the world doesn't need new Chamberlains

Submitted by Staunch Secularism Supporter (Russian Federation), Jul 31, 2008 at 02:49

When the Nazi regime annexed Austria, the then-prime minister of Britain Neville Chamberlain's government acquiesced to the Anschluss.

When Nazi Germany annexed Sudetenland, a portion of Czechoslovakia, Chamberlain went to Munich, where Nazi movement had its origins, to ratify the agreement that justified this cleear act of aggression. He made his famous speech that went "...we will have peace in our time."

This was all parts of his general policy of appeasement.

Yesterday the Supreme Constitutional court of Turkey announced its decision not to close the Justice and Development Party (AKP). Strange enough, 6 out of 11 members voted in favor of closure, and another 4 agreed that the party had become a focal point of anti-secular activity.

AKP has been and still is conducting a ruthless witch-hunt, in the most classic and clear sense of the phrase, against its political opponents, namely secularists and patriots of their motherland for some years now. Many people were incarcerated without an indictment, some died in prison. Book-authors, newspaper editors, retired generals who organized political rallies against them were arrested on indefinite charges and some held for more than a year.

This all reminds me the political assassinations of the Nazi regime, the Night of the Long Knives, and the Kristallnacht. Slowly but surely, AKP is establishing its stranglehold on the Turkish politial scene, and its ideology and members stifling the Turkish society. This threatens not only the Turkish nation, which has striven so hard to achieve modernity and to become Western for the last 160 years, but also its allies in Europe, America, Israel, and the oppressed Muslim nations of the Middle East who are struggling to free themselves from backwardness and tyranny.

The West indulged itself once in isolationism and appeasement in the face of the rising Nazi threat, and did nothing until it was too late. Afterwards it pretended to repent and atone for its mistake. Let it not do the same, if not a worse, mistake by condoning the actions of AKP and supporting these Islamists just because it thinks that they will give them a convenient excuse to deny Turkey, a secular nation of 70 million, membership to the European Union. The future of Eurasia may very well depend on this.

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