everybody is writing about turkey
I seem to have unexpectedly tapped into the zeitgeist, for once--in fact, I'm living in the middle of it. The weekend's NYT brought us this paean to the joys of İstanbul (better than the Time piece mentioned here, and with a picture of my neighborhood to boot!) and this good, lengthy, serious discussion in the magazine about Turkish politics.
The latter piece is particularly useful for coming to understand why someone like me might sound like such a supporter of Erdoğan. I mean, the man's a religious conservative. My views about sexual morality alone would surely make the man break out in hives. Not only that, he's a laissez-faire pro-business religious conservative. On the surface, he might seem to have something in common with the party that I routinely complain is ruining my country.
And yes, I'm pretty firmly convinced he (and his party) are one of the best things to happen for democracy in this country in a long time. They have finally to have broken the strangehold of the military and the old, Kemalist-nationalist party elites (the "deep state" whose lingering power the magazine piece alludes to) on Turkish politics. Erdoğan is pushing for EU membership, making human rights reforms, and doing a remarkably successful job of walking the tightrope of foreign policy--maintaining ties to the EU and US, and at the same time representing the democratic opposition in this country to the US war on Iraq and the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. And as appalled as I surely would be by many of his social/cultural beliefs, he's too busy dealing with the above issues to push much of a social-conservative policy agenda, anyway. So I'm pretty deeply hopeful about the potential of the policies he's embarked upon--now let's just pray that Europe will overcome its xenophobia, anti-Islamic prejudice, and economic paranoia about immigrants and give Turkey a genuine path to EU membership. And then we can all tell Niall Ferguson and Samuel Huntington can go screw themselves.
The latter piece is particularly useful for coming to understand why someone like me might sound like such a supporter of Erdoğan. I mean, the man's a religious conservative. My views about sexual morality alone would surely make the man break out in hives. Not only that, he's a laissez-faire pro-business religious conservative. On the surface, he might seem to have something in common with the party that I routinely complain is ruining my country.
And yes, I'm pretty firmly convinced he (and his party) are one of the best things to happen for democracy in this country in a long time. They have finally to have broken the strangehold of the military and the old, Kemalist-nationalist party elites (the "deep state" whose lingering power the magazine piece alludes to) on Turkish politics. Erdoğan is pushing for EU membership, making human rights reforms, and doing a remarkably successful job of walking the tightrope of foreign policy--maintaining ties to the EU and US, and at the same time representing the democratic opposition in this country to the US war on Iraq and the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. And as appalled as I surely would be by many of his social/cultural beliefs, he's too busy dealing with the above issues to push much of a social-conservative policy agenda, anyway. So I'm pretty deeply hopeful about the potential of the policies he's embarked upon--now let's just pray that Europe will overcome its xenophobia, anti-Islamic prejudice, and economic paranoia about immigrants and give Turkey a genuine path to EU membership. And then we can all tell Niall Ferguson and Samuel Huntington can go screw themselves.
posted by kitabet at 2:45 PM
2 Comments:
freyir,
if i thought you were actually interested in learning something about this, i'd point you to the rest of the posts on this blog about issues like the Armenian Genocide (and the recent conference held in istanbul to acknowledge it), Turkey's troubled treatment of minorities, and why I think EU membership will empower the reformers fighting on these very issues in Turkey. But I've seen your comments on other weblogs, and they make it pretty clear you're an anti-Turkish troll. I've got better things to do that debate with someone whose idea of discussing the brutality of the Turkish state against Kurds is to laud the PKK as "liberation warriors."
Yay, I'm a celebrity now!
On a serious note, care to answer my question.
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