Writing in Foreign Policy, Mustafa Akyol breaks down the general paranoia that has long been widespread among Turks. He concludes that conspiracy theories tend to gain so much traction in the country, mainly, because Turkey does indeed have a history of shadowy actors exerting great influence. The infiltration of the Gülenists is but one example and provides fodder for other, less substantiated theories:

Some of these conspiracy theories are based on misinterpreted facts. … Other conspiracies are based on pure imagination.

Having said all that, one must also be fair to Turkey. In the past year, the country has suffered more than a dozen devastating terror attacks. … All these problems had their own complex reasons, but it was easy for the nation to perceive them as a well-crafted plot against the homeland.

Turks also suffered the bloody coup attempt of July 15, confirming longtime worries about a shadowy “state within the state” organized by the Gulenist cult. This peculiar threat was pointed out for decades by Turkey’s secularists, then by Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) in the past three years — but few imagined that it could come to the point of launching a military coup. The staggering scale of the conspiracy convinced some that other conspiracy theories must be real, too.

The Gulenists, who were once Erdogan’s best allies against the secularists, are conspiracy-obsessed. Their main TV channel, STV, used to air a massively popular series named One Turkey, which depicted a dark Masonic cabal focused on making nefarious plans to undermine the country. Later, the Gulenists advanced an Iranian conspiracy against Turkey, depicting senior AKP members as “Iranian spies” and even preparing a trumped-up indictment in early 2014 to arrest them as such.

In short, conspiratorial thinking is a national problem in Turkey. And it has detrimental consequences for the whole nation.

Read the full article here.