Military forces pour into the streets, forcefully seizing the reins of power and killing dozens and injuring hundreds of the same civilians they are supposed to be protecting and serving. They round up the President and senior members of the duly-elected civilian government and place them under military arrest. Months later, security forces armed to the teeth massacre over 800 unarmed protesters within the span of a few hours, and ban the once-legitimate political party they belonged to. A few short years later, the President and senior members of his party are sentenced to death by a kangaroo military court. The buffoon of a man who orchestrated the coup then trades his swanky “Field Marshall” military uniform for Armani suits and rule the country with an iron fist. Increased radicalization leads to a virtual civil war in parts of the country. All the while, tens of thousands of activists and regime opponents of all backgrounds are arrested, tortured, and even killed in custody. Civil rights are curtailed to a level never before seen, while even NGOs providing a range of vital services aren’t free from harassment.

This wasn’t Turkey on July 16, 2016, but the sad story of Egypt from a coup that was launched on July 3, 2013. Coup apologists of all stripes―especially at its outbreak―had all sorts of justifications. There were tens of millions of people out on the streets calling for a coup! Morsi was an “Islamist” who had it coming! Instead, now there will be a technocratic, secular government! Mohamed ElBaradei will serve as president! There will now be greater international investment and stability with a government backed by military rule!

Fetishizing Coups

Yet few media outlets dared to ask the hard questions that many “experts” and coup apologists were avoiding like the plague:

What would happen if after the next post-Morsi election, a “modern”, liberal, “pro-Western”, secular nationalist like ElBaradei received a majority plus one of the vote-but Egypt’s other 40+ million people either immediately disapproved of the choice or later turned against him before his term ended? Do those people then have the right to run to the military to call for another military coup? Will it simply be democracy until the other side decides your time is up? Or will it just be a democratic mandate for whatever side the military is willing to back? Given that men in brass already yield most of the power, should Egypt simply drop all pretensions of democracy and just give them all of it? If so, can you then truly say Egypt is a democracy at all? Would such a country be the nation that the heroes of Tahrir Square struggled and died for?

Now a similar saga is unfolding in Turkey. Although the unrest in Istanbul and Ankara seems to suggest a different outcome as the coup appears to have failed, the initial knee-jerk response from many coup apologists have been the same―to the point of rehashing many of the arguments these apologists used to justify the brutality of the anti-Morsi coup. While Erdogan and his AKP party―like the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood-have been rightly criticized for autocratic tendencies, this attempted coup against their democratically elected government was almost immediately defended as a “necessary corrective action” by the military. The military was regularly heralded as a staunch “defender of secularism” and “bulwark against civilian authoritarianism” as soon as the first bullets were fired. Some politicos even tried to sell the coup as being “good for American interests”



Romanticizing Military Rule

Good for America? Perhaps if perceptions of those interests were rooted in Cold War-era Kissinger-esque understandings of economic stability and national security. Yet are coups good for our national interests if we’re serious about crafting a holistic,modern foreign policy doctrine befitting the 21st Century? One which vigorously defends and genuinely promotes democracy, the rule of law, and universal human rights?

Absolutely not. A military junta overthrowing a democratically elected government, no matter how flawed, is never a good thing-in Turkey or anywhere else. Turkey’s military may have historically enjoyed a legacy as a “defender of secularism”. Yet past military regimes have had a atrocious record in human rights. Turkey and Kurdish scholar Aliza Marcus articulates the horrors of one era of military rule:

After the 1980 military coup, the junta suspended all civil liberties and then

severely curtailed them when it drew up a new constitution that enshrined the military as the ultimate arbiter in Turkish politics. Upwards of 650,000 people were arrested during the period of military rule, many of whom were tortured and killed. Kurds had it the worst: In Diyarbakir Prison, then run by the military, detainees were sodomized with batons, forced to eat their own excrement, left in rat-infested cells, and given water mixed with detergent to drink.

These abuses aren’t simply to be brushed aside as horrific past aberrations in the hopes of getting “lucky” with today’s military junta lottery. The odds are never good with these games. As a matter of statistical fact, somewhere in the military officer corps are Turkish Sisis who would love nothing more than to stifle dissent, line the pockets of their cronies, and bolster the military at the expense of every other institution as well as civil society. Far more often than not, it’s not the dutiful patriots but the Sisis of the world thirsting for power who come out on top of military struggles for power. Why spin the coup roulette wheel instead of trusting in the democratic process?



All of these political theories of militaries acting as some kind of “guardian angel” against corrupt and ineffective civilian governments are idealistic and naive at best, and completely fallacious and revisionist at worst. This model hasn’t actually worked anywhere-not in Thailand, Pakistan, Bangladesh, or in Turkey. Militaries have no experience in the minutiae of national and local-level governance, complete with the demand of providing public services on a daily basis while crafting long-term economic and social policies. Nor are they capable of dealing with different political parties, advocacy groups, civil society, and other stakeholders. Instead militaries are specialized organizations dedicating to doing just one thing: Defending the country against foreign and domestic enemies.



Understanding the AKP



To understand the rise of the AKP and their base of support requires some historical context. For decades, Turkey oscillated between a series of center-left or center-right secular civilian governments and right wing military dictatorships. In 2001, the “Justice and Development Party” came along and proposed a platform of social conservatism, economic neoliberalism, and robust relations with regional and Muslim countries. The AKP give a voice that was sorely missing to a lot of Muslim Turks who felt alienated and unrepresented by all of the other parties. And many of their policies were actually quite popular for a variety of reasons.

