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The prime minister has repeatedly and constantly defied criticism leveled against the police for brutality against protesters during the Gezi Park unrest, despite the fact that the excessive use of police force during the unrest in the country since May 3 has resulted in the deaths of three protesters and one police officer and the injury of nearly 5,000 people.
While the world should not mistake accommodation, compassion, compromise, and kindness for weakness, the fear that a part of it may would seem to propel the opposite: the want of an iron fist.
Turks who may read about Prime Minister Erdogan in Huriyet have been delivered the impression of an autocrat, and one may expect further amplification and cleaving along that seam. On one side: a dangerous nationalism and the rise of a “strong man” in the too familiar vein, the kind that references “the interest rate lobby” without intending to refer to the Chinese (to whom the world’s largest bank belongs); on the other, a more compassionate, comprehending, and more inclusive humanity, the kind that with Moses and the Jews becomes the “mixed multitude” that leaves Pharaoh and abandons him to his fate.
Turks have grown disgruntled over the headstrong prime minister’s increasingly autocratic leadership and the opaque decision making of a powerful centralized state that is unresponsive to the needs of Turkish citizens, especially those outside Erdogan’s nationalist and Islamic coalition.
What Erdogan may represent is not only Erdogan’s problem.
This comes by way of another front, this one European:
After dark, the respectable mask slipped. While a Jobbik official watched, I was slapped in the head by a reveler annoyed that “Jews” were at his festival. He then poured a beer over my head. Although irritating and sticky, it could have been worse —I was in a forest at night surrounded by thousands of nationalists and stalls selling whips and axes.
Whelan, Brian. “My Week With Hungary’s Far Right.” Vice, May 2013.
Brian Whelan‘s clip on the Channel4News YouTube page (“The rise of the far-right in Hungary”):
“Jobbik” is “The Movement for a Better Hungary”. The Wikipedia entry characterizes it this way:
“Jobbik has been described by scholars, different press outlets and its political opponents as fascist,[9] neo-fascist,[10] Neo-Nazi,[11] racist,[12] anti-Semitic,[13] anti-Roma[14] and homophobic.[15] Measured according to its representation in the European Parliament and the National Assembly, it is Hungary’s third largest party.”
Next to that Erdogan’s “Justice and Development Party (AKP)” enjoys on Wikipedia more gentle treatment, but even so, according to Wikipedia, “The core of the party was formed from the reformist faction of the Islamist Virtue Party.”
For compassionate liberals, no more signal than “Islamist Virtue Party” is needed, for it resonates worldwide today with police units formed around “the promotion of virtue and the elimination of vice”. Moreover, in Islamic states, the same signals the room for maneuver given to venal “takfir” — those who accuse others of blasphemy, which in theocracies provides ever the accuser’s gateway to murder, theft, and revenge.
I feel inspired by the video featured on this post — fill in the blanks: “We have an internal problem that is ___________, and an external threat . . . the Jewish invasion . . . We know there is a global Zionist fund controlling the whole world, including the U.S. and the European Union . . . It is thanks to them that ________ has become a mess since ________.”
It would seem the political imposition of purity standards — nationalist, racist, or religious — pernicious and divisive from any perspective.
In the larger politics and its psychology, growing Hungarian and Turkish nationalism would seem to share similar characteristics: deflection of responsibility (blame it on the “interest rate lobby” and similarly convenient foils; craving for a uniform cast and homogeneous society (please, no freethinkers, liberals, or Gypsies); want of power and strength by way of a demonstrated and punishing will altogether lacking in compassion, empathy, and love (such a monstrous character is what is most demonstrated by the arrest of doctors attending wounded at demonstrations).
Additional Reference
Arango, Tim. “Turkish Liberals Turn Their Backs on Erdogan.” The New York Times, June 19, 2013.
The Turkish Health Ministry demanded a list of all doctors who had treated injured demonstrators. The Turkish Medical Association (TBB) reported the demand.
National Movements & Intermediary Structures in Europe
Vogt, Jonas. “Far-Right Terror in Hungary.” Vice, June 2012.
Williams, Lonna Lisa. “Turkish doctors protest by striking.” Digital Journal, June 17, 2013:
“The doctors were only trying to help the protesters by giving them emergency medical aid in the clinic set up inside the Divan Hotel,” one witness told me. “The police marched right into the five-star hotel and arrested these doctors dressed in white lab coats. They were led off with their hand behind them, handcuffed.”
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