Re: 300,000 rally against Turkish government
Mike, Yoshie didn’t say you didn’t support military dictatorships -
in fact she implied the opposite. She’s the one who said that secular
western leftists would prefer a military dictatorship, and assumed
you probably fell into that category because we’re all so simple and
provincial. I said you almost certainly didn’t support military
dictatorships, and no leftist that I know did.
Doug
On Apr 15, 2007, at 7:56 PM, Mike Ballard wrote:
On 4/15/07, Doug Henwood dhenwood@panix.com wrote: >
On Apr 15, 2007, at 11:18 AM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
I’m afraid that many secular Western leftists would prefer a
military dictatorship that bans hijab to a democracy that allows but does not impose hijab.Since Carrol won’t play his usual role in demanding names rather than generalizations, I’ll do it - who are these western leftists? Not me or anyone I know. So name one - no, more than one, since you said “many.”
Mike Ballard, normally a pacific man not known for any sympathy for militarism, seems positively elated by a big pro-military rally in Turkey, just because it is billed as a rally in defense of secularism against an Islamist party (even though, in this case, it’s a party that is more cosmopolitan and more oriented to Europe than hard-line secular nationalists) and favorably covered in the corporate Western media. Western leftists can be as simple and provincial as that, and I doubt that Mike is an exception. I’d expect many of them to support the Democratic Left Party (social democrats, http://www.dsp.org.tr/MEP/) which joined the rally (if they look
into the matter enough to find out that it was also part of it).
Yoshie
Yoshie’s right. I don’t support military dictatorship, anywhere.