Erdogan has since engaged in a range of authoritarian measures including clamping down on free speech rights , stifling the independence of the judiciary , and expanding the power of the Executive. Being in power for so long has certainly corrupted “The 21st Century Sultan.” Yet there is crucial context to the APK’s continuing support among the majority of the population. To schematize their supporters as regressive uneducated bumpkins akin to Turkish Trump supporters is to severely misunderstand Turkish politics and society since the millennium.

Coups: The Ultimate “Get Out of Democracy” Drumpf Card

A modern, functioning, bona fide democracy is one that follows a simple formula: Rule by the people. Not “by the people unless the generalissimos say otherwise.” You can’t half-ass democracy, civilian governance, and the rule of law. You can’t just support democracy when your side wins, and then chuck it out when they don’t. You’re either all-in or all-out. If the majority of Turkish citizens don’t like Erdogan and the AKP, they should unite, organize, mobilize, and vote them out in the next election. Running to the military to orchestrate a violent coup when a democratic government does not act in accordance with your approval is akin to kids running to mommy when they lose at a game of Monopoly, upending the board, and jailing or shooting the other players.

Relying on the military in the hopes that they will solve your problems is a “get out of democracy card”, and is ultimately regressive and unworthy of a genuine modern democracy. Instead, it is incumbent upon conscientious and “woke” citizens to strive to create and protect a robust marketplace of ideas, with maximum room for political participation of all stripes.



Imperfect Democracies and the Defense of Civilian Rule



Democracy is often a messy and deeply flawed process, with both in-power administrations abusing their democratic mandate to increase their powers while opposition parties resorting to self-defeating obstructionism. This illustrates a mentality gap which is deep rooted in many societies and can only be fixed over several generations. Yet the solution to such predicaments is for civil society to come together and rally to win the hearts and minds of the public through grassroots activism, civic engagement, and politics. The antidote to democratically-consented authoritarianism is greater civic education and public engagement in the marketplace of ideas, which all genuine democracies and democratic societies should strive to create and commit to robustly defend.

Short of violent repression, citizens must commit to advance their struggles through the bullhorn in the public square and through the ballot box in clean, reputable elections; not through terrorist bombs, insurgent bullets, and military coups.

As flawed as Erdogan and the AKP government may be, they were democratically elected. And at their worst, they are still far better than Turkish military juntas at their best. The facts on the ground abundantly demonstrate that Turkish people themselves understood this reality. As soon as the coup unfolded, virtually every major opposition party immediately united to condemn the coup. Beyond just words and statements, some of first tanks in Istanbul and Ankara were actually stopped by CHP supporters while the first massive counter-coup demonstrations happened in Izmir, a CHP stronghold.



The vast majority of Turkish people of all political persuasions and walks of life, who were dead tired of coups and military regimes as a regressive and archaic throwback to Cold War-era doctrines and mentalities, poured into the streets en masse. They stood fully ready to be gunned down by fully-equipped combat troops, tanks, and helicopter gunships in order to defend civilian governance and the rule of law: 49 of them lost their lives, while hundreds more were injured. At a steep price that night, democracy prevailed. If more publics around the world were as conscientious and courageous as the people of Turkey, military coups and dictatorships could be relegated to history museums.



When coups like this are attempted, it’s a sad situation for not just Turkey, but the greater Muslim and developing world. Anyone who genuinely cares about democracy and the rule of law has heavy hearts every time something like this happens.



#DemocracyLivesMatter

Unfortunately, this otherwise sensible position all too often gets a geopolitical version of the infamous “black lives matter-all lives matter” treatment, with a condemnation of coups being equated to unconditionally supporting the government that was ousted. This logic is heralded even when the coup executors unleash extreme violence to achieve their aims, including the use of heavy weaponry to murder policemen. What did any of these policemen have to do with either Erdogan or the AKP government? All they signed up to do was uphold law and order and chase down the occasional criminal, not face down helicopter gunships and tanks operated by treasonous soldiers from their own country.

Yet there seems to be a twist in the plot, with reports emerging that supporters of the “Islamist” Gulen movement may have been behind the attempt. Which begs the question: If these reports are true, does that magically make this ultra-violent and vicious coup a bad thing again, rather than if it was conducted by pro-Western secular officers aka “the good guys”?



One can imagine how quickly the coup apologists’ will reverse course, and can only guess the awkward mental gymnastics they will be forced to resort to in order to condemn a coup they were such gleeful cheerleaders of.

Daring to Commit to the Rule of Law

The issue is far deeper than the events in Egypt or Turkey. It suggests a glaring double standard that we all-to-often harbor for democracies: They’re great when they go our way. Yet the minute the populace dares to elect governments we find objectionable, we are fully willing to greenlight all measures possible to try and make that government fail, even to the direct detriment of millions of innocent people. In our Cold War-fevered past, we were even willing to overthrow governments which were dedicated to secularism and democracy-the very governments we should have been best of allies with-if they dared demand more economic and geopolitical parity.

Newsflash: You can be anti-imperialist and pro-democracy. You can be anti-terrorism and anti-collective punishment and pro-democracy. And you can be anti-coup and anti-Erdogan. “Principles” which change based on conveniences were never principles in the first place.



Political parties, platforms, policies, and even entire nations and empires regularly come and go through the ages. Yet principles remain, and dedication to advancing utilitarian and moral principles are worthy quests which will stand the test of time. As a global community, we always have to aspire for the rule of law and democracy. We always have to side with the people and their representatives, rather than those who would use force against the former to achieve their aims.

Prayers and best wishes for the people of Turkey, Egypt, Syria, and dictatorships everywhere.