ER Editor: the original publication date of this piece was November 13, 2017
Yiğit Bulut: “I am sorry for the Greeks. They have been left with nothing.”
DEFEND DEMOCRACY PRESS
Greece will be in a “non-functional condition” until 2020, predicts the advisor to the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Yiğit Bulut, who characterizes the Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras as a “tool of the imperialists”.1
Speaking on the state television programme “Deep Analysis,” he gave the example of Greece to show the consequences of imperialism for global political developments.
”They sold off everything. The banks have passed into the hands of the Germans. They have been left with nothing. People in Greece wait for products from Germany and Italy.1 There is a film about 300 Spartans who fall heroically in battle. Those 300 of Leonidas should come back to Greece now, because nothing has remained standing.
The plundering of Greece is so huge that the Greek people don’t realize it. Tsipras doesn’t wear a tie. He was going to stop imperialism. But Tsipras works for them. Do you remember? There was a finance minister who rode around on a motorcycle. An academic. They got rid of him. I mentioned that on this programme in the past. They will sack that Greek finance minister and then Greece will sign the agreement with the IMF. I said it. When they had got rid of the finance minister they brought an Englishman and the Englishman became a minister of the Greek government and they signed. We said that on our programme here before it happened.
The imperialist model hasn’t changed. Countries get into debt. They sink into crisis. The property of the people is transferred and after that they simply change the government. The same thing happened in Turkey in 2001. They sent Kemal Derviş to Turkey to put things in order for the imperialists. They appointed him Roman governor in Turkey. But fortunately Devlet Bahçeli was found to spoil their game for them,” Erdoğan’s advisor stated, and continued: “I feel sorry for the Greeks. They are victims of imperialism.”1
The above declaration by the Turkish official was made on Turkish state television. It was translated for DDP from the Greek sites that reproduced it under the headline “Erdogan’s advisor makes provocative declarations”.
Turkey still occupies a large part of Cyprus after having invaded the island in 1974 and expelled more than 200,000 Greeks from their homes. It has territorial claims on Greek Aegean islands and deploys the world’s largest fleet of landing craft some miles from them. The Turkish National Assembly has voted a resolution threatening Greece with war in the event of use by Athens of its right to expand Greek territorial waters to 12 miles. It is only natural that Greeks do not much appreciate a Turkish official speaking of their country in this way. It is indeed a “provocation” from the point of view of rules of diplomatic behavior, given that Mr. Erdogan is preparing his visit to Greece.
Of course, Greeks know only too well that the description of the Turkish official is quite close to the truth. It is probable that the advisor of the Turkish President does not so much have the intention of provoking Greeks as influencing Turkish politics by showing his public opinion what happens to a country that surrenders to “Western Imperialism”.
There is a deep irony to Turkey depicting, as it does here, the EU, Germany, the Eurozone, NATO and big finance destroying a member-state of the EU, and using this argument rhetorically!
D.K.
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Original article
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