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