn it around, declaring war on what he called a “parallel state”: followers of his one-time ally Fetullah Gulen who he said were plotting a coup. He fired thousands of police officers and prosecutors, launching an endless tirade in the media that he’s ensured is widely pro-government, and sidelined dissidents. This is stage two: arresting the critics. … On Friday Mr Edogan vowed to pursue Gulen supporters “in their lairs”.

So at this point in Turkey, it looks like the latest Deep State is losing to the Peak State.

Another aspect of interest is the question of what’s more important to control: television or text? A chief target of this roundup was the editor of the Gulen cult’s Daily Zaman, which is sort of the Wall Street Journal of Turkey. My vague impression is that in the 21st Century, it’s more politically powerful to control television than the Internet, or at least that seems to have been the opinion of Berlusconi and Putin. But I don’t really understand the media situation in Turkey.