Emine Antoinette: Let Them Drink White Tea!

“Let them eat cake” is one of the most famous quotes in history. The wife of France's King Louis XVI never said it. It is an urban legend. It has been alleged by the victors of the clashes in France that at some point around 1789, when told that her French subjects had no bread, Marie-Antoinette supposedly said, “Qu'ils mangent de la brioche” -- “Let them eat cake.”
The revolutionaries made the queen a hated symbol of the decadent monarchy and fueled the revolution that would also pave the way for her to be executed several years later. As a matter of fact, Marie-Antoinette was an intelligent woman who donated generously to charitable causes. She definitely and undeniably had a lavish lifestyle; nevertheless, she also displayed sensitivity towards the poor population of France.

This vilification alone shows how the victors rewrite history based on fabrication to demonize their opponents. Thus, it is not sufficient to read Byzantine history written by the Ottomans or Ottoman history written by the Kemalists. Can you imagine, if (God forbid) the Justice and Development Party (AKP) annihilates democracy, pluralism, rule of law and the Hizmet movement, how they will depict all these “opponents” of the AKP in their “Ak-history” books?

Anyway, even though Marie-Antoinette never uttered those words about eating cake, we can safely say that this cliché underlines the sad mental state of the nobility. I do not mean their callous, hard-nosed and heartless attitude toward the poor, but their ignorance about real life outside of their lavish and luxurious life styles. Whenever I heard the phrase “let them eat cake,” I always thought that the queen was so isolated from real life that she sincerely thought that cake was cheaper and more easily available than bread! Well, obviously this is not what can describe the reasoning of Marie-Antoinette, since she did not utter the phrase.

But I can safely argue that the phrase “Let them drink white tea” definitely tells us something about Turkey's new sultan and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's wife, Emine Erdoğan-Antoinette. We can say the same thing not only about Queen Emine Erdoğan-Antoinette but also about the staunch Erdoğan defender Yeni Şafak's editors.
As reported by Today's Zaman, in a futile effort to distract attention from the huge expenses of the AK Saray, Sultan Erdoğan's presidential palace, and the extreme costs of its construction, its 1,150 rooms and its 2,700 staff, the government mouthpiece Yeni Şafak newspaper published a story about vinegar hand-made by Emine Erdoğan aiming to portray the Erdoğan family as refraining from lavishness. In the interview, Erdoğan-Antoinette even says that when alone, Tayyip and Emine only eat a cup of soup for lunch and dinner.

The general election is approaching and the AKP voters who have not cared about corruption and illegal acts of the rulers have shown some signs of unease with the lavish lifestyle of the Erdoğan dynasty, i.e. not only of the couple, but their children, in-laws, cousins, brothers and sisters, etc. Yeni Şafak aimed to decrease unease in the public concerning the lavishly constructed Ak Saray.

However, Yeni Şafak wrote also that the Erdoğan family drinks Turkish white tea without knowing the price of the white tea, which costs about $1,800-2,000 per kilo! It is so obvious that for some time the sultan's family has never bothered to go shopping and never cared about how much the food costs. For the Erdoğans, who lived in a cheap rented flat before 1994, this is understandable, since they have been active politicians in a third world country for two decades. In those parts of the world, politics makes people super-rich by ultra-corruption.

However, the existence of the same detachment from reality for newspaper editors may be unique to Erdoğan's mouthpieces only!

İHSAN YILMAZ (Cihan/Today's Zaman)