Turkish President Erdogan is an evil person with evil intentions. He wants to bring back the Ottoman Empire and wage a terrible war against Christianity and the Church to try to bring the entire world to submission to Islam.
But as evil is a perversion of good, one cannot outright say that everything which Erdogan does or says is inherently evil. The ends which he might intend to use them for are evil, but not the acts themselves. In fact, in order for Erdogan’s evil rise to power, it must deceive a great number of people, being conducted under the guide of doing good. This also includes many Christians.
I do not like Erdogan. Nobody who is a Christian should. But there are six things I can say that the so-called leaders of the Western world might want to re-think about him:
1) He understands that the possession and spread of divine truth comes before all earthly values
We have written here extensively about how Erdogan has allowed himself to be spoken of in terms no less than suggesting his own divinity. However, this does not mean that he does not understand the importance of religion and a clear meaning as to what religious truth is for any society.
The fact is that beginning with the Protestant Revolution, the result over the last 500 years has been the gradual decline and destruction of any idea of divinely revealed, unchangeable truth. Instead, the people have been conditioned to believe that they are able to determine on their own power what is right and what is wrong and to have the ability to distinguish between them. This is the essence of declaring oneself divine, since only God can objectively determine and distinguish between good and evil because He is absolute good itself and anything which does not conform to Him is a perversion of good and as such is evil.
Regardless of how evil Islam is, one thing which cannot be denied is that the Muslim world for the most part still believe in the idea of absolute truth. This cannot be said for the Western world, who has abandoned God in exchange for a concept of der Triumpf des Willens, in which the will of man defined truth instead of God. While both views- Islam and the neo-secularism of today- are evil, they both come from the same source and are both against Christianity and all that it stands for. As such, it would be easy for the West in its current, spiritually decrepit state to become Muslim, as it would be the mere transition from one evil to another, except with Islam the evil would be formalized under a system of worship with “Allah” as diety instead of the self.
2) He understands the symbolic and metaphysical importance of sacred space
Throughout history, the Musilms have always attacked Christian sacred spaces and places and ensured that they would be converted to mosques. The reason for this is to assert the spiritual dominance of Islam through the temporal over Christianity and all that it stands for. Likewise, this is also the reason for the beauty of church buildings in both the west and east, for as Christ said, if we pray that God’s will is done “on earth as it is in heaven,” then God deserves our best both in this life and in the next. As the Church is the house where God, who is King over all resides in the tabernacle, nothing less than the best suffices for him, and no expense should be spared.
This is why Erdogan wants to turn the Hagia Sophia back into a mosque. Far more than just “historical” or “cultural” relevance, the reason why the Hagia Sophia was turned into a mosque was to be a slap in the face at Christianity and God by desecrating such a place that is dedicated to the Holy Wisdom of God and making is a place where Allah, a false god of will and caprice, is worshipped. It is like the desecration of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in the 18th century France during the revolution but worse.
3) He understands that a nation’s demographics is its destiny
Erdogan recently stated that he wanted Turkish people to settle into Europe ‘as their new homeland,’ and encouraged them to have three to five children minimum. Regardless of the reason for having the children, the fact is that a nation’s value comes from its people first and then from its products. Certainly human capital can be underused or even worse, misused, but the fact does not change that men generate value for other men, and the tools through which they can generate value only accentuate that which they are already engaged in. If there are no people in a nation to do the work or who choose to work that which a nation requires, that nation will contract and collapse.
Europe has been very economically successful, but their “productivity” is suffering because Western Europeans are (sad to day) a lazy, decadent people who will neither work nor reproduce. As such, they elect to have other people do the work which they need to do for themselves contracted out to others to such an extent that the people they brought in to do their work are actively taking over their nations. Now many people are upset about this and they want “those immigrants to go back to their countries.” While there have been many problems that these people, who are for the most part Muslims have brought in, the fact is that they allowed this problem to happen because they did not and still refuse to work and have children greater than the minimum total fertility replacement rate. Europe is trying to “have its cake and eat it too,” pushing against Islam and non-Europeans while at the same time refusing to take any steps that caused this problem to happen in the first place.
From Erdogan’s position, he can easily see that as evidenced by all nations, any nation with a surplus population will almost always and naturally diffuse into areas of lower or declining populations over time. One only needs to look at the nations of Western Europe once upon a time, where their people went all over the world and conquered it through the simple family unit.
Demographics DO matter, and Erdogan knows they are in his favor right now. All that he has to do is simply encourage the current trends.
