Feeling the Angst? A Year in Jail Should Help.
Juliet Samuel | July 19, 2007, 8:21am
Several years ago a young Turkish rock band released a song railing against the unfairness of the country’s national standardized test for university entrance. “Life should not be a prison because of an exam,” they sang, “I have gotten lost; you have ruined my future; I am going to tell you one thing: Shove that exam...”
This week they are standing trial for “insulting Turkishness,” with the possibility of an 18 month jail sentence if convicted. That seems unlikely, however:
There's been little public discussion about the wisdom of prosecuting the punk band. Turkish prosecutors routinely file defamation complaints, creating a glut of cases, some of which never go to trial.
So the whole case is a tiresome and wasteful use of government resources—if Turkey keeps it up, its prospects for EU membership look better than ever. (via Shoutmouth)
tarran - the half-turk | July 19, 2007, 10:10am | #
You can thank Woodrow Wilson for this stupid law;
During World War I Woodrow Wilson pushed this idea of "ethnic self-determination", which when you get donw to the nuts and bolts means that each ethnicity has its own country.
At the end of World War I, the Ottoman Empire was broken up, much the way the Austrio-hungarian empire was broken up.
When Mustafa Kemal started his campaign to drive the Greeks, French et al off of Asia Minor, he essentially selected the borders of the new country based on defensability. Then, to justify it, they decreed that this new country would be the land of a mythical ethnic group known as "the Turks". It is important to note that the original Turks, a tribe giving military assistance by the Chinese as an anti-Mongol measure are lost in the mists of time. The tribe the Chinese bought off would conquer a neighboring tribe, dub them to be Turks now, and move on. The original tribe splintered as a result of political divisions, but its descendants kept expanding, inter-marrying with the people that were conquered. By the time the Ottoman empire reached its height, you had a massive range of ethnicities living in a band across Asia that were called Turks of one sort or another.
So, the new government basically called everyone who happenned to live in the region Turks and ruthlessly suppressed any contradictory memes. For example, they called the Kurds mountain Turks and outlawed the Kurdish cutlure including language, names and customs. the laws against insulting Turkishness are a critical component of suppressing unapproved ethnic identities.
Mustafa Kemal was a fascist. Not a particularly vicious one, but a fascist nonetheless. A book, whose name escapes me, written in the late 1930's that provides a taxonomy of fascism has a nice chapter on the Turkish Republic. Being a fascist, he felt that the state and the people were one. Thus, his party moved to include strict limits on the amount of criticism one could level at the state.
So, if you insult the state too vigorously, you are opposing the Turkish people, hense the insulting Turkishness rule.
Woodrow Wilson ... Its amazing how much nastiness can be traced back to his stint in politics.
