Showing posts with label Gezi Park. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gezi Park. Show all posts

Saturday, June 29, 2013

Claire Berlinski is our prescient eyes-and-ears in Istanbul, front-and-center on the battle between the past and the future -and what comes next- in a very important place: Turkey. With a smart and knowing Twitter feed that's exploding -and golden for journalists- she's now wrapped up the past few months in one great piece in The Tower magazine: "The Gezi Diaries: Can We Still Call Turkey Civilized?"; @ClaireBerlinski


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For months I've been closely following American writer Claire Berlinski's incisive writing from Istanbul, via her various online pieces and her very intensive and very popular Twitter feed, @ClaireBerlinski

Berlinki's like a one-woman wire service the way the timely and useful information just flows in and out of her feed every few seconds for what often seems like hours at a time.
It's quite impressive in its scope in ways that Florida media websites and Twitter feeds aren't and never have been, but ought to be, given their greater resources.
Yet she's the one who pulls it off.

Berlinski reminds us again thru her hard work and diligence that the wonders of technology are useless unless the people using it are both savvy and energetic, not one-note town criers.

That Berlinski lives four blocks from Taksim Square and knows the ins-and-outs of everything, plus speaks the language and is NOT one of the many foreign correspondents there who are forever having to get everything second-hand even while they're eyewitnesses, gives her the effect of knowing things before they happen.
In my opinion, she's lapping the field, which is why I've sent multiple emails out over the past two months with links to particular tweets of hers that were prophetic and spot-on.

Now that she's been front-and-center for months on what's really going down in Taksim Square, and with Prime Minister Erdogan's imperious march to the past, just as Turkey finally has the well-educated and dynamic population it's long needed to take its full place on the stage, the West's fear of Turkey finally going a bridge-too-far -and a subsequent brain drain- is more than just an idle threat as she tells below in a great essay that captures what's really animating the push against Erdogan.

Here's a taste:
According to legend, when the great historian Robert Conquest was asked if he wanted to rename the updated edition of The Great Terror, his history of the Stalinist purges, he replied, “How about, I Told You So, You F***ing Fools.”
And that’s what I’m saying now to every single lazy journalist and policy wonk, professional sycophant, diplomat and idiot pundit who’s never so much as visited this place, the duly-funded social scientists and craven Western politicians and everyone else who for years swallowed Erdoğan’s nonsense and helped to manufacture the fantasy that Turkey was getting more and more democratic by the day.

That's what I'm talking about!

The Tower magazine
The Gezi Diaries: Can We Still Call Turkey Civilized?
By Claire Berlinski
Some see it as a modern democracy with an Islamic tint, an improving, reforming country. But if you were in Istanbul during the last month and a half, you’d have seen something completely different: a violent, authoritarian, increasingly suppressive and brutal regime. Tales from the Dark Side, Turkish style.
I’ve always been a critic of armchair reporting. But when your armchair is four blocks away from Taksim Square, it has one of the best views of the uproar in Istanbul any diligent reporter could ask for. I’m now able to calculate with great precision the time between the beginning of the screaming, the sound of the shot, and the entry of the gas through my window. It’s two and twelve seconds respectively.
Read the rest of her great essay at 
http://www.thetower.org/article/the-gezi-diaries-erdogans-turkey-goes-medieval/
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The Towerhttp://www.thetower.org/ You can see the whole Middle East from here

Claire Berlinski, @ClaireBerlinskihttps://twitter.com/ClaireBerlinski

http://www.berlinski.com/

Saturday, June 1, 2013

Turkish House of Cards finally coming apart? Istanbul - Come for the peaceful protests, but stay for the tear gas and the water cannons! Turkey continues to screw-up over-and-over, play the 'heavy,' and cause reasonable Western observers to shake their heads and wonder whether it can now be trusted in the future; blogger Dani Karlsson is right in the middle of the action!


bakshow1 YouTube Channel video: Overview of Gezi Park protests in Istanbul and government's clumsy and heavy-handed response, as seen via Al Jazeera News' English-language service. Uploaded May 31, 2013. http://youtu.be/-MZpzPeeKOk


Taksim Istanbul
by Its me, your Dani June 1st, 2013 15:57

Well, as so often seems to be the case, Swedish model and blogger Dani Karlsson, of "It's me, your Danni" fame, recently in Miami, has found herself in the middle of everything yet again.
I mean really in the right place at the right time.

This week, in the middle of the mass protests by Turkish citizens, chiefly in Istanbul, who don't want the government to chop down some much-needed shade trees and level parts of Gezi Park,  a spot of green amongst acres and acres of concrete, merely to indulge their edifice complex instincts and do some redevelopment in a place where it's both inappropriate and unpopular, though there's no accounting for taste among visiting tourists.

Tens of thousands of regular citizens participated there and eslewhere in Turkey.
And in the case of the former, received complimentary tear gas and water cannons for their troubles.

Dani, who appears on the popular Metromode blogging platform, has lots of photos of her
protest experience at http://dani.metromode.se/2013/06/01/occupy-taksim/

The BBC's take on the government's heavy-handed reaction and the police over-reaction, is interesting:
Correspondents say that what was initially a local issue has spiralled into widespread anti-government unrest and anger over the perceived "Islamisation" of Turkey.
One woman told Agence France-Presse: "They want to turn this country into an Islamist state, they want to impose their vision all the while pretending to respect democracy."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-22741644

Meanwhile, Channel 4 News has their own take here.

Channel 4 News video: Turkey protests: police fire tear gas on demonstrators
Turkish police fire tear gas and pressurised water at demonstrators on a second day of anti-government action, which was sparked by a protest to protect a park from redevelopment. 
SATURDAY 01 JUNE 2013
http://www.channel4.com/news/turkey-protest-police-tear-gas-taksim-square-istanbul-ankara  They're chanting, among other things, "shoulder to shoulder against fascism"

In their dispatch from there today, Reuters deals a lot more with the increasingly-seen authoritarian side of the current Turkish Prime Minister and the grave concerns among secular Turks that he is increasingly willing-accomplice in undoing what modern Turkey had become -a small-case democracy with a majority Muslim population within NATO.

If Erdogan keeps it up, he will be initiating the brain drain that's long been feared.
Once that happens, that country will quickly lose its dynamism and become the land of misfits as companies bolt. leaving the dummies behind.

Reuters
Turkish PM Erdogan calls for end to protests as clashes flare
By Nick Tattersall and Humeyra Pamuk
ISTANBUL/ANKARA | Sat Jun 1, 2013 4:23pm EDT
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/01/us-turkey-protests-idUSBRE94U0J920130601

American Thinker
Are the Turkish people finally waking up to 'creeping Islamization'?
By Rick Moran
June 1, 2013
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/06/are_the_turkish_people_finally_waking_up_to_creeping_islamization.html