4) He understands that war is deceit
In the words of Mohammed himself, “war is deceit.” All wars involve on some level involve exploit and enemy’s weakness in order to overpower him with superior strength. This weakeness can be gained either by a direct flaw that really exists, or it can come through a perceived weakness or strength in order to give the other person a false impression so to change their actions and reactions for a particular situation.
Erdogan has shown himself to be masterful in the art of deceit. Using his economic power, historical relationship with Germany and the Protestant nations of Europe, geostrategic location, and a lot of outright lying, Erdogan has placed himself in a unique position. He is considered both an “ally” and an “enemy” of Europe and the United States, and given Turkey’s position economically and geographically, people do not want to interfere with him because there is money to be made with and through Turkey, especially with regards to the transport of oil and gas. He enjoy s a uniquely “protected” status, being able to do what he wants for the most part without anybody stopping him, which in this case he is using to build up his military prowess with the intention of a future invasion of the Middle East and Europe as part of his attempts to reestablish Osman’s Dream. It is much like the last days of the Byzantine Empire, when Turkey would sit back and allow the Byzantine Empire and her sister warring kingdoms in the Balkans to tear each other apart, forming and dissolving alliances as quickly as a teenage girl changes outfits, and all for the purpose of allowing these nations to divide and conquer each other from within.
Erdogan will continue to be a “frenemy” of America and Europe for as long has he can. He will condemn Germany while making secret treaties with her and planning to renew his historical alliances with her, and when he does it will shock many people. But it won’t be as though most people could not see it coming- it is just like with a great magician, they were watching the part he wanted them to watch while ignoring the rest of what he was doing.
5) He understands the weakness of Protestant Europe and his historical German ally
Something that is seldom discussed in Europe and America is a phenomenon known as “Turco-Calvinism.” this refers to the fact that from the beginning of the Protestant Revolution up through the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699, the Ottoman Empire worked aggressively to cultivate relationships with Protestant revolutionaries. Because Germany was at the epicenter of the Revolution, most of the focus was on Germany, but it extended to all of the Protestant areas in northern and western Europe. The Emperors went so far as to fund Protestant missions, and as I noted in my book, some even sent letters directly to Protestant groups throughout Europe soliciting alliances with them.
Now the Ottomans had no love for Christianity, and they did not do the same for the Catholics or the Orthodox. The reason is that while there are many good Protestant people, Protestantism is an outright heresy, and in the Turkish mind by helping to drive the creation of more heresy, they could further place division within Christendom which they could then exploit to conquer at a later point. Since as we have pointed out that all of the great saints of the Catholic Church have pointed out that Islam is a heresy, the natural fruit of Protestantism if left unchecked and allowed to blossom into its full form would be Islam. Since the seeds of Protestantism had already been sown and sprouted, it was simply for the Ottomans to tend to them until they blossomed into their natural end.
As we have pointed out, Germany has historically allied with the Ottomans since the Revolution. In recent times they helped the Ottomans commit the Armenian Genocide, they were allies in the First World War and the Second World War, and as we have pointed out, there is a great collusion today between German and Turkish business, financial, and industrial interests that is leading up to the advent of, if left unchecked, what will be a third world war.
6) He understands that his time is limited in which he can act
There is only a certain number of sunrises and sunsets that men will see. Time is limited, a frame within existence. Erdogan will only live for so long, and if he is to realize his Ottoman dream, he needs to act now or take the steps so he can enact his vision.
Europe for the last century following World War II (and in reality beginning earlier, but that is another discussion) has been plagued with a lack of a sense of meaning. Europe does not know what it is any more, having abandoned the Church and wandering between different “isms.” In the word of one German man I met many years ago, when I asked him about religion in Europe, he said that most Europeans did not care about religion, and it was for them to enjoy a good life today.
A life without God is a life without meaning. Sure, men can do many good things that bring partial fulfillment, or even a sense of fulfillment, but the reality is that a man’s true happiness rests in his doing the will of God, for it was God who created him and to God that he will return. Europe is angry with God and does not want to repent. Erdogan, while his god is a demon, only gains victory because the protection that God gave to the European peoples is removed because they do not want it. It does not mean that he is in fact stronger or that Islam is true- far from it- rather, it is simply moving into a vacuum created by the apathy and apostasy of the Europeans. And with the Europeans still choosing to live for the day and themselves, if they do not change their attitudes then Erdogan and the Turks will simply fill the void that they leave because although their vision is flawed they have a vision and will use force to attain it.
Erdogan is very evil. He will bring nothing but trouble. That said, every broken clock is right twice a day, and it is not so much that he is doing anything “right” at all, but just placing himself into the giant holes left by a formerly Christian society who would rather persist in its apostasy and folly instead of humble itself and choose to clean up the mess it created by its own poor decisions.
Just think about it.