Tim Drayton wrote:bill cobbett wrote:Reprisals and crack-downs against protesters continue in Erdogan's Turkey, with a return to what one writer would describe as ...
A revival of the old state, a relapse in to the old dictatorial ways under a new identity...
..."The apparent crackdown against the media, intimidation of business and heightened rhetoric, says Dagi, marks Turkey’s relapse into a familiar, older style of politics. For decades, the state, led by the powerful military and a secularist bureaucracy, had kept the domestic press, the business community and even elected politicians on a tight leash. The moderately Islamist AKP’s surprise election victory in 2002 and its liberalizing reforms in its first years in power marked, or seemed to mark, a long awaited break with the past. Things have since gone full circle, says Dagi. After this summer, he says, it’s clear that the AKP has “revived the old state, just with a new identity.”
More at... http://world.time.com/2013/07/30/in-tur ... z2af0y1Fiz
I had to go here to find a readable version of the article:
http://www.newsxs.com/en/go/13054814/Ya ... rnational/
The conclusions are I think true, but one has to realise that at least the old corrupt, repressive, ossified Kemalist regime was rooted in secularism, surely a prerequisite for pluralistic democracy, and paid at least lip service to a broadly progressive ideology that saw Turkey take its place among the modern, democratic nations of the world, whereas there is nothing in the least bit progressive about the AKP's core ideology.
Do you think it is regressing to the policies of a 7th century peadofile?
- what irony ...)
