COUP FAMILIAR

The 'coup' in Turkey gives every appearance of having been staged for the purposes that are now unfolding in that blighted country. Paul Monk opines:

There is something deeply disturbing about the direction in which Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party are taking Turkey....
The scale and arbitrariness of what is happening are ... akin to Adolf Hitler’s state of emer­gency after the Reichstag fire in 1933, or Joseph Stalin’s reaction to the assassination of Sergei Kirov in 1934, than to the US in the 50s. There is also an analogy with Iran’s 1979-81 Islamic revolution.
In the wake of a coup attempt whose source remains mysterious and that fizzled within hours, Erdogan’s regime began arresting or dismissing from their posts tens of thousands of people: military officers, soldiers, police, schoolteachers, academics, judges and civil servants. The scale and speed of the reaction have been breathtaking and cannot possibly be based on evidence of complicity in the failed coup. They can be based only on lists long prepared of those deemed to be politically and ideologically opposed to the Erdogan regime.