In a famous essay, one of the most acute self-critical reflections to emerge out of any of the youthful revolts of the 1960s, Murat Belge – a writer unrivalled in his intelligence of the political sensibility of his generation – told his contemporaries on the Turkish left, as yet another military intervention came thudding down over more than a decade of ardent hopes, that they had misunderstood their own country in a quite fundamental way.[1] Please continue.