[lbo-talk] 300,000 rally against Turkish government

Mike Ballard swillsqueal at yahoo.com.au
Sun Apr 15 16:56:56 PDT 2007


On 4/15/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at 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. I doubt that many, if any socialists in Turkey support a military dictatorship, although there may be some leftists who prefer it to having political Islam in control of the State apparatus. Neither do I support a theocratic State in Turkey nor in any other place in the world, even if it comes about through bourgeois democratic elections. I do support the strict separation of religion and the State though. "Gott mit uns? Nein danke." ;p

Regards, Mike B)

Download a free pdf copy of the "Industrial Worker": http://www.iww.org/PDF/IndustrialWorker/IWMarch07.pdf

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