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

[Doug Henwood]

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 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.