Signs that Erdogan has flipped:
Can Erdogan's Enemies Kill Him With Their Minds?Recently, I asked whether Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan believed his own conspiracy theories about the anti-government protests that began in an Istanbul park at the end of May. His appointment this week of a new chief adviser suggests Erdogan may have embraced a dark fantasy world.
The new man with the prime minister's ear, Yigit Bulut, previously was the editor-in-chief of the television station Kanal 24, and has been a point man for conspiracy theories about the Gezi Park protests. His analysis has included the following interesting ideas:
-- That the German airline Lufthansa was behind the protests, because it feels threatened by Erdogan's plans to build a third airport for Istanbul that would be the largest in Europe and would compete with Frankfurt, Lufthansa's hub, for air traffic between Europe and the East;
-- That "In many centers there is work going on to kill Erdogan from afar, through methods such as telekinesis";
-- That Germany and England were in on the plot, having also been responsible for the Turkish military's hanging of former Prime Minster Adnan Menderes in 1961, following a coup;
-- That Germany owns 65 percent of Turkish media (it doesn't);
-- And that an "interest-rate lobby" has been conspiring to drive up Turkey's borrowing costs, because the banks and speculators who comprise the lobby are making less money by lending to the government than they used to before Erdogan took power. Back then, Turkey suffered from inflation rates as high as 60 percent and interest rates were commensurate